Leonard Nimoy’s first film as director undoes the ending of The Wrath of Khan with more grace than the job deserved. The cast has never looked more like a family, and the planet where it all happens has never looked more like a set.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) ended with Spock dead in a torpedo casing on a planet that had been made that afternoon. Two years on, Leonard Nimoy, who played him, directs for the first time and is handed the job the title describes. Bring the man back, but do not make his death worthless. Harve Bennett’s script solves it by moving the cost onto Kirk. Spock’s return is going to be paid for, and the film is really about the bill.
The first half hour is the best Nimoy has. The Enterprise limps home, McCoy (DeForest Kelley) starts speaking in Spock’s cadence, and Sarek (Mark Lenard) arrives to explain that his son left something in the doctor’s head. Starfleet quarantines Genesis and orders the ship scrapped, so Kirk and his officers steal her. Scotty (James Doohan) sabotages the new Excelsior, Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) holds a transporter room at gunpoint, Sulu (George Takei) throws a guard twice his size. Robert F. Shugrue cuts it as a heist, and James Horner turns the Enterprise theme into a march as she backs out of the dock. We felt a small, foolish thrill as she cleared the doors, and we will not apologise for it.
Christopher Lloyd’s Kruge is the other reason to watch. He plays the Klingon as a mid-ranking officer with a job to finish, and his contempt for his own crew is funnier than most of the film’s intended jokes. Robert Fletcher puts him in dark leather and studs, Charles Correll lights his bridge in red and steam, and he keeps a puppet monster as a pet and treats it more kindly than anyone with a pulse. His plan is thin, though. He wants Genesis as a weapon, arrives, and waits for Kirk so the plot can start.
The planet is the problem. Correll shoots Genesis on a sound stage under orange and violet gels, plastic snow in one corner and a red-lit cactus in another, and we could see where the ground stopped. The scenes there belong to Saavik (Robin Curtis, new to the role) and David Marcus (Merritt Butrick), and neither is given much. Curtis plays Vulcan calm as an absence of anything, and Butrick mostly looks guilty at rocks. We were bored on Genesis, and we caught ourselves counting the minutes until Kirk arrived.
What holds it together is a cast that has been playing these people since the 1960s and knows what a scene needs. Kelley is the film’s quiet lead: McCoy is carrying a mind that is not his, and Kelley plays both men with no make-up, only a change in the shoulders and a flattening of the drawl, then a flare of temper when the doctor gets himself back. Lenard gives Sarek a grief held so tightly it hurts to watch. Shatner is uneven, but halfway through Kirk receives news we will not repeat, and Shatner plays it not with a speech but by losing his footing on his own bridge. It is the best thing he does in the picture, and it lasts about four seconds.
The rest is thinner than it should be. Bennett hands out one problem at a time and never lets two collide; the Klingons, Starfleet and the Vulcan business each wait politely for the others to finish. Nimoy directs conversation in flat two-shots, and there is far less wit here than in the previous film. The last stretch, on Vulcan, is a ceremony shot at ceremonial speed, with Judith Anderson in Fletcher’s enormous robes saying grave things slowly. Horner’s score, which reprises much of his work from the previous film, swells to tell us to feel something, and by then we mostly did.
It sits in the middle of the original-cast films, below The Wrath of Khan and well above the first. A film this fond of its own people is hard to dislike. But it exists to undo a good ending, and for all its care it never explains why that ending needed undoing. Watch it straight after The Wrath of Khan, as the second half of a long evening, and it plays as a coda. On its own it is a warm, competent, slightly cheap adventure that runs 105 minutes, carries a PG, and knows exactly who it was made for.
