Katra got your tongue?
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
'>Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
essay by William S. Kowinski
'>Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan had the biggest opening weekend in Hollywood history as of 1982, according to Leonard Nimoy's book, I Am Spock. That would mean it opened better than Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark. So it was a sure thing that Star Trek would be generating a third feature film. And thanks to Spock's death and nearly everybody's second thoughts about it, this would be an actual sequel: a story of what comes next.
The success of "Khan" even suggested there could be more Star Trek movies past the third, and since the impact of Spock's death proved the enduring importance of the character, Spock would be necessary to the Star Trek film future, as well as especially pivotal in this movie. So one of the first people Paramount wanted to talk with was Leonard Nimoy.
Thanks to an inspiration in the waiting room before his meeting with a tardy executive, Nimoy suddenly made a case for why he should direct the film as well as appear in it. Paramount agreed, then apparently balked over rumors that Nimoy hated Spock and Star Trek (which he painfully denied). After further conversation with Paramount Pictures boss Michael Eisner, and perhaps after the idea was blessed by marketing chief Frank Mancuso, Leonard Nimoy was announced as the director of Star Trek III.
(At some point, Nicholas Meyer, director of "Khan," may have passed on the project. He wasn't happy with the idea that Spock hadn't really died, and didn't approve "Khan's" final shots of Spock's coffin on the Genesis planet's surface. )
Producer Harve Bennett wanted to write the script, and with Nimoy's input he did. He knew what he had to do: the resurrection. But how? According to Nichelle Nichols, it was her partner, Jim Meechan, who suggested a solution, and as an aerospace executive with a science background and connections in NASA, he provided enough of a rationale to excite Bennett's interest. He theorized that on the Genesis planet radiation-induced mutations could be responsible for Spock's regeneration. He suggested that Spock's whispered "remember" would motivate McCoy to search for Spock. According to Nichelle, Bennett promised Meechan screen credit as technical adviser, but he reneged.
The basic idea of the Genesis planet---"life from lifelessness"-was itself enough of an analogy to at least poetically explain a simple regeneration, but Bennett's script took it several elegant steps further. This would be a new Spock, born with Genesis, growing in sudden bursts with the planet's fitful, accelerated surging towards its quick death. But this Spock would lack a center, an identity: his soul.
It's not clear where the idea of "the katra" (Spock's separated spirit and mind: his soul) came from. In an interview on the DVD, Nimoy suggests one source in the Jewish theatrical tradition of the Dybbuk---the wandering soul of another takes over the body. In any case, it enters the movie when Dr. McCoy begins acting strangely and uncontrollably.
Then Spock' father, Sarek, comes to Kirk when the Enterprise has returned to earth, demanding to know why he left Spock on Genesis instead of taking him home to Vulcan. Sarek introduces the concept of the katra, "that which is not of the body" (in Sarek's words)---the living spirit, mind and soul that a Vulcan can pass on. (In Vonda N. McIntyre's novelization, as in other Star Trek novels, it's explained that this means the katra can be preserved, disembodied, in the Hall of Ancient Thought, where specially trained adepts could learn from it. It is only in rare and perhaps unprecedented instances that the katra can be reintegrated with a body when it is still living. In the novelization it's also emphasized that the body and the katra are not two totally separate things, that they are interdependent and crucial to each other.)
In the film, Sarek suggests only that Spock's katra and his body must be returned together to Vulcan for a ceremony, so that all the Spock knew and was would not be lost. Sarek had assumed Spock passed his katra to Kirk, because he was the person closest at Spock's death. But knowing he would die in the isolation of an irradiated chamber, Spock had mind-melded with McCoy, and it was this, along with the presence of his katra, that was literally driving McCoy crazy. His unprepared mind couldn't take the strain. When Sarek realizes this, it raises the stakes: now Spock's body must be brought to Vulcan not only to preserve his katra, but to save McCoy from permanent insanity or death.
text continues after photos
essay by William S. Kowinski
'>Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan had the biggest opening weekend in Hollywood history as of 1982, according to Leonard Nimoy's book, I Am Spock. That would mean it opened better than Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark. So it was a sure thing that Star Trek would be generating a third feature film. And thanks to Spock's death and nearly everybody's second thoughts about it, this would be an actual sequel: a story of what comes next.
The success of "Khan" even suggested there could be more Star Trek movies past the third, and since the impact of Spock's death proved the enduring importance of the character, Spock would be necessary to the Star Trek film future, as well as especially pivotal in this movie. So one of the first people Paramount wanted to talk with was Leonard Nimoy.
Thanks to an inspiration in the waiting room before his meeting with a tardy executive, Nimoy suddenly made a case for why he should direct the film as well as appear in it. Paramount agreed, then apparently balked over rumors that Nimoy hated Spock and Star Trek (which he painfully denied). After further conversation with Paramount Pictures boss Michael Eisner, and perhaps after the idea was blessed by marketing chief Frank Mancuso, Leonard Nimoy was announced as the director of Star Trek III.
(At some point, Nicholas Meyer, director of "Khan," may have passed on the project. He wasn't happy with the idea that Spock hadn't really died, and didn't approve "Khan's" final shots of Spock's coffin on the Genesis planet's surface. )
Producer Harve Bennett wanted to write the script, and with Nimoy's input he did. He knew what he had to do: the resurrection. But how? According to Nichelle Nichols, it was her partner, Jim Meechan, who suggested a solution, and as an aerospace executive with a science background and connections in NASA, he provided enough of a rationale to excite Bennett's interest. He theorized that on the Genesis planet radiation-induced mutations could be responsible for Spock's regeneration. He suggested that Spock's whispered "remember" would motivate McCoy to search for Spock. According to Nichelle, Bennett promised Meechan screen credit as technical adviser, but he reneged.
