Anna Daniels
Directed by Leonard Nimoy, Star Trek IV is delightfully weird. The action is launched when an alien probe journeys to Earth because it can no longer hear the songs of humpback whales. The reason it can’t hear the whales is because they’re long extinct, which angers the probe for reasons that are never precisely explained. It proceeds to decimate the planet.
From there, the crew of the Enterprise decides to travel back in time by sling-shotting around the sun (which makes no sense—their ship already goes faster than the speed of light) so they can go back to when humpback whales were still alive, pick up a couple, then sling-shot back around the sun the other direction to return to their own time and repopulate the Earth with the whales.
Okay, while none of that makes sense, here’s the real question: Why, instead of bringing a pair of whales back to their own time, didn’t our heroes simply prevent their extinction in the first place? Because it would risk altering the past, you might say? Well you can forget about that, because they spend much of the movie stumbling around the 1970s as obvious as can be. Their actions there already could have changed the future in an infinite number of unforeseeable ways. But hey: The whales return, and the probe returns to its far-off home, satisfied. Hooray?
Written by: Looper
