Captain's Blog pt. 30: The Undiscovered Country

Nick Meyer's original choice of title for Star Trek II was The Undiscovered Country. Given that film's themes of friendship, age, and death, the reference to Hamlet makes perfect sense. As Hamlet questions whether or not life is worthwhile given its hardships, coming to the conclusion that people endure only out of a fear of death, (that undiscovered country whence no traveler has ever returned * ) its parallels to Captain Kirk's character arc are perfectly clear.

* Well, except Spock.

 
I can understand the studio's insisting it be changed: The Wrath of Khan has more immediate impact. Meyer acquiesced, but unhappily, so when he was approached by Nimoy to do a story about "the Berlin Wall coming down in space," he said Sounds great; I have the perfect title.

Except that's the first (though not the foremost) problem with TUC; the title makes only the vaguest sense when transposed on the story we actually get. Suddenly, Hamlet's soliloquy is interpreted as "the uncertain future?" i.e. the future of Klingons and the Federation / Trek itself is "the undiscovered country?" I mean, first of all, it was actually fairly well-discovered territory in 1991; we were all watching it every Saturday or Sunday on The Next Generation. I know Kirk and the gang don't know that in the timeline of the movie, but it still repeats the mistake of STV: The Final Frontier, i.e. only by the loosest stretch of the definition did the story involve an actual "final frontier." (It made sense for the original script but not so much for the film it ended up as.) Part VI could just as well be called Star Trek: It's Like About 1991 America and Stuff.

This title mismatch is emblematic of all that is wrong with TUC: this is a movie that overflows with incongruent details not fatal in and of themselves, but a nick here and a nick there and pretty soon you're bleeding to death. Or, as the Klingons put it before they switched to all-Shakespeare, a thousand throats can be cut by one running man.

For years I've been hearing from people who love this movie and have no time for any of the following. To each his or her own, of course, but keeping this sum-is-greater-than-its-parts/ cumulative-effect in mind, let's look at just a few of the many changed premises Meyer and co. bring to the table.

Since when do phasers leave exit wounds? Cool effect, bro and everything, but it is at odds with everything we've ever seen. While I'm here, is it at all believable this Klingon crew could be so confused and helpless in a failure-of-gravity situation? They act not only like this has never happened before but like they've never even considered it happening before.

 

 

 

Text by Michael Okuda. (His text-commentaries on the Trek films/ some episodes are always entertaining)

The entire sequence from the fake photon blast through the Daft Punk robots (thanks to Jeff B, for that) through McCoy's conveniently-botched examination through the trial (where people use 1940s-style transistor-translators and Chang channels Adlai Stevenson, for some reason) just rings false.

Then again, speaking only in other people's catchphrases seems to be all that Chang does. He's the Klingon equivalent of the alien from Explorers, apparently.

The Klingons were of course meant to represent the crumbling Soviet Empire, but the metaphor wags the tail a bit too much to be at all believable. TUC seems more dated than TOS, in so many ways.

The Federation comes across even less convincingly. I'll get to the film's biggest problem (i.e. our heroes and Starfleet are both inexplicably and incredibly racist) more in a little bit, but beyond that:

Apparently, it was meant for the Federation President to be blind, (which actually is a wink-wink detail I enjoy) hence this scene where he pointedly puts on his purple-tinted shades. They probably should have mentioned that in the dialogue itself. Or, better yet, cut it out altogether.

Or have him not be obviously sighted in every other scene. (Incidentally, this whole break to the Federation's p.o.v. is such a tonal break in the film)

Also, are we really to believe that Starfleet conducts its business in a 18th century French drawing room?

Or uses 1960s classroom fold-over maps to pitch a military operation? ("Operation: Retrieve," no less.)

I don’t want to make Nick Meyer the bad guy here. Really, he did everyone a favor by coming on board and steering the production to something resembling a credible destination. As Nimoy said of The Final Frontier, "(Bill) was just riding a bad script." So, too, was Nick, here, except he was riding five or six bad scripts all at once, cobbled together with little sense. (That story's too involved to reproduce here, but suffice it to say, script negotiations started in good faith and ended in chaos and arbitration. Nimoy, Meyer, and Shatner all discuss it at great length in their respective memoirs.)

