Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett

A fairy godmother with an important mission has passed on, leaving her wand and quest in the hands of the well-meaning but inexperienced Magrat Garlick. Magrat teams up with Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax to travel to the distant city of Genua to stop a fairy tale coming true, which seems a bit off until the witches meet the other fairy godmother and learn that "happy ever after" can be a curse as well as a blessing.

Witches Abroad is the twelfth Discworld novel and the second to focus on the coven of Lancre witches (also the third to feature Granny Weatherwax). With their native village of Lancre recovering from the events of Wyrd Sisters, Pratchett decides to send the witches off on a jobbing holiday. This results in a book of two halves: the first, where they travel across the Disc to Genua, and the second where they confront the "bad guy" in Genua itself. The first half is a splendid romp as the witches visit castles, villages and dwarf mines and meet wolves and vampires. Pratchett can be good at travelogues and this is one of his better ones, and the trail of inadvertent chaos two "little old ladies and a wet hen" leave across the continent is most amusing.

Events in Genua take a cleverer turn, where the witches encounter a mash-up of Baba Yaga, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella in the Disc's version of New Orleans, complete with voodoo magic, zombies, alligators and some amazingly good food. It sounds odd but it works surprisingly well, and breaking the story in two in an already-short novel (under 300 pages) means the story cracks on with impressive pace. There's balls and glass slippers and lots of gumbo as the pages fly by.

The book features some of Pratchett's better one-novel-only characters, like Mrs. Gogol, Baron Saturday and Lily, as well as the formidable Legba. We also get a larger focus on Nanny Ogg than in the previous witches novel, and a much larger role (so to speak) for Greebo, Nanny's debauchedly murderous cat. Also look out for the debut of Casanunda, master swordsman and the world's greatest stepladder-assisted lover and/or liar.

Witches Abroad (****) is a free-wheeling book that mashes together influences from wildly different sources and creates a highly entertaining novel out of the results. The book is available now in the UK and USA.

I previously reviewed the novel here.

Star Trek: Generations

Captain James T. Kirk attends the launch of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-B. An emergency situation arises and Kirk, as usual, helps save the day, but he is apparently killed in the process. Seventy-eight years later, Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Enterprise 1701-D is put in a desperate situation when a fanatical scientist starts destroying entire star systems. Picard is going to need some help...

With the conclusion of Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1994, a TV series that dwarfed the popularity and reach of its predecessors, Paramount was keen to move the show and its popular cast onto the big screen as soon as possible. Overriding the concerns of the production team, the film was immediately put into rotation to start shooting as soon as filming was completed on the TV show and to be on cinema screens before the end of the same year. It was a tall order, leaving the cast and crew exhausted from working on the TV show for seven years and then straight into a full-length feature film.

Some of this can be seen on screen. Star Trek: Generations (the first film in the series to drop the roman numerals) is a solid but unexceptional film, something of a surprise given it features Captains Kirk and Picard joining forces to take down a mutual threat, a charismatic villain played by Malcolm McDowell. There's some entertaining comedy beats and some very good characterisation, particularly of Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner) as he gets used to his "emotion chip". Most of the castmembers get at least a brief chance to shine and, in the scene where the Enterprise-D's saucer section crash-lands on a planetary surface, one of the franchise's most memorable action and effects set-pieces.

The film relies a little too heavily on the TV show for setup. Villains Lursa and B'Etor have very little motivation and if you hadn't seen them already in the TV show, you'd have no idea why them showing up is a big deal. Similarly, Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) feels like a bit of a walking deus ex machina in the film and her character has no real arc.  The story also feels a bit overworked and overcomplicated, with too many moving pieces and a TV-like approach of pressing on regardless of if the plot makes sense  (Soren not being able to beam into the Nexus from a ship already feels a bit iffy, but the jump from that to blowing up entire stars to shift the Nexus's path feels extreme). The film's big ending being a fistfight between two middle-aged gentlemen and an older one on a big rock is also rather underwhelming. Destroying another Enterprise also feels a bit gratuitous, although it is at least done in an impressive manner.

