Star Trek III: The Search For Spock Revisited: The Most Underrated Trek?
https://www.joblo.com/star-trek-iii-the-search-for-spock-revisited-the-most-underrated-trek/
shareIt's a good Trek. I think people ripped on it just to uphold that theory that even numbered Treks were good and the odd numbered ones sucked.
shareAs silly as it sounds, I really do think the whole "odd numbered curse" fan meme is mostly responsible for this one's reputation, which I swear just seems to get worse and worse with each passing year.
Star Trek III was a big hit and got great reviews. Not everyone loved it, (Ronald Reagan and Billy Idol notoriously made their displeasure public for instance, lol) but it was also very much a common occurrence back in the 80s for Star Trek III to be someone's favorite.
And then Star Trek V came out and someone came up with their cute "odd numbered Star Trek movie curse" idea and it took off and since then it's just been common wisdom that Star Trek III was one of "the bad ones." It's pretty lame!
But Nemesis completely shattered that stupid "odd-numbered-Trek-movies-bad" curse, because it turned out to be far worse than Final Frontier!!
Yes that's right, at the time Star Trek III did get good reviews (I remember one saying not quite as good as Trek II but light years ahead of TMP) and box office did almost same as II (76m domestic to IIs 78m. Worldwide 87m to 95m. But it had a bigger opening wkend 16m to 14m) audiences HAD to see it to see how they were going to bring Spock back , like the Endgame to Khans Infinity War
and yeah the 'curse' did come about around V and was in full flow for VII with reviews often citing the 'curse' of the odd numbered films, and reviews for Nemesis were about how the curse was finally being broken. But in reality there was no curse bc III was one of the best Trek films (its actually 2nd best overall imo),