(watched as part of a broadcast-order franchise group-watch)
Down to two years between movies at this point!
I know this one isn't particularly well thought of. Hopefully I'll find stuff to enjoy in it before going onto fan favourite Voyage Home and then returning to episodes and crossing over what I still consider the boundary of modern Trek with TNG.
Started watching!
The titles are even less high-falutin' and perhaps more modern as they play over recap and then stock footage, and then the usual starfield but one pans over to reveal the Enterprise. This feels a lot more like a series now.
Didn't realise they actually recast Saavik, that's frustrating. Not sure there have been any canon recastings up till now in the show or movies? I'd rather they'd just shuffled the character offscreen, but maybe that was unmanageable with how closely the stories are linked, I'll have to see.
Nimoy directing! Is this the first castmember directing? Or at least the first series regular?
Hmm, they've said most trainees were reassigned and sent Saavik down to the planet with David, they easily could have just sent her off with the rest of the trainees. Ah well.
I like the bit with Scotty about the factor of 4. Didn't realise the stuff between him and Geordi about this in TNG was a callback!
Uhura has taken time to get a new hairdo!
The reveal of the Klingon cloaking tech surprised that pirate guy, so I guess it hasn't gone into common use since "The Enterprise Incident".
That Klingon dog is really goofy. And they even do a comedy bit with it! Undercuts the villain immediately.
Still, interesting to see a new Klingon woman design. Shame that they feel the need to make her attractive to human audiences, with minor head-ridging and a cheesecake outfit (and to give them no benefit of the doubt, lighter skin). Iirc the cleavage-framing costumes will persist at least through Generations, though the face make-up will start to align more with the men.
Rand cameo! This non-dialogue moment is all she gets, but still fun to see her shake her head grouchily at the state they brought the Enterprise back in.
These security officer outfits are terrible! I'm guessing they saved money by reusing the costumes from a sports movie and spray-painting them.
Speaking of money, some of the compositing seems a bit worse in this movie. But the Klingon and pirate ship stuff all looked really nice.
Again, the opening to this movie feels too loose, they tend to just set up a bunch of stuff in order and then get around to tying them all together at some point. Like, I don't think we needed to see the Klingon stuff until now, and we could have gotten to this point with Kirk et all a lot quicker.
I liked the scene with McCoy in Spock's quarters, very spooky and Kelley plays it really well.
Wow, they got as much replay value out of that Genesis CG render as they could!
Speaking of CG, that shot of the science ship heading to the Genesis planet felt very CG. I hope I'm not watching some sort of remaster with new fx - if not, it's a very impressive fx shot for the time, even with the compositing artefact of a lighter square of space around the planet.
Interesting to get a (first?) mention of the Klingon Empire negotiating peace with the Federation.
Cool to see Sarek again! Everything's still feeling pretty directionless, though. Hopefully now Kirk's got a mission it'll all get on track.
Very funny that the security video logs of Spock's final moments just happen to exactly match the camera angles and editing of the movie! Complete with celluloid scratches too, which doesn't jibe with the magnetic tape effects we've been seeing on other diegetic footage.
Ahh, McCoy is so good in this! Those terrible attempts at a neck-pinch, and then "revenge for al those arguments he lost". Gold!
They really should have focused on this instead of having like four different plot strands all vaguely going in the same direction anyway.
This gives everyone something to do as well, even if it is just little action comedy moments and it means that suddenly the Federation is full of dickweeds to be humiliated.
Nice use of Kobayashi Maru as their team codename.
And a callback to the 'give the word' dialogue from WoK. It's cool that the movies are starting to build up their own little reference points as well as taking stuff from the show. Makes the whole thing start to feel cohesive.
A shame Uhura isn't coming along with them. Chekov is getting all the comms dialogue she could have had! Especially as they don't have Spock, they really could have streamlined some other stuff and given her a big role in this movie.
Hey, Miguel Ferrer! He's like the ultimate stick-up-the-ass dickweed casting. Plus this preening, smug captain. Very funny how that's the framing of the Federation now and Kirk et al are the Han Solos flying around dodging regs in an old rustbucket. I guess they did often have stuffy Federation diplomats and high ranking officers getting in the way in TOS.
I think Lloyd works quite well as a cold-hearted schemer, more in line with the TOS Klingons than the hulking brutes that would come later. And I guess they didn't want another Khan type right away. He feels more like an 80s Middle Eastern terrorist character, like Art Malik in True Lies or something. But he doesn't really get enough to work with here to be a truly memorable villain, in the way that he would later with Judge Doom for example.
It's probably his voice that's the biggest issue, he just sounds like a human American middle manager, it needs some spice on it. He does do a great "GET OUT!" though.
That entire Enterprise destruction sequence is fantastic, in fact.
Oof, Nimoy doesn't direct physical fights very well, the scuffles on the planet surface are worse than the ones on the show!
The Genesis setting reminds me of LOST a little bit - jungle setting associated with the source of life, a mysteriously empty coffin, a final fight on a disintegrating clifftop. (LOST even planned to have erupting lava for the final fight originally!)
Prosthetic effect of face pulsating as it changes shape - now I know we're in the mid eighties!
Okay, finished now. That ending was cool but real slow, which I wouldn't mind so much if the rest of the film had been a bit more successful. This really did feel like a 'downtime' episode in a modern serialised show where it's just spinning wheels and connecting a couple of dots between two tentpole episodes.
I also vaguely remember that Spock is reset again in Voyage Home to not calling Kirk "Jim", which might wind up being a bit frustrating when they already gave him a reset in TMP and had him remember him as Jim here, but we'll see.
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