Star
Trek IV: The Voyage Home is a 1986 American science fiction film
released by Paramount Pictures. It is the fourth feature film based
on the Star Trek science fiction television series and completes the
story arc begun in The Wrath of Khan and continued in The Search for
Spock. Intent on returning home to Earth to face trial for their
crimes, the former crew of the USS Enterprise finds the planet in
grave danger from an alien probe attempting to contact now-extinct
humpback whales. The crew travel to Earth's past to find whales who
can answer the probe's call.
After directing The Search
for Spock, cast member Leonard Nimoy was asked to direct the next
feature, and given greater freedom regarding the film's content.
Nimoy and producer Harve Bennett conceived a story with an
environmental message and no clear-cut villain. Dissatisfied with the
first screenplay produced by Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes,
Paramount hired The Wrath of Khan writer and director Nicholas Meyer.
Meyer and Bennett divided the story between them and wrote different
parts of the script, requiring approval from Nimoy, lead actor
William Shatner and Paramount.
Principal photography
commenced on February 24th, 1986. Unlike previous Star Trek films,
The Voyage Home was shot extensively on location; many real settings
and buildings were used as stand-ins for scenes set around and in the
city of San Francisco. Special effects firm Industrial Light &
Magic (ILM) assisted in postproduction and the film's special
effects. Few of the humpback whales in the film were real: ILM
devised full-size animatronics and small motorized models to stand in
for the real creatures.
The Voyage Home premiered
on November 26th, 1986, in North America, becoming the top-grossing
film in the weekend box office. The film's humor and unconventional
story were well received by critics, fans of the series and the
general audience. It was financially successful, earning $133 million worldwide.
The film earned several
awards and four Academy Award nominations for its cinematography and
audio. It was dedicated to the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger,
which broke up 72 seconds after takeoff on the morning of January
28th, 1986. Principal photography for The Voyage Home began four
weeks after Challenger and her crew were lost.
Cast:
William Shatner plays
Admiral James T. Kirk
Former captain of the
Enterprise. Shatner was unwilling to reprise the role of Kirk until
he received a salary of $2 million and the promise of directing the
next film. Shatner described The Voyage Home's comic quality as one
"that verges on tongue-in-cheek but isn't, it's as though the
characters within the play have a great deal of joy about themselves,
a joy of living [and] you play it with the reality you would in a
kitchen-sink drama written for today's life."
Leonard Nimoy plays Spock
Spock was resurrected by
the effects of a powerful terraforming device and had his "living
spirit" restored to his body in the previous film.
DeForest Kelley plays
Doctor Leonard McCoy
Kelley is given many of the
film's comedic lines; Kelley biographer Terry Lee Rioux wrote that in
the film "he seemed to be playing straight man to himself".
On Earth McCoy was paired with engineer Montgomery Scott (James Doohan),
as producer Harve Bennett felt that Kelley worked well with
[Doohan's] "old vaudeville comic". The other members of the
Enterprise crew include George Takei as helmsman Hikaru Sulu, Walter
Koenig as Commander Pavel Chekov, and Nichelle Nichols as
Uhura. Koenig commented that Chekov was a "delight" to play
in this film because he worked best in comedic situations.
Catherine Hicks plays
Doctor Gillian Taylor
Gillian Taylor is a
biologist on 20th century Earth. During production a rumor circulated
that the part had been created after Shatner demanded a love
interest, a regular aspect of the television series that was absent
from the first three films. Writer Nicholas Meyer denied this, saying
that the inspiration for Taylor came from a woman biologist featured
in a National Geographic documentary about whales. Nimoy chose Hicks
after inviting her to lunch with Shatner and witnessing a chemistry
between the two. Catherine Hicks is also well known for playing Annie
Camden on the long-running television series 7th Heaven. Her TV
husband on that show was Stephen Collins (minister Eric Camden) who
played Captain Willard Decker in Star Trek - The Motion Picture.
Mark Lenard and Jane
Wyatt play Ambassador Sarek and Amanda Grayson
Spock's parents. Wyatt
commented that although she generally disliked working with actors
who were directing, she found Nimoy an exception because he could
concentrate on being part of the cast as well as setting up the crew.
Majel Barrett reprises
her role as Christine Chapel
Christine Chapel is now the
director of Starfleet Command's medical services. Many of her scenes,
some reportedly very large, were omitted in the final cut, angering
the actress. Her final role in the film consists of one line of
dialogue and a reaction shot.
Robin Curtis reprises
the role of Saavik
Saavik, a Starfleet
lieutenant. Saavik's role is minimal in the film, originally, she was
intended to remain behind on Vulcan because she was pregnant after
she had mated with the younger Spock in Star Trek III: The Search for
Spock. In the final cut of the film, all references to her condition
were dropped.
