Star Trek III: The Search for Spock | | Cast : | Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, DeForest Kelley | | Director : | Leonard Nimoy | | Studio : | Paramount Home Video | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen, Dolby | | Released Date : | June 01, 1984 | | DVD Released Date : | May 13, 2003 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), French (Dubbed), English (Subtitled), English (Original Language), French (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | PG (Parental Guidance Suggested) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | August 08, 2005 | | Summary | Genesis of the Modern Klingon | Content
 | If anyone is wondering where the Klingons of the later Star Trek movies and television series' came from, this is it. Christopher Lloyd's "Kruge" is the defining character after which all the later ones were patterned.
This movie also dramatically introduces the much used Klingon Bird-of-Prey that turns up frequently in later movies and on TV.
In my opinion, this is the best movie after "The Wrath of Khan" and keeps the drama and action moving quickly along. |
| Rating | | | Date | June 19, 2005 | | Summary | Odd number Trek's bomb? I think not!!! | Content
| The oft-quoted rule that has even-numbered Trek movies beating odd-number movies was never that convincing - and this flick proves it wrong.
Picking up at the moment where "Wrath of Khan" left off, "Search" has Spock's coffin soft landing on the Genesis planet. Dr. Marcus and Saavik return to their to investigate that world's development. Meanwhile, the badly damaged Enterprise returns to Earth where Captain Kirk learns the ship is to be scrapped. When Dr. McCoy begins showing signs that he was "mind-melded" with Spock - thinking he actually is Spock - he tries to get a ship back to the Genesis planet where Spock's body was left. (In a scene that sends up the cantina scene from the first Star Wars flick, McCoy tries getting a ride with an alien who bears a resemblance to the Vorvon from "Buck Rogers"). Kirk, informed by Spock's father Sarek that both McCoy and Spock's body must be returned to Vulcan, tries to get to Genesis himself, even though Starfleet has quarantined the planet. Meanwhile, Kruge (Christopher Lloyd), a rogue Klingon warlord with his own ship and crew, penetrates federation space greedy for the secrets of Genesis.
Though this flick seems a bit abbreviated - filler between "Khan" and "Voyage Home" it's not only a lot of fun, but a great example of how good Trek can be. The script has our heroes working outside Starfleet regulations and having loads of fun with each other. Prime examples: Scott explains how he saboutaged the Excelsior to McCoy, dropping that ship's isolinear chips into McCoy's palm like spare change ("From one Doctor to another, when you've learnt how to clean the pipes, you know how to stop the drain"). Kirk, when meeting up with the Spock-possessed McCoy holds his hand up in the Vulcan salute, asking the Doctor "how many fingers am I holding up"; and let's not forget that magic moment when Bones tries to give a Starfleet Security the Vulcan neck-pinch. Laughs aside, the script is tight and sticks with its central theme of pulling life from death - epitomized by the rescue of Spock and the awesome self-destruction of the Enterprise. Christopher Lloyd's Klingon was underused, but he showed some potential. The special effects beat anything I've seen on the Next-Generation movies and the script makes the characters seem a whole lot livelier. If you've put off this flick because this was an odd-numbered Trek movie, think again and give it a try. |
| Rating | | | Date | April 04, 2005 | | Summary | always and forever | Content
| a Story that is the transitionary story from movie 2 to movie 4. So obviously this movie is the middle movie where we find the crew of the enterprise trying to find and re-animate the body of Spock, our long lost vulcan friend. A movie worth noting because, unlike other sequels, it is actually worth seeing more than once in a life time. |
| Rating | | | Date | April 01, 2005 | | Summary | Old Vulcans never die. . . | Content
| Leonard Nemoy's Star Trek directorial debut succeeds in two vital areas: A)It's extremely well-paced and B)There's quite a bit of good humor in it. The story takes place right after Khan's wrath and involves Kirk's starship-jacking of the Enterprise to go look for Spock's body to unite with his mind which in imprinted in McCoy's cranium. The problem is Spock's body landed on the newly created and recently doomed planet of Genesis. As luck would have it, a group of ambitious Klingons, led by Christopher Lloyd, want the information to make their own Genesis and go after the research vessel, which is inhabited by Kirk's son and the newly made-over Lt. Saavik, orbiting the planet for the information.
