The NASA spaceprobe blown up in the first appearance of the bird of prey is Pioneer 10, not a later Voyager craft. There is an obvious scream mixed in with the sound effects.
Awesome vid. I am pumped for First Contact as I sort of see both arguments. If that is what you want out of your Trek, it executes it very well (unlike Final Frontier), but if it is not what you want out of Star Trek, oh boy. I also disagree with Clay on his rebuttal that it's an action movie but the characters are consistent. Picard is completely inconsistent with I, Borg and Descent, and snapping the spine off the skull of the Borg Queen is not only something I couldn't see Picard doing, but it defeats the moral point of him learning not to be an Ahab like Khan. It all feels like how Patrick Stewart kept bugging the writers of the show should make Picard than actually Picard.
Thanks again. I'm really enjoying the ST film reviews. You're managing to come up with some interesting perspectives that haven't been discussed on other reviews, or to still say oft repeated perspectives in a fresh way. I saw it in the cinema (despite the reviews) because Jerry Goldsmith was brought back. I think Luckinbill does his best with an unfocused character and that Luckinbill would have made a great Klingon in another ST film. The entire film is like a first draft. I can't remember which UA-cam reviewer proposed this idea, but it's interesting: What if the film is a campfire story told by Kirk to Spock and McCoy? That's why we end up back at the camp fire. It would at least excuse some things in the movie.
Yes, a lot of people like to think the whole thing is a dream, they go to sleep at the beginning of the movie by the campfire, and everything that happens after that is a dream and that's as you say how the end up right back at the campground at the end of the movie. I wish shot and I would just say that as a Saving Grace at this point.
For some reason, I read the book before seeing the movie -- if they kept in the filler that raised all sorts of questions in the film -- like where they were going; the shields and the reason the guy in the beginning had a rock shooter gun, it may have had a better flow. When I saw it, I always wondered if they all hit the craft services too much and if Shatner was using his own horses.
I like the note of the weird feeling, being more like Dune or other sci-fi, as it almost comes off as another sci-fi story which was rewritten to be Star Trek. I also like the thought of it feeling like fan fiction, which as you say is written by fans who don't know how to write the character, or even write. People wondering why they used the TNG music is funny, I remember thinking the same thing, because I saw this before I'd seen The Motion Picture, so didn't appreciate TNG used the Jerry Goldsmith theme from TMP. Riker would totally wear a "no fat chicks" shirt.
The Ohura dance scene: at first i thought it was a holographic thing or something. when it was revealed it was Ohura, I was like, OK thats weird. But then i thought 'oh right, she can sing' and it became a nice callback to TOS, but still weird. The attraction was to her siren song though so I mean it kinda works
Paradise City! And it almost seems like the Guns N Roses song of the same name came out that year? And the Klingons with Bon Jovi hair... It truly is a time capsule!
This is objectively a pretty bad movie, but I do think there is something funny and charming with this one in its ridiculousness. I do think the movie had some interesting ideas in there with Sybok and the God storyline but obviously it was just executed bizarrely with some of the other things going on
This could be a really good movie if they changed a few things , to start i would tone down the humor too many cheesy jokes and stuff that made if feel like they were playing a parody of themself at times .. Then i would have a scene after the cold open set a month prior with with Sybok on Vulcon at a event or something where he is using his powers on people , where after a mysterious person gives him information on where to find Sha Ka Ree, then he says "all i need is star ship to get there with it then cutting to the Enterprise ...Then i would cut some of the planet stuff shorter and have the barrier more dangerous to pass to the point where the ship is heavily damaged and the loose some crew members...At the end reveal that the god character is a Q which would tie into TNG at the time .. Plus some better affects of course ..lol
Watched this the first time today, after putting it off for months. It seems unfair to put it last on the TOS Trek movie list but I finally came back to it like I promised myself. This movie is the defenition of what I would call a "flawed masterpiece." Honestly it wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be. The scenes with Kirk, Spock and McCoy are mostly great but there are a few headscratching moments: like Scotty bumping his head, the three titted cat girl (who I'm pretty sure the sound department just recycled sped up James Brown screams for the growls), and the infamous Uhura dance - that's the only part of the movie I skipped. It has a lot of ideas and potential for a great storyline but it suffers from questionable directing choices from Shatner. Understandable since it was the only movie he'd been in charge of at that point, and in part feels like an Original Series episode on the big screen, complete with the camp factor and bad effects. I'll definitely watch it again, but not so much as the other movies. This one is a fun guilty pleasure though.