Still, it's a long way from the worst entry in the Star Trek pantheon and it has fun moments. William Shatner takes a delight in hamming up every second he's on-screen, but for once this is more charming than annoying, due to his limited screen time (he has a brief appearance at the start of the film and then at the end, more of an extended camo than the promised film-length team-up). He and Stewart make for an entertaining team, even if the gulf in their respective acting abilities is more of a yawning chasm. Malcolm McDowell can do "charming but evil" in his sleep and the film packs a lot into its running time.

Star Trek: Generations (***½) isn't going to be winning any prizes for being a classic movie, but it is a solid and entertaining piece that does its job - passing the baton from one generation to another - efficiently.

Games Workshop announces WARHAMMER streaming service, to be led by 11 new animated shows

Games Workshop has announced their own home streaming service, Warhammer+, which will be blasting its way onto people's desktops and Smart TVs in July.

The service will be the home of no less than eleven new, animated series set in the two main IPs Games Workshop owns: Warhamer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar.

The shows will include Astartes 2, Altar of Wrath, Interrogator, Blacktalon, Pariah Nexus, Angels of Death, Hammer and Bolter, utilising a number of animation styles from 3D photorealism to 2D and anime-influenced styles. It won't include the Eisenhorn live-action TV series currently in development at Amazon.

Games Workshop launching their own streaming service feels ambitious (recalling that the vastly-better-known DC Comics were unable to get their own streaming service on the air) given the niche appeal, but they are promising additional benefits from being a subscriber, including possibly discounts and exclusive offers for the tabletop game. There's also some speculation that this move is to enable GW to start producing original content for later distribution via other, larger platforms once a deal can be reached.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

The Klingon moon Praxis has exploded, disrupting the Empire's energy production and polluting the atmosphere of the Klingon homeworld. The United Federation of Planets sees the catastrophe as an opportunity, offering assistance in repairing the damage in return for a lasting peace. The Klingon Chancellor travels to Earth to negotiate the treaty but is killed, his assassination pinned on Captain Kirk, a well-known enemy of the Klingon Empire. With Kirk and McCoy imprisoned, it falls to Captain Spock and the Enterprise crew to exonerate their comrades, rescue them and stop those who are determined to end the chances of peace forever.

With the release of Star Trek V in 1989, it was felt that the time of the original Star Trek crew had come to an end, and the next film would star the Next Generation crew. However, Paramount were not keen on waiting until The Next Generation finished before making a new movie in the franchise. Plans for a prequel film set at Starfleet Academy also failed to excite anyone. At the same time, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War was firing up the excitement of Leonard Nimoy and Wrath of Khan writer-director (and Voyage Home co-writer) Nicholas Meyer, who saw the opportunity for a great analogy with real-life events. The frugal Meyer's involvement worked for Paramount, who wanted to make the film for less money than the disastrous Final Frontier, and also for Nimoy, who had pondered directing but knew it would annoy co-star Shatner; Meyer was a neutral figure everyone respected and whose work on two previous movies had been lauded. The meme that "every odd-numbered Star Trek film is rubbish" had started gathering pace by this time as well, so the fact the next movie was an even-numbered one and Meyer had worked on the two previous even-numbered films was encouraging.

Star Trek VI is not a subtle film. The comparisons to contemporary politics are fairly obvious, with the destruction of Praxis being basically Chernobyl in space, and the Klingon-Federation peace talks are the end of the Cold War by any other name. However, the film does start building a genuine sense of mystery. When the Enterprise fires on the Klingon ship, despite its records showing a full set of torpedoes on board, it creates a paradox that Spock, Scotty, Chekov and Uhura have to work to unravel. This is great fun - Star Trek usually handles mysteries well, at least those that do not bog down in technobabble - and is preceded by some very powerful scenes employing actors of the calibre of David Warner and Christopher Plummer (an old friend of Shatner's, who's clearly having an absolute whale of a time) as they debate realpolitik and quote Shakespeare. There some startling scenes as Kirk has to confront his racism towards the Klingons, inspired by his constant struggles with them and their murder of his son (in The Search for Spock). Characterisation is strong and the actors do well with the material, Meyer again getting a great performance out of Shatner (though he seems more willing to let some hammier takes go through, possibly due to a lack of time and money) and Nimoy showing up with his A-game, having understandably lost the will to live during The Final Frontier.

