Release Year: 1986

Genre: Adventure, Sci-Fi

Director: Leonard Nimoy

Writers: Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, Nicholas Meyer, Harve Bennett

Stars: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Catherine Hicks, DeForest Kelley

Here's something only a true Trekkie could tell you: The Voyage Home is the conclusion to Star Trek's unofficial trilogy. Beginning with 1982's The Wrath of Khan and continuing through 1984's The Search for Spock, this low-key trilogy represents the best Star Trek has to offer.

You might be surprised, then, to find out that The Voyage Home defies every Star Trek convention under the sun. There's no villain. There's no Enterprise. Oh, yeah, and did we mention that it takes place in 1986? Yes, we know what you're thinking—The Voyage Home is the only Star Trek film to be set in an era when Huey Lewis and the News was an active band.

Forget about A.D. or C.E., or however you mark your time periods. We prefer A.H.L.N.—After Huey Lewis and the News.

Anyway, this baby was directed by Leonard Nimoy, who plays Spock. Nimoy's directorial approach emphasizes naturalism over epic sci-fi insanity, and that's a factor that further contributes to The Voyage Home's unique status in the Star Trek franchise. It might also have contributed to its overall success: it was the most profitable film in the series, and it even earned four Academy Award nominations.

Here's the lowdown: in 2286, a giant space probe is detected heading toward Earth, disabling nearby ships using a strange audio signal. When it finally reaches Earth, it causes widespread power outages and weather disturbances on the planet's surface. It seems like the end is near.

Luckily, Admiral James T. Kirk and his crew are here to save the day. They determine that the strange audio signal is, in fact, a recording of—drum roll, please—humpback whales, a species that has been extinct for hundreds of years.

So what do our heroes do? They pull a Dr. Frank-N-Furter and do the time warp again. Ending up in San Francisco in 1986, the crew must locate humpbacks and bring them to the future, all the while trying to make sense of the primitive 20th-century world. Live long and prosper? Not in 1986, apparently.

In this way, The Voyage Home doles out incisive social commentary like candy on Halloween. Our use of language? Barbaric. Our technology? Shockingly primitive. Our system of medicine? Indistinguishable from medieval torture. In these and many more ways, The Voyage Home forces us to reexamine our preconceptions about society.

Hey, it might not feature as many space battles as you're used to, but The Voyage Home is a whale of a good time…

Did cavemen know they were cavemen? Did barbarians know they were barbarians? Did medieval barbers realize that it was insane to slap leeches on their patients?

Basically, we're asking if people in the past knew the limitations of their perspectives. When looking back at humanity's history, it's hard not to be horrified by our former practices, whether we're talking about slavery, warfare, or even basic hygiene. How could those people not realize that what they were doing was wrong?

The Enterprise crew members ask themselves the same questions when they travel back to 1986. Did people really use so much profanity? Did they really think that "money" was a smart system? And why, oh, why did they abuse the environment with such reckless disregard for their own future?

These questions, unfortunately, don't have easy answers—but that's the point. In the same way that superstitious medieval villagers didn't see anything wrong with burning "witches" at the stake, we don't see anything wrong with these clearly negative aspects of our society.

That's what The Voyage Home is here for. Through humor and satire, the film unpacks our society and lays its failings out for all to see, ultimately giving us a better understanding of our era's place in the context of history. We've never heard of Star Wars doing something like that. Just sayin'.