This flick is an absolute mess that is poorly written, cheaply produced, and badly directed. THAT SAID... ..."Uh, excuse me... I'd just like to ask a question... What does GOD need with a starship?" is unfathomably badass and one of Kirk's greatest moments.
Sean Connery was supposed to play Sybok .. Sean Connery = Sha Ka Ree ! I'm not kidding.. you can google info on that I'm sure. btw I'm really enjoying your podcast for a while !! and: finally not your TNG into music any more ;-) hehe
I came across your channel when you were almost through with the TNG reviews - I heard them all from the beginning and after more than hundred episodes, I always skipped the intro music and went on to the next review when the outro came. listening to it 6 times a days wasn't necessary! Anyway - I look forward to your TNG film reviews! Keep on the good work.
Yeah, I get that about the theme song. I consider not having it, but I like the way that each series will have it's own immediately identifiable hook at the beginning. At leats I cut out the song running past our talking in the TOS podcasts!
I simply feel that this movie equal in quality with the motion(less) picture ans any and all tng and JJ films. for no other reason than its a poor film directed by a hammy actor that shouldn't have ever been that close to the directors chair.
The Klingons are gunning for Kirk because from their POV he is a war criminal. Kirk was tried in a Federation hearing NOT a Klingon Imperial Tribunal. Your reviews are well done up to a point, but often I feel like I have to clean up some pretty obvious overlooking on your parts.
I find this movie fundamentally invalid. There are far too many factual or continuity issues and there's too many camp or ridiculous elements to take seriously, never-mind other problems. I instinctively don't like the idea of a religious movie made by people who are either non-practicing or straight-up aethists. Trek people rarely (Voyager's Roxann Dawson seems to be one of the few exceptions here, largely due to her own spiritual journey), have little feeling for something they usually don't actually believe in and end up being very heavy-handed and sometimes quite patronising to those who do believe in whatever they produce - see the Picard lecture in "Who Watches the Watchers?" so intentionally disrespectful, just another case of some Hollywood person (the writers) rejoicing in shouting at us all how morally superior they are because they DON'T believe. God and Humans are not a natural fit in Trek. Bajorans, yes, Humans, no, not according to the rules that Roddenberry laid out - and I have MANY problems with those rules. He thinks that God is silly superstitions our ancestors invented to explain things that had rational explanations, that's just how this universe works - Gods are ALWAYS hella powerful aliens, even the Q, the Prophets and Pah Wraiths. Whether you like that interpretation or not, to work a genre universe has to be consistent and coherent and in choosing this subject matter, this movie isn't that, as hard as they are trying to sell it. It CANNOT be God, so if it cannot be God, its ANOTHER hella powerful alien being that Kirk will talk to death or defeat improbably. How boring and futile - been done, 4 movies ago, try something else. Lawrence Luckinbill (Lucille Ball, the God Mother of Trek's son-in-law) is effective with his role though, which is a shame, its a waste of his efforts - and thank God we get more David Warner in the next movie and in 'Chain of Command'. If you are a fan, the laughing Vulcan gag at the start lands, but no one else would have a clue. "Sha-ka-ree" - "Sean Con-ner-y", come on! More fundamentally I consider this movie uncanon. ST II, ST III, ST IV and ST VI, those are the TOS movies, ST I and ST V don't fit into the cycle, they break the flow and have nothing whatsoever to do with the direction of travel with the series, the character arcs and world building within Trek, pointedly deal in subject matter that doesn't work with Humans in Trek because Roddenberry and the producers says it can't because clearly none of them actually respect the subject matter and the two movies most certainly DO NOT help bridge the gap between TOS and TNG. With ST II, ST III, ST IV and ST VI, we have a quadrilogy about Genesis and its consequences for intergalactic politics. MANY people die because of what has effectively become a weapon of mass destruction. Carol Marcus the naive scientist brought this planet-killer into life, quite unintentionally and lives to rue the day. Her team is murdered, her son is murdered, Khan and his crew dies, the Klingons with one exception dies, the freighter crew dies, the Grissom crew dies, Spock gets resurrected and Federation relations with everyone else plummets because now the Federation is building super-weapons. In parallel, many likely die thanks to science run amok thanks to the whale probe given the devastation wrought to ships and to the Earth. Just because they saved Earth, DO NOT kid yourself that the Klingon's gave up on the idea of getting their hands on Kirk one day, they are just biding their time. In the background of these movies, the Klingons want Kirk's head, potentially as their price for reduced tensions and maybe some arms controls, the Romulans are stirring the