The film contains several
cameos and smaller roles. Madge Sinclair makes an uncredited
appearance as captain of the USS Saratoga. Jane Wiedlin appears as a
Starfleet officer seen briefly at Starfleet Command. John Schuck
appears as a Klingon ambassador, Robert Ellenstein as the Federation
President, and Brock Peters as Fleet Admiral Cartwright. Grace Lee
Whitney reprises her role as Janice Rand from the original television series.
Before The Search for Spock
was released, its director Leonard Nimoy was asked to return to
direct the next film in the franchise. Whereas Nimoy had been under
certain constraints in filming the previous picture, Paramount gave
the director greater freedom for the sequel. "[Paramount] said
flat out that they wanted my vision," Nimoy recalled. In
contrast to the drama-heavy and operatic events of previous Star Trek
features, Nimoy and producer Harve Bennett wanted a lighter movie
that did not have a clear-cut villain. As William Shatner was
unwilling to return, Nimoy and Bennett spent eight months considering
a prequel concept by Ralph Winter about the characters at Starfleet
Academy, before Shatner received a pay increase and signed on to
star. Nimoy and Shatner each received $2.5 million for the film, less
than their original demands, but the film cast's rising salaries
caused Paramount to create a new television series, Star Trek: The
Next Generation (1987), with less-expensive, lesser-known actors.
Despite Shatner's doubts,
Nimoy and Bennett selected a time travel story in which the
Enterprise crew encounters a problem that could only be fixed by
something only available in the present day (the Star Trek
characters' past). They considered ideas about violin makers and oil
drillers, or a disease that had its cure destroyed with the
rainforests. "But the depiction of thousands of sick and dying
people seemed rather gruesome for our light-hearted film, and the
thought of our crew taking a 600-year round trip just to bring back a
snail darter wasn't all that thrilling," explained Nimoy. The
director read a book on extinct animals and conceived the storyline
that was eventually adopted. Nimoy hit upon the idea of humpback
whales after talking with a friend, their song added mystery to the
story, and their size added logistical challenges the heroes would
have to overcome.
Nimoy approached Beverly
Hills Cop writer Daniel Petrie, Jr. to write the screenplay when a
concept that executive producer Jeffrey Katzenberg described as
"either the best or worst idea in the world" arose, Star
Trek fan Eddie Murphy wanted a starring role. Nimoy and Murphy
acknowledged his part would attract non-Star Trek fans to the
franchise following the rising popularity of Murphy, but it also
meant the film might be ridiculed. Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes
were hired to write a script with Murphy as a college professor who
believes in aliens and likes to play whale songs. Murphy disliked the
part, explaining he wanted to play an alien or a Starfleet officer,
and chose to make The Golden Child, a decision Murphy later said was
a mistake. The character intended for Murphy was combined with those
of a marine biologist and a female reporter to become Gillian Taylor
played by Catherine Hicks (left, below).
Paramount
was dissatisfied with the script, so its head of production Dawn
Steele asked Nicholas Meyer, the writer and director of Star Trek II:
The Wrath of Khan, to help rewrite it. Meyer never read the earlier
script, reasoning it pointless to do so since the content had no
appeal to the studio. He and Bennett split the task of conceiving the
plot between them. Bennett wrote the first quarter of the story, up
to the point where the crew goes back in time. Meyer wrote the
story's middle portion, taking place on 20th-century Earth, and
Bennett handled the ending. After 12 days of writing, Meyer and
Bennett combined their separate portions. In this version, Gillian
Taylor stays on 1986's Earth and vows to ensure the survival of the
humpback whale despite the paradox it could create. Meyer preferred
this "righter ending" to the film version, explaining
"The end in the movie detracts from the importance of people in
the present taking the responsibility for the ecology and preventing
problems of the future by doing something today, rather than catering
to the fantasy desires of being able to be transported in time to the
near-utopian future." Meyer and Bennett cut out Krikes and
Meerson's idea of having the Klingon Bird-of-Prey fly over the Super
Bowl and the hint that Saavik remained on Vulcan because she was
pregnant with Spock's child.
Nimoy said Meyer gave the
script "the kind of humor and social comment, gadfly attitude I
very much wanted". He added that his vision was for "no
dying, no fighting, no shooting, no photon torpedoes, no phaser
blasts, no stereotypical bad guy. I wanted people to really have a
great time watching this film [and] if somewhere in the mix we lobbed
a couple of big ideas at them, well, then that would be even
better." One of Meyer's earlier films, Time After Time, was
largely based in San Francisco; when he was told by the producers
that The Voyage Home had to be set in the same city, he took the
opportunity to comment upon cultural aspects not covered by his
earlier film, such as punk rock, The Voyage Home's scene where Kirk
and Spock meet an annoying punk rocker was based on a similar scene
cut from Time After Time.
