The Star Trek Movie Franchise. Part 3: The Search For Spock.

For the rest of this week. I am boldly going where I have never gone before.  Each day I am going to be looking back at the first four original Star Trek feature films. I have not seen much of these films in their entirety before.  So let's beam up the reviews and get going.

Star Trek III: The Search For Spock

Cast, William Shatner, DeForest Kelly, Christopher Lloyd

Writer: Harve Bennett

Director: Leonard Nimoy

*** out of four

t's going to be extremely difficult to talk about the plot of Star Trek III:The Search For Spock without spoiling what happens at the end of the second feature.  I realize that these movies are old but yet I still feel that there is a reader out in the sticks somewhere who has never heard of this franchise before and I don't wanna be a dick and ruin the experience.  So if you have any plans to see these movies in the future.  Stop reading now, and then c
ome back once you do.


All right now that everyone is out of the room. I can safely talk about this feature.At the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan.  Spock sacrifices himself to help save his crew from being destroyed by the Genesis Device that was initiated by Khan.  After a very heartfelt memorial.  The casket is then launched and in the final scenes we see the coffin land on the planet that was started by the same device.  Once the crew reaches an Earth space station they are ordered not to talk about The Genesis planet and are denied permission to retrieve Spock's coffin.  Meanwhile Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelly) begins acting strange and is eventually detained.  Later it's discovered that Spock has transferred his spirit into the body of Dr. McCoy to help get his body back to the home planet, Vulcan.  James T Kirk and the crew disobey orders and steal Enterprise to bring Spock back.  On the way they are attacked by a group of Klingon's lead by Kruge(Christopher Lloyd) who demands the surrender of the ship.  Will they be able to defeat Kruge and get Spock's body back in time to Vulcan before his spirit ends up killing McCoy?  Watch and see.  I'm not giving any spoilers here, sorry.  You'll haft to wait and read the next installment before I do that. 

Leonard Nimoy steps behind the camera and it marks the first time a cast member has done that in this series.  The results are something that is a hybrid between a great television episode and a great movie.  Seriously, if this was shown on TV as a two part episode. It would have been huge.  Nimoy's understanding of the show and it's characters is what makes the film run at such a good pace. The only drawback is that some of the acting and line delivery is a bit hokey from time to time.  Especially in certain scenes that were meant to be dramatic.



Having seeing these films in order I really enjoyed this third feature a lot.  It helped answer a lot of questions and more humor was added to these movies.  I'm not so sure I would enjoy this one by itself because it does rely on you knowing about the events in the last movie to care about what happens in this one. However that's not the case with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home which I will write about in a couple of days.