The basic idea of the Genesis planet---"life from lifelessness"-was itself enough of an analogy to at least poetically explain a simple regeneration, but Bennett's script took it several elegant steps further. This would be a new Spock, born with Genesis, growing in sudden bursts with the planet's fitful, accelerated surging towards its quick death. But this Spock would lack a center, an identity: his soul.
It's not clear where the idea of "the katra" (Spock's separated spirit and mind: his soul) came from. In an interview on the DVD, Nimoy suggests one source in the Jewish theatrical tradition of the Dybbuk---the wandering soul of another takes over the body. In any case, it enters the movie when Dr. McCoy begins acting strangely and uncontrollably.
Then Spock' father, Sarek, comes to Kirk when the Enterprise has returned to earth, demanding to know why he left Spock on Genesis instead of taking him home to Vulcan. Sarek introduces the concept of the katra, "that which is not of the body" (in Sarek's words)---the living spirit, mind and soul that a Vulcan can pass on. (In Vonda N. McIntyre's novelization, as in other Star Trek novels, it's explained that this means the katra can be preserved, disembodied, in the Hall of Ancient Thought, where specially trained adepts could learn from it. It is only in rare and perhaps unprecedented instances that the katra can be reintegrated with a body when it is still living. In the novelization it's also emphasized that the body and the katra are not two totally separate things, that they are interdependent and crucial to each other.)
In the film, Sarek suggests only that Spock's katra and his body must be returned together to Vulcan for a ceremony, so that all the Spock knew and was would not be lost. Sarek had assumed Spock passed his katra to Kirk, because he was the person closest at Spock's death. But knowing he would die in the isolation of an irradiated chamber, Spock had mind-melded with McCoy, and it was this, along with the presence of his katra, that was literally driving McCoy crazy. His unprepared mind couldn't take the strain. When Sarek realizes this, it raises the stakes: now Spock's body must be brought to Vulcan not only to preserve his katra, but to save McCoy from permanent insanity or death.
text continues after photos
This was Leonard Nimoy's first movie as a director, and after initial misgivings by fellow cast members, he won universal praise from his actors for being meticulously prepared, and collaborative in directing them. As the first television series to spawn feature films with the same cast, Star Trek presented opportunities and difficulties never encountered before. In television, there was a new director every week in episodes written by different writers, but the actors played their characters throughout. Only the actors could create a through-line of development and a consistent character that viewers would recognize and come to care about, week after week. Though producers had ultimate control, they also responded to what the actors created, and in several senses, embodied.
Since much of what makes a series character is in small moments, the actor is the ultimate arbiter. Eventually the writers learn the character from the actor, and even may use the actor's real life or previous roles in creating new story and new character points---for the actors also depend on writers for new situations and ideas, so their characters can expand and change, or at least show different facets of themselves. Actors know that as their characters, they have to be recognizably themselves, but they also have to surprise.
Previous (and then-ongoing) movie series had come from books or other movies. But the power of Star Trek came from the television series, its characters (and actors) as well as its nature and even its quirks. Nobody knew all of that in a practical way better than the actors. So even if naming Leonard Nimoy as director was partly a marketing gimmick, and a big partly to insure he would appear as Spock, it had immediate practical benefit. Once the other actors saw that he would continue to honor their interpretations of their characters, and their way of working, they collaborated with him happily and fruitfully.
In his DVD interview and commentary, Nimoy says that his basic approach to Star Trek III was operatic: big actions, big emotions, in a story about friendship, death and resurrection. This approach works especially well with the economy of the dialogue and Nimoy's shooting style, which is a mixture of fluid movement and quick action cuts (the motion picture part) and elegantly framed two- and three-shots (a conspicuous virtue of the original TV series.)
The first act of this drama gives us the premise, and the basic quest: Kirk's action to restore Spock's soul, which he sees as a necessity for honoring his own integrity and meaning: his own soul.
The first act also sets up events on the Genesis planet itself, and the antagonist Klingon commander, the operatically evil, and quite crude, Kruge (played with menacing panache by Christopher Lloyd.) In scenes originally scattered through this act but re-edited into the current sequence, there is the gathering of heroes that begins the second act. As the rest of the bridge crew acts to help their Captain defy Starfleet, steal Enterprise and warp off to Genesis, they mirror Kirk's commitment. It's a soul quest all around.
Since much of what makes a series character is in small moments, the actor is the ultimate arbiter. Eventually the writers learn the character from the actor, and even may use the actor's real life or previous roles in creating new story and new character points---for the actors also depend on writers for new situations and ideas, so their characters can expand and change, or at least show different facets of themselves. Actors know that as their characters, they have to be recognizably themselves, but they also have to surprise.
Previous (and then-ongoing) movie series had come from books or other movies. But the power of Star Trek came from the television series, its characters (and actors) as well as its nature and even its quirks. Nobody knew all of that in a practical way better than the actors. So even if naming Leonard Nimoy as director was partly a marketing gimmick, and a big partly to insure he would appear as Spock, it had immediate practical benefit. Once the other actors saw that he would continue to honor their interpretations of their characters, and their way of working, they collaborated with him happily and fruitfully.
In his DVD interview and commentary, Nimoy says that his basic approach to Star Trek III was operatic: big actions, big emotions, in a story about friendship, death and resurrection. This approach works especially well with the economy of the dialogue and Nimoy's shooting style, which is a mixture of fluid movement and quick action cuts (the motion picture part) and elegantly framed two- and three-shots (a conspicuous virtue of the original TV series.)
The first act of this drama gives us the premise, and the basic quest: Kirk's action to restore Spock's soul, which he sees as a necessity for honoring his own integrity and meaning: his own soul.
