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STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK (1984)
Turns out Kirstie Alley was the sexy Saavik Trek's third movie finds the franchise at its most confused and uncertain. Its plot finds one way after another of tearing down the things that resonated the most strongly in The Wrath Of Khan, by most accounts Trek's best movie. It suggests like few other Trek adventures that man's invention will not serve him; and will sometimes cause more problems than it solves. It even gives us the old reliable Klingons as villains (their first significant role in Trek in about fifteen years at the time), but is at a bit of a crossroads as to how to portray them. And for most of this movie, it doesn't have Spock - Spock, that most iconic, intelligent, fascinating original series character! Of course, Leonard Nimoy is all over this movie, specifically, directing it. But his absence in front of the camera is...disheartening, especially since the slack could have been taken up by the underused supporting cast, but wasn't. All this might lead one to think ill of Star Trek III, but beyond the obviously sentimental soft spot I have for it (I'm still kinda pissed that dad took Jim to see this and left me at fucking home), I have to admit this: the Star Trek universe never seemed more rich and full of possibilities than it did around this time. By undoing so much of what Trek had done up to this point, the franchise took on a freshness that has been little in evidence since. This is the movie that dared to destroy the Enterprise herself, and when it happens, it is done with heavy heart and convincing finality, not like in the shows since where you could count on seeing it destroyed six or seven times an episode. We pick up just about immediately after the second movie, with the Enterprise limping home from her costly battle with Khan, still bearing the scars inside and out. The first scenes with the crew don't tell us much that we don't already know - they miss Spock. In a bit of projection, Kirk worries that "this entire crew seems on the verge of obsessive behavior regarding Mr. Spock", just in time for a batshit moment from Dr. McCoy has where he starts talking in Leonard Nimoy's voice. After docking at Earth's starbase (probably the second most beautiful thing ever to come out of Trek, behind Jeri Ryan) Kirk and crew are informed by Fleet Admiral Morrow (Robert Hooks) that not only is the Enterprise to be decommissioned, but because the Genesis planet has become a "galactic controversy" nobody is allowed near it except for a lone science vessel, the Grissom. Grissom counts among its crew Kirk's son David (whose partner in the Genesis project and mother is not mentioned) and Lt. Saavik, who later enjoys a bit of finger-foreplay to alleviate the agonies of Ponn Farr, the seven-year itch that turns male Vulcans into Ted Nugent. All is not going as planned down on the Genesis planet; for one thing, thirty-foot cacti have snowcaps. Spock's father Sarek marks his first appearance since the original series when he shows up at Kirk's home uninvited and chews him a new one for abandoning Spock's body on Genesis. After a mind-meld and some replay of footage from the previous movie (one of three scenes which do so), Kirk and Sarek learn that before his death, Spock mind-melded with an unconscious McCoy. So the poor bastard who liked Spock the least has to carry what's left of his mind around in his head, at least until he can get it put back into the possibly regenerated Spock that miiiiiight be growing on the Genesis planet along with everything else down there. So motivated, Kirk tries to convince the brass to let him take Enterprise back to Genesis. The bad news for him - and for the starry-eyed fanboys for whom the tenets of the Federation had amounted to a life code - the Federation has become conservative, stuffy and timid to the point of uselessness. Admiral Morrow actually denies Kirk's petition to visit Genesis because he "never understood Vulcan mysticism". The Vulcans are one of the founding members of the Federation, with telepathic powers that have presumably been documented and researched for hundreds or even thousands of years, and this guy's shooting down a joint request from Starfleet's most famous admiral and the Vulcan ambassador himself because he never understood Vulcan mysticism? It's a refreshing u-turn view of the Federation, which has been so reverently portrayed over Trek's life before and since that it ultimately became one of the things I hated about it, embodying that vanilla blandness that's been the bane of Trek for twenty years. There's even a bit of a sinister undercurrent, as McCoy is jailed simply for mentioning Genesis in public by a Starfleet panicked toward totalitarianism by this "controversy", which is never really illuminated and left to the viewers' imaginations. Kirk makes the first of two extremely hard decisions; he elects to steal the Enterprise, at the cost of his career, and with it take McCoy to Genesis so this mess with people's minds can be settled. McCoy's prison break and the theft of the Enterprise make for the isolated shining moments for Uhura (who, with some weird dialogue, easily takes care of a junior officer), Sulu (who delivers a comeuppance to a bored security guard) and Scotty, who sabotages the pursuing Excelsior, whose (awed breath) "trans-warp drive" is a dorky fanboy moment if there ever was one. "Trans-warp" means even less than "warp", it just means faster, which doesn't really affect anything in the Star Trek universe anyway since all interstellar trips take exactly as long as the stories need them to take. It is sabotaged easily and proves, in the first of two such moments in this movie, to be a singularly unimpressive bit of human ingenuity (the other is when we find that the Genesis planet is destroying itself because David unethically used "protomatter" to create it - Saavik lays on the guilt trip for this pretty thick). Chekhov does nothing in the whole movie except repeat Kirk's lines in a crucial scene and wear the most hilariously emasculating shirt I think I've ever seen. Meanwhile, the Klingon Kruge (Christopher Lloyd) is purchasing information about part 2's Genesis Device from an associate (and, apparently, lover) - since all the information he's getting about it is what it does and that Kirk was involved, it seems unnecessary that he has to kill her for having viewed it too, especially since we later learn that these most basic facts have been widely enough known that they've become a "galactic controversy". And if you think he's a hardass as a customer, wait till you see him as a boss - we haven't see those agonizing-looking disintegration weapons much since, have we? But it's okay, because he tells her that she "will be remembered with honor". Remember, those Klingons are all about the honor, though these early days of fleshing out Klingon psychology suggests that maybe their code of honor isn't as warm and fuzzy as that of Worf could have us believe (Kruge is okay with executing unarmed women and children), and I never understood what place cloaking ships would have in such a code. This is the first we see of the famed Klingon Bird Of Prey (probably the most badassed-looking ship in the Trek canon) and the first really good look at a culture where the captain gets to keep a pet on the bridge no matter how much it drools. Considering that this was the first use of a cloaked Bird Of Prey in filmed Trek history, it's spotted with remarkable ease by Kirk, whose eagle eyes (he's not even wearing his glasses!) buy them a few minutes of standoff. The standoff is tense, if a little too reminiscent of so much of Star Trek II. The big difference here though is that the two captains actually get to meet each other and duke it out in a lightning-and-lava apocalypse, though they're unconvincingly evenly-matched (Kruge is a Klingon, obviously in better shape, and presumably quite a bit younger than Kirk) and it's resolved in one of the most arbitrary strokes of dumb luck you'll ever see. Star Trek III is a "middle chapter" of sorts, with parts II through IV forming something of a trilogy within the series of Trek movies. Despite its problems, it's one of the more "complete" such middle chapters I've seen; most of these movies don't have an ending. This has more than an ending, it has a new beginning on Vulcan; all these handmaidens and litter-bearers are not what I'd think of when imagining a society based on logic above all things, but maybe logic taken that far would end up as just another religion buried under impenetrable ritualistic mumbo jumbo. I'm not sure how the re-integrated Spock remembers lines he spoke after the mind meld with McCoy, but it was sure nice to get him back to play in front of the camera for Star Trek IV. (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |