If they were going to do something like that though, I think they did it well - part of the reason that I liked it. Plus it's not like WoK didn't happen because of this one you know?
Well, it was certainly handled better than, say, Superman The Movie. Boy, did I feel cheated at the end of that, even though I knew that they couldn't leave Lois Lane dead.
👷👳 Bob the Builder and Hadji walk into a bar...
Trek III is my second favorite Trek film, it's very underrated and all kinds of awesome.
This film brought back Klingons in a totally kick ass way and expanded the Trek universe of spaceships, we see the Klingon Bird of Prey for the first time, the Excelsior, the Grissom science vessel and the gigantic Earth space dock.
Up until this film all we had seen in terms of Federation and Klingon ships were Constitution-class Enterprise ships, Klingon Battle Cruisers, and the USS Reliant. In one movie they doubled the amount of ship classes in the fleets and the designs were great and iconic.
Yeah, it brought back Spock, but he wasn't the same and TWOK wasn't undone because Kirk had to lose his son and the original Enterprise to do it.
Agreed, it also works as a fantastic 80s Sci fi action movie like Spielberg/Lucas movies of the era, with elements of the 80s sword&sorcery fantasy genre.
It's hard to put this ground breaking film into a proper sense of perspective after watching the thousands of hours of Star Trek produced after, but this really must have been quite something to see for the first time back in the day. All the science, adventure, and aliens of Star Trek finally brought to full visual life on the screen.
At the time in summer 84 and the years after (maybe upto about when TNG got going in s3 onwards) Trek III was like the most epic Trek of all. with Starfleet Command, the Klingons & Vulcan seen properly since their fleeting glimpses in the 1st film.
And second biggest opening weekend in 84 (16m beating all the competition that year like Gremlins, Ghostbusters, BHC, 2010) second only to Indiana Jones (25m). and was overall #8 domestic and worldwide