The film also features George Takei's best performance as Sulu, as well as giving him much more to do as the Captain of the Excelsior. More disappointing is the absence of Saavik, who was originally supposed to be the traitor on the Enterprise. Kim Cattrall auditioned for the part and impressed Nimoy and Meyer, but was unimpressed to learn she would be the third actress to play the role and turned it down. The producers agreed to rewrites making her a new character, Valeris (Cattrall even named her). However, the script was not adjusted to fit a more Vulcan-like character, leaving Saavik's more emotional tendencies (a result of her supposed half-Romulan heritage, although that revelation had been cut out of The Wrath of Khan) in place with a supposedly purely-Vulcan character. Cattrall does as good a job as she can as Valeris, but the character is somewhat under-written as a result of the changes.

The sequences on Rura Penthe are also disappointing; the lack of budget results in unconvincing sets and iffy alien makeup, though Iman gives a good performance as Martia, and the sequence relies a lot on Shatner and DeForest Kelley's effortless banter to get through it.

The film has a rousing climax with a solid space battle, and it's good to see the constantly-hamstrung USS Excelsior finally cutting loose and showing what it is capable of. The fact that this time everyone knew they were making their last full picture together makes for a more final and emotional ending, enhanced by the fact that the film launched in Star Trek's 25th anniversary year and that Gene Roddenberry sadly passed away shortly before the premiere. 

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (****) is not as accomplished as either The Wrath of Khan or The Voyage Home, but comfortably emerges as the third-best Star Trek film, with some excellent characters and storylines and some great dialogue. Only a few clunky scenes and budget constraints hold it back from matching the earlier two Meyer films.

Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett

Windle Poons, the oldest wizard in Ankh-Morpork, has died at the grand old age of 130. To his bemusement, Death does not show up to collect him and he is forced to return to life as a zombie. Across the Discworld, people are dying, only to find that they're not moving on. On a remote farm, a new worker shows up to start cutting the corn. Fortunately, he's a dab hand with the old scythe...

Terry Pratchett was, as is well-known by now, something of a "gardener" when it came to writing. He started books with an idea and maybe a character and just kept writing until he bumped into something approximating a plot, often working backwards in edits to stitch the whole thing together cohesively. By the time he got to Reaper Man, the eleventh book in the Discworld series, he had this structure down pat and could write an entertaining yarn with his eyes closed. For whatever reason, though, Reaper Man, doesn't quite work as a cohesive novel in the same way as most of the rest.

In this case it seems that Pratchett had two separate ideas competing for attention, neither strong enough to propel an entire book, and decided to fuse them together. In the first storyline, something of a sequel to the earlier Mort, Death's growing affection for the lifeforms he has to cull has caused some controversy among the Auditors of Reality and Death is fired. He's given some time to put his affairs in order, but rather than do this he decides to live as a human for the last few days of his existence, taking up the role of Bill Door, handyman for hire, and going to work on a remote farm for Ms. Flitworth. This story is entertaining, well-characterised and even somewhat moving.

In the second storyline, strange artifacts are appearing all over Ankh-Morpork (nominally caused by the growing lifeforce left behind by people who can't move on from this plane of reality, though this connection feels strained), initially snowglobes and then shopping trolleys, culminating in the horrific appearance of the out-of-town shopping mall, a parasitical commercial tic which drains the life from the urban host. This isn't a bad idea, per se, and ties in with Pratchett's preferred scheme of finding a facet of human existence - movies, cops, opera, the press - and transferring it to Discworld to be poked around satirically. However, you can't quite shake the feeling that Pratchett's idea here is not fully-formed and may have been driven by an unpleasant parking experience at a shopping centre rather than a much stronger idea.

The result is arguably the most schizophrenic Discworld novel of them all, on one hand the splendid and enjoyable story of Death trying his hand at life, and on the other, the much more vague idea of the Unseen University wizarding faculty and an undead self-help group joining forces to taken down an, er, evil retail park.

Fortunately, the vagueness of the Ankh-Morpork storyline doesn't stop it from having some very funny lines and characters. The undead self-help group is great fun, populated by a traditional, Pratchettian cast of deranged-but-likeable characters, and the book delves deeper into the Unseen University faculty after their previous major appearance just one book earlier. The fact that the entire faculty survived that book into this one may cause hardened Discworld readers to pass out (the Archchancellor is the same one from the last book, which has never happened before) and enjoy the growth the characters show, or, in the case of the Bursar, the distinct decline in sanity. Unfortunately, the UU cast do have a tendency to reduce Pratchett to the most slapstick style of comedy, a style which he is not accomplished at, and later scenes of the wizards running around, being whisked off by self-steering shopping trolleys etc do become tiresome.

