Next week will mark the 25th anniversary of the release of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country . The film -- the final adventure of the original crew of the USS Enterprise -- was released on Dec. 6, 1991, and was part of the 25th anniversary celebration of the Star Trek franchise itself.

The final voyage of the original crew of the USS Enterprise took place in Star Trek VI.

Undiscovered Country was notable for the return of Nicholas Meyer to the director’s seat. As the man who resuscitated the franchise with The Wrath of Khan nine years earlier (and as a key contributor to the screenplay of The Voyage Home, the biggest crossover success for big-screen Trek at the time), Meyer’s steering the last voyage of Captain Kirk and his team was welcomed by fans wholeheartedly. In fact, the film is still regarded as one of the best of the Star Trek movies with its tale of the first tentative steps towards peace between the Federation and the Klingon Empire after the long Cold War between the two powers (a clear analogy to the relationship between the U.S. and the USSR).But Meyer has come to regard some parts of the film with a certain regret. I recently spoke with the filmmaker about what he now sees as the more naïve aspects of Star Trek VI, as well as other memories he has of the film. We also touched on his sci-fi adventure Time After Time ( read more about that here ), Star Trek: Discovery, and more.

Nicholas Meyer on the sets of Wrath of Khan and Undiscovered Country

Loading

Loading

Dec. 6?No, I wasn't aware of it, but I like that movie.Yes, absolutely. There are movies I've made that I think no celebrations are in order. [laughs]There are a couple things in that movie... yes, I think there are things in the movie that are either naive or that make the… The naiveté doesn’t exactly make me wince, but there are things that make me wince in it. The naive thing I suppose is simply that we thought, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, that we had reached the end of history and we were entering a brave new world minus the Soviet Union where everything was going to be peaches and cream. And, in fact, we've entered a world which is arguably much more dangerous than [being] eyeball to eyeball with the USSR. And in that sense, yes, we were naive. We were extremely prescient in that we predicted the Soviet coup before it happened. That was kind of amazing. But I also think that the scene where Spock is doing the Vulcan mind meld on [Kim Cattrall’s character] Valeris to get information sort of looks like waterboarding to me, and doesn't make me very happy to see it.Yeah. It doesn't seem like the right thing.Not at all. Not at all. Never occurred to us.Well, the nitty gritty of it is really beside the point at this time. They all got resolved in the way that such headbutting usually does. It's, in a way, like going over the details of a disease that you've recovered from. “Yeah, and then my fever went down and I still had the swelling.” It's like, oh who cares?Basically, I had a very good relationship with him, absolutely. He was a very creative guy.He was the boss. He was the executive producer.Well, it was my film but it was made under his aegis, and in another sense, the initial prompting idea for a story about the collapse of the, the way he put it to me was, “What if the wall comes down in outer space?” And that germ of an idea was what became the movie. And that was his. Not mine. For sure.You know, I never thought about it. I never gave my career much strategic thought. Maybe I should have. [laughs] Or maybe I should now. I just kind of went with what interested me at the time. What could be said is that having done Sherlock Holmes [in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution], I didn't feel like doing nothing but Sherlock Holmes. Having done, you know, science fiction, I didn't want to get trapped in science fiction. So my eclecticism was my only conscious choice. I didn't want to find myself in a niche that I couldn't get out of.I'm still working on it.There's that, and there's other stuff.Well, it represented a big change and it's certainly slowed down the process. Whether one thinks this is good, bad, or indifferent, that I can't discuss.Well, I did the Houdini [History Channel] two-parter. I also have done the first two episodes of Medici: Masters of Florence, which is playing and doing quite well in Italy at the moment. So I hope it's going to come to America. I've spent the past few years learning about television because movie studios, Hollywood studios, by and large are not making the kind of movies that I go to see. I'm not really interested in the exploding car or endless sort of dystopian fantasies and superheroes. None of that... that doesn't interest me very much. I'm mainly interested in people trying to figure s#!t out. I think all my Star Trek movies are very earthbound. Time After Time is... one aspect of it is science fiction, but another aspect of it isn't that at all.It's the romance and it's also the social commentary. It's the... what is the world in which we live? And how to bring ourselves to view that with some objectivity? And the objectivity in this case are these two Victorian characters, each of whom brings a different set of values and world view to where they find themselves.Well, what I want any genre to do, what I want any work of art to do, is to illuminate the human condition. Leo Tolstoy said the purpose of art is to teach you to love life. And that's what I want.As of this month, Time After Time is now available on Blu-ray through the Warner Archive Collection. Read more of our chat with Meyer about that film here. Star Trek: VI can be found pretty much anywhere.

Talk to Senior Editor Scott Collura on Twitter ator listen to his