But it's difficult not to see Nick Meyer as the "running man" from the Klingon proverb above in his determination to turn the film into a relentless hodge-podge of anachronistic cultural allusions completely at odds with all previously-established Trekverse rules. Whereas his Hornblower allusions were kept in check in TWOK, here he gives them not just free reign (At one point, Kirk tells the helm "Right Full Rudder." Are you serious?) but diplomatic immunity.

Not to mention his penchant for all-things-Holmes. I like Holmes (and Hornblower) as much as the next guy, and for the record, I'm fine with Spock mentioning an ancestor of his originated the famous Sherlock Holmes quote "If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." (Meyer maintains it was meant to indicate Spock's relation to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through his mother. Fine, whatever.) But I can think of few scenarios less applicable to that quote than the "mystery" sequence in the middle of the film, which is at odds with everything we ever learned about a starship, or tricorders or internal sensors for that matter, and where characters enter and exit like dinner theater, and bad dinner theater at that:

 

 

 

 

By the by, Meyer and JJ Abrams' Dad are friends, and Meyer gave a young JJ an annotated copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes at JJ's bar mitzvah.

I am fine with adding a galley and laundromat to the Enterprise; maybe they went retro at the last refit. I'm fine with adding some new Starfleet rule regarding the discharge of a phaser aboard a starship; it makes no sense/ is contradicted in dozens of previous episodes and movies, but hey, bureaucrats. I'm fine with a one-time "we've got to turn out every locker and mattress as if we were on a submarine" sequence; it makes no sense to go about things this way but hey, okay. (Likewise, I'm fine with the old "Uhh, listen up, everyone, would the killers, like, report to Sick Bay?" trick.) I'm fine with Chekov being made to look like a buffoon just to have a "if the shoe fits..." joke; maybe he's having a mental health day.

Ditto for Scotty, who once again is played mainly for comic relief.

But put all these things together? No. That's several bridges too far. That's an archipelago of bad and lazy writing.

Incidentally, despite the way it's pronounced, the word "inalienable" means in-a-lien-able. Which makes the whole business of "if you could only hear how bigoted you sound," not to mention some of the discussion around the topic, somewhat confused. It might have worked as a moment of translation/ communication difficulty had I gotten the impression the screenwriters understood the word's actual meaning.

And ditto for this "Let's pull out old 19th-century-looking Klingon translation dictionaries" sequence.  Nichelle Nichols objected to this scene, stating (quite correctly) that Uhura would have at least a passing familiarity with Klingon, but Meyer (rather bluntly, according to Nichols) overruled her. (Chekov can he heard saying something about how a universal translator would be recognized, but the whole thing rests on the strange premise that these ships cannot scan one another. Before we even get to the wtf-ness of this "quick! Pretend we're Klingons!" sentry-password stuff, there's that.)

Nichelle Nichols does a good job with the humor of this scene, but the idea of making all of the senior officers look like grandparents trying to "figure out this Tumblr thing" is at best a bad idea and at worst needlessly - and illogically - cutesy.

Maybe spell-check your character names, too? It's Uhura, not Uhuru. Then again, Kirk got it wrong a few times in TOS, as well:

"What's happening to Lieutenant Yoo-hoo-roo!?"

I'm usually pretty forgiving of this we're-really-commenting-on-ourselves aspect of Trek. As a rule, I shrug off a lot of stuff; if we could perfectly detail life in the twenty-third century and beyond, we'd be living in the twenty-third century and beyond. I get it - everything we write is, ultimately, the eye describing only itself. No problem. But The Undiscovered Country is a good exception to this rule: I'm perfectly happy to be forgiving of these things if the story in question doesn't hold the metaphor in such contempt. This couldn't be anything else but 20th (and in some cases, 18th and 19th) century baby boomers winking at themselves and masquerading as Trek. (If I had the time, I'd do a video mash-up of TUC to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" to really drive this point home.)

