How Do You Say "Glasnost" in Klingon?

Funny thing about wars.

They end.

They might not end gracefully, and they might not end the way you want them to, but there will always come a point when the slaughter stops; sometimes because there is simply no one left to slaughter. 

Or no one left with the ability to continue.

Those of you who have been following my current film season (Genre Fluid) will know that I have been exploring portrayals of the Cold War over the past few weeks. The Thief was explicitly a Cold War espionage story, albeit one that didn't have a lot to say for itself (if you know what I mean). The Big Country was an epic pacifist Western, but director William Wyler had intended the story as a very obvious allegory for the escalating hostility between the two superpowers.

Our next film is an allegory for the end of the Cold War, although it might not be the one you were expecting.

This is Nicholas Meyer.

Back in 1991, Nicholas Meyer was a successful and highly respected writer/director in the very prime of his career. He had enjoyed an early success with his 1974 novel The Seven Percent Solution; a pastiche Sherlock Holmes story about the great detective's imagined meeting with Sigmund Freud. In 1975 he wrote the screenplay for The Night That Panicked America, a television dramatization of the Orson Wells "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast (which you may recall I screened last Halloween). And in 1983 he directed The Day After, a grim and powerful television movie about a nuclear attack on the US, which became one of the cultural milestones of its generation.

Somewhat less successful was his 1991 espionage thriller Company Business, a semi-lighthearted caper about an ageing CIA operative who is tasked with transporting a captured KGB mole to a prisoner exchange in recently-unified Berlin.

Company Business was a perfectly enjoyable little late-stage Cold War thriller, and a fun vehicle for its two stars (Gene Hackman and  Mikhail Baryshnikov). Under most circumstances it would have served its purpose well, but history decided to play a cruel joke on Nicholas Meyer and his amiable Cold War flick. Between the Spring of 1990 (when it was filmed) and the Autumn of 1991 (when it was released) something slightly unusual happened.

The Soviet Union collapsed.

Suddenly (and it did happen very fast) the Cold War was over, and movies like Company Business were instantly and glaringly anachronistic. The film received a very muted release and (somewhat inevitably) lost a significant amount of money.

Not to be deterred, Nicholas Meyer decided to follow with a film that was explicitly about the end of the Cold War, and the political and cultural impact of such a momentous and historical development.

So he made a Star Trek movie.

Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country was the final film of the franchise to feature the original cast of the 60s television era. By 1991, Star Trek was fast approaching its 25th anniversary, and its classic cast was no longer in the first flush of youth.

A brand new television version had been launched four years earlier, which had initially proved very controversial with the hard-core fanbase. 

Many felt that Star Trek could not be Star Trek without Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the rest of the familiar faces. It hadn't helped that the first season of The Next Generation was awful beyond belief (it's actually a minor miracle that the show made it into a second season) and for a time, it looked as if the franchise was destined to fade into obscurity.

But then the Cold War ended.

One of the hallmarks of 1960s-era Star Trek had always been its basically optimistic vision of the future. Gene Roddenberry had imagined a 23rd Century in which humanity had managed to overcome its internal problems. The original Enterprise crew included a diverse mix of ethnicities, skin colours and genders (even a Russian) and audiences were continually reminded that this was not meant to be a warship (Roddenberry himself had served as a combat pilot in Word War II, and he never tried to portray war as either heroic or noble).

But the Klingons of the original series had been written as a very obvious allegory for the Soviet Union, so a 1991 film about the collapse of the Klingon Empire gave Nicholas Meyer a golden opportunity to create the political thriller of his dreams.

The Undiscovered Country is probably the most erudite of all Star Trek films, full of references to everything from the Chernobyl disaster to the Cuban Missile Crisis, with liberal amounts of Shakespeare, The Manchurian Candidate and Judgment at Nuremberg (among other things) thrown in for good measure.

It was a standing joke in the history of Star Trek that actors cast as Klingons were generally Shakespearians, and The Undiscovered Country takes that to its inevitable conclusion.

As Nicholas Meyer said at the time, if he had gone to the studio with a proposal for a film that deals with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, he would have had an uphill battle trying to get the project off the ground. 

But a Star Trek film? That's a different story.

Ultimately, The Undiscovered Country is a very special film that could only have been made at a specific moment in history. It was also the perfect send-off for the veteran cast, and allowed them to end their tenure on a suitably high note.

We will screen Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country at 7.30 on Thursday, the 24th of October at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.