pot and EVERYONE else is reassessing their military strategy, defence procurement and planetary evacuation strategies and we have already met mid-tier power the Ferengi by this time in the production cycle in 1989 and we will meet the Cardassians soon. That's the context for ST III and ST IV. The process of peacemaking and the birth of something better is seen in ST VI, with the destruction of Praxis forcing everyone's hands - a scenario that still costs lives, Gorkon and members of his crew, Martia, Chang and his crew and Colonel West all die in the course of the movie. This movie fails because it has NOTHING whatsoever to do with the rest of 1980s Trek because they are too busy searching for God. It didn't need to be the case, some renegade Klingon leader mobilising his people against the Federation in rejection of his Government's diplomacy, sure, it might explain the taking of hostages and the involvement of General Korrd and WOULD have fit in with where the movie franchise had been going since 1982, but we didn't get that - we got this mess instead. There are some franchise-appropriate parallels with what was going on in the Soviet Union at the time that could have been hinted towards. There IS something there that could have salvaged the film, but you have to 1) tie it into what's going on elsewhere in the franchise in the 1980s, which this isn't and 2) cut out the God elements, they don't work and it isn't actually God anyway. And that's before we get onto the fact that because of rewrites and reworkings, the core trio stay basically in-tact and so nothing is learned, gained or developed and has ZERO consequences - unlike STs II, III, IV and VI, so this movie FUTILE from start to finish then. This is a hot skip for me sadly.
![Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country [Podcast]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/2CypLs2-Sy4/mqdefault.jpg)
![Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country [Podcast]](/img/tr.png)
![Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan [Podcast]](/img/n.gif)
Wait a minute...Kirk goes head-to-head with God, Spock has a surprise relative and McCoy is wise-cracking set dressing. This IS classic Trek!
The NASA spaceprobe blown up in the first appearance of the bird of prey is Pioneer 10, not a later Voyager craft. There is an obvious scream mixed in with the sound effects.
Thank you!
Numinous20111 Hinting it was a live??
I always wondered where that scream was in there... Was it also assimilated by some alien race? Really seems to stick out...
Awesome vid. I am pumped for First Contact as I sort of see both arguments. If that is what you want out of your Trek, it executes it very well (unlike Final Frontier), but if it is not what you want out of Star Trek, oh boy. I also disagree with Clay on his rebuttal that it's an action movie but the characters are consistent. Picard is completely inconsistent with I, Borg and Descent, and snapping the spine off the skull of the Borg Queen is not only something I couldn't see Picard doing, but it defeats the moral point of him learning not to be an Ahab like Khan. It all feels like how Patrick Stewart kept bugging the writers of the show should make Picard than actually Picard.
Thanks again. I'm really enjoying the ST film reviews. You're managing to come up with some interesting perspectives that haven't been discussed on other reviews, or to still say oft repeated perspectives in a fresh way. I saw it in the cinema (despite the reviews) because Jerry Goldsmith was brought back. I think Luckinbill does his best with an unfocused character and that Luckinbill would have made a great Klingon in another ST film. The entire film is like a first draft. I can't remember which UA-cam reviewer proposed this idea, but it's interesting: What if the film is a campfire story told by Kirk to Spock and McCoy? That's why we end up back at the camp fire. It would at least excuse some things in the movie.
Thanks for the kind words.
Yes, a lot of people like to think the whole thing is a dream, they go to sleep at the beginning of the movie by the campfire, and everything that happens after that is a dream and that's as you say how the end up right back at the campground at the end of the movie. I wish shot and I would just say that as a Saving Grace at this point.
Scotty knocking his head in the beam the best scene in the movie.
For some reason, I read the book before seeing the movie -- if they kept in the filler that raised all sorts of questions in the film -- like where they were going; the shields and the reason the guy in the beginning had a rock shooter gun, it may have had a better flow.
When I saw it, I always wondered if they all hit the craft services too much and if Shatner was using his own horses.
I like the note of the weird feeling, being more like Dune or other sci-fi, as it almost comes off as another sci-fi story which was rewritten to be Star Trek. I also like the thought of it feeling like fan fiction, which as you say is written by fans who don't know how to write the character, or even write.
People wondering why they used the TNG music is funny, I remember thinking the same thing, because I saw this before I'd seen The Motion Picture, so didn't appreciate TNG used the Jerry Goldsmith theme from TMP.