The "Only Nixon could go to China" line would actually be pretty good if everything else in the movie wasn't there. I like that Spock is trying to make a joke - and a pretty good one. Unfortunately, it's so tonally at odds with the scene that surrounds it (and everything else that happens) that it falls flat.

There are many more examples; to list them all would be overkill. Any one of them can be explained away with a little thought, but the cumulative effect is insurmountable for me. There's a difference between nitpicking and accounting, for Crissakes. One last one: the final starship battle rests on "this ship has got to have a tailpipe," a strange reference for someone of Uhura's era to make, and modifying an actual torpedo, not a photon torpedo, as it is called again and again. It might as well be a "magic cannonball."

Granted, this torpedo business is confused in many iterations of Trek, not just TUC.

Let's turn our attention to the bigotry and false-flag-ness of the whole Starfleet plot. Suddenly, Starfleet is racist and ignorant, displaying an understanding of the Klingons out of the 1930s.

Shatner (quite rightly) considered his "let them die" comment to be very un-Kirk-like. Meyer insisted. As a compromise, he did the scene in one take and added a dismissive wave after his comment which was subsequently edited out of the final movie despite Meyer's promise to leave it in. Considering Shatner only said the line contingent on the gesture/ shrug to explain it, this is pretty inconsiderate on Meyer's part.

Nichelle Nichols flat-out refused to say the racist lines attributed to Uhura (the lines were redistributed to the two jock-bigot transporter room folks we see after the Klingons beam in.) Koenig tried the same, but he finally relented, delivering the somewhat-humorous-if-odd-for-Chekov-to-reference "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" line.

Brock Peters' scene in the council chamber had to be shot in numerous takes, as he was very uncomfortable with the racial undertones in his lines that the Federation take the opportunity to "bring them to their knees" which was itself a reference to another film in which that line was said about African Americans. (i.e. The Birth of a Nation.)

The whole idea of turning Brock Peters and top Starfleet brass into bigots and false-flag-operatives is yet another shortcut-to-plotting/ lazy writing, to begin with. Compare how this comes across vs. the considerably better-handled false flags/ crew-stands-up-to-conspiracies of Into Darkness or Insurrection.

Would Starfleet seek to exploit another culture's tragedy and conspire to commit murder and blame it on others to further its own military ends and use racism/ xenophobia as cover for it? Not the Starfleet I know, but these are certainly questions worth considering and I'm glad Trek is asking them. They would be much more relevant, though, if the script didn't undermine and contradict itself (and all previous Trek) as it poses them. When Gorkon's daughter tells Kirk "You've restored my father's faith," and Kirk answers with "You've restored my son's," it's especially grating, given the backflips Kirk's characterization had to do to get to this "breakthrough" moment. Granted, these Klingon bastards killed his son, and granted Kirk's principles are somewhat "flexible" in TOS. But still:

“All things being equal, but things are not equal.”

Not just the actual conspiracy plot, but Worf's grandfather's speech in the Klingon kangaroo court in particular.

Meyer, to his credit, regrets having Spock torture Valeris to get the info, nowadays. One can argue that it's logical for Spock to do so, and I can see that, somewhat. But given the abundance of mixed messages surrounding it, it seems as odd a bit of characterization as everything else in the film.

 

It's supposed to end on a hopeful note, but the whole thing is a war of attrition to get there.

All of these problems notwithstanding, TUC remains a curiously well-regarded Trek film. There are certainly things I like about it, but they're so minor and few and far between:

 

The 2nd unit stuff sounds like it was especially difficult to film, but the visuals are undoubtedly cool.

Sulu is handled well.

His long overdue Captaincy of the Excelsior is good to see, as well as his unhesitant going off-grid when he realizes something rotten is going on.

Valeris is more or less fine. I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense for her to be in on the conspiracy; maybe if they'd intended her to be the fall guy? (Fall girl, I guess.) It's better than the original idea of having Saavik turn traitor. (They only changed Saavik to Valeris when Kim Cattrall balked at being the third actress to play the role; sadly, Robin Curtis wasn't even asked.)