The first act also sets up events on the Genesis planet itself, and the antagonist Klingon commander, the operatically evil, and quite crude, Kruge (played with menacing panache by Christopher Lloyd.) In scenes originally scattered through this act but re-edited into the current sequence, there is the gathering of heroes that begins the second act. As the rest of the bridge crew acts to help their Captain defy Starfleet, steal Enterprise and warp off to Genesis, they mirror Kirk's commitment. It's a soul quest all around.
To the Federation, Genesis was a powerful force for good: it was creative. But the Klingons saw it as the ultimate weapon: in the course of creating life on a world, it could destroy what life already existed. As a technology meant to create peace that haunted the world with its immense power for war and annihilation, it was the Federation's atomic bomb (as Nimoy and Bennett refer to it.) Science fiction writer David Brin, in his comments included on the DVD, saw it as a Frankenstein myth: in creating life, they created a monster. It is not the first nor the last time that Star Trek would caution that sometimes science and technology get ahead of human abilities to control them.
This sense of tampering with power too great to control, perhaps too close to the ultimate power beyond the legitimately human realm, adds to the underlying power of this story and the appropriately operatic approach.
But this is also a very human story. In giving each crew member a task and a small adventure to start the heroes' journey, Nimoy was using a standard tactic from television's "Mission Impossible" ( Nimoy had joined its cast for a year after Star Trek's cancellation.) But it is also a variation of such gathering in myths, like Jason and the Argonauts.
Nimoy also wanted to give his fellow actors outside the basic triumvirate of Kirk, Spock and McCoy, their own moments, which they'd seldom received in the series. So Nichelle Nichols got to initiate some action, and after a surprising, deftly ironic and exhilarating scene, delivers a lovely line: "All my hopes..." George Takei got a jaunty action scene, as he sweeps in with a cape to improbably flip a much larger security officer, with a signature line: "Don't call me Tiny."
James Doohan got several nice moments, including some of his best movie lines ("And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon," "Up your shaft," and the admission that he routinely quadruples his repair estimates to maintain his reputation as a miracle worker) and a gleeful bit of engineer-geek sabotage that leaves the new hope of the Federation starship Excelsior (with its never to be seen in the film series again "trans-warp drive") coughing and sputtering in the old Enterprise's rainbow warp wake. Scotty observes that the more complicated the plumping, the easier it is to break it. It is a comic echo of the theme of technology getting too far beyond human scale.
Walter Koenig had some nice moments as well, but he would have to wait for the next movie to really have his own scene. Scenes like these remind us of the potential actors have that is too seldom used, but how often they rise to the occasion when given the chance.
The Enterprise streaks to the Genesis planet, where the science vessel Grissom is in orbit. The Grissom detects the torpedo casing that contained Spock's body on the surface, along with animal life signs. Two people beam down to investigate: Dr. David Marcus (one of the creators of the Genesis device, and Kirk's son, as he and we discovered in Star Trek II) and Lt. Saavik (the half-Vulcan officer.) At first they find only slug-like creatures, evolved at unnatural speed from microbes adhering to the torpedo. But then as they view the now empty coffin, and the ground shakes beneath them, they hear a cry.
As they discover the Vulcan boy who is the regenerated Spock, Kruge's Bird of Prey uncloaks and destroys the Grissom. Saavik and David know the Klingons are coming for them, and as they flee to shelter, they see that the Genesis planet is destroying itself. David admits that he used a powerful but unstable substance, protomatter, to make the Genesis matrix work. "Like your father, you broke the rules," Saavik says. This was a theme of Star Trek II: how Kirk beat the no-win scenario he faced as a cadet, the Kobayashi Maru, by secretly changing the conditions of the test. In this story he has broken the rules again by defying Starfleet to steal the Enterprise and head for the now forbidden Genesis planet.
But while the father succeeds in cheating death---and will again shortly---the son loses that gamble. "How much damage have you caused," Saavik says to David, "and how much is to come."
(Savvik is played by Robin Curtis this time. Though the conventional wisdom has become that Kirstie Alley was better in the role, I doubt she had the gravitas for Savvik in this film. Jeff Katzenberg, then also a Paramount chief, bet Leonard Nimoy that audiences would laugh at the scene of the suddenly adolescent Spock touching fingers with Savvik, in what was obviously foreplay to calming his Vulcan glands, on fire in the "pon farr" (or Vulcan in heat) that the series established all Vulcan males experience every seven years. As they rub their erect fingers there is definite snicker potential, but it doesn't happen. I believe it was Robin Curtis' characterization that made it work; with Kirstie Alley, Nimoy might have lost his bet.)
Like the Genesis device, which is both creative and destructive, the attempt to be direct, to break the rules, can be good, or in taking dangerous shortcuts, it can be fatally bad. In a poetic sense, David will pay for his rule-breaking's failure with his life, willingly. When Kirk arrives in orbit and David tells him over the communicator that Genesis doesn't work, Kirk asks, "What went wrong?" "I did," David answers. "I went wrong." In another sense, David redeems, or attempts to redeem his mistake, by offering his own life for Saavik's and Spock's, when Kruge demands that one of his henchmen with them on the surface kill one of them to convince Kirk to surrender the Enterprise. The Klingon knife seems pointed at Saavik when David defends her, and is killed.
When Kirk learns of his son's death, it leads to a dramatic scene that Shatner believed might be his best. Kirk is standing, and upon hearing the news, backs up, and stumbles. It is a unique and very effective bit of business, and Shatner's body language and voice as he repeats, "Klingon bastards, you killed my son," is powerful. We have never seen Kirk quite so vulnerable, and so close to defeated.
Now this jaunt to save his friend has suddenly exacted a cost. Thematically, it is another matched pair: to save a life has cost a life. To save his friend, has cost Kirk his son. But it is in some ways not as shocking as the loss that comes directly afterwards.
William Shatner's acting is more assured throughout this film than in the previous two (though he had many excellent moments in "Khan."). His reaction to his son's death has been justly praised, but no one has commented on a moment just as important: his skillful transition to action afterwards. For a moment, Kirk is grief-stricken and reeling. But the plot calls for him to immediately devise a clever strategem and carry it out.
