Layers. Star Trek III has no layers. It’s all id. Star Trek loses its ship, Kirk loses his son, Dr. McCoy loses his mind and none of it means anything. My fiancée pointed out that III is a bridge between II and IV, it brings Spock back to life. It fulfills a need. Forget the need. Forget the bridge--The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly knew what to do with bridges.
III isn’t bad, though. There are some great sequences (Nimoy is a damn good Panavision director, damn good), but they’re all too short. The film runs 105 minutes and it’s got too much to do for that time to be appropriate. The film deviates from the Enterprise crew to Kirk’s son and spends a bunch of time on the Genesis planet (sorry to go geek), the product of II. Well, that’s fine, but it’s all the McGuffin to bring Spock back. We get a long, tortured explanation that Kirk’s son--a scientist--flubbed his work to guarantee success. There’s an attempt at a rhyme to Star Trek II, but it’s incredibly forced and, even if it wasn’t, I’m not sure rhymes between films in a series should be so evident. The rhymes should be feelings, not plot points. To go geek some more... the planet was supposed to be made out of a moon or some “dead” planet. It was made, by accident, out of a cloud of dust. Maybe that could have been the reason it was unstable, not because the kid was a screw-up. There’s a trivia note on IMDb that the writers killed the kid because of this transgression--he “deserved” it. What a load.
All of the faults of the film, except the running time since Nimoy probably had the opportunity to insert scenes for the DVD, rest on the writer’s shoulders. Harve Bennett did a bang-up job producing Star Trek II through V, but he’s pood of a writer (oddly, there are some nice producing flourishes around).
I can think of two particular sequences that Nimoy does some amazing work with--a chase scene and the Enterprise burning up--and I desperately wanted more from these scenes. They really resonated. So did the early scenes on the planet, which lasted about fifteen good seconds before the “story” took over. Events are quality’s enemy... events are excellence’s enemy? I was trying for a rhyme thing, but I guess I’ll just have to be happy that I worked ‘pood’ into a post.
CREDITS
Directed by Leonard Nimoy; screenplay by Harve Bennett, based on the television show created by Gene Roddenberry; director of photography, Charles Correll; edited by Robert F. Shugrue; music by James Horner; produced by Bennett; released by Paramount Pictures.
Starring William Shatner (Admiral James T. Kirk), Leonard Nimoy (Capt. Spock), DeForest Kelley (Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy), James Doohan (Montgomery "Scotty" Scott), George Takei (Hikaru Sulu), Walter Koenig (Pavel Chekov), Nichelle Nichols (Cmdr. Uhura), Merritt Butrick (Dr. David Marcus), Robin Curtis (Lt. Saavik), Robert Hooks (Adm. Morrow), Cathie Shirriff (Valkris), Christopher Lloyd (Cmdr. Kruge), Stephen Liska (Torg) and John Larroquette (Maltz).
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