STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

   Film (1991). Paramount. Dir Nicholas Meyer, starring the lead players from the STAR TREK tv series, along with Kim Cattrall, David Warner, Rosana DeSoto, Christopher Plummer, Morgan Sheppard. Screenplay DennyMartin Flinn, Meyer, based on a story by Leonard Nimoy, Lawrence Konner, Mark Rosenthal. 109 mins. Colour.

   After the disaster of STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER (1989), this film may have been a cynical decision to cash in on Star Trek's 25th anniversary and squeeze the last possible dollars out of the box-office. It is a watchable wrap-up of the series, or at least of the series as starring the original and now elderly cast. The story, a metaphor about Russian-US glasnost, deals with the dawn of more peaceful relations between humans and Klingons, with Kirk's dislike of making any such accommodation, and with an unholy alliance of right-wing factions on both sides whose purpose is to sabotage the peace process by assassinating leaders among the peacemakers. Plummer plays the Shakespeare-quoting villain, Chang; strangely the film's title is amistake; Shakespeare's phrase "the undiscovered country" refers not to the future, as the film has it, but to death. Like all but the first of its predecessors, this low-budget affair has the feel of a blown-up tv episode, but is enjoyably melodramatic.The novelization is The Undiscovered Country * (1992) by J.M. DILLARD.

   PN