The subtle transition Shatner makes is as impressive a piece of acting as the more obvious moment of reaction to David's death. From looking like he might cave inward, repeating his curse, Kirk starts to move. His eyes are still dulled, yet without exaggeration but with cold determination, he tells his stunned crewmates, "I swear to you, we're not finished yet."
This sense of tampering with power too great to control, perhaps too close to the ultimate power beyond the legitimately human realm, adds to the underlying power of this story and the appropriately operatic approach.
But this is also a very human story. In giving each crew member a task and a small adventure to start the heroes' journey, Nimoy was using a standard tactic from television's "Mission Impossible" ( Nimoy had joined its cast for a year after Star Trek's cancellation.) But it is also a variation of such gathering in myths, like Jason and the Argonauts.
Nimoy also wanted to give his fellow actors outside the basic triumvirate of Kirk, Spock and McCoy, their own moments, which they'd seldom received in the series. So Nichelle Nichols got to initiate some action, and after a surprising, deftly ironic and exhilarating scene, delivers a lovely line: "All my hopes..." George Takei got a jaunty action scene, as he sweeps in with a cape to improbably flip a much larger security officer, with a signature line: "Don't call me Tiny."
James Doohan got several nice moments, including some of his best movie lines ("And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon," "Up your shaft," and the admission that he routinely quadruples his repair estimates to maintain his reputation as a miracle worker) and a gleeful bit of engineer-geek sabotage that leaves the new hope of the Federation starship Excelsior (with its never to be seen in the film series again "trans-warp drive") coughing and sputtering in the old Enterprise's rainbow warp wake. Scotty observes that the more complicated the plumping, the easier it is to break it. It is a comic echo of the theme of technology getting too far beyond human scale.
Walter Koenig had some nice moments as well, but he would have to wait for the next movie to really have his own scene. Scenes like these remind us of the potential actors have that is too seldom used, but how often they rise to the occasion when given the chance.
The Enterprise streaks to the Genesis planet, where the science vessel Grissom is in orbit. The Grissom detects the torpedo casing that contained Spock's body on the surface, along with animal life signs. Two people beam down to investigate: Dr. David Marcus (one of the creators of the Genesis device, and Kirk's son, as he and we discovered in Star Trek II) and Lt. Saavik (the half-Vulcan officer.) At first they find only slug-like creatures, evolved at unnatural speed from microbes adhering to the torpedo. But then as they view the now empty coffin, and the ground shakes beneath them, they hear a cry.
As they discover the Vulcan boy who is the regenerated Spock, Kruge's Bird of Prey uncloaks and destroys the Grissom. Saavik and David know the Klingons are coming for them, and as they flee to shelter, they see that the Genesis planet is destroying itself. David admits that he used a powerful but unstable substance, protomatter, to make the Genesis matrix work. "Like your father, you broke the rules," Saavik says. This was a theme of Star Trek II: how Kirk beat the no-win scenario he faced as a cadet, the Kobayashi Maru, by secretly changing the conditions of the test. In this story he has broken the rules again by defying Starfleet to steal the Enterprise and head for the now forbidden Genesis planet.
But while the father succeeds in cheating death---and will again shortly---the son loses that gamble. "How much damage have you caused," Saavik says to David, "and how much is to come."
(Savvik is played by Robin Curtis this time. Though the conventional wisdom has become that Kirstie Alley was better in the role, I doubt she had the gravitas for Savvik in this film. Jeff Katzenberg, then also a Paramount chief, bet Leonard Nimoy that audiences would laugh at the scene of the suddenly adolescent Spock touching fingers with Savvik, in what was obviously foreplay to calming his Vulcan glands, on fire in the "pon farr" (or Vulcan in heat) that the series established all Vulcan males experience every seven years. As they rub their erect fingers there is definite snicker potential, but it doesn't happen. I believe it was Robin Curtis' characterization that made it work; with Kirstie Alley, Nimoy might have lost his bet.)
Like the Genesis device, which is both creative and destructive, the attempt to be direct, to break the rules, can be good, or in taking dangerous shortcuts, it can be fatally bad. In a poetic sense, David will pay for his rule-breaking's failure with his life, willingly. When Kirk arrives in orbit and David tells him over the communicator that Genesis doesn't work, Kirk asks, "What went wrong?" "I did," David answers. "I went wrong." In another sense, David redeems, or attempts to redeem his mistake, by offering his own life for Saavik's and Spock's, when Kruge demands that one of his henchmen with them on the surface kill one of them to convince Kirk to surrender the Enterprise. The Klingon knife seems pointed at Saavik when David defends her, and is killed.
When Kirk learns of his son's death, it leads to a dramatic scene that Shatner believed might be his best. Kirk is standing, and upon hearing the news, backs up, and stumbles. It is a unique and very effective bit of business, and Shatner's body language and voice as he repeats, "Klingon bastards, you killed my son," is powerful. We have never seen Kirk quite so vulnerable, and so close to defeated.
Now this jaunt to save his friend has suddenly exacted a cost. Thematically, it is another matched pair: to save a life has cost a life. To save his friend, has cost Kirk his son. But it is in some ways not as shocking as the loss that comes directly afterwards.
William Shatner's acting is more assured throughout this film than in the previous two (though he had many excellent moments in "Khan."). His reaction to his son's death has been justly praised, but no one has commented on a moment just as important: his skillful transition to action afterwards. For a moment, Kirk is grief-stricken and reeling. But the plot calls for him to immediately devise a clever strategem and carry it out.
The subtle transition Shatner makes is as impressive a piece of acting as the more obvious moment of reaction to David's death. From looking like he might cave inward, repeating his curse, Kirk starts to move. His eyes are still dulled, yet without exaggeration but with cold determination, he tells his stunned crewmates, "I swear to you, we're not finished yet."
