I am continuing to work my through the Star Trek movies in preparation for the release of the new movie!  ‘The Undiscovered Country’ has always been one of my favorites, a great farewell film for the original crew to go out on.  I’ve always thought it was well written, paced great, and solid development in most of the characters.  I love that Sulu has his own ship, that they acknowledge their age and that they’re on the verge of retiring, and tremendous use of Shakespeare.  Awesome.

Originally, Lt. Valeris was written as Saavik, but they decided they didn’t want to turn her into a traitor.  Personally, I still think that would have been a great way to ratchet up the intensity of the movie.  It’s also interesting to me that the actors were not happy with how racist their characters were against the Klingons in the opening parts of the film.  I think I do agree with their sentiment that it could have been dialed down and still been a great story.

Here’s my one actual complaint: Chekov’s character kind of comes across as not knowing too much in this movie.  Everything that happens, every security issue, every step in the investigation, he’s the one that doesn’t know what’s going on or why.  Which is a joke considering that his character used to be chief of security on another ship.  Of course, they needed the questions to be asked for the sake of the audience so we would understand what was happening, it just shouldn’t have been done at the expense of Chekov.

Wow.  I’m such a nerd.

Anyway, I love the movie!  One last bit of trivia … if I recall correctly, originally, in the closing statement Kirk was going to actually use the words ‘next generation,’ but Michael Dorn (plays Work in the Next Generation), who was in the sixth movie with all of them made some joke or something about the Next Generation crew taking over, ticked everyone off, and they changed the words.  Oh well!