Still, Pratchett on an off day is still entertaining. Reaper Man (***) has some good laughs - Death trying to help out a cockerel with dyslexia, Poons mentoring a shy bogeyman - and the Death part of the novel is excellent. The rest just feels like it could have done with a few more rewrites. It is available now in the UK and USA.

Please note I previously reviewed the novel here.

UNCHARTED 4 - and maybe the whole series - coming to PC

In eye-opening news, Sony has finally unlocked the cabinet holding the crown jewels and offered to sell them to PC players.

Sony revealed the plan to port Uncharted 4: A Thief's End to PC in a recent presentation. Sony confirmed that the PC releases of both Horizon: Zero Dawn and Days Gone have been very successful and they see more PC ports as a way of improving future revenue streams.

However, the Uncharted series is a bit of a different beast to the other two titles. Produced by Sony subsidiary Naughty Dog, the series is one of the biggest-selling PlayStation exclusives of all time, having sold just under 42 million copies of five games. The series comprises Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (2007), Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (2009), Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (2011), Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (2016) and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy (2017). The series, which draws plot inspiration from the Tomb Raider and Indiana Jones franchises and gameplay ideas from Gears of War, follows treasure hunter Nathan Drake and a number of allies around the world as they get into various misadventures. 

Uncharted 4 is the biggest-selling PlayStation 4 exclusive of all time (and second-biggest-selling game overall, behind only Grand Theft Auto V), whilst Uncharted 3, 2 and 1 respectively rank as the third, fourth and ninth biggest-selling PlayStation 3 exclusives of all time. One of the series' few competitors is a fellow Naughty Dog series, The Last of Us, which has sold almost as many copies of just two titles.

Reports are conflicted whether just Uncharted 4 is crossing to PC, or if the earlier three games are coming over as well in a remastered form (which could then presumably also be offered for sale on PlayStation 5). Still, Sony making any Uncharted game available on another platform is a startling development, and encouraging to those holding out for games like Spider-Man and Bloodborne.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Nimbus III: the "Planet of Galactic Peace," a world where the Klingons, Romulans and Federation have agreed to put aside their differences and work together to develop a society in tandem. The plan was a miserable failure, the planet reduced to a backwater, albeit the only backwater apart from Earth where representatives of all three powers can be found. When a terrorist group takes the ambassadors hostage, the USS Enterprise is ordered to mount a rescue mission.

They say if you stare too long, into the abyss, it will stare back into you. Watching Star Trek V: The Final Frontier makes the viewer acutely aware of the accuracy of that statement, except the abyss is William Shatner, believing he is a good director and very desperately hoping he can convince you he is as well.

The fifth mainline Star Trek feature film is something of an odd beast, to say the least. After Leonard Nimoy directed the third and fourth films, Shatner invoked a clause in his Paramount contract giving him the right to direct the next film in the series and have a say in its story. Paramount braced themselves for the experience and it was a heady one, with Shatner proposing a story where the crew of the Enterprise are forced to travel to a planet in search of God but instead discover the Devil pretending to be God, and are caught in a cosmic battle between good and evil. Aware they were under a contractual restraint, Paramount executives put the story into development, managing to convince Harve Bennett (producer on the second through fourth films) to return to help guide - or make filmable - the "ambitious" project. Bennett realised that Shatner had become fascinated by the idea of televangelists, particularly corrupt ones who conned people into giving them money by promising them a place in the promised land. Script rewrites with David Loughery developed the idea that there was no real God or the Devil in the story, and instead an imprisoned alien entity would pretend to be God to try to hitch a ride on the Enterprise out of its prison.

With this new story in place - one less likely to get the franchise blacklisted by Christians - and the cast signed up (Nimoy stoically agreeing to return as a professional courtesy to his colleague Shatner, but frantically encouraging rewrites behind the scenes) things were in a promising place for perhaps a watchable movie. But The Final Frontier immediately ran into a series of big problems: Paramount decided to rush-release the film to hit the summer 1989 market rather than wait until Christmas; additional rewrites designed to iron out the remaining script problems were halted by the 1988 Writer's Strike; and Industrial Light and Magic and most of the other big Hollywood effects companies were fully booked with projects like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Ghostbusters II and Tim Burton's Batman. The only effects company available on short notice were, how shall we say, "not very good" and inexperienced, wasting a huge amount of the film's not-ungenerous budget (half again that of The Voyage Home) on test shots that went nowhere.