Meyer found writing the
script to be a smooth process. He would write a few pages, show it to
Nimoy and Bennett for consultation, and return to his office to write
some more. Once Nimoy, Bennett, and Meyer were happy, they showed the
script to Shatner, who offered his own notes for another round of
rewrites. The completed script was shown to Paramount executives, who
were very pleased.
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AV
CLUB FEATURETTE DEPARTMENT
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Widely considered the best movie in the "classic Trek" series of feature films, Star Trek IV returns to one of the favorite themes of the original TV series, time travel, to bring Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov from the 23rd century to present-day San Francisco. In their own time, the Starfleet heroes encounter an alien probe emitting a mysterious message, a message delivered in the song of the long extinct Earth species of humpback whales. Failure to respond to the probe will result in Earth's destruction, so Kirk and company time-travel to 20th-century Earth in their captured Klingon starship to transport a humpback whale to the future in an effort to peacefully communicate with the alien probe. Add
Star Trek IV The Voyage Home to your DVD collection.
Industrial Light &
Magic (ILM) was responsible for The Voyage Home's model design and
optical effects. The alien probe was the responsibility of ILM's
model shop, which brought in outside help like illustrator Ralph
McQuarrie for concept art. The modelmakers started with art director
Nilo Rodis' basic design, a simple cylinder with whalelike qualities.
The prototype was covered with barnacles and colored. The ball-shaped
antenna that juts out from the bottom of the probe was created out of
a piece of irrigation pipe; internal machinery turned the device.
Three sizes of the probe were created; the primary 8-foot probe model
was supplemented by a smaller model for wide shots and a large
20-foot model that used forced perspective to give the probe the
illusion of massive dimensions.
The effects crew focused on
using in-camera tricks to realize the probe; postproduction effects
were time-consuming, so lighting effects were done on stage while
filming. Model shop supervisor Jeff Mann filled the probe's antenna
with tube lamps and halogen bulbs that were turned on in sequence for
different exposures; three different camera passes for each exposure
were combined for the final effect. After watching the first shot,
the team found the original, whalelike probe design lacking of
menace. The modelmakers repainted the probe a shiny black, pockmarked
its surface for greater texture and interest, and re-shot the scene.
Although they wanted to avoid postproduction effects work, the
opticals team had to recolor the antenna ball in a blue hue, as the
original orange looked too much like a spinning basketball.
Aside from the probe, The
Voyage Home required no new starship designs. The USS Saratoga, the
first Federation starship disabled by the probe, was the USS Reliant
model from The Wrath of Khan. The Bird-of-Prey model from The Search
for Spock was reused, but ILM built additional sturdy versions for
The Voyage Home's action sequences. The inside of the Bird-of-Prey
was represented by a different set than The Search for Spock, but the
designers made sure to adhere to a sharp and alien architectural
aesthetic. To give the set a smokier, atmospheric look, the designers
rigged display and instrumentation lights to be bright enough that
they could light the characters, rather than relying on ambient or
rigged lighting. While Paramount had instructed ILM to trash the
large Spacedock model created for The Search for Spock, the team had
been loath to discard the complicated model and its miles of fiber
optic lighting. When The Voyage Home called for the return of
Spacedock, ILM had only to reassemble the model from storage.
Robert Fletcher served as
costume designer for the film. During the Earth-based scenes, Kirk
and his gang continue to wear their 23rd-century clothing. Nimoy
debated whether the crew should change costumes, but after seeing how
people in San Francisco are dressed, he decided they would still fit in.
Nimoy chose Donald
Peterman, ASC, as director of photography. Nimoy said he regarded the
cinematographer as a fellow artist, and that it was important for
them to agree on "a certain look" that Peterman was
committed to delivering. Nimoy had seen Peterman's work and felt it
was more nuanced than simply lighting a scene and capturing an image.
The film's opening scenes
aboard the starship Saratoga were the first to be shot; principal
photography commenced on February 24th, 1986. The set was a redress
of the science vessel Grissom's bridge from The Search for Spock, in
turn a redress of the Enterprise bridge created for The Motion
Picture. The scenes were filmed first to allow time for the set to be
revamped as the bridge of the new Enterprise-A at the end of filming.
As with previous Star Trek
films, existing props and footage were reused where possible to save
money, though The Voyage Home required less of this than previous
films. The Earth Spacedock interiors and control booth sets were
reused from The Search for Spock, although the computer monitors in
these scenes featured new graphics, the old reels had deteriorated in
storage. Stock footage of the destruction of the Enterprise and the
Bird-of-Prey's movement through space were reused. While the
Bird-of-Prey bridge was a completely new design, other parts of the
craft's interior were also redresses; the computer room was a
modification of the reactor room where Spock died in The Wrath of
Khan. After all other Bird-of-Prey bridge scenes were completed, the
entire set was painted white for one shot that transitioned into a
dream sequence during the time travel.
