Hey Trekkies! Put those blasters on stun and get ready to take the Death Starz to lightspeed!

Star Trek IV is returning to theaters in August 2021! I have only seen the film on the tele so I plan to grab some tix and head to the theater to see Cap'n Kirk and the crew. I watched the 40th anniversary theatrical re-release of STTMP in 2019 in the theater and it was quite impressive.

See you in August! I'm getting my white bathrobe and headband ready to cosplay as Spock at the showing!

https://www.fathomevents.com/events/Star-Trek-IV-The-Voyage-Home-35th-Anniversary?date=2021-08-22

I would go see this in a theater if it was coupled with a special event like a post-film Q&A with an actor from the film or the director.

I saw this twice, maybe three times in the theater back in the day.

That was 1986 so I distinctly remember not going out to the movies very much that year due to family/financial issues at the time. The other big movies of that year like Top Gun, Aliens and Ferris Bueller I did not see until several years later on home video.

I saw it in a theater around Christmas time. ad a few times later on TV. On a different point, I did attend a meet and story time by 3of the actors Zulu and Scott y and Kirk . They told a brief story about the filming. then if you wanted to pay ( 50 or 100 bucks ) U could enter into other rooms of the Hotel for a Q and A. I was dating a young woman at the time so spent it on her.

Yeah, I watched the movie last month for the first time on the large theater screen and it was fantastic! what can I say, i'm a sucker for the large theater screens where everything is larger than life!

I saw the film once or twice in it's entirety over 10 or 15 years ago so I only remembered the basic outline. I was so pleased with how well everything fit together in the movie.

I first believed that the 2 whales being returned to the ocean from the institute was an "artificial deadline or red herring" since the crew could go out to the ocean and grab any 2 humpback whales. In my earlier viewings I totally missed or forgot how Spock kept to the Trek ethos by doing the whole Mind Melding thingummy with the Humpback whale to getting their permission, rather than kidnapping them, to take them back to 23rd century timeline to save earth from the probe.

It was nice to see Spock slowly regaining bits of humanity as the film progressed. My favorite bit was at the end when Sarek and Spock meet. I thought it was lovely when Sarek first apologizes to Spock for not agreeing with his decision to enter the ST academy and saying something to the effect of his mates, "being fine people." And, of course, the next part when Sarek asks if Spock has any messages for his mother and he replies, "yes, tell her 'I feel fine.'" I believe that was my favorite scene in the film.

The film had such good pace and so many good lines and jokes that I forgot about until watching this screening. I found it totally worth my time and money.

That was indeed a very good scene and one of very special importance when you realize that was the last time Mark Lenard and Leonard Nimoy shared a scene together.

I'll represent the counterpoint view here.

It was a fun movie, but being a nerd, the casual handling of time travel was a little frustrating for me. I can understand playing a little fast and loose with things to keep the story going, but the characters even stating a disregard for time travel concerns was disappointing to me. Additionally, the probe causing issues just didn't seem to make any sense - I would think that any reasonably intelligent race would know what their probe would be doing if it were that severe, and it was just a weak reason to get whales to fix a problem. With that, the whole "save the whales" story line was a little heavy-handed to me. Overall, it just seemed to be made with a "humor at all costs" attitude.

I might go see STII in the theater if I ever get that opportunity, but probably not this one unless there was more of an event, like PM said. I have a 65" 4K HDR TV with surround sound in a fairly small room, giving the screen a dominating presence, so something would have to be pretty important to get me to go somewhere else to see it.

I agree with this 100% and while the Star Trek films are not considered to be "hard sci-fi", I'd say by comparison to ST IV that ST: The Motion Picture is absolutely hard sci-fi!

I enjoy Star Trek IV for what it is.

From a sci-fi nerd standpoint, here, I believe backwards time travel is impossible due to the positive pressure induced by the expanding Universe. The timeline is irreversibly forward in a linear direction given the space/time relationship. There may be ways to view the past, however, but I'm saving that for something I would like to write.

What has happened, however, has and is done.

So any film or show dealing with time travel in my eyes is simply tongue and cheek. I can't fathom nor see any way within the accepted physical laws, relativity, and even theories(including string), nor observations that suggest to me that backwards time travel is possible. Short of our entire reality being generated by a master computer, of which our digital existence resides in, we can't "rewind." I believe the amount of energy required to travel back in time would equal the sum total energy that could negate the force of the entire expanding Universe, and even then, I'm not sure we'd find much there short of memories, so nothing could be altered of changed, or even interacted with in a meaningful way.

LOL! It's not just what you believe but also all of current-day established Astrophysics and Quantum Mechanics a well! And as you alluded to, unless humanity has yet to uncover some profound secret of the universe which violates every Newtonian and Einsteinian law, travelling BACK in time is absolutely impossible

I get all that, but a lot of it is about context. We'll probably never have artificial gravity or inertial dampeners, Heisenberg compensators or a number of other things, at least in the way they present it, but kept in context, we accept them as part of the suspension of disbelief.

In the case of Star Trek, the show has shown how changing the past affects the future on multiple occasions, and treated it as a big problem. Sure, they fudged things a lot, but the whole attitude was more serious. STIV was just straight comedy, which just isn't a real Start Trek mindset to me. Even though they've had some amusing episodes, the context even for those was that there were serious repercussions for the situation. In the worst scene of STIV in this regard, they directly state the concern, then immediately follow it with a silly justification ("How do we know he didn't invent it?").