This is just good ol' fashioned Star Trek minus great space battles of the last installment. Lloyd makes an admirable and funny adversary, surprisingly almost as good as Ricardo Montalban's Khan but not as memorable. That's probably how you could sum up all of 'The Search for Spock': almost as good as Khan, but not as memorable. |
| Rating | | | Date | March 29, 2005 | | Summary | The big in-betweener | Content
| You know, it's kinda suspicious how the Star Trek movies seem to follow a few of the patterns of the original `Star Wars' trilogy. After the success of the first `Star Wars' flick, Paramount decided to take advantage of the newfound promise of big-screen sci-fi, and launched the first Star Trek movie series a few years later. Then, following in the footsteps of `The Empire Strikes Back', the Trek-flick purveyors put out their own in-betweener, ST-III:TSFS. Like `Empire', ST-III had a somewhat open ending, which left its loyal Trekkie minions hanging for a few years, culminating in the resolution as presented in `The Voyage Home'. It's also interesting to note that the title of this little bit of `Trek-celluloid, directed by and featuring the man behind our fave half-Vulcan, is very similar to `In Search Of...', a then-recently-cancelled documentary TV series narrated by Mr. Nimoy himself. An innocent coincidence... or a subliminal plug? You be the judge!
But, conspiracy theories aside, I thought this particular Trek outing was a pretty good showing for our gallant Enterprise crew. Aside from a few silly less-than-special FX here & there (especially the `falling cliff' during the Kruge/Kirk hand-to-hand scuffle), ST III has managed to buck the curse of the odd-numbered Trek sequels. Of course, that's not saying much... but at least it's sort of an accomplishment.
Speakin' of accomplishments: I'm glad to see Paramount's finally come `round and giving the Star Trek movie line the Special-Edition-DVD-with-all-sorts-of-extras treatment... which is something I wish they'd done the first time `round. But hey, why put out the best stuff the first time `round when ya can soak the Trekkies with an inferior product first (AKA the initial DVD release), knowin' full well they'll also snap up the Special Edition platter in the future? Once again the ol' Dreaded DVD Double-Dip Ploy (read about this annoying phenomenon at www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/guides/guide-display/-/3CVFIEG84F2PF) rears its ugly head...
On the upside, when compared to the picture & sound quality of the initial DVD release-- which was really good-- this "Special Collector's Edition" DVD outdistances it by a couple parsecs! Thanks to the superior sound clarity & separation, I can actually hear many subtle background bits ( for example, Starfleet officers being paged over the intercom at Spacedock) that I never picked up on before! And the picture quality is better than ever, with greater definition and clarity than what I saw in previous video releases. `Course, this superior picture has its drawbacks: you can actually see the shortcomings of the special effects technology of the time. The matte "shadows" surrounding the ships and the space Dock are more apparent. I guess superior visual resolution isn't all it's cracked up to be...
The feature-length commentary track is split between director Leonard Nimoy, producer Harve Bennett, Robin "Saavik, Take 2" Curtis, and photography director Charles Correll. Nimoy's thoughts take up about half the track, and includes his memories on directing ST-III as well as his desire to show the audience "what makes the Klingons tick" as a race. He also brings up the various Vulcan rituals and practices he had a significant hand in establishing in the original series and the previous movies. Bennett spends much of his mic time discussing his work as a TV producer, and how he applied and adapted these skills to produce the Trek-flicks. Correll's stuff is technical in nature; he talks about certain shots and FX in the movie, and the labors he and his crew had to go through to pull them off correctly. Robin Curtis' comments pop up whenever Saavik enters frame; she discusses her "inheritance" of the role from Kirstie Alley, and the joy & headaches she experienced working with Nimoy and the old-school Trek cast.
Disc Two is filled with various interviews, behind-the-scenes and making-of featurettes, and the obligatory theatrical trailer. While the "Captain's Log" interview segment wasn't all that interesting overall, I did get a kick outta William Shatner talking about his efforts to keep the Genesis planet set from burning down when a fire broke out on a set next door (fortunately, he and his Turbo 2000 got out of the blaze unscathed). Another interesting segment features linguist Marc Okrand giving the viewer a lecture on how he created the preferred language of get-a-lifer fanboys everywhere, Klingonese! Okrand follows up his little "history" lesson by mapping out how he put the language together, from the sounds of the words on down to conjugation of tenses, and how Klingonese sentences are put together-- you know the placement of the subject & the predicate, and all that. If you've ever wondered who's to blame for the local community college adding a Klingon language class to its curriculum, look no further-- you've found him! Well, okay, he's not directly to blame, but-- well, I think you get the picture...
But probably the most interesting extra bit is the doc that discusses the possibility of terraforming other worlds. Mars is used here as a potential place for humans to take their first crack at terraforming. While there was a smattering of scientific jargon that I had a slight bit of trouble wrapping my brain around-- most of the folks layin' out the possibility and painstaking logistics of a Martian makeover in this featurette are NASA scientists-- I found the notion of such an undertaking kinda interesting. Only thing is, we haven't even figured out how send a manned mission to Mars yet, let alone found out a doable way of making it more Earth-like. First things first, guys...
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