Even more emotional, and certainly more controversial, than David's death was the destruction---the self-destruction---of the starship Enterprise (which, if you're counting, more or less ends the movie's second act.)
When he saw this in Harve Bennett's script, Gene Roddenberry was adamantly opposed. Bennett justified its function in the story with an historical example (quoted in Gross & Altman's 1993 book, "Captain's Logs: The Complete Trek Voyages"): Oliver Hazard Perry, America's first naval hero, won the battle of Lake Erie by scuttling his ship. Shatner, in his book on the Star Trek films, suggests that Roddenberry's experience was with World War II bombers, which were like airships with their own names and personalities, while Bennett's military experience was with helicopters in Korea, which were treated as expendable machines. But the source of Roddenberry's trepidations might be found between the lines of his counterproposal, which was to destroy the saucer section but leave the essential stardrive intact (and in the final film, though the drive section is badly battered, it isn't blown to bits like the saucer.) It could well be that Roddenberry feared the destruction of this Enterprise would mean the end of any Enterprise at the center of Star Trek. He may have suspected what others have since intimated, that Bennett intended future Trek missions would be in the Excelsior.
In a sense the sting is taken out of the self-destruction of Enterprise because it was established in the first minutes of the movie that the 20-year old starship was going to be decommissioned as obsolete. But as Kirk's desperate yet characteristically bold and clever solution in the face of defeat, it works brilliantly---especially because it happens so fast.
Kirk orchestrates a simultaneous beam-out to the planet as the Klingon boarding party transports into the Enterprise, where they are caught in the spectacular self-destruction. Watching its fragments streak across the reddened sky from the surface, Kirks says, "Bones, what have I done?" "What you had to do," McCoy says. "What you always do: turn death into a fighting chance to live."
Faced with the prospect of Spock dying a second time if he stays on the planet that is rapidly and violently coming apart, Kirk finds a Klingon communicator and taunts Kruge with the deaths of his crew on Enterprise. It has Kirk's swagger but the hint of revenge that extends Kirk's reaction to his son's murder (and would flare into anger in how he finally dispatches Kruge.) He tells Kruge he has to beam them all up to the Bird of Prey to get the Genesis secrets now. Instead Kruge catches them off guard by beaming down. He orders his last remaining crewman to beam the Enterprise team aboard, except for Kirk and the now fully grown but unconscious Spock.
Kirk and Kruge wind up in a classic Trek "bare-knuckle fist-fight" as Roddenberry would call it, as recalcitrant special effects limited the planned action. Yet Nimoy creates a strong sense of the planet's violence, particularly with shots of roiling fire. Everything about this climax is predictable, including the fact that Spock is rescued at the precise moment that he looks just like Leonard Nimoy, and that Kirk wins the fight and is beamed up just as the place where he was standing disappears in fire and brimstone. (It's the kind of climax Star Trek would employ again, so effectively satirized in "Galaxy Quest" when that crew of actors successfully defuses a dangerous device with time to spare, only to see it click down to the last possible second before it stopped, because that's always how it happened on the show.) Yet, as always, it works.
Now the real rescue can begin, as our heroes race to Vulcan aboard the captured Bird of Prey. They take Spock's body to the mountain temple for the ceremony that they hope will extract Spock's katra from McCoy, and reunite it with his body.
When he saw this in Harve Bennett's script, Gene Roddenberry was adamantly opposed. Bennett justified its function in the story with an historical example (quoted in Gross & Altman's 1993 book, "Captain's Logs: The Complete Trek Voyages"): Oliver Hazard Perry, America's first naval hero, won the battle of Lake Erie by scuttling his ship. Shatner, in his book on the Star Trek films, suggests that Roddenberry's experience was with World War II bombers, which were like airships with their own names and personalities, while Bennett's military experience was with helicopters in Korea, which were treated as expendable machines. But the source of Roddenberry's trepidations might be found between the lines of his counterproposal, which was to destroy the saucer section but leave the essential stardrive intact (and in the final film, though the drive section is badly battered, it isn't blown to bits like the saucer.) It could well be that Roddenberry feared the destruction of this Enterprise would mean the end of any Enterprise at the center of Star Trek. He may have suspected what others have since intimated, that Bennett intended future Trek missions would be in the Excelsior.
In a sense the sting is taken out of the self-destruction of Enterprise because it was established in the first minutes of the movie that the 20-year old starship was going to be decommissioned as obsolete. But as Kirk's desperate yet characteristically bold and clever solution in the face of defeat, it works brilliantly---especially because it happens so fast.
Kirk orchestrates a simultaneous beam-out to the planet as the Klingon boarding party transports into the Enterprise, where they are caught in the spectacular self-destruction. Watching its fragments streak across the reddened sky from the surface, Kirks says, "Bones, what have I done?" "What you had to do," McCoy says. "What you always do: turn death into a fighting chance to live."
Faced with the prospect of Spock dying a second time if he stays on the planet that is rapidly and violently coming apart, Kirk finds a Klingon communicator and taunts Kruge with the deaths of his crew on Enterprise. It has Kirk's swagger but the hint of revenge that extends Kirk's reaction to his son's murder (and would flare into anger in how he finally dispatches Kruge.) He tells Kruge he has to beam them all up to the Bird of Prey to get the Genesis secrets now. Instead Kruge catches them off guard by beaming down. He orders his last remaining crewman to beam the Enterprise team aboard, except for Kirk and the now fully grown but unconscious Spock.