The Voyage Home was the
first Star Trek film to extensively film on location, only one day
was spent doing so in The Search for Spock. Much of the production
was filmed in and around San Francisco during ten days of shooting.
The production wanted to film scenes that were readily identifiable
as the city. The use of extensive location shooting caused logistical
problems; a scene in which Kirk is nearly run over by an irate driver
required 12–15 cars to be repositioned if the shot was
incorrect, taking a half-hour to reshoot. Other scenes were filmed in
the city but used sets rather than real locations, such as an Italian
restaurant where Taylor and Kirk eat. In the film, the Bird-of-Prey
lands cloaked in Golden Gate Park, surprising trashmen who flee the
scene in their truck. The production had planned to film in the real
park, where they had filmed scenes for The Wrath of Khan, but heavy
rains before the day of shooting prevented it, the garbage truck
would have become bogged down in the mud. Will Rogers Park in western
Los Angeles was used instead.
When Kirk and Spock are
traveling on a public bus, they encounter a punk rocker blaring his
music on a boom box, to the discomfort of everyone around him. Spock
takes matters into his own hands and performs a Vulcan nerve pinch.
Part of the inspiration for the scene came from Nimoy's personal
experiences with a similar character on the streets of New York;
"[I was struck] by the arrogance of it, the aggressiveness of
it, and I thought if I was Spock I'd pinch his brains out!" On
learning about the scene, Kirk Thatcher, an associate producer on the
film, convinced Nimoy to let him play the role after he learned that
the audio for the scene would be by "Duran Duran, or
whoever" and not "raw" and authentic punk. Thatcher
shaved his hair into a mohawk and bought clothes to complete the
part. Credited as "punk on bus", Thatcher (along with sound
designer Mark Mangini and two sound editors who were in punk bands)
also wrote and recorded "I Hate You", the song in the
scene, and it was his idea to have the punk, rendered unconscious by
the pinch, hit the stereo and turn it off with his face. Recording in
the sound studio as originally planned produced too clean a sound, so
they moved to the outside hallway and recorded the song in one take
using cheap microphones to create a distorted sound. The song was
also used in Paramount's Back to the Beach.
Much of the Cetacean
Institute, Taylor's workplace, was created by using the real-life
Monterey Bay Aquarium. A holding tank for the whales was added via
special effects to the Aquarium's exterior. For close-ups of the
characters as they watched the whales in the tank, the Aquarium's
walls and railings were measured and replicated for a set on the
Paramount parking lot. One scene takes place by a large glass through
which observers view the whales, and Spock's initiation of a mind
meld, underwater. Footage of the actors shot in front of them as they
reacted to a brick wall in the Aquarium was combined with shots taken
from their rear as they stood in front of a large blue screen at ILM
to produce this scene. The footage of Spock's melding with the whales
was shot weeks later in a large water tank used to train astronauts
for weightlessness.
In
the film, Uhura and Chekov visit the aircraft carrier USS
Enterprise. The real Enterprise, out at sea at the time, was
unavailable for filming, so the non-nuclear-powered carrier USS
Ranger was used. Oakland International Airport was used for the
foreground of Starfleet Headquarters. Scenes in the San Francisco Bay
were shot at a tank on Paramount's backlot.
The scene in which Uhura
and Chekov question passersby about the location of nuclear vessels
was filmed with a hidden camera. However, the people with whom Koenig
and Nichols speak were extras hired off the street for that day's
shooting and, despite legends to the contrary, knew they were being
filmed. In an interview with StarTrek.com, Layla Sarakalo, the extra
who said, "I don't know if I know the answer to that... I think
it's across the bay, in Alameda", stated that after her car was
impounded because she refused to move it for the filming, she
approached the assistant director about appearing with the other
extras, hoping to be paid enough to get her car out of impoundment.
She was hired and told not to answer Koenig's and Nichols' questions.
However, she answered them and the filmmakers kept her response in
the film, though she had to be inducted into the Screen Actors Guild
in order for her lines to be kept.
Vulcan and the Bird-of-Prey
exterior was created with a combination of matte paintings and a
soundstage. Nimoy had searched for a suitable location for the scene
of the Enterprise crew's preparations to return to Earth, but various
locations did not work, so the scene was instead filmed on a
Paramount backlot. The production had to mask the fact that
production buildings were 30 feet (9.1 m) away. A wide-angle shot of
Spock on the edge of a cliff overlooking the scene was filmed at
Vasquez Rocks, a park north of Los Angeles. The Federation council
chamber (above) was a large set filled with representatives from many
alien races. Production manager Jack T. Collis economized by building
the set with only one end; reverse angle shots used the same piece of
wall. The positions of the Federation President's podium and the
actors on the seats were switched for each shot. Since The Voyage
Home was the first Star Trek film to show the operations at Starfleet
Command, Bennett and Nimoy visited NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
to learn how a real deep space command center might look and operate.
