1979 - TIME AFTER TIME, deliberately old fashioned fantasy, romance

The writer and director Nicholas Meyer is about three years away from making the best of the Star Trek films, Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn.  He's six years away from contributing to the the time travel Star Trek film,  Star Trek:  The Voyage Home.  Time After Time is almost a warm up for those two films.

The plot has Malcolm McDowell (for once not playing some kind of cinematic psycho character) as H.G. Welles.  In this story, back in 1893 Welles invents a time machine which is stolen by Jack The Ripper who uses it to escape through time into the future.  The time machine automatically returns to Welles who also travels through time to find and stop Jack the Ripper from killing again.

Into this story is woven a love story as Welles meets a woman from the 20th century and has to confront the various challenges of understanding the future age he has traveled into.  It's a clever screenplay.

  

The acting by McDowell and David Warner as Jack The Ripper is tops,  however Mary Steenburgen plays McDowell's love interest and her performance is so low key it almost seems like she is barely awake in her scenes. Actually if there is a criticism to be made about this film it's Nicholas Meyer's direction which could have used a little more energy to it, the film is awfully low key at times.

 

The special effects and the music provided by Miklos Rosza (in his final score) deliberately evoke an old fashioned feel to the film.  All in all Time After Time is an entertaining film, the running time is 112 minutes.

1982 - STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, paired up with 1967 - SPACE SEED

Double feature night at the local neighborhood theater which can't make up it's mind whether it wants to show independent films or old classic films.  Anyway we zipped over to watch Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan and much too my surprise they showed the original episode Space Seed which the film was based on. 

Well, Space Seed is from Season One of the original cast when the series was very fresh.  It looks like a television show, a lot of light on the sets everywhere to put it mildly.  Forgot how sexist the show was when it came to women, those Star Fleet uniforms sure are short and tight.  Ricardo Montalban is as over the top and hammy as he was in The Wrath of Kahn, he is a good villain for Kirk to go up against. Actually a pretty fun episode of the series which had had a lot of crappy shows particularly in the third season.

However all hail Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, the first real Star Trek film.  The troublesome Gene Roddenberry was pushed out of the film after making a mess out of Star Trek The Motion Picture.  His replacement Harv Bennett television producer of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman was brought in to put together another Star Trek film.  It was Bennett who realized Space Seed could be a jumping off point for another Star Trek film.  When you get right down to it Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn is really just another episode of the old television series. 

After cutting the necessary deals with the cast, Bennett hired Nicholas Meyer and inexperienced director to shoot the film.  Meyer did an uncredited rewrite of the script and actually managed to get the old feeling of the show in the film something Roddenberry completely failed to do.

 A very enjoyable big screen version of the television series.

Space Seed 50 minutes.

Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Kahn  113 minutes.

1991 - STAR TREK 6: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY, as they say nostalgia ain't what it used to be

The final film with the original Star Trek cast is a letdown.  After five films Paramount probably saw the handwriting on the wall with diminished box office returns and a cast that was probably asking for more money with each successful film.  The studio decided to pull the plug on the series with this shoddy production.

The director of the best film in the original series (The Wrath of Kahn)  Nicholas Meyer was brought in to wrap things up.  Meyer was also co writer of the screenplay and conceived an outer space murder mystery for a plot, with Kirk and McCoy being put on trial for the death of a Klingon ambassador while Spock tries to figure who framed them.

The mystery element was new in the series which had increasingly loaded up the films with comedy.  Meyer had written a few Sherlock Holmes stories so he probably seemed like the right person to incorporate the mystery and science fiction plots.  But the mystery was really uninteresting with everyone pretty much walking around waiting for the next clue to show up.  

Unfortunately by this point the oldster cast had kind of descended into a quasi hammy acting style.  If the audiences wanted to see William Shatner in full overblown expressive mode that's what he gave them.  DeForrest Kelly was equally hammy as the put upon ship's doctor and the rest of the original crew followed suit with similar broad performances.  The acting at one point was so ridiculous that Christopher Plummer showed up as a Shakespeare quoting Klingon captain attempting to match Shatner with an equally over the top performance.  The constant quoting of Shakespeare that was meant to give the story some dramatic importance got pretty stupid.

All of this might have made for an enjoyable final film but Nicholas Meyer directed the film with almost no visual style or pace.  Almost every scene is shot in medium closeups with all the interest of an episode of Dragnet. The film looks very clautrophobic for a story with spaceships flying through space.

The constant jokes about retirement and being "put out to pasture" get tiresome, and even Shatner's overblown acting style can't prop this thing up.  The reassurance of seeing the familiar characters that dates back to their first appearances in the the 1960's show is about the only thing interesting in The Undiscovered County.

A disappointing way to end the first Star Trek film series.

113 minutes.