Kirk and Kruge wind up in a classic Trek "bare-knuckle fist-fight" as Roddenberry would call it, as recalcitrant special effects limited the planned action. Yet Nimoy creates a strong sense of the planet's violence, particularly with shots of roiling fire. Everything about this climax is predictable, including the fact that Spock is rescued at the precise moment that he looks just like Leonard Nimoy, and that Kirk wins the fight and is beamed up just as the place where he was standing disappears in fire and brimstone. (It's the kind of climax Star Trek would employ again, so effectively satirized in "Galaxy Quest" when that crew of actors successfully defuses a dangerous device with time to spare, only to see it click down to the last possible second before it stopped, because that's always how it happened on the show.) Yet, as always, it works.
Now the real rescue can begin, as our heroes race to Vulcan aboard the captured Bird of Prey. They take Spock's body to the mountain temple for the ceremony that they hope will extract Spock's katra from McCoy, and reunite it with his body.
They proceed to the Vulcan temple, which is based on the only original series episode to visit Vulcan, "Amok Time." also involving a ceremony. Theodore Sturgeon, the famed science fiction writer and author of that episode, had the idea that an advanced society like the Vulcans would preserve primal elements of their pre-technological traditions.
The art department worked Vulcan symbols into styling a place that otherwise looks vaguely Tibetan crossed with Chinese, with a little suggestion of the Flash Gordon tradition of depicting aliens as Asians, like the Emperor Ming. And the long-legged female attendants in diaphanous white gowns adds a bit of Cecil B. Demille's Hollywood Babylon sex appeal to the exotic situation. But the scenes here work, thanks to excellent dialogue, Nimoy's camera work and the montage editing, and of course, to the authority of Dame Judith Evans as the Vulcan High Priestess, T'Lar.
This was Nimoy's casting coup, but he got this living legend of the British and American stage because her nephew was a Star Trek fan. She contributed more than just her performance. According to Harve Bennett, it was her suggestion that her lines include a reference to the danger to McCoy of the "re-fusion" ritual. It would set up a memorable moment.
Though this is a story about Spock, and is Nimoy's directorial debut, and it features a strong performance by William Shatner and memorable scenes for the other cast members, I always think of "Star Trek III" as DeForrest Kelly's movie. He is central to its plot, and he has some of the best scenes and best lines in the film. In his comic scene in the bar where he's trying to hire transport to Genesis before the Enterprise crew gets involved, his Vulcan and McCoy personalities clash, sometimes in a single line, ending with his desperately futile attempt at a Vulcan neck pinch. Then his line when Kirk tells him he's the victim of Spock's mind meld: "This is his revenge for all those arguments he lost." His line on the Genesis planet in response to Kirk's dismay after destroying the Enterprise, his dramatic confession of affection to Spock's inert body, and then his quintessential response to T'Lar.
Dame Judith tells McCoy that the danger to him is as great as it is to Spock, and he must choose whether or not to go through with the ritual. Looking simultaneously uncomfortable and resolute, McCoy says clearly, "I choose the danger."
I choose the danger! Actors wait their entire careers for a line like that. But Kelley follows it immediately with an acerbic aside: "Hell of a time to ask." In just two perfectly delivered sentences, DeForest Kelley defines the Leonard McCoy character perfectly and delightfully. Kelley himself once said that the secret of Trek films was in the moments. This is a great Star Trek movie moment.
This section of the film is a textbook of graceful efficiency: the close-ups, the two and three shots of the approaching characters, their lines and responses, the montage of the waiting, and then another signature exchange between Kirk and Sarek, before the final moments of Spock struggling to recover his memory and understand what has happened.
In one of Mark Lenard's best Trek movie moments, Sarek looks at Kirk with an expression of suppressed gratitude and pain. "Kirk, I thank you. What you have done---"
"What I have done I had to do."
"But at what cost?" The pain is in the cadence, rather than the still-logical tone of voice. "Your ship, your son---"
"If I hadn't tried, the cost would have been my soul."
The quest to re-integrate Spock by restoring his soul was demanded of Kirk's integrity, his soul. When Nimoy's innocent, puzzled Spock in the hooded white robe asks Kirk why he came back for him, Kirk eventually reverses the ethical pronouncement at the heart of the previous movie by saying: "Because the needs of the one outweighed the needs of the many." In this context it isn't a contradiction, but a completion. Both sides of the proposition are true, or can be.
How can this be? Kirk hints at how it works in a line just previous to this one, which Shatner says almost as a throwaway, when he tells Spock, "You would have done the same for me."
This is the heart of our day- to-day ethical relationships, the essence of how and why human societies work, combining empathy and reciprocity, and enabling both acts of great courage and cost, and ordinary courtesies: you'd do the same for me.
The circle of friendship is joined when the Enterprise crew gathers around Spock, reunited with their friend, himself recently "reunited." Though this is one of the few Star Trek films that doesn't end with the Enterprise heading off on its next mission, the sense that there will be more Star Trek movies precedes the words flashing onto the screen as this picture ends (with perhaps a nod to Gene Roddenberry and his ending for Star Trek I): "...and the adventure continues."
The art department worked Vulcan symbols into styling a place that otherwise looks vaguely Tibetan crossed with Chinese, with a little suggestion of the Flash Gordon tradition of depicting aliens as Asians, like the Emperor Ming. And the long-legged female attendants in diaphanous white gowns adds a bit of Cecil B. Demille's Hollywood Babylon sex appeal to the exotic situation. But the scenes here work, thanks to excellent dialogue, Nimoy's camera work and the montage editing, and of course, to the authority of Dame Judith Evans as the Vulcan High Priestess, T'Lar.
This was Nimoy's casting coup, but he got this living legend of the British and American stage because her nephew was a Star Trek fan. She contributed more than just her performance. According to Harve Bennett, it was her suggestion that her lines include a reference to the danger to McCoy of the "re-fusion" ritual. It would set up a memorable moment.