Among the resulting set's features was a large central desk with
video monitors that the production team nicknamed "the pool
table"; the prop later became a fixture in USS Enterprise-D's
engine room on the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Nimoy approached ILM early
in development and helped create storyboards for the optical effects
sequences. Many shots used matte paintings to extend backgrounds and
create establishing shots without the cost of building a set. Matte
supervisor Chris Evans attempted to create paintings that felt less
contrived and more real, while the natural instinct of filmmaking is
to place important elements in an orderly fashion, Evans said that
photographers would "shoot things that are odd in some way"
and end up with results that look natural instead. The task of
establishing the location and atmosphere at Starfleet Headquarters
fell to the matte department, who had to make it feel like a bustling
futuristic version of San Francisco. The matte personnel and Ralph
McQuarrie provided design input. The designers decided to make actors
in the foreground more prominent, and filmed them on a large area of
smooth concrete runway at the Oakland Airport. Elements like a
shuttlecraft that thirty extras appeared to interact with were also
mattes blended to appear as if they were sitting by the actors.
Ultimately the artists were not satisfied with how the shot turned
out; matte photography supervisor Craig Barron believed that there
were too many elements in the scene.
The scenes of the
Bird-of-Prey on Vulcan were combinations of live-action footage,
actors on a set in the Paramount parking lot that was covered with
clay and used backdrops, and matte paintings for the ship itself and
harsh background terrain. The scene of the ship's departure from
Vulcan for Earth was more difficult to accomplish; the camera pans
behind live-action characters to follow the ship as it leaves the
atmosphere, and other items like flaming pillars and a flaring sun
had to be integrated into the shot. Rather than try to match and
combine camera pans of each element, each component was shot with a
static camera and the pan was added to the resulting composite by a
motion control camera. The sun (a light bulb focused by a convex
lens) was shot in different passes to create realistic light effects
on the Bird-of-Prey without having the light bleed around other
elements in the shot.
The
script called for the probe to vaporize the Earth's oceans,
generating heavy cloud cover. While effects cinematographer Don Dow
wanted to go to sea and record plumes of water created by exploding
detonating cords in the water, the team decided to create the probe's
climatic effect in another way after a government fishing agency
voiced concerns for the welfare of marine life in the area. The team
used a combination of baking soda and cloud tank effects; the
swirling mist created by the water-filled tank was shot on black
velvet, and color and dynamic swirls were added by injecting paint
into the tank. These shots were composited onto a painting of the
Earth along with overlaid lightning effects, created by
double-exposing lights as they moved across the screen.
The Bird-of-Prey's travel
through time was one of the most difficult effects sequences of the
film. While ILM was experienced in creating the streaking warp effect
they used for previous films, the sequence required the camera to
trail a sustained warp effect as the Bird-of-Prey rounded the sun.
Matching the effect to the model was accomplished through
trial-and-error guesswork. The team did not have the time to wait for
the animation department to create the sun for this shot. Assistant
cameraman Pete Kozachic devised a way of creating the sun on-stage.
He placed two sheets of textured plexiglass next to each other and
backlit them with a powerful yellow light. The rig was rotated on a
circular track and the sheet in front created a moire pattern as its
position shifted. Animator John Knoll added solar flare effects to
complete the look; Dow recalled that the effect came close to
matching footage of the sun taken by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Traveling
through time, Kirk and crew experience what author Jody Duncan Shay
termed a "dreamlike state". The script's only direction for
the effect was "now [they] go through time"; Nimoy and
McQuarrie envisioned Kirk's dream as a montage of bizarre images. The
filmmakers decided early on that part of the dream sequence would use
computer-generated animation to give it an unreal quality divorced
from the rest of the film. ILM worked from McQuarrie's storyboards
and created a rough mock-up or animatic to show Nimoy and hone the
direction of the sequence. For the very beginning of the dream, the
inside of the Bird-of-Prey bridge was painted stark white. Part of
the final sequence involved morphing the heads of the Enterprise crew
into one another; ILM digitized the cast members' heads using a 3-D
scanning technology developed by Cyberware and used the resulting
data for the computer models. Because each head model had the same
number of key points of reference, transforming one character into
another was simple; more difficult, the animators recalled, was
ensuring that the transformation looked "pleasing" and not
"grotesque". The resulting thirty seconds of footage took
weeks to render; the department used every spare computer they could
find to help in the processing chores. ILM's stage, optical, and
matte departments collaborated to complete other shots for the dream
sequence. The shot of a man's fall to Earth was created by filming a
small puppet on bluescreen. Shots of liquid nitrogen composited
behind the puppet gave the impression of smoke. The background plate
of the planet was a large matte that allowed the camera to zoom in
very close. The final shot of marshy terrain was practical and
required no effects.
