Star Trek Sundays: "The Search for Spock" showcases the cast
A messy movie with an awful lot of heart
It’s Sunday, and we’re going through all 13 theatrical STAR TREK films, a series that includes a number of pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). We continue today with STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK. Enjoy…
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
1984, Dir. Leonard Nimoy
Originally published in 200 Reviews, based on notes from 2022
The Search for Spock is not the high point in the original Star Trek film canon, but it is definitely an underrated entry. While it has messy stretches and looks a bit cheaper and rougher around the edges than the films before and after it, where this film excels is in what exceptional use it makes of the characters and their camaraderie. That’s what’s special about both films Leonard Nimoy directed; he wasn’t a visionary visual stylist or narrative innovator, but he knew and loved his co-stars, innately understanding their strengths and clearly delighting in giving everybody big moments to shine, and meaningful interactions to share together. I adore the sequence where the crew collectively kick into action as soon as they realize there might be a chance to save Spock, a heist movie in miniature that puts everyone’s skills on display and underlines what a competent, well-honed unit this team has become after so many years together. Nimoy would double down even further on these ideas in The Voyage Home to great effect, but watching the films in order, The Search for Spock delights on its own terms for how it builds more room for the co-stars to show off than in the first two films combined.
Where the film suffers is mostly on the surface of the Genesis planet, which never convincingly looks like anything more than a lightly decorated studio backlot, and where the worst narrative decisions take place. The material with the young Spock’s sudden-onset puberty forcing Saavik (recast here with Robin Curtis replacing Kirstie Alley) to engage in pon farr with him is so spectacularly bad and weirdly uncomfortable that it feels like something the crew was blackmailed into doing by a particularly strange fanboy. Moreover, killing Kirk’s son David, one film after we met him (and just weeks of in-universe time after Kirk learned he even existed), has always felt a bit mean-spirited to me; we later got one of the very best Star Trek films out of it – The Undiscovered Country, in which Kirk grapples with his resentment towards the Klingons over David’s murder – but The Search for Spock itself just isn’t equipped to deal with what it says for Kirk to lose his son while saving Spock, or what Spock’s feelings would be knowing such a horrible sacrifice was made in the effort.
Speaking of the Klingons, though, I absolutely love Christopher Lloyd in this as Kruge. Coming one film after Star Trek II means Lloyd’s work has always been overshadowed by Ricardo Montalbán’s Khan, but Kruge is a truly great villain in his own right. He is entirely uncomplicated, but that’s part of the fun. Lloyd vacillates between high camp and genuinely chilling displays of malice, such as in the ship-to-ship standoff in orbit, where the character is more intimidating than he often gets credit for.
Of course, the resolution to that stand-off leads to perhaps The Search for Spock’s greatest moment, with the destruction of the Enterprise. Star Trek as a franchise has tried to recapture the energy and drama of this scene far too many times now, and every attempt pales in comparison to the original destruction here, which is the only time the desolation of the Enterprise really and truly feels like a loss. I love the moment where the crew initiates the destruct sequence, with Kirk, Scotty, and Chekhov all having to do it together, each having to plunge the knife in as one, and all feeling the horrible cost of what they are about to do. Once they arrive down on the surface and the ship blows, we get both one of the great images in the history of Star Trek – the fiery ruins of the Enterprise soaring across the orange sky at sunset – and one of the best pieces of dialogue.
“My god, Bones. What have I done?”
“What you had to do. What you always do. Turn death into a fighting chance to live.”
Imperfections or no, how can you not love this movie when it has a moment like this?
One surprise for me, revisiting the film now, is that the final scenes on Vulcan, where Spock’s katra is returned to his body (and McCoy is saved in turn) are much longer than I had remembered, but in a good way. Nimoy’s instincts as a director are very sharp here, letting Spock’s reunion with the crew really breathe, elongating the moment so feel all the tension and pathos and relief. There is joy, but also pain – they’ve all been through a lot to get here, and possibly have much more to go through given the rules they broke along the way – and it is, of course, all a little surreal. What Nimoy understood, I think, is that if you are going to reverse a moment as dramatic as Spock’s death in The Wrath of Khan, you have to earn it, and part of that means letting the viewer feel the impact of the revival when it comes. Overall, The Search for Spock does about as well I could imagine at threading the needle between honoring the story and characters up to this point while bringing Spock back from the dead, restoring a beloved character to the screen without feeling like they simply slapped the reset button and brought back the status quo. There’s an actual sense of a journey here, and the feeling that this journey will continue. A neat trick to pull off for an assignment that could have felt crass or cowardly in lesser hands.
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