Though this is a story about Spock, and is Nimoy's directorial debut, and it features a strong performance by William Shatner and memorable scenes for the other cast members, I always think of "Star Trek III" as DeForrest Kelly's movie. He is central to its plot, and he has some of the best scenes and best lines in the film. In his comic scene in the bar where he's trying to hire transport to Genesis before the Enterprise crew gets involved, his Vulcan and McCoy personalities clash, sometimes in a single line, ending with his desperately futile attempt at a Vulcan neck pinch. Then his line when Kirk tells him he's the victim of Spock's mind meld: "This is his revenge for all those arguments he lost." His line on the Genesis planet in response to Kirk's dismay after destroying the Enterprise, his dramatic confession of affection to Spock's inert body, and then his quintessential response to T'Lar.
Dame Judith tells McCoy that the danger to him is as great as it is to Spock, and he must choose whether or not to go through with the ritual. Looking simultaneously uncomfortable and resolute, McCoy says clearly, "I choose the danger."
I choose the danger! Actors wait their entire careers for a line like that. But Kelley follows it immediately with an acerbic aside: "Hell of a time to ask." In just two perfectly delivered sentences, DeForest Kelley defines the Leonard McCoy character perfectly and delightfully. Kelley himself once said that the secret of Trek films was in the moments. This is a great Star Trek movie moment.
This section of the film is a textbook of graceful efficiency: the close-ups, the two and three shots of the approaching characters, their lines and responses, the montage of the waiting, and then another signature exchange between Kirk and Sarek, before the final moments of Spock struggling to recover his memory and understand what has happened.
In one of Mark Lenard's best Trek movie moments, Sarek looks at Kirk with an expression of suppressed gratitude and pain. "Kirk, I thank you. What you have done---"
"What I have done I had to do."
"But at what cost?" The pain is in the cadence, rather than the still-logical tone of voice. "Your ship, your son---"
"If I hadn't tried, the cost would have been my soul."
The quest to re-integrate Spock by restoring his soul was demanded of Kirk's integrity, his soul. When Nimoy's innocent, puzzled Spock in the hooded white robe asks Kirk why he came back for him, Kirk eventually reverses the ethical pronouncement at the heart of the previous movie by saying: "Because the needs of the one outweighed the needs of the many." In this context it isn't a contradiction, but a completion. Both sides of the proposition are true, or can be.
How can this be? Kirk hints at how it works in a line just previous to this one, which Shatner says almost as a throwaway, when he tells Spock, "You would have done the same for me."
This is the heart of our day- to-day ethical relationships, the essence of how and why human societies work, combining empathy and reciprocity, and enabling both acts of great courage and cost, and ordinary courtesies: you'd do the same for me.
The circle of friendship is joined when the Enterprise crew gathers around Spock, reunited with their friend, himself recently "reunited." Though this is one of the few Star Trek films that doesn't end with the Enterprise heading off on its next mission, the sense that there will be more Star Trek movies precedes the words flashing onto the screen as this picture ends (with perhaps a nod to Gene Roddenberry and his ending for Star Trek I): "...and the adventure continues."
The Special Edition DVD contains interesting commentary from Nimoy and others, interviews and documentaries on the film. Robin Curtis, looking radiant, does a funny Christopher Lloyd imitation. There's detailed discussion of the evolving Klingon language: the prefixes were modeled on Himalayan languages, which is especially apropos in that years later, Dan Curry would develop Klingon weapons and costumes from similar sources.
I especially enjoyed two additional documentaries. In an informative examination of proposals to terra-form Mars, Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center says bluntly that the idea that if we ruin our planet we can just go to Mars and start over is never going to work. If we can't keep the earth going, we won't be able to accomplish a terraformed Mars, or keep it going.
In "Terraforming and the Prime Director," science fiction writer David Brin provides a unique broad commentary on Star Trek in a larger science fiction context. Cultures used to believe that the Golden Age was in the past, he said, but our age is the first to think of the Golden Age as in the future.
"It's not in its mechanical aspects that science fiction achieves its most powerful influence," he says. "It's more in the area of warnings and enticements. Especially dire warnings, because the most powerful form of science fiction is the self-preventing prophesy---prophesies that scared us with a failure mode." He names the films Fail-Safe, On the Beach and Dr. Strangelove as some "that frightened us into taking extra measures to prevent accidents." Soylent Green inspired environmentalists, and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four gave us the universal symbol of Big Brother. By warning us of the costs of errors such as abusing the planet, or of continuing to abuse the innocent and act immorally, they suggest that "maybe we should do better" in the future. Which is the vision of Star Trek.
The Star Trek III novelization by Vondra N. McIntyre adds a romance between David and Saavik, and some scenes with Carol Marcus and Spock's mother Amanda that somewhat account for their absence from the film. But there is a lot of fill, including more attenuated intrigue among the Klingons, and some fairly lame earthside family business for Scotty. The actual plot of the film takes up a fraction of the pages, though many of the key lines are reproduced accurately. While there is some useful elaboration (especially on Kruge's thinking when he realizes Kirk has destroyed the Enterprise) it doesn't often seem to perform the other useful service of novelizations, which is to explain (or at least rationalize) holes in the on-screen story. We don't learn, for example, why Saavik doesn't seem to know anything about the katra.
A few final comments: The alien McCoy is talking to in the bar inverts his word order in a way reminiscent of another alien who first appeared four years earlier in The Empire Strikes Back, except this one isn't a wise and noble sage, but a mercenary with a ship for hire....The science ship Grissom is evidently named after astronaut Gus Grissom, who was one of the first astronauts in space, and also one of the first in the space program to die, in an Apollo program pre-flight test accident. Grissom's reputation had been unfairly tarnished when it appeared that after splashdown, he opened his Mercury capsule's hatch prematurely, causing it to sink. Although I never met him, he won a special place in my pantheon when, as a freshman editor of my high school newspaper, I printed a picture of the first three Mercury astronauts in space (Alan Shepard, Grissom and John Glenn), and sent a copy to each of them. I never heard from Glenn, I got a nice letter from Shepard, and from Grissom I got a thank you note and the photograph I'd sent him---with his signature, and Shepard's and Glenn's. That thoughtfulness for a teenager far away was enough to make me a Grissom fan for life, and I was happy to see Star Trek honor him in this movie.