The scenes in the prison camp are all kind of fun.

Although this "Kissing yourself must have been your lifelong ambition" thing makes little sense as a line spoken between Kirk and the shapeshifter. Like the Nixon and China thing, had the rest of the script not existed, it'd be fine, but taken as part of the tsunami of wink-wink and anachronistic lines and moments, just... ugh. To paraphrase Joss Whedon re: Waterworld, "The problem with the third act is the first two acts."

 

 

Is this the stuff of David Bowie's nightmares? Or perhaps his fondest dreams?

I've detailed here and there how Roddenberry's declining health and presence of mind dovetailed with the last few Trek films and the beginning of TNG. After a particularly intense stroke, he was confined to a wheelchair and unable to say much beyond yes or no. Susan Sackett relays in her memoir how he was wheeled into a screening of this film. While the assembled suits (for whom the screening had primarily been arranged) talked to themselves about how great everything looked, Roddenberry, limited in speech but having one of his more lucid days, could only whisper "No... no... no..." over and over again.

I'm sorry, but a) that is so incredibly sad, and b) could this possibly bring Captain Pike from "The Menagerie" to mind any more?

 
Once he recovered his energy and vocabulary, Gene instructed his lawyer to do everything possible to shut the movie down, as it had taken the "Starfleet is military" trope to new and dangerously offensive heights. He died shortly after, and the lawsuit fizzled out. TUC raked in just under $75 million at the box office, and the original cast never appeared together again on the silver screen.

Given how they are handled here, that is probably a good thing. I personally prefer to think of The Voyage Home as the original cast's collective swan song. I've never read a satisfactory explanation as to why Meyer went about things the way he did with this movie; he seems to shrug off all criticism of it in his memoir (though less so in interviews on YouTube.)

For me, and with apologies to those who champion it, it's the first thing I think of whenever I hear or read people say "(fill in the blank) doesn't get Star Trek." Take the worst episodes of every Trek series, and they all seem more Trek-like than what we get here. It's hardly the worst thing in the world, but it's definitely my least favorite of the bigscreen Treks.

Captain's Blog pt. 20: The Wrath of Khan

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was released in 1982. I never realized until getting this post together just how long of a shadow that year cast over my VHS-watching for the rest of the 80s. Tron, Poltergeist, E.T., The Road Warrior, The Thing, Blade Runner, The Beastmaster, The Last Unicorn, Rocky III, and The Dark Crystal were all released that year - not to mention Zapped with Scott Baio, which has the distinction of being the first thing I ever saw on Laser Disc at my buddy's house - and while many of those became ongoing re-watch favorites, for at least the middle part of the 80s the one I watched more than any other was:

As a result of familiarizing myself so thoroughly with the pan and scan home video release back then, I'm always struck at the scenes added back in (Scotty's extended scene in Sick Bay, Scotty's nephew arguing with Admiral Kirk re: the readiness of Engineering, McCoy's arguing with Spock, etc.) when I catch it on cable or see it on disc nowadays. Of these restored scenes, the McCoy-arguing-with-Spock scene works well, but the Scotty/ Scotty's nephew scenes are tonally "off," so it's understandable why they were cut.

I will never understand why Scotty first brings the boy to the bridge instead of Sick Bay. More on this when we get to "The Nick Meyer Approach," though.

At that time I was completely unaware of the behind-the-scenes drama that attended the making of the film:

- Despite its hefty box office receipts, Roddenberry's perceived lack of control over the production of The Motion Picture and his failure to play well with others prompted Paramount to put veteran TV producer Harve Bennett in charge of the sequel. Roddenberry was given the ceremonial title of "consulting producer." His contract made it clear that no Trek could be produced without his name attached, but this ultimately became the sum total of his involvement in the movies: Roddenberry In Name Only.

- Harve Bennett settled into his new job by watching every episode of TOS back to back. He picked "Space Seed" as the story to revisit and began soliciting scripts. Eventually, Nicholas Meyer was hired to direct. Says Mr. Meyer: "I'd never seen Star Trek. Although I did know a guy who watched it dropping LSD for 54 days straight in college. So, I don't know... maybe there's something there."