Riker would totally wear a "no fat chicks" shirt.
Riker IS a fat chick! :D
Four Words: Naked Uhura Moon Dance
AIGH! I shivered just after reading this. . .
32:05 I think those Reman-looking aliens in Nemesis had machine guns, but we should forget that movie entirely lol!
I have a feeling I'm going to enjoy your's and Clay's analysis of this film. For me this is the Moonraker of the trek series. So bad it's good!
The Ohura dance scene: at first i thought it was a holographic thing or something. when it was revealed it was Ohura, I was like, OK thats weird. But then i thought 'oh right, she can sing' and it became a nice callback to TOS, but still weird. The attraction was to her siren song though so I mean it kinda works
It's mostly odd because of how unexpected and weird it is.
Bugs-Bunny-level-ridiculous :-) I liked the desert-planet scenes in this movie. Even dancing Uhura, possibly because it was indeed comical.
Paradise City! And it almost seems like the Guns N Roses song of the same name came out that year? And the Klingons with Bon Jovi hair... It truly is a time capsule!
Row row row row row your boat.
This is objectively a pretty bad movie, but I do think there is something funny and charming with this one in its ridiculousness. I do think the movie had some interesting ideas in there with Sybok and the God storyline but obviously it was just executed bizarrely with some of the other things going on
Agreed.
This could be a really good movie if they changed a few things , to start i would tone down the humor too many cheesy jokes and stuff that made if feel like they were playing a parody of themself at times .. Then i would have a scene after the cold open set a month prior with with Sybok on Vulcon at a event or something where he is using his powers on people , where after a mysterious person gives him information on where to find Sha Ka Ree, then he says "all i need is star ship to get there with it then cutting to the Enterprise ...Then i would cut some of the planet stuff shorter and have the barrier more dangerous to pass to the point where the ship is heavily damaged and the loose some crew members...At the end reveal that the god character is a Q which would tie into TNG at the time .. Plus some better affects of course ..lol
Watched this the first time today, after putting it off for months. It seems unfair to put it last on the TOS Trek movie list but I finally came back to it like I promised myself. This movie is the defenition of what I would call a "flawed masterpiece."
Honestly it wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be. The scenes with Kirk, Spock and McCoy are mostly great but there are a few headscratching moments: like Scotty bumping his head, the three titted cat girl (who I'm pretty sure the sound department just recycled sped up James Brown screams for the growls), and the infamous Uhura dance - that's the only part of the movie I skipped.
It has a lot of ideas and potential for a great storyline but it suffers from questionable directing choices from Shatner. Understandable since it was the only movie he'd been in charge of at that point, and in part feels like an Original Series episode on the big screen, complete with the camp factor and bad effects.
I'll definitely watch it again, but not so much as the other movies. This one is a fun guilty pleasure though.
This flick is an absolute mess that is poorly written, cheaply produced, and badly directed. THAT SAID...
..."Uh, excuse me... I'd just like to ask a question... What does GOD need with a starship?" is unfathomably badass and one of Kirk's greatest moments.
The number of ads on this video is insane
Sean Connery was supposed to play Sybok .. Sean Connery = Sha Ka Ree ! I'm not kidding.. you can google info on that I'm sure. btw I'm really enjoying your podcast for a while !! and: finally not your TNG into music any more ;-) hehe
Don't like the TNG music? :)
I came across your channel when you were almost through with the TNG reviews - I heard them all from the beginning and after more than hundred episodes, I always skipped the intro music and went on to the next review when the outro came. listening to it 6 times a days wasn't necessary!
Anyway - I look forward to your TNG film reviews! Keep on the good work.
Yeah, I get that about the theme song. I consider not having it, but I like the way that each series will have it's own immediately identifiable hook at the beginning. At leats I cut out the song running past our talking in the TOS podcasts!
I simply feel that this movie equal in quality with the motion(less) picture ans any and all tng and JJ films. for no other reason than its a poor film directed by a hammy actor that shouldn't have ever been that close to the directors chair.
The Klingons are gunning for Kirk because from their POV he is a war criminal. Kirk was tried in a Federation hearing NOT a Klingon Imperial Tribunal. Your reviews are well done up to a point, but often I feel like I have to clean up some pretty obvious overlooking on your parts.
1:02:18 MST3k worthy 😂
I find this movie fundamentally invalid. There are far too many factual or continuity issues and there's too many camp or ridiculous elements to take seriously, never-mind other problems.
