Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Part 4

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I've finally finished watching Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. And it only took me three weeks. This is the fourth and final part of this review, but if you want to check out PART ONE, PART TWO or PART THREE, you can click one of those links.

I'm really running low on trivia to pad out this intro text now. Uh, the title font looks mostly the same as the one used in Star Trek 1 and Star Trek 3, so they'd pretty much settled on a style by this point.

It also got brought back for the Deep Space Nine and Voyager logos, but they got bored with it after that. Which is a shame I reckon as it looks great. It's not an obviously sci-fi looking typeface but not quite fantasy either. The current TV series have gone back to the equally iconic Original Series logo, so maybe there's hope that the movie logo will also make a comeback someday.

Okay, please be aware that there will be lots of pictures underneath this writing and underneath each of those pictures will be even more writing. And that writing will be 90% SPOILERS. I'll not be spoiling any Trek that comes afterwards however. Well, unless stuff like logo fonts counts as a spoiler for you, in which case I've already given away too much.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Part 3

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm still writing about Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. 

I keep thinking that I should apologise for writing so much about this film and dragging this on for so long. It wasn't the original plan, I'm not working towards a word count goal, it's just how it worked out. On the plus side you're basically getting a free book out of me here. A free book without an editor!

This is the third part of four, so if you want to go back to PART ONE or PART TWO click the text.

SPOILER WARNING: I'll be spoiling everything that happens in the film and any Star Trek movie or episode that came before it is also fair game.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm continuing through the fourth of the original Star Trek movies, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. I like roman numerals, they make titles seem classier.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation movies also made it to film #4, but only just, and they didn't put any kind of numerals in its title. It's just called Star Trek: Nemesis. The Kelvin Timeline films don't use numbers either (they don't even use colons) so there's no danger of another Star Trek IV coming out any time soon. I mean seriously, it's been seven years since Star Trek Beyond and they still haven't made a fourth movie yet.

This is the second part of four, so if you want to go back to PART ONE click the text.

I'll be writing about the whole movie scene by scene, so there will be SPOILERS. Though I won't spoil anything from later Star Trek stories, even when there's something really obvious I should mention.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Part 1

Writer:

Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, Nicholas Meyer, Harve Bennett

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Director:

Leonard Nimoy

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Release Date:

1986

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the film I have to describe as 'The One With the Whales' for SEO purposes: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.  

It's weird to say that the fourth movie is the third in the trilogy, but that's how it kind of worked out, as this continues on from the events in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, two films I wrote about back in 2016. You might be wondering why I jumped ahead to Star Trek VI and never came back to this, especially considering it was the film's 30th anniversary at the time... well, it's never been a favourite of mine. It's all about whales instead of spaceships, and the music sounds like it's from a Christmas movie, and Spock's weird, and etc. Though to be fair I was really young when I formed my first impression.

Speaking of anniversaries, the film was released on Star Trek's 20th anniversary, though I don't think they made a big deal out of it. Not compared to when Star Trek 6 came out on its 25th anniversary. In fact in some countries the posters called it The Voyage Home: Star Trek IV, with the Star Trek part in tiny writing, to not put people off. (The franchise hadn't been doing so well outside of the US).

Alright, I'm going to split this review into four parts, because films are long, and I'm going to split the parts over three weeks, because they take ages to write about. Well they do when you write about every bloody scene at least. The way I see it, I'm only ever writing about this film once so I might as well say everything I want to say now. This means that there will be huge SPOILERS here, but only for Star Trek stories up to November 1986.

Doctor Who: The Sixth Doctor Era (1984-1986)

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I've reached the Sixth Doctor era of Doctor Who. Yay!

I can't believe that this logo's lasted for three Doctors now. Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker all had two logos and two opening credit sequences each, but this terrible looking neon tube logo just won't die! They did give it a bit of a glow though, plus they swapped in Colin Baker's face and threw in some colourful weirdness for the camera to fly through, seeing as he was the gaudy Doctor.

Underneath this SPOILER warning you'll find reviews for all 11 Sixth Doctor stories and inside those reviews you'll find spoilers. But only for what you've been reading so far, I won't say a word about future stories. Except for in the next paragraph where I'll mention something entirely innocuous about Army of Ghosts.

Aliens: Special Edition

Written by:

James Cameron

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Directed by:

James Cameron

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Release Date:

1986

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm going to go through James Cameron's legendary sci-fi action thriller sequel Aliens! Because 20th Century Fox have decided that the 26th of April is now 'Alien Day', and that's enough of an excuse for me to give it a rewatch. I suppose it would've made more sense to watch Alien today and save Aliens for its 30th anniversary in July, but that idea occurred to me a little too late unfortunately. Maybe I'll watch Alien later and sneakily swap the post dates around... no one will ever notice.

I already watched the movie last April as research for my 'Aliens: Colonial Marines' review on Super Adventures, so I was thinking I'd put the theatrical cut on instead this time and save myself some work. But that doesn't seem right when the Special Edition is considered the definitive version by basically everyone, especially James Cameron and Sigourney Weaver who weren't that happy when 14 minutes of their movie got sliced out. Sometimes a 'director's cut' is just a re-edit purely for the sake of selling the same movie twice, but Fox had the theatrical version of Aliens cut down so that cinemas could fit more screening in each day, so this is a restoration of its true form. All two and a half hours of it.

Like always I'll be going through the whole damn movie, writing my thoughts underneath DVD screencaps and throwing out massive SPOILERS all over the place, for this film and the original Alien. I won't spoil a thing about Alien³ onwards though, no matter how tempted I am to go into a rant.