I.A.M. Musing About…

On we go with the story of the Enterprise (which I think is now NCC-1701B in this film). Given the title of the film, plus the fact the strap-line repeats it, it’s fairly clear that Spock is at least missing. How one mislays someone that damned tall is itself a mystery. To explain more would ruin the ending of the previous film, as well as a fair amount of this one.

Star Trek III ~ The Search for Spock (1984)

Again, to differentiate this one from the others – and after a couple of weeks has passed since you saw them, they can get a bit homogeneous, let me tell you – this is the one where we get Saavik played by that woman you can never remember the name of *, and the crew ends up being away from home without their own ship at the end. Also, we see Spock played by five different people at one point. Yeah; that’s the one.

This is made with Leonard Nimoy’s direction, and he’s damned good. There’s a good use of the frame, and the various aspects of the mythos are brought in without any of the predictable ‘if McCoy is being grumpy we must be 20 minutes into it already’ sort of stuff that can get you down. There’s a fair bit of Vulcan mumbo-jumbo in it, and handled badly it could have been a real mess. Due to the talents of Nimoy and writer Harve Bennett, nothing is messed up.

It’s not what you’d call really epic film-making, but it certainly gets you from the last film to the next one in an effective way. Given this is Nimoy’s first direction for the big screen, it’s fantastic, although future efforts in this series by him will make more effective use of the visual elements of SF. That might seem to be initially slight praise, but given the complexity of the material and the story elements of this particular series, it’s really easy to go nuts with explosions and shoot-outs, letting the story get lost on the way. Between the direction ‚writing, acting, and cinematography, it all works; and it’s not easy to do that.

Not that I know that from personal experience, but you know…

Star Trek III ~ The Search for Spock (1984)
Cinema Group Ventures
Paramount Pictures

Director:
Leonard Nimoy

Writers:
Gene Roddenberry (television series Star Trek)
Harve Bennett (written by)

This year, I’ve been watching DVDs from the library for a number of reasons, mostly to do with a combination of “filling in the gaps in my ‘pop culture’ knowledge”, as well as a concerted effort to better understand story editing by both watching a film and then re-watching listening to people who have studied that particular movie for years in order to better appreciate the themes, plot construction, symbolism, and so on.

The process would be nothing without the secondary audio tracks. Sometimes it’s like having actually been through the film-making process with the people involved.

* Robin Curtis [ RETURN ]

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 4th, 2011 at 4:27 pm and is filed under movies, Personal, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.