Indeed.

Nick succeeded in getting a script together from the various attempts (Jack Sowards' being the closest to the end product's) that was palatable to Harve Bennett, Paramount, and to Shatner and Nimoy (who was lulled back to the franchise by being promised "a great death scene.") The only one to whom it wasn't acceptable was Roddenberry, who quickly learned how sidelined he had become when he threatened to walk and it was made clear to him that walk or not, Wrath of Khan was proceeding as planned. Says Harve: "Gene's notes (were highly defensive.) This will ruin Star Trek kind of stuff. I saved a lot of them, but I don't ever want to make them public, because they're very painful. No matter what we came up with (...) he'd counter by pitching a story about the crew (time-traveling) to stop the JFK assassination. That story came up 4 times as substitute for whatever we were planning to do, II, III, IV and V."

(Gene's campaign to get the Trek/JFK story made is the butt of many jokes, and admittedly it's difficult to see it translating well to the screen. But in his defense it's tough not to think of Stephen King's 11/22/63 and how well that story works. Maybe a Trekkified version of 11/22/63 would have been just as good? We'll never know, of course, I'm just saying: it may sounds ludicrous, but who knows? This is a show that had Captain Kirk and Abe Lincoln fist-fighting a rock monster, after all; there are always... possibilities.)

What was Gene's problem? First, the paramilitary look and feel of the story. Harve Bennett again: "Gene always said Trek wasn't military, but in TOS, there was a great deal of violence. (...) In his statesmanlike personal growth, (he'd) begun confusing his own idealism - which was wonderful - about a peaceful future with Star Trek. In my mind, Star Trek's vision was very different and very specific. Parameters will change, technology will change, but human nature will most definitely remain the same. (...) Will 400 years of technology elevate (human nature) into bliss and karma? (...) Gene made that assumption in his later years, or at least that was the basis of his objections to the things we were trying to do."

Taking Roddenberry's side of it for a minute, perhaps he saw the violence/ standard conflicts-making on TOS as a compromise born of television production necessity and was pushing for something less beholden to current storytelling models. I agree with Harve that TOS doesn't quite live up to Gene's idealism, here, and Gene's stance on this was famously restrictive to the writers he hired for TNG. But staying on his side for a second, there are elements of Wrath of Khan which make little sense for tactical combat in the 23rd century. For example:

The first battle between Reliant and Enterprise is staged like a broadside-battle between Age of Sail ships.

 

Even the development of this battle, later in the film, when it draws attention to itself re: Khan's "two-dimensional thinking," bears more resemblance to Napoleonic War combat than something from the future.

As Nicholas Meyer said over and over, he was making "Hornblower in outer space." That's fine, of course; Roddenberry characterized the show exactly the same way, many times. But perhaps Gene's objection was less that Trek was being military and more the way "the future navy" was portrayed.

Personally, I think Meyer managed to keep his Hornblower-allusions in check just enough with Wrath of Khan, excepting this rather silly 18th-century-esque photon torpedo bay sequence, but he took it to ridiculous lengths in The Undiscovered Country. Put another way, Wrath of Khan feels like a Hornblower story successfully-enough adapted to the Trekverse, whereas Undiscovered Country feels like a film that is determined to be Hornblower-esque, Trek, logic and legacy be damned.

Regardless, Roddenberry was out, Bennett was in, and there was little Gene could do but accept the situation as gracefully as possible.

Gene dealt with his second objection less graciously. He leaked the news of Spock's death to the hardcore fans - a real dick move, really, though I have a certain amount of sympathy for his position. The fans immediately sent thousands of letters of protest to media outlets and to Paramount, and Bennett and co. had to work overtime placating the fans and begging for a chance - something that further soured Roddenberry's relationship with the new regime. (Ultimately, though, it led to re-arranging the script for the better.)

"Aren't you dead?" Nice fake-out. The audience breathes a sigh of relief, and the impact of Spock's actual death is all the more powerful for it.