So, whilst Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is a diabolical mess of a movie with awful visual effects, major script problems and leaden direction, it's unfair to blame all of this on the film's director and star. In fact, the film has a reasonable amount of merit to it. It's the only film in the franchise to follow the TV show's lead and focus extremely closely on the Kirk-Spock-McCoy relationship, the emotional core of the original series. With Shatner clearly exhausted from pulling double duty as director, and Nimoy giving arguably the most phoned-in performance of his career (there are a few scenes where you can see Nimoy's soul vacating his body during some of his line readings), it falls on DeForest Kelley to emerge as the film's most valuable player. He adds charm and wit to the campfire scenes at the start of the movie, and the scene where he has to relive the death of his father might be McCoy's most challenging emotional scene in the entire franchise, and Kelley rises to the occasion tremendously. James Doohan and Nichelle Nichols have a fair bit to do, for once, and there's an intriguing hint that they're in a relationship, or might be headed that way, which is never really followed up on. Nichols also gets her infamous "fan dance" scene, which remains baffling (and where Uhura got the fans is never disclosed).

On the guest star front, the film lucks out with Laurence Luckinbill, a well-regarded stage actor who very rarely did film or television (Star Trek V is literally his last on-screen starring role). Luckinbill gives a spirited, enthusiastic performance as Sybok, the Vulcan who rejected logic to become a man of faith, very much the televangelist of Shatner's original inspiration. But he's not a lunatic or a fire-and-brimstone preacher, rather a man of charisma, intelligence and tremendous empathy who inspires trust. It's a really hard mix to nail successfully, but Luckinbill succeeds. Other castmembers are also very good, particularly David Warner, Charles Cooper and Cynthia Gouw as the ambassadors to Nimbus III, though they seem to have less screentime than was originally envisaged; Warner and Cooper were later invited back to the franchise, the latter also as a Klingon, possibly to make up for this. The other Klingon villains are a bit one-note, but they're not needed for much more than that.

So having an accomplished guest cast and some great scenes for the established regulars result in some pretty good moments in the film. Unfortunately, the problems elsewhere almost overwhelm the movie. The effects are terrible: back-projection (!) is used for some of the space scenes and other scenes that normally use greenscreen and this does not look very good, at all. Jerry Goldsmith returns for his first soundtrack in the franchise since Star Trek: The Motion Picture and seems to have gotten confused and just reused his score from that film with little in the way of new themes or development. It's the first time in the movie franchise so far that a soundtrack disappoints. The physical effects are also embarrassing. A physical fight between Kirk and a cat-alien on Nimbus III is Doctor Who-on-a-bad-day levels of cringe. The climactic battle on Sh Ka Ree sees Kirk call a photon torpedo - a device which at its lowest level is still basically a tactical nuke - down on his head and it causes almost no damage to the surrounding area. It's all deeply amateur hour, except there's Trek fan films which have more convincing production values.

But the key weaknesses of the film remain the script - even this much-improved one over the demented original story treatment - and Shatner's leaden direction. Although reportedly Shatner was a convivial director on set, even earning the respect of actors he'd annoyed over the years like Doohan and Takei, he doesn't have much sense of pacing or energy, and his shots are often rote. There's little sense of the invention or energy that both Meyer and Nimoy brought to the fore in the preceding three movies. In more than a few scenes, the lifeless takes make you horrifically wonder what the takes were like which weren't used. Mercifully, Paramount have declined Shatner's various offers of a Director's Cut, which is probably for the best.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (*½) is not a great movie, which is a shame because it does have potential. The idea of both individuals and an alien playing on people's faith to manipulate them has a lot of merit, and the character-based interplay between the triumvirate of Kirk, Spock and McCoy is the closest the movies ever get to the TV show. DeForest Kelley might give his franchise-best performance, making up for Shatner and Nimoy (both off their game). But the combination of Shatner's lifeless direction, the absolutely woeful visual effects, a phoned-in musical score and a weak script eventually provides the Enterprise crew with an enemy they cannot overcome.