The
filmmakers knew from the beginning of production that the whales
were their biggest effects concern; Dow recalled that they were
prepared to change to another animal in case creating the whales
proved too difficult. When Humphrey the Whale wandered into the San
Francisco Bay, Dow and his camera crew attempted to gather usable
footage of the humpback but failed to do so. Other footage of real
humpbacks either did not exist on 35mm film or would have been
difficult to match to specific actions required by the script.
Compositing miniatures shot against bluescreen on top of water
backgrounds would not have provided realistic play of light. Creating
full-size mechanical whales on tracks would severely limit the types
of angles and shots. To solve the whale problem, Rodis hired robotics
expert Walt Conti. While Conti was not experienced in film, Rodis
believed his background in engineering and design made him
well-equipped for Rodis' planned solution: the creation of
independent and self-contained miniature whale models.
After watching footage of
whale movement, Conti determined that the models could be simplified
by making the front of the whale entirely rigid, relying on the tail
and fins for movement. Conti showed footage of the operation of a
30-inch prototype to Paramount executives, who according to Conti,
"loved it... It really knocked them out." With Paramount's
approval, ILM hired marine author, conservationist and illustrator
Pieter Folkens to sculpt a realistic whale exterior. ILM decided on a
finished model size of 4 feet, the size prevented delicate components
like the tail from buckling under stress, and fitted it with
mechanics and radio equipment required for control and operation. To
prevent water from ruining the whale's electronics, the modelmakers
sealed every individual mechanical component rather than attempting
to waterproof the entire whale. Balloons and lead weights were added
to achieve the proper balance and buoyancy. The finished models were
put in a high school swimming pool for two weeks of shooting; the
operation of the whales required four handlers and divers with video
cameras to help set up the shots. Accurately controlling the whales
was difficult because of the murky water, ILM added diatomaceous
earth to the water to match realistic ocean visibility. For a few
shots, such as the whales' breaching the water towards the end of the
film, the creatures were represented by life-size animatronics shot
at Paramount.
Models of the starship USS
Enterprise were destroyed in the previous film partly because visual
effects supervisor Ken Ralston wanted to build a "more state-of-the-art
ship for the next film", but the filmmakers made the less
costly decision to have the crew return to serve on the duplicate USS
Enterprise A, and six weeks were spent repairing and repainting the
old model. A travel pod from Star Trek: The Motion Picture was also
reused for the ending, although the 20-foot-long interior set had to
be rebuilt. Graphic designer Michael Okuda designed smooth controls
with backlit displays for the Federation. Dubbed
"Okudagrams", the system was also used for displays on the
Klingon ship, though the buttons were larger.
James Horner, composer for
The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock, declined to return for
The Voyage Home. Nimoy turned to his friend Leonard Rosenman, who had
written the music to Fantastic Voyage, Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the
Rings, and two Planet of the Apes sequels. Rosenman wrote an
arrangement of Alexander Courage's Star Trek television theme as the
title music for The Voyage Home, but Nimoy requested an original
composition. Music critic Jeff Bond writes, "The final result
was one of the most unusual Star Trek movie themes," consisting
of a six-note theme and variations set against a repetitious
four-note brass motif; the theme's bridge borrows content from
Rosenman's "Frodo March" for The Lord of the Rings. The
melody is played in the beginning of the film on Vulcan and the
scenes of Taylor's search for Kirk to help find her whales.
The Earth-based setting of
the filming gave Rosenman leeway to write a variety of music in
different styles. Nimoy intended the crew's introduction to the
streets of San Francisco to be accompanied by something reminiscent
of George Gershwin, but Rosenman changed the director's mind, and the
scene was scored with a contemporary jazz fusion piece by
Yellowjackets. When Chekov flees detention aboard the aircraft
carrier, Rosenman wrote a bright cue that incorporates classical
Russian compositions. The music for the escape from the hospital was
done in a baroque style. More familiar Rosenman compositions include
the action music for the face off between the Bird-of-Prey and a
whaling ship in open water, and the atmospheric music (reminiscent of
the composer's work in Fantastic Voyage) during the probe's
communication. After the probe leaves, a Vivaldiesque "whale
fugue" begins. The first sighting of the Enterprise-A uses the
Alexander Courage theme before the end titles.
Mark
Mangini served as The Voyage Home's sound designer. He described it
as different to working on many other films because Nimoy appreciated
the role of sound effects and made sure that they were prominent in
the film. Since many sounds familiar to Star Trek had been
established, the Bird-of-Prey's cloaking device, the transporter
beam, et al., Mangini focused on making only small changes to them.
The most important sounds were those of the whales and the probe.