I instinctively don't like the idea of a religious movie made by people who are either non-practicing or straight-up aethists. Trek people rarely (Voyager's Roxann Dawson seems to be one of the few exceptions here, largely due to her own spiritual journey), have little feeling for something they usually don't actually believe in and end up being very heavy-handed and sometimes quite patronising to those who do believe in whatever they produce - see the Picard lecture in "Who Watches the Watchers?" so intentionally disrespectful, just another case of some Hollywood person (the writers) rejoicing in shouting at us all how morally superior they are because they DON'T believe. God and Humans are not a natural fit in Trek. Bajorans, yes, Humans, no, not according to the rules that Roddenberry laid out - and I have MANY problems with those rules. He thinks that God is silly superstitions our ancestors invented to explain things that had rational explanations, that's just how this universe works - Gods are ALWAYS hella powerful aliens, even the Q, the Prophets and Pah Wraiths. Whether you like that interpretation or not, to work a genre universe has to be consistent and coherent and in choosing this subject matter, this movie isn't that, as hard as they are trying to sell it. It CANNOT be God, so if it cannot be God, its ANOTHER hella powerful alien being that Kirk will talk to death or defeat improbably. How boring and futile - been done, 4 movies ago, try something else.
Lawrence Luckinbill (Lucille Ball, the God Mother of Trek's son-in-law) is effective with his role though, which is a shame, its a waste of his efforts - and thank God we get more David Warner in the next movie and in 'Chain of Command'. If you are a fan, the laughing Vulcan gag at the start lands, but no one else would have a clue.
"Sha-ka-ree" - "Sean Con-ner-y", come on!
More fundamentally I consider this movie uncanon. ST II, ST III, ST IV and ST VI, those are the TOS movies, ST I and ST V don't fit into the cycle, they break the flow and have nothing whatsoever to do with the direction of travel with the series, the character arcs and world building within Trek, pointedly deal in subject matter that doesn't work with Humans in Trek because Roddenberry and the producers says it can't because clearly none of them actually respect the subject matter and the two movies most certainly DO NOT help bridge the gap between TOS and TNG.
With ST II, ST III, ST IV and ST VI, we have a quadrilogy about Genesis and its consequences for intergalactic politics. MANY people die because of what has effectively become a weapon of mass destruction. Carol Marcus the naive scientist brought this planet-killer into life, quite unintentionally and lives to rue the day. Her team is murdered, her son is murdered, Khan and his crew dies, the Klingons with one exception dies, the freighter crew dies, the Grissom crew dies, Spock gets resurrected and Federation relations with everyone else plummets because now the Federation is building super-weapons. In parallel, many likely die thanks to science run amok thanks to the whale probe given the devastation wrought to ships and to the Earth. Just because they saved Earth, DO NOT kid yourself that the Klingon's gave up on the idea of getting their hands on Kirk one day, they are just biding their time. In the background of these movies, the Klingons want Kirk's head, potentially as their price for reduced tensions and maybe some arms controls, the Romulans are stirring the pot and EVERYONE else is reassessing their military strategy, defence procurement and planetary evacuation strategies and we have already met mid-tier power the Ferengi by this time in the production cycle in 1989 and we will meet the Cardassians soon. That's the context for ST III and ST IV. The process of peacemaking and the birth of something better is seen in ST VI, with the destruction of Praxis forcing everyone's hands - a scenario that still costs lives, Gorkon and members of his crew, Martia, Chang and his crew and Colonel West all die in the course of the movie.
This movie fails because it has NOTHING whatsoever to do with the rest of 1980s Trek because they are too busy searching for God. It didn't need to be the case, some renegade Klingon leader mobilising his people against the Federation in rejection of his Government's diplomacy, sure, it might explain the taking of hostages and the involvement of General Korrd and WOULD have fit in with where the movie franchise had been going since 1982, but we didn't get that - we got this mess instead. There are some franchise-appropriate parallels with what was going on in the Soviet Union at the time that could have been hinted towards. There IS something there that could have salvaged the film, but you have to 1) tie it into what's going on elsewhere in the franchise in the 1980s, which this isn't and 2) cut out the God elements, they don't work and it isn't actually God anyway.
And that's before we get onto the fact that because of rewrites and reworkings, the core trio stay basically in-tact and so nothing is learned, gained or developed and has ZERO consequences - unlike STs II, III, IV and VI, so this movie FUTILE from start to finish then. This is a hot skip for me sadly.