Everyone knows the best Star Trek movie of all time is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It’s bombastic and cinematic. Depending on who you ask, they might even tell you that it saved the entire franchise after the overly self-important big screen debut of the USS Enterprise and crew in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
The Star Trek movie that’s universally agreed upon amongst all Trek fans as the most fun is Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (written about on this very account here). It’s the only Trek movie that doesn’t feature a villain per se, instead having a mysterious and faceless super-intelligent probe kick off a time travelling romp back to the 20th Century so the Enterprise crew can find Humpback Whales to repopulate the species in the future. Very tree-hugger hippy vibes, but it made for a delightful movie.
While both of those films are great, no question, there’s another Star Trek movie between these two that’s often overlooked amongst the Star Trek movie entries—a film that connects the dots between two of the franchise’s most beloved stories to create a tight trilogy that can easily be watched as one epic saga.
That film is 1984’s Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
No one really wondered where Spock went at the end of Star Trek II. He was dead. Killed saving the crew from the evil Khan in a selfless death for the ages. Problem was, that movie turned out to be a huge hit. Leonard Nimoy had been playing Spock for 20 years by that point and, in fact, it was only to satisfy his contract demands that they killed off the character in the first place.
Nimoy was done with Star Trek.
That is unless they let him direct the next movie. In which case, he might consider bringing back the massively popular character.
For a film that came as a result of a couple of career demands from one of the stars of the show, Star Trek III turned out to be way better than it had any business being. Particularly when you consider that it wasn’t only Nimoy’s directorial debut, the producer of the film, Harve Bennett, decided to just write the script himself. No disrespect to Bennett, he did have a long and successful TV writing career behind him at this point. What he came up with is an extremely plot-driven adventure film that has the crew of the Enterprise go rogue so they can resurrect their dead friend.
The film works for a number of reasons, but first and foremost it’s simple. Simple can be hard to do, but it really helps when the entire movie has one job: bring back Spock. At the risk of being almost paint-by-numbers Star Trek, Bennett’s script makes use of all the best Star Trek tropes. You’ve got your main sci-fi element in an unstable Genesis planet capable of creating brand new ecosystems from lifelessness (hint, hint), you’ve got your Vulcan voodoo powers with Spock’s consciousness living inside Doctor McCoy’s head due to a Vulcan mind meld he didn’t even know Spock did before he died, then within all of this you’ve got the crew of the Enterprise having to hijack the ship since they’ve been ordered not to go back to the Genesis planet under any circumstances, and last but certainly not least there’s the primary villain role being filled by none other than Captain Kirk’s oldest foe… the Klingons. The screenplay is a clinic in genre writing. It’s clear Bennett’s past in TV writer’s room had served him well.
Another key ingredient to making this film add up to more than the sum of its parts is that it doesn’t play it safe. In the span of a lean 105-minute running time we get the full lifespan of Spock’s newly regenerated body (albeit sans his consciousness), a delightful mini caper movie where Kirk and crew steal the Enterprise and defy orders, the death of Captain Kirk’s son David who is the scientist behind the whole Genesis planet, the destruction of the Enterprise which is basically like killing off one of the main crew, a hand-to-hand final showdown with Kirk and Kruge (the aforementioned Klingon heavy) that results in a classic 1980s special effect of a villain falling to their death, and, of course, the eventual merging of Spock’s consciousness with his body to complete the goal of full resurrection.
I ask you, what more could you want from a Star Trek movie?
Of course, the secret sauce that brings everything together is the same thing that makes all Star Trek featuring the original cast work: the dynamic between the characters and the ridiculous chemistry between those actors. The cast here is rounded out by some top-notch character actors including Merrick Butrick, Robin Curtis, and none other than Doc Brown himself, Christopher Lloyd as the Klingon baddie, Kruge. If you watch this movie for no other reason than to see Lloyd’s performance as a Klingon, you will have served yourself well.
When you give our heroes such a clear goal and stack the odds against them so steeply, how can we NOT be on the edge of our seats. It’s basic storytelling 101. There are two things that Star Trek does exceptionally well: explore big ideas and provide imaginative adventure. It’s at its best when it nails both of those things at the same time. The Search for Spock is one hundred percent more adventure than big idea, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that from time to time.
In a time when films are expected to turn every trope on its head and reinvent the wheel left and right, there’s a lot to be said for trusting the formula. Especially when it comes to franchise fare. Afterall, it’s not the formula that will let you down, it’s poor execution. As Nicholas Meyer, the director of Wrath of Khan said, and I’m paraphrasing, it’s not whether you kill Spock—it’s whether you kill him well. The same can be said of the resurrection. Arguably a more difficult task. Not only did Nimoy and Bennett succeed in resurrecting Spock, they succeeded in doing it well.
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