In the original crew’s send-off, we find them feeling their years and weary of the burdens of their roles on the Enterprise. They are wary of the fragile new peace with an old enemy, The Klingons: A dinner between humans and Klingons ends with the painful awkwardness of any forced attempt at political goodwill; and a bad situation becomes worse when a Klingon ambassador--amenable to the peace treaty being brokered between the Federation and The Klingon Empire--is murdered. Captain Kirk is framed for the crime. What follows is an exciting planet-hopping adventure that veers from prison break to political intrigue, as the Enterprise’s crew must stop a group of conspirators from wrecking a peace conference and plunging the various worlds back into unwinnable wars.

The film is beautiful, shot in autumnal colors; brass, deep reds and the glow of sunsets. The entire film looks like a story being told by a flickering fire: how it was, and how it may be again. Meyer gets excellent performances from his cast yet again—the core trio of William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley playing off each other like a bunch of riffing musicians who know the others' quirks and tempo down cold. Iman has an eye catching part as Martia, a traitorous shapeshifter at the prison colony Kirk is sent to. And Christopher Plummer makes a terrific villain, looking like a fancy leather handbag in his Klingon makeup and quilted armor.

If it’s true that films reflect the time they’re made, it’s also true they gain new facets in the times they’re rewatched. If the dissolution of the Soviet Union is the seismic shift felt under “The Undiscovered Country'"s plot, the pall of Trumpism and Brexit hangs over it now. There’s something very melancholy about a sci-fi film concerning an older generation that does not wish to screw over the younger one. In a time where there’s a real meanness in the air—the snarl of “if I can’t have it all nobody can have any of it” that burns in the eyes of Trump supporters making war whoops at the mention of Elizabeth Warren’s name, the open harassment aimed at people perceived as foreign all over England—there’s something radical about the “The Undiscovered Country'"s understanding that heroism isn’t always about choosing the fight, but preventing one. That there is heroism in understanding your era is ending and then making way for the next generation. It’s the willingness to accept change and the passage of time that separates the film’s villains from its heroes. And in a summer of howling, empty cinematic apocalypses, there is something appealing in a sci-fi adventure story that is all about preventing destruction on a mass scale.