 

I was young enough for this to be pretty much my first "big death." It's certainly survived in my imagination as the standard of comparison. (Coincidentally, the other big deaths of my childhood were Jean Grey's and Elektra's; all three were brought back to life.)

Most fans adopted a "wait and see" attitude and while saddened by Spock's death, were ultimately delighted with the film itself. David Gerrold relays the absurdity of some of the boycott hysteria in The World of Star Trek: one fan went to see the film five times but got up and left the theater right before Spock's death each time. That's a particularly curious way to "vote with your wallet."

Let's get to the film itself. In addition to "Hornblower in outer space," Meyer refers to it as an "adventure movie that was about friendship, old age, and death."

 

 

It's certainly successful on those counts. Also as a tale of obsession and revenge, i.e. the "wrath" of the title. Montalban is exceptional as Khan.

His desire for vengeance and liberal quoting of Moby Dick all make sense in context of the story, (as does the film-framing quotations from A Tale of Two Cities; Meyer is considerably less successful, again, trying for this sort of thing in Undiscovered Country) and you can't help but feel sympathy for his position. Kirk deposits the Botany Bay crew on Ceti Alpha Five at the end of "Space Seed," and, as Khan relays to Chekov and Captain Terrell, no one ever bothered to check up on their progress. As a result, all of the hardships they experience (including the death of Khan's wife, former Starfleet officer Marla McGivers) metastasize in the pursuit of vengeance against James Kirk. Kirk, then, has two figures from his past re-surface, Khan, and his son David. Twin sons of the same father, twin results of  youthful decision-making, coming home to roost.

Shatner's bellowing of "KHAAAN" is perhaps the most enduring bit of the film. No less amusing, though, is Khan's reaction shot, as Kirk's fury (an affectation as part of the misdirection in play - Kirk needs Khan to think his fury has overcome his reasoning - but let's be clear on something: reading this as a ploy in no way satisfactorily explains Shatner's over-the-top-ness here; this is vintage Shatner madness, ruse or not, and thank goodness) echoes over the comm link:

He's enjoying this in an equally over-the-top way.

The film enjoys the reputation of still being the best Trek of them all. Is it? I'll save my how-the-films-rank thoughts for that eventual post, but I love this movie. The score, the editing, the performances, pretty much everything is airtight. Hindsight allows us to see it as only the first part of a trilogy of stories, and as such, it certainly sets everything up (and how.) But even had Search for Spock and The Voyage Home never been made, this would remain a powerful high water mark for the Trekverse. (Perhaps especially if they had never been made; if this, say, was not a box office hit and the franchise left to die, what a farewell this would be.) A few stray observations:

- I'm not sure it's entirely logical for Starfleet to employ live explosives during its Kobayashi Maru exercise:

But, I applaud their commitment to realism.

Much has been made of how Chekov would recognize Khan, since Walter Koenig was not in TOS episode "Space Seed," but okay, maybe he familiarized himself with the ship's adventures before joining the crew. Meyer himself says he was aware of the discrepancy and considered putting Uhura on the Reliant, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle frequently contradicted himself in the Sherlock Holmes books, i.e. "continuity doesn't matter so long as the audience is engrossed and enjoying themselves." To a certain extent, I agree; on the other hand, it's such a flip attitude. Here and elsewhere, he uses his veneration of Sherlock Holmes and Horatio Hornblower to justify any Trek decision he made, as if the source material for his reasoning is so superior to Trek as to be an answer in and of itself.

EDIT: Personally, I never cared much, either way (and it is entirely possible that Meyer is being cheeky, here, and I shouldn't take his comments so literally.) Whether or not Chekov was on the ship during "Space Seed" has little bearing on whether he would recognize Khan. It matters, certainly, for whether Khan would recognize Chekov. But I'm fine with any of the suggestions offered in the comments or elsewhere. I also agree more or less with Meyer's point; he knows him because it makes the scene better. That's not a good rule for storytelling, but it's not a bad exception, every now and again.

