With Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country – dedicated to series creator Gene Roddenberry, who died the year of its release – the sci-fi franchise manages to find a new way to be oppressively boring. This entry is structured as a police procedural, as Kirk (William Shatner) and “Bones” (DeForest Kelley) are framed for the assassination of a Klingon ambassador. While they’re sent to a “penal asteroid,” Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and the rest of the Enterprise crew dig around the starship trying to find clues pointing to the actual culprits. This mostly combines the interminable interstellar politics of the later Star Wars films with the slowest game of Clue you’ve ever played. The only moments of interest come on that asteroid, where Kirk makes out with a shape-shifting fellow prisoner who initially looks like supermodel Iman (and is indeed played by her) and later transforms into a copy of Kirk himself. It’s the perfect metaphor for the series’ narcissistic, blowhard hero. From director Nicholas Meyer, who also made the second film, and with appearances by Kim Cattrall as a “sexy” Vulcan and Christopher Plummer as an apparently Asian Klingon obsessed with Shakespeare.
