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All that may seem a large order for what is, after all, a small picture, but, as everyone remembers, the old Star Trek television series was adept at wrapping up even bigger issues in an hour. This film represents a reversion to that agreeably middlebrow mode rather than a continuation of the first Star Trek movie's overweening manner. This time no one is out to zap the teen market with an imitation Star Wars. The special effects, for example, are modest and traditional, mostly models bopping around star fields. There is an easy sureness about Nicholas Meyer's direction (the sometime novelist also did a good job on Time After Time three years ago): he trusts his solid material. So instead of the strain that was almost palpable in Enterprise's first voyage into the alien territory of theaters, there is something comfortable, even old-shoeish, about the new film, a sense, appropriate to its theme of coming to terms with middle age, that all aboard are pleasurably rediscovering their best selves. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley and the rest of the gang on the bridge and, lest we forget, Scotty (James Doohan) down there in the engine room—have all matured gracefully. They now have the air of people who have done something in which they can take a decent pride. One leaves the film neither hugely thrilled nor greatly awed, but with a pleasant sense of having caught up with old friends and found them to be just fine, pretty much the way one hoped they would turn out in later life. —By Richard Schickel