Mangini's brother lived near biologist Roger Payne, who had
recordings of whale song. Mangini went through the tapes and chose
sounds that could be mixed to suggest conversation and language. The
probe's screeching calls were the whale song in distorted form. The
humpback's communication with the probe at the climax of the film
contained no dramatic music, meaning that Mangini's sounds had to
stand alone. He recalled that he had difficulty with envisioning how
the scene would unfold, leading Bennett to perform a puppet show to
explain. Nimoy and the other producers were unhappy with Mangini's
attempts to create the probe's droning operating noise; after 18
attempts, the sound designer finally asked Nimoy what he thought the
probe should sound like, and recorded Nimoy's response. Nimoy's voice
was distorted with "just the tiniest bit of dressing" and
used as the final sound.
The Voyage Home opened
theatrically in North America on Thanksgiving weekend, November 26th,
1986. Since Star Trek had traditionally performed poorly
internationally, the producers created a special trailer for foreign
markets that de-emphasized the Star Trek part of the title, as well
as retelling the events of The Wrath of Khan and The Search for
Spock. Winter recalled that the marketing did not seem to make a
difference. The Voyage Home was the first Star Trek film shown in the
Soviet Union, screened by the World Wildlife Fund on June 26th, 1987,
in Moscow to celebrate a ban on whaling. Attending the screening with
Nimoy, Bennett was amazed the film proved as entertaining to the
Russians as it did with American audiences; he said "the single
most rewarding moment of my Star Trek life" was when the Moscow
audience applauded at McCoy's line, "The bureaucratic mentality
is the only constant in the universe. We'll get a freighter."
Bennett believed it was a clear "messenger of what was to come."
Vonda
N. McIntyre wrote a novelization that was released at the same time
as the film. It was the biggest tie-in novel published by Pocket
Books, and spent eight weeks on The New York Times bestseller list,
peaking at #3. MCA Records released the film's soundtrack November
26th, 1986.
In its first week, The
Voyage Home ended "Crocodile" Dundee's 8-week reign of the
American box office. The Star Trek film made $39.6 million in its
first five days of release, exceeding The Search for Spock's opening
by $14 million. Ultimately the film grossed a global total of
$133,000,000, against its $21 million cost ($1 million under budget).
In six weeks, The Voyage Home sold $81.3 million in tickets, more
than the franchise's second or third film, and almost as much as Star
Trek: The Motion Picture. The film was a major commercial success for
Paramount, which released five of the top ten films of the year, and
garnered 22 percent of all money taken in at American theaters. Much
of the credit for Paramount's success was given to chairman Frank
Mancuso, Sr., who moved The Voyage Home's release from Christmas to
Thanksgiving after research showed that the film might draw filmgoers
away from The Golden Child.
The Voyage Home received
mostly positive reviews, Nimoy called it the most well-received of
all Star Trek films made at that point, and it appealed to general
audiences in addition to franchise fans. The movie was a "loose,
jovial, immensely pleasurable Christmas entertainment" for The
Washington Post's Paul Attanasio, and a retrospective BBC review
called the film "one of the series' strongest episodes and proof
that the franchise could weather the absence of space-bound action
and the iconic USS Enterprise, and still be highly enjoyable".
Although Janet Maslin of The New York Times called the film's plot
"demented", she wrote that the film "has done a great
deal to ensure the series' longevity." Rushworth Kidder of the
Christian Science Monitor praised the film for giving audiences a
view of their modern life from a different perspective, while
simultaneously proving that a film does not need to have murder,
violence, innuendo or even a main villain for dramatic storytelling.
The film's "fish out
of water" comedy and acting were mostly lauded. The Courier Mail
wrote that the film was funnier than its predecessors, and while not
"flippant", a sense of humor was revealed through the
efforts of the cast, writers and director. Newsweek's David Ansen
considered The Voyage Home not only the most light-hearted of the
movie franchise, but the most true in spirit to the original
television series.
The Voyage Home garnered 11
nominations at the 14th annual Saturn Awards, tying Aliens for number
of nominations. Nimoy and Shatner were nominated for best actor for
their roles, and Catherine Hicks was nominated for best supporting
actress. At the 59th Academy Awards, The Voyage Home was nominated
for Best Cinematography, Sound (Terry Porter, David J. Hudson, Mel
Metcalfe and Gene Cantamessa), Sound Effects Editing, and Original Score.
Paramount
was dissatisfied with the script, so its head of production Dawn
Steele asked Nicholas Meyer, the writer and director of Star Trek II:
The Wrath of Khan, to help rewrite it. Meyer never read the earlier
script, reasoning it pointless to do so since the content had no
appeal to the studio. He and Bennett split the task of conceiving the
plot between them. Bennett wrote the first quarter of the story, up
to the point where the crew goes back in time. Meyer wrote the
story's middle portion, taking place on 20th-century Earth, and
Bennett handled the ending. After 12 days of writing, Meyer and
Bennett combined their separate portions. In this version, Gillian
Taylor stays on 1986's Earth and vows to ensure the survival of the
humpback whale despite the paradox it could create. Meyer preferred
this "righter ending" to the film version, explaining
"The end in the movie detracts from the importance of people in
the present taking the responsibility for the ecology and preventing
problems of the future by doing something today, rather than catering
to the fantasy desires of being able to be transported in time to the
near-utopian future." Meyer and Bennett cut out Krikes and
Meerson's idea of having the Klingon Bird-of-Prey fly over the Super
Bowl and the hint that Saavik remained on Vulcan because she was
pregnant with Spock's child.
