Cheap Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country (Two-Disc Special Collector's Edition) (DVD) (Nicholas Meyer) Price

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Customer Reviews of Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country (Two-Disc Special Collector's Edition)

Great w/Rifftrax
The folks from MST 3k are running a great new service where they provide audio tracks to go along with... quesionable... movies. This is one of them, and the commentary is funny, and the movie is actually watchable (unlike, say, Firewall). <
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>As far as the movie itself - I remember going to see it on the opening weekend, and probably the most memorable and entertaining part of the experience was the local chapter of Serious Trekkies had their own section of the theater roped off, and the place was just swarming with people in spandex and velcro shoes. As far as the movie itself, its probably one of the worst Star Trek films, though it is just about cheesy enough to be entertaining in its own right. <
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>I think that a one-eyed shakespeare-spouting klingon dude should just be a staple of every sci fi movie from now on.

Promising premise gives way to cliches and blendering
In my opinion, the film gets off to a strong start with a Cold War allegory. This 6th feature film in the series controversially continues to alter Spock's character to become increasingly emotional and human, but it seems to work pretty well along with the portrayal of Kirk's famous heroism being similarly reinterpreted as being possibly too militaristic and even bigoted. This is a great theme to explore, and I'm pleased that the filmmakers thought of it and put it on-screen. <
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>HOWEVER: <
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>The film's second half veers abruptly away from this strong start, instead devoting almost all of the remaining screen time to standard genre material instead of building upon the premise it introduced. In short order, we are treated to the heroes' imprisonment and escape (complete with, of all cliches! a villainous quip about "Well, since you're going to die anyway, I might as well tell you..."), a stock mystery scenario (including a totally misplayed Vulcan character, Valeris, who seems to be brimming with emotion and who engages in a bizarre and reckless act of vaporizing a kitchen pot with a phaser in what has to be one of the most ridiculous scenes in any of the Trek films, apparently thrown in merely because it's more cinematic to demonstrate something in rather than simply explain it), and the old stock plot element of racing to prevent an assassination in the nick of time. <
>Director/co-writer Nicholas Meyer tries to claim that he saved the film franchise with his brilliance... Puh-leez!! Here he adds liberal doses of gore, easily topping the amount that he had already displayed in spicing up Trek II. While that may appeal to younger, action-oriented viewers who are unfamiliar with the series, it is totally irrelevant to what Roddenberry's Star Trek is all about. In addition, Meyer turns far too many of the dialogue scenes into a shameless collection of anachronistic and absurd quotations - again even more than he had done in Trek II. Meyer prides himself on his cleverness at putting Shakespearian dialogue, and in fact a total hodgepodge of diverse present-day pop-culture quotes into the mouths of Klingons, Vulcans, Russian, well, pretty much every character in the film, totally oblivious to how ridiculous and out-of-place it all sounds. Ostensibly, it was done purely for humorous purposes, but it seriously sabotages the credibility of the characters who are meant to be the means for delivering worthy commentary about militarism, prejudice, the Cold War, and social/personal change. Those themes were good but are mainly in the first half of the film, the second half being primarily devoted to stock action sequences and mostly quite formulaic plot resolutions. In the commentary, the director takes pride in the laughs obtained by two of these inappropriate quotations (Spock saying there's an old Vulcan proverb that "Only Nixon could go to China," and Chekov saying "Guess who's coming to dinner.") Tellingly, in the commentary Meyers admits that he's still clueless as to why Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) felt uncomfortable with the bigoted connotations of the latter quotation (the title of a 1967 film about what was then known as miscegenation), and if I may be so bold as to say so, when director Nick tells how he always hears people laughing at the Nixon line, may I suggest that the laughter it generated was because of its total absurdity rather than because of any cleverness or wit? The film had a strong start despite many of the ridiculous aspects of a dialogue dominated by whatever quotations they thought would fit (much in the same way that teenage film enthusiasts have fun liberally quoting from their favorite films) but over time these flaws prevent the film's complete success. It entertains, but in the second half such entertainment is at the expensive of its dramatic effectiveness. It takes chances and develops the characters, but without enough respect for their original conception and what made them enduring in the first place. The portrayal of Valeris was totally misguided as a Vulcan character - I kept waiting for McCoy to pull out his tricorder to reveal: "Jim, she's a Romulan!" There's a bit too much that is absurd in the dialogue and "Nick"-of-time plot resolutions to allow the film to be taken very seriously as drama, and yet drama would have been its strongest offering, given the genuinely good premise that had been offered. In this way, the film is as disappointing as Trek V, although it delivered far more of substance than Trek V and at least (finally!) gave better characterizations to the old "snarling villain" and "militaristic alien" themes. As entertainment it is a generally pleasing film, but as drama it's ultimately not really doing justice to its theme. A pretty good entry in the film series, but certainly not the best of Trek. Director Meyers' claims that he and Harve Bennett somehow rescued Trek from itself deserves a scoff or two - especially presumptious given that Bennett was not involved in Trek VI. I give Harve Bennett a lot more credit than Nick Meyers. Bennett is a brilliant person who actually watched all 79 series episodes before he took on the task of contributing to the feature films, whereas Nick Meyer kept trying to change the films (even against Roddenberry's protests) to make the Trek enterprise conform to old genre cliches (such as Meyers' preferred stories of sailing ships, Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, and, apparently, gory action). While many people including Roddenberry are fond of Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes, after a certain point, references to such become counterproductive, replacing the traditions and virtues of the Trek scenario with ones that aren't always compatible and don't need to be retold or combined since both are quite capable of standing on their own. This film is generally enjoyable to view, but also contains a great number of serious missteps that will have to be overlooked by viewers generous enough to cut it some slack. A pretty strong entry in the film series - mostly for its first half - but also somewhat disappointing in its inconsistencies (and some of the liberties it takes with the characters and traditions of Trek, as also can be heard in parts of the commentary as Nick Meyers expresses various criticisms of Roddenberry's original conception of Trek; Meyers also offers the delusional interpretation that his two films, along with IV, were the most successful - this is factually wrong; Box Office returns show that the most successful films were Trek IV, I, and VIII. Nick's films, II and VI, are after those three and roughly on a par with III, VII, and IX; this leaves only V and X as the clear low spots in the franchise, and anyway the film series is arguably appealing to an entirely different audience and generation than the tv series that established it; Meyers accuses the tv series of having simplistic characterizations, but he could learn some lessons from watching some of those original episodes...the tv characterization of Khan was far more rich than Meyer's film, in which Khan was rendered almost totally one-dimensional. Quoting Shakespeare and Melville doesn't add character depth so much as make us aware of the lack of it by the need to resort to invocations of classic literature to apologetically fill in the dialogue gaps where original, newly written dialogue should be doing its work. Quotations are no substitute for fresh dialogue, and despite the use of such quotes, villains are still flat one-dimensional characters if their only clear character element is as simplistic as "revenge!" or "make war!" Meyer could use a bit of the self-analysis that Kirk and Spock engage in during the films. I give him credit for adding good elements, but am not going to overlook the numerous negative elements that he also added - including the increasing militarization of Trek - an aspect he criticizes Roddenberry for not agreeing to. Fortunately, Roddenberry's vision holds a lot more weight in cultural history, although that vision is sometimes diluted to a mere seven-percent solution in the hands of Meyer).