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Episode
093
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
Finding Spock proves easier than finding a way to find Spock. But Kirk, McCoy, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu and Chekov will not be dissuaded. Commandeer a ship or two and join Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
I always loved this Comic Book cover painting
Unhappy Cast photo
They are all taking that photo session extremely seriously.
I know -right? Not so here – as it looks like the best of times between the two …
Always liked that pic.
WTF is Chekov wearing??? Sheesh.
Pretty sure I still have that – it’s a nice bit of art!
Star Trek- The Magazine Cover’s the Search:
Speaking of Magazines : From the 1980’s comes-
Z Channel !
I saw Star Trek II and III in the theater when they came out. I was in my teens. I was shocked when Spock died, but I wept when the Enterprise died. The destruction of the Enterprise in this movie was at the same time absolutely necessary and utterly unforgivable. It’s like having to commit the horror of killing your spouse to stop them from killing your mother.
I was also disappointed with the severe nature of Star Fleet in STIII.
I was also uncomfortable with the difference of cinematography between the two movies; for lack of a better description, STII seemed to have been filmed in warm light, while STIII seemed to have been filmed in harsh blue of fluorescent or LED light.
But despite any complaints about this movie, James Horner’s soundtrack has to be hailed as a masterpiece.
I don’t love this film, but let’s take a moment to appreciate the Galadriel-esque gowns on the Vulcan priestesses. Costumes, particularly women’s costumes went the wayside in the movies (we must partly forgive them for it being the 80s) and since the nicest thing we’ve seen on a female actor to this point is a glorified bathrobe, these were such an elegant breath of fresh air, and harkened back to the ritual costumes in Amok Time.
Your insight, that Harve Bennett essentially started at the end and worked his way backwards, now makes perfect sense, because for the longest time I found this the most contrived story of all the oriignal films. The entire situation, from the bad treatment of the Enterprise and the condescendnig attitude of practically everyone else in Starfleet, to the unreasonableness, was a blatant play for audience reaction that you wouldn’t see again until the Abramsverse. And I never got how Kirk and Sarek went from first wanting to have Mccoy taken to Vulcan to have Spock’s katra removed, to wanting to go to the Genesis planet? As far as I remembered, no one outside of the Grissom crew knew Spock’s body had regenerated.
Ah, hell. I can’t help but love it anyway. My first date was to see it; the movie theatre showed The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan beforehand.
It feels to me as if there’s a scene cut between Sarek and Kirk about going to get Spock’s body, or it is simply Kirk wanting to honor his friend by giving him a proper burial.
If he’d wanted to give a proper burial, why bother with the funeral at the end of Wrath of Khan?
Exactly. I wonder why Sarek and the alien in the bar even know about the Genesis planet. If Vulcan knows about Genesis and finding Spock is so important to Sarek perhaps they could have pulled strings or offered a ship?
The age of the Enterprise stated by Admiral Morrow is inconsistent with TOS. If there were 15 years between Space Seed and TWoK and 13 years between Space Seed and The Menagerie, the Enterprise is at least 28 years old. Those numbers are probably inconsistent too, but the dialogue regarding the Enterprise’s decommissioning simply doesn’t work.
I liked that you brought up the expansion of character we got here for the supporting players. What that did for me was accomplish a kind of mental ret-conning of the relationships between the characters all along that simply never had a camera pointed at them for us. It isn’t just Kirk that steals the Enterprise. All of them are willing to sacrifice their futures in Starfleet just for a chance that Spock could be saved. It says something to me about times of shared experiences and intimacies of friendship and camaraderie, about deeper and more nuanced relationships between Spock and all of the main cast crew members that we rarely saw, or had to delve into some of the novels to uncover. And it even did a great job of revealing a new side to the relationship between Spock & McCoy that on the surface can seem so often adversarial. There’s that beautiful scene where McCoy is talking to Spock’s unconscious body, saying “…it seems I’ve.. missed you. And I don’t know if I could stand to lose you again.”
I don’t think Scotty was necessarily totally poo-poo about the Excelsior itself, but more specifically about transwarp drive. Plus by the time he’s saying “up your shaft” to the Excelsior computer, he’s gotta be unhappy about the plans to mothball Enterprise, and about getting assigned to Excelsior to work for this smug, riders-crop-carrying jackass of a captain. It’s Sulu’s comment about transwarp that prompts Scotty’s grandmother retort. He’s probably aware of transwarp theory and he doubts its implementation on Excelsior is going to work, and it turns out later he was right, though I suppose he wasn’t skeptical enough to leave it to chance. It’s a good thing he disabled Excelsior because it might have been able to chase them and maybe overtake them on their way to Genesis with its standard warp drive, but ultimately the Excelsior’s “Great Experiment” was not a success, so there is some justification for his attitude.
Yep – I think that’s one of the brilliant things about the writing in the original cast movies: it served to enhance what we knew about those secondary characters which then made watching TOS even more rewarding. Many of those loose ends or incomplete characters were given much more solid footing.
Totally. And it’s not always the obvious scenes like that one with McCoy & Spock. There’s this brief little ‘nothing’ of a scene in ST:IV that always warmed my heart for no obvious reason. Scotty & Spock are in the bird of prey engineering, recrystallizing the dilithium, and Kirk comes over the intercom and pushes Scotty to speed it up.
SCOTT: I’ll try, sir. Scott out. He’s in a wee bit of a snit, isn’t he?
SPOCK: He is a man of deep feelings.
SCOTT: Aye, what else is new?
The words are the words but the delivery is so suffused with history in an effortless way. It feels like ‘Yeah of course I’m 300 years in the past turnin’ wrenches on a stolen Klingon ship with Spock by my side. Where else in the universe would I possibly be?’
Only a true Trek fan would accept this ridiculous movie premise as illustrating something fundamental about our beloved characters and the human spirit. Which is why i find this movie to be so fantastic.
Haha – well said!
This movie has such a “gang’s back together” feel, one of my favorite movie tropes that rarely feels tropey.
One of the things that I love about this movie is that it proves that you don’t need to keep raising the stakes to increase the drama of the movie. Emotional stakes will draw in the audience.
Take Avengers – a franchise I love. Every movie, something bigger is at stake: the city, the earth, the universe, etc. But that doesn’t necessarily increase the drama or our investment.
In Search for Spock, we only have a handful of characters and the scale of events are relatively small. But the emotional aspects- risking everything we love for something we love more- that’s what makes an audience care.
The only part that I think fell really flat for me was Kirk’s son. He is introduced last movie to give Kirk’s character complexity and then he dies this movie as another plot device in Kirk’s journey. I don’t think the franchise gave the son enough dimension to make us care and by the end of the movie, I don’t even believe that Kirk cares that much.
Overall, though, I liked this movie a lot.