Less simple is why he and Captain Terrell don't just beam back to the ship from inside the Botany Bay once Chekov realizes where he is. Did I miss something? Did Pavel just panic? Why rush back out into the sand storm?

Of course if they had, we wouldn't get this admittedly-awesome shot of Khan and the gang in the swirling sands, ready to capture them. Again, when confronted with what looks best on screen vs. what makes the most sense, Meyer chooses the former every time. Case in point, Saavik:

Or rather, Saavik's tears at Spock's funeral:

Nicholas Meyer addresses this on the commentary track: "I remember somebody came running up to me and said, 'Are you going to let her do that?' And I said, 'Yeah.' And they said, 'But Vulcans don't cry,' and I said, 'Well, that's what makes this such an interesting Vulcan." Cute, except it contradicts everything we'd heretofore learned about Vulcans. There really isn't any valid excuse for Saavik to cry, here, except, of course, it looks better on screen. Considering the depths to which Meyer's "Who the hell cares" attitude descends on Undiscovered Country, this is a foreboding remark. But in the context of Wrath of Khan, all right, fine, who cares:

Kirstie Alley is an appealing Saavik, but Robin Curtis (who replaces her in Search for Spock and The Voyage Home) plays the character much more Vulcan-like. We'll get to that film in turn, but it certainly shows the difference between the two directors re: Vulcans.

EDIT: Okay, everyone seems to be remembering Saavik's half-Romulan-ness as something other than an explanation after the fact. I have the novelization for this on audiobook and will huddle over that like a man with an Enigma machine when I get to it. I will say it was my distinct impression from the commentary track and from reading Meyer's book that he didn't even know what a Romulan was, but it's entirely possible he was being cheeky, there, as well.

The other additions to the main cast work well:

Bibi Besch as Carol Marcus.

Paul Winfield as Captain Terrell

And Merritt Butrick as David Marcus.

And although they don't get much to do as they will in the other parts of this trilogy of stories, the rest of the cast is fun to watch as well:

 

 

Of the recurring cast, I guess this is Chekov's big moment in the films, isn't it? He's used for something more than comic relief/ light touch/ Captain Kirk, Jr., here, and as mentioned elsewhere, the moments where he and Terrell are brought under the control of the Ceti eels imprinted themselves on a generation's nightmares. The sequence aboard Regula One is also gruesomely effective, particularly the Captain's grim business of lowering the strung-up corpses:

The effects of this film still hold up pretty well. Industrial Light and Magic had to basically start from scratch, as Doug Trumbull's company refused to share any of the work they'd done on The Motion Picture with them.

 

The Genesis Device is a fascinating idea:

and the simulation of its effects are still fun to watch:

 

Additionally, I always laugh at this next part because I was convinced as a kid that this dawn of the star beyond the Genesis planet was the impact of Spock's burial tube.

 

and I always wondered how the tube remained intact or didn't level any of the foliage on the surface, with an impact like that...! Obviously, I mistook the star beyond the planet as the impact, but as a metaphorical set-up for Star Trek III, it works well. Michael Eisner likened the death of Spock to the crucifixion and insisted the film needed the Gethsemane resurrection. Bennett (and Nimoy) agreed, but Nicholas Meyer hated (and continues to hate) the non-finality of Spock's death.

The film was a huge hit. Charles Bluhdorn, the notorious chairman of Paramount's parent corporation, Gulf and Western, personally phoned Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer with his congratulations. (Bluhdorn was aka "the mad Austrian of Wall Street," and Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls contains several colorful anecdotes of his interactions with Barry Diller, Don Simpson, et al.) 

Given his obstructionism during all aspects of production, Roddenberry was not phoned, by Bluhdorn or by anyone. I can't help but feel for Roddenberry, here. Trek was finally an unreserved success. (The box office receipts of The Motion Picture notwithstanding, its reputation would take awhile to improve; it was considered the misstep that Khan corrected at the time and by the studio brass/ most fans.) Yet he had to watch through the window, uninvited to share in the spoils of the party to which he had dedicated so many years of his life, so much of his soul.

Sadly, this was a situation that would be repeated on Trek's next four big screen iterations.