Star Trek III is the middle of an unplanned trilogy, and in other ways a transitional movie, so it doesn't get as much respect as it deserves. Its virtues include some surprising shifts in tone, as well as memorable moments. It's intriguing how many individual moments and especially lines of dialogue stand out in this film as well as the later transitional Trek movie, Generations.
Another sort of transition begins to occur towards the end of this movie, when a certain new comedic tone starts to emerge. It is self-effacing, ironic, yet it doesn't take us too far outside the action or the Star Trek universe. It's there in McCoy's "hell of a time to ask" aside, but even more in Kirk on the Bird of Prey. "Help us or die," he says in standard Kirk fashion to the last remaining Klingon. "I do not deserve to live," the Klingon says solemnly. "Fine," Kirk says, "I'll kill you later." And later, when the Klingon wants to know why he isn't being killed, Kirk says, "I lied."
Shatner delivers this lines quickly, unceremoniously but with aplomb. I always believed that Shatner may have discovered this style in his funny self-parody of Kirk as Commander Buck Murdock in "Airplane: The Sequel" in 1982. In any event, it was the beginning of a new tone for Star Trek films that would flower in the very next outing. Though in other ways, Star Trek IV was going to be different. Very different. And still, perhaps the best exemplar of Star Trek yet.
I especially enjoyed two additional documentaries. In an informative examination of proposals to terra-form Mars, Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center says bluntly that the idea that if we ruin our planet we can just go to Mars and start over is never going to work. If we can't keep the earth going, we won't be able to accomplish a terraformed Mars, or keep it going.
In "Terraforming and the Prime Director," science fiction writer David Brin provides a unique broad commentary on Star Trek in a larger science fiction context. Cultures used to believe that the Golden Age was in the past, he said, but our age is the first to think of the Golden Age as in the future.
"It's not in its mechanical aspects that science fiction achieves its most powerful influence," he says. "It's more in the area of warnings and enticements. Especially dire warnings, because the most powerful form of science fiction is the self-preventing prophesy---prophesies that scared us with a failure mode." He names the films Fail-Safe, On the Beach and Dr. Strangelove as some "that frightened us into taking extra measures to prevent accidents." Soylent Green inspired environmentalists, and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four gave us the universal symbol of Big Brother. By warning us of the costs of errors such as abusing the planet, or of continuing to abuse the innocent and act immorally, they suggest that "maybe we should do better" in the future. Which is the vision of Star Trek.
The Star Trek III novelization by Vondra N. McIntyre adds a romance between David and Saavik, and some scenes with Carol Marcus and Spock's mother Amanda that somewhat account for their absence from the film. But there is a lot of fill, including more attenuated intrigue among the Klingons, and some fairly lame earthside family business for Scotty. The actual plot of the film takes up a fraction of the pages, though many of the key lines are reproduced accurately. While there is some useful elaboration (especially on Kruge's thinking when he realizes Kirk has destroyed the Enterprise) it doesn't often seem to perform the other useful service of novelizations, which is to explain (or at least rationalize) holes in the on-screen story. We don't learn, for example, why Saavik doesn't seem to know anything about the katra.
A few final comments: The alien McCoy is talking to in the bar inverts his word order in a way reminiscent of another alien who first appeared four years earlier in The Empire Strikes Back, except this one isn't a wise and noble sage, but a mercenary with a ship for hire....The science ship Grissom is evidently named after astronaut Gus Grissom, who was one of the first astronauts in space, and also one of the first in the space program to die, in an Apollo program pre-flight test accident. Grissom's reputation had been unfairly tarnished when it appeared that after splashdown, he opened his Mercury capsule's hatch prematurely, causing it to sink. Although I never met him, he won a special place in my pantheon when, as a freshman editor of my high school newspaper, I printed a picture of the first three Mercury astronauts in space (Alan Shepard, Grissom and John Glenn), and sent a copy to each of them. I never heard from Glenn, I got a nice letter from Shepard, and from Grissom I got a thank you note and the photograph I'd sent him---with his signature, and Shepard's and Glenn's. That thoughtfulness for a teenager far away was enough to make me a Grissom fan for life, and I was happy to see Star Trek honor him in this movie.
Star Trek III is the middle of an unplanned trilogy, and in other ways a transitional movie, so it doesn't get as much respect as it deserves. Its virtues include some surprising shifts in tone, as well as memorable moments. It's intriguing how many individual moments and especially lines of dialogue stand out in this film as well as the later transitional Trek movie, Generations.
Another sort of transition begins to occur towards the end of this movie, when a certain new comedic tone starts to emerge. It is self-effacing, ironic, yet it doesn't take us too far outside the action or the Star Trek universe. It's there in McCoy's "hell of a time to ask" aside, but even more in Kirk on the Bird of Prey. "Help us or die," he says in standard Kirk fashion to the last remaining Klingon. "I do not deserve to live," the Klingon says solemnly. "Fine," Kirk says, "I'll kill you later." And later, when the Klingon wants to know why he isn't being killed, Kirk says, "I lied."
Shatner delivers this lines quickly, unceremoniously but with aplomb. I always believed that Shatner may have discovered this style in his funny self-parody of Kirk as Commander Buck Murdock in "Airplane: The Sequel" in 1982. In any event, it was the beginning of a new tone for Star Trek films that would flower in the very next outing. Though in other ways, Star Trek IV was going to be different. Very different. And still, perhaps the best exemplar of Star Trek yet.
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