Netflix announces additional castmembers for SANDMAN

Netflix began filming a TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novel series last October, and by now are probably not far off from finishing. They announced the main cast back in January and have now announced a number of additional castmembers.

The new castmembers are:

• Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death
• Mason Alexander Park as Desire
• Donna Preston as Despair
• Razane Jammal as Lyta Hall
• Joely Richardson as Ethel Cripps
• Niamh Walsh as Young Ethel Cripps
• David Thewlis as John Dee
• Kyro Ra as Rose Walker
• Patton Oswalt as the voice of Matthew the Raven
• Stephen Fry as Gilbert
• Jenna Coleman as Johanna Constantine
• Sandra James Young as Unity Kincaid

They join Tom Sturridge as Dream, Boyd Holbrook as the Corinthian, Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer, Charles Dance as Roderick Burgess, Asim Chaudhry as Abel, Sanjeev Bhaskar as Cain and Vivienne Acheampong as Lucienne.

The Sandman is expected to debut on Netflix either in late 2021 or early 2022. The first season adapts the first two graphic novels in the series, Preludes & Nocturnes and The Doll's House.

HBO taps PERSON OF INTEREST writer for GAME OF THRONES spin-off TEN THOUSAND SHIPS

HBO has brought on some new talent to tackle the development of their Game of Thrones spin-off roster.

Princess Nymeria and Prince Mors Martell, artwork by Karla Ortiz

Amanda Segel is an experienced writer and producer from shows such as Without a Trace, The Good Wife, Nikita, Person of Interest, The Mist and Helstrom. HBO has tapped her to write and possibly produce/showrun Ten Thousand Ships, a Game of Thrones spin-off focusing on the historical character of Nymeria, Princess of Ny Sar. Nymeria and her people survived the destruction of their homelands along the River Rhoyne by ancient Valyria by embarking on thousands of ships and fleeing across the Summer Sea. After a lengthy voyage of many years, during which time her ships sought safety in Sothoryos, Naath and the Summer Islands, they finally arrived in Dorne in the south of Westeros, uniting that country into the southernmost of the Seven Kingdoms.

The project is one of several additional Game of Thrones spin-offs in development at HBO. Rome and Gotham showrunner Bruno Heller is developing Nine Voyages, a show about the great explorer Corlys Velaryon. HBO is also developing both Flea Bottom, set in the slums of King's Landing in an unknown historical period, and Dunk & Egg, an adaptation of a series of novellas George R.R. Martin has written or has in the planning stages. Neither of the latter projects has had a creative team attached as yet. HBO Max is also developing a potential Game of Thrones animated project.

Production is well underway on another prequel project, House of the Dragon, based on the civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons. Shooting began several weeks ago in Cornwall, and production has since moved to Warner Brothers' studio facility in Leavesden, outside London. House of the Dragon is currently scheduled to debut in early 2022.

Wertzone Classics: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Having saved their comrade Captain Spock, the crew of the late starship Enterprise decide to return home to face court martial for their actions. However, an alien probe of tremendous power arrives in Earth orbit and drains the planet of energy, whilst sending out incomprehensible transmissions. Analysing the transmissions, Admiral Kirk and his crew determine that the probe is attempting to communicate with humpback whales, a species rendered extinct due to the actions of humans three hundred years earlier. With little choice, the crew decide to time travel to the late 20th Century to try to recover two whales to help them save humanity.

As a seven-year-old back in 1986, I remember reading reports about the new Star Trek movie in production. The story - that the crew would go back in time to save the humpback whale from extinction with a right-on environmental message, the Enterprise would not appear and the film would have a comedic tone - sounded second only to Spock's Brain in cringe-inducing awfulness, and I braced myself for a terrible movie.

Which just goes to show. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is, easily, the most breezily enjoyable popcorn flick in the entire Star Trek canon. In terms of raw dramatic power and thematic richness it can't hold a candle to The Wrath of Khan, but it doesn't even try. Instead it leans heavily on the warmth and comedic interplay of the crew, celebrating twenty years of working together in this film. Everyone is on top form, Leonard Nimoy delivers arguably his best work as both director and actor, William Shatner gets to deploy his formidably-weaponised wit and charm (somewhat missing from the three previous, more sombre films) and the other actors all get their time in the sun.

