A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of watching J.J. Abrams splendid and beautifully crafted reboot of the Star Trek series. Since it's release it has been widely critically acclaimed and said to be one of the best, if not the best Star Trek film of all time. Now with this said, obviously a debate has started within the Sci-Fi community of which Trek film really is THE Trek film. The most famous and obvious picks were the ones debated for the top spots, like Wrath of Khan and for me First Contact, but then I heard people say The Undiscovered Country also deserved a top spot. Now up until this last Star Trek film I had actually never seen The Undiscovered Country, to be honest I haven't even seen the first yet either (I have seen just about every other though). So I thought why not give this one a try, since I am of course a big Star Trek fan and it's only fitting that I should know all of my Star Trek films. So I set a course for my video store, WARP 10, and picked up a copy and popped it into my DVD player. Well after seeing it I would have to say this film was more of a turn off than two Klingon girls in heat!

The film starts out with a freak accident on one of the Klingon Empire's moons, Praxis, where their key energy production facility is lost in the explosion that destroys half the moon. Starfleet quickly organizes it's top officials, including Capt Kirk (Shatner) and his crew, and states that the Klingon empire now has 50 years of life left with their energy production facility destroyed and are now in peace talks with the federation so that they can gain aid from them to stay afloat. Kirk denounces the peace talks as a waste of time as he does not trust the Klingons because of the death of his son, but Kirk nonetheless is chosen to escort the leader of the Klingon High council, Chancellor Gorkan, to Earth for the peace summit. However during the escort, Chancellor Gorkan is assassinated and Kirk is accused of organizing the attack and is put on trial in front of the Klingons. Spock, however, senses there's someone on the Enterprise that plotted this.

The best Star Trek films have always been the ones that play out less like a 2 hour long episode (Star Trek: Insurrection, Star Trek: The Final Frontier) but more like an actual movie (Star Trek: Wrath of Khan, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek 2009), in this case Undiscovered Country feels more like the former. At several points during the film I found myself checking the time because I found myself almost falling asleep because it was so boring, and it felt like I was watching a long episode. It just seemed like Shatner and the rest of the cast were just winging it for a quick paycheck and it felt like the director was just trying to squeeze out the last bit of cash he could get out of the franchise before turning it over to TNG entirely. It's pretty disappointing considering, at the time, it was supposed to be the final farewell for the original Star Trek films and it just didn't seem like they were trying too hard.

The film is also a big Sci-Fi allegory for the things that were taking place at the time of it's release. During those years the Soviet Union had finally collapsed, ending the cold war, Americans and Russians still had bitter feelings for each other, but the mend was starting between the two groups, though in large part both sides still don't trust each other today. Undiscovered Country tries to get their audience to understand this time, using their Star Trek Universe as the background, and it does okay at this. It's gets a little preachy at times with the more pacifistic TNG views being spliced into it, but it makes some good points about redemption, not holding grudges, and the inevitable “we're not so different after all” theme. So the film isn't all bad, it's a little preachy and it makes obvious metaphors to the Post Cold War era, but it does alright for itself.

That said though, Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country is a pretty boring Trek film, and in my eyes doesn't hold a candle to Abrams' Star Trek and much less Wrath of Khan and First Contact. If anything, it's not completely unbearable, and Star Trek fans will find something to enjoy about the various little Trek jokes within it, but I wouldn't recommend it at all to non-fans because they would probably fall asleep, which even I as a Trek fan almost did. Anyways, set your phasers to avoid this one.