If it were Hot Tub Time Machine, I wouldn't care, but in Star Trek, it just seemed out of place.

Pretty much, although I recall sometime in Hawking's latter years he alluded to fathoming time backwards time travel was possible, which I found perplexing and chalked it up to his old age catching up with him. There's literally nothing I can imagine that would allow it to be possible beyond potentially peering into the past, but that's about it.

I'm not so sold on this being impossible.

Consider, for a moment, that we're dealing with mass and momentum and the relationship between matter and spacetime. We currently posit that the Higgs boson is what imbues matter with mass because of these bosons' ability to link our fermions with spacetime, thus causing deformation, aka placing us under gravitic influence.

If we were to figure out...

a) The mechanism of how these bosons link with spacetime
b) How to manipulate these bosons ourselves or the mechanism and de-link ourselves from spacetime

Then it may be possible to set our mass at or near zero by creating zero distortion in the fabric. We would, however, still be subjected to traveling through the medium of spacetime same as light. Light is affected by gravity at cosmic scales, so we wouldn't be completely unbound and still have to travel within the confines of the 3 + 1 dimensions we reside in.

Alternatively, we could also figure out how to...

a) Exit our Universe or enter a quasi-border like state between ours and outside

Then gravity would not apply to us at all.

We need to be able to unify quantum mechanics with general relativity before any of this is ever possible, aka need some form of unified field theory or verification of string theory before that can happen.



Trek IV is one of my favorites of the films, by far. I enjoy time travel stuff so long as it is tongue in cheek--I'm a big fan of classic Doctor Who.

I recently enjoyed a semi-ST movie marathon (I II III IV VI) and really enjoyed post-Khan ST more than I thought I would. But VI is as far as I can go (and I still can't sit through V).

I take it then you’re not a fan of the Next Generation crew?

Nope, not a fan. With my very limited knowledge of TNG, here's my take on how it would have actually played out...

Captain Stubing's Whoopi-bar Love Boat Enterprise (the ugliest Sci-Fi spacecraft ever conceived?) wouldn't have lasted six weeks on deployment. By week four, every single human male (and many females) on-board would have a debilitating addiction to the Holodeck. Especially the teenager on the bridge who, like the other males, is constantly getting an eyeful of that counselor chick.

The teen (assuming he's a super smart geek with having a job on the bridge) would be a real problem because he probably knows best how to program the Holodeck for inappropriate use (his age would make him very motivated and resourceful) and to bypass any security or filters. He could even possibly, for profit, create deviant "Fantasy Island" scenarios for the crew (Mr. Roarke Khan would be impressed).

The only ones, at least on the bridge, who might not be affected by Holodeck addiction would be the android and the Klingon. We already know you can't trust androids with "Alien" (although redeemed in "Aliens", at best it's a crap-shoot). Klingons belong in the brig, not the bridge, but this one seems tame enough (was even legal defense for Kirk and Bones in ST VI...learned this only recently). But just wait until he becomes afflicted by whatever the Klingon version of "Pon farr" is. Unless the whiz kid on the bridge can whip up a proper Holodeck antidote (assuming it's good enough to fool biology), the Klingon will probably go even more insane than a psychotic Vulcan and start killing off the crew until he's put down himself.

Total disaster...quickly becoming a ship full of perverted Holodeck-addicted alcoholics (at least those who survive the Wrath of Klingon).

First thing Kirk would have done, after puking his Romulan ale on first sight of new Enterprise's extreme fugliness (opposite of jaw-dropping beauty of revised Enterprise in ST I), is to have the bar and Holodeck removed from the ship. Kirk ran a tight disciplined ship, his Enterprise was never a pleasure cruise (even with the space hippies)!

As a side note...

I remember seeing the first ST movie at a theater with a friend (his mom took us, we were 12/13) and being wowed by presentation of the retrofitted docked Enterprise on the big screen. I put that moment right up there with the never-ending Imperial Star Destroyer at the beginning of the first Star Wars movie (IV).

I enjoyed seeing that Enterprise many times over on a giant screen on Disney's Great Movie Ride.

EDIT: Been enjoying the soundtrack themes to the ST movies...good stuff.

Of all the reasons I've heard for preferring TOS to TNG, the suspicion that Wesley Crusher masturbates too much is surely the weirdest

How sad! And as you said that makes it a scene of very special imporatnce. Thanks for the info.

That's an interesting way of putting it. But the problem would likely affect the vast majority of the crew.

Whoever was the Starfleet idiot who approved the Enterprise to even have a Holodeck should be fired, along with the entire styling team. It's just a *very* bad idea, IMO.

Did they also have a souvenir shop on that abomination of a starship?

The first Trek film I saw in the theater was ST II. In fact, I didn't see TMP, ST III, IV or V until much later after release on VHS. I did however see ST VI and all of the Next Generation movies in the theater.

edit: Concerning the soundtracks, they are all indeed very memorable. Jerry Goldsmith's score for TMP is a classic and James Horner did a great job with both ST II and ST III.

Nevermind the families and children on TNG.

Yup. I distinctly remember some people calling the Enterprise a "cruise ship" when TNG first premiered. Sure, even the Enterprise in TOS was not strictly a military vessel but I think the producers went overboard with having a Care Bear version of the Enterprise for TNG. That did change of course later on when Picard got command of a Sovereign class ship. That one was made strictly for combat.