The film does feel a bit over-familiar in some aspects: the opening with an alien object of tremendous power approaching Earth is pretty much a replica of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (fortunately this probe only knocks ships out rather than scanning them to death), and the ships in the film are all suspiciously the same as the four extant Starfleet ship models (the Constitution, Miranda, Excelsior and Oberth classes, by this point). But this is all (well-handled) setup to the central gag of getting our characters to 20th Century Earth and seeing them try to cope in a "paranoid, primitive culture." The culture clash gags are amusing - even moreso now that we are so far removed from 1986 San Francisco that it appears to be a historical time period itself - with the crew struggling with concepts like money and public transport. Once the crew find their feet, the film becomes even more entertaining, with Dr. McCoy giving a dialysis patient a tablet that instantly regrows her kidney, Scotty and McCoy creating a self-repeating temporal paradox by giving the inventor of transparent aluminum the formula, Chekov getting into hot water for asking about "nuclear wessels" and Spock mind-melding with a whale. Rarely does a scene pass without a genuinely great, comedic line ("You are not seeing us at our best," "That much is certain").

There are some spotty plotting moments, including why they went back to 1986 to recover whales when their numbers were already depleted rather than, say, the middle of the 6th Century BC and just beaming them up, though I like the idea of Spock deciding to communicate with them and bring them on-board with the plan; they are sentient beings, after all (that said, one line suggests that Spock recreated the timejump parameters by memory from their last jump in the original TV series, in which they travelled back exactly 300 years, so that may have been the limitation here). The Klingon Bird-of-Prey also continues its somewhat elastic connection with any kind of scaled reality, dramatically shifting in size depending on the needs of the scene. But this isn't a film about nitpicking or pedantry. It's a feel-good adventure, especially after the heavy drama of the previous two flicks, and it works extremely well on that basis.

Particularly strong is the script, which is packed with delights. The original script wasn't working so producer Harve Bennett convinced Wrath of Khan co-writer and director Nicholas Meyer to return for a script polish-up, adding a lot of character and warmth to proceedings. The script also intelligently addresses the outstanding plot issues from the previous two films, with Kirk and his crew having to face the consequences of their actions. The claim that Star Trek II, III and IV form a trilogy is overstated - the three films merely acknowledge the previous films happened and there is some plot business from them that needs to be dealt with - but it's good to see continuity being handled well and logically.

The film also works well without a villain: The Motion Picture tried that but it didn't entirely work. Here it's handled much better. The superbly-realised and somewhat eerie probe is the closest thing we have to an antagonist and it's more of a force of nature than a character, though some may feel disappointed we don't learn more about its origins (the entertaining novel Probe does provide some interesting ideas about its origins, non-canon though it is). John Schuck - who later appears as Draal in Babylon 5 - makes a good but brief impression as the belligerent Klingon Ambassador to the Federation who is out for Kirk's blood, and he reprises that role in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (which can be seen as something of a stand-alone "sequel" to the "Genesis Trilogy," as limited as those connections are).

The film is also notable for its distillation of the Star Trek ethos: the probe is a potential threat, but not mindlessly belligerent. Violent solutions to the situation are rejected in favour of peaceful ones. The hunting of intelligent beings to death just for their meat is deemed by Spock to not be "logical." The short-sightedness of humanity against its long-term interests is repeatedly mentioned. Arguably the film's most interesting moment is also its most subtle: in his mind-meld, Spock asks the whale Gracie to help save humanity from the probe and she agrees, despite learning her species is destroyed just a few decades later by the actions of humanity, a subtle suggestion that the morality of whales is superior to that of humans.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (****½) is unalloyed fun from start to finish, hampered maybe by a few clunky lines of dialogue and one or two gags that don't land as well as most. Maybe not quite the best Star Trek film, but certainly the most watchable and the most fun, augmented by Leonard Rosenman's distinctive and unusual-for-Star Trek score and some great visual effects (the film's animatronic whale models are particularly impressive). One of the main legacies from the film was Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner's high salary demands, which made the viability of future films doubtful and spurred Paramount to commission a brand new television show with a new, cheaper cast. Star Trek: The Next Generation was announced just before the film launched, but the "classic" cast would still have two more appearances to come.