In
the film, Uhura and Chekov visit the aircraft carrier USS
Enterprise. The real Enterprise, out at sea at the time, was
unavailable for filming, so the non-nuclear-powered carrier USS
Ranger was used. Oakland International Airport was used for the
foreground of Starfleet Headquarters. Scenes in the San Francisco Bay
were shot at a tank on Paramount's backlot.
The
script called for the probe to vaporize the Earth's oceans,
generating heavy cloud cover. While effects cinematographer Don Dow
wanted to go to sea and record plumes of water created by exploding
detonating cords in the water, the team decided to create the probe's
climatic effect in another way after a government fishing agency
voiced concerns for the welfare of marine life in the area. The team
used a combination of baking soda and cloud tank effects; the
swirling mist created by the water-filled tank was shot on black
velvet, and color and dynamic swirls were added by injecting paint
into the tank. These shots were composited onto a painting of the
Earth along with overlaid lightning effects, created by
double-exposing lights as they moved across the screen.
Traveling
through time, Kirk and crew experience what author Jody Duncan Shay
termed a "dreamlike state". The script's only direction for
the effect was "now [they] go through time"; Nimoy and
McQuarrie envisioned Kirk's dream as a montage of bizarre images. The
filmmakers decided early on that part of the dream sequence would use
computer-generated animation to give it an unreal quality divorced
from the rest of the film. ILM worked from McQuarrie's storyboards
and created a rough mock-up or animatic to show Nimoy and hone the
direction of the sequence. For the very beginning of the dream, the
inside of the Bird-of-Prey bridge was painted stark white. Part of
the final sequence involved morphing the heads of the Enterprise crew
into one another; ILM digitized the cast members' heads using a 3-D
scanning technology developed by Cyberware and used the resulting
data for the computer models. Because each head model had the same
number of key points of reference, transforming one character into
another was simple; more difficult, the animators recalled, was
ensuring that the transformation looked "pleasing" and not
"grotesque". The resulting thirty seconds of footage took
weeks to render; the department used every spare computer they could
find to help in the processing chores. ILM's stage, optical, and
matte departments collaborated to complete other shots for the dream
sequence. The shot of a man's fall to Earth was created by filming a
small puppet on bluescreen. Shots of liquid nitrogen composited
behind the puppet gave the impression of smoke. The background plate
of the planet was a large matte that allowed the camera to zoom in
very close. The final shot of marshy terrain was practical and
required no effects.
The
filmmakers knew from the beginning of production that the whales
were their biggest effects concern; Dow recalled that they were
prepared to change to another animal in case creating the whales
proved too difficult. When Humphrey the Whale wandered into the San
Francisco Bay, Dow and his camera crew attempted to gather usable
footage of the humpback but failed to do so. Other footage of real
humpbacks either did not exist on 35mm film or would have been
difficult to match to specific actions required by the script.
Compositing miniatures shot against bluescreen on top of water
backgrounds would not have provided realistic play of light. Creating
full-size mechanical whales on tracks would severely limit the types
of angles and shots. To solve the whale problem, Rodis hired robotics
expert Walt Conti. While Conti was not experienced in film, Rodis
believed his background in engineering and design made him
well-equipped for Rodis' planned solution: the creation of
independent and self-contained miniature whale models.
Mark
Mangini served as The Voyage Home's sound designer. He described it
as different to working on many other films because Nimoy appreciated
the role of sound effects and made sure that they were prominent in
the film. Since many sounds familiar to Star Trek had been
established, the Bird-of-Prey's cloaking device, the transporter
beam, et al., Mangini focused on making only small changes to them.
The most important sounds were those of the whales and the probe.
Mangini's brother lived near biologist Roger Payne, who had
recordings of whale song. Mangini went through the tapes and chose
sounds that could be mixed to suggest conversation and language. The
probe's screeching calls were the whale song in distorted form. The
humpback's communication with the probe at the climax of the film
contained no dramatic music, meaning that Mangini's sounds had to
stand alone. He recalled that he had difficulty with envisioning how
the scene would unfold, leading Bennett to perform a puppet show to
explain. Nimoy and the other producers were unhappy with Mangini's
attempts to create the probe's droning operating noise; after 18
attempts, the sound designer finally asked Nimoy what he thought the
probe should sound like, and recorded Nimoy's response. Nimoy's voice
was distorted with "just the tiniest bit of dressing" and
used as the final sound.
