Star Trek 3 “Resurrection”

Review by L8wrtr — November 9, 2010 @ 7:06 pm

Star Trek 1, 3, or 5? Which was the least watchable? Which was the biggest disappointment? Compelling arguments can be made for all 3, but I always found myself the most disappointed with Search for Spock because it achieved so little, yet had so much promise. The movie always felt disjointed and that it generally was an underachiever.

With “The V’ger Incident” Bob has proven he can take a stinker of a movie and make it watchable and even enjoyable. With “Perdition’s Flames” Bob took to the next level by taking a great movie, and giving it a new and enjoyable twist that in many ways made it perhaps even more enjoyable to watch than the original. So now, what could Bob do with a movie that had tremendous potential, but was a huge belly flop in the pool of Star Trek movies?

Visual Quality
Similar to both The V'ger Incident and Perdition’s Flames, this edit suffers from less than ideal video quality. There are compressions in certain reds as well as the DVD being inletter-box aspect. This doesn’t bother me greatly as I can simply change the format on my TV and I get the proper ratio with minimal additional quality loss. From a purely evaluational standpoint I have to give it a 7/10 for visual quality and again I hope that Bob will someday return to his Star Trek edits and give them the proper treatment.

Audio Quality
I can pretty much duplicate my last review of Perdition’s Flames here. Bob’s work in the audio department really stand out. Again we have the infusion of TOS sound effects and music which adds so much to the atmosphere of the movie. Bob’s work on Resurrection is probably his best yet as far as layering and blending the old audio and music, Easily a 10/10 for me.

Editing
This is another great job of editing. No flash frames, no plot holes or continuity errors. On a personal preference, there are only two aspects that I didn’t care for from a technical execution on this edit. I’m not sure how I feel about the freeze-frame that was used for several of the commercial fade outs, however this is a stylistic choice on the editor’s part, but for me I prefer a more traditional motion fade, but this is a very minor gripe. *SPOILER* For the sequence of Spock regaining his memories, the freeze frame image montage was also not my first choice. I would enjoy more traditional motion images during the sequence, but again, this is a preference issue, Bob’s execution is not flawed here as it really works quite well. Overall, Bob’s technical editing skills are great and if you had never seen this movie before you’d not be able to tell this was not a theatrical release of the movie. 9/10

Story/Film improvement
BionicBob has turned one of my least favorite Star Trek movies into one of my favorite. By re-ordering the two storylines the movie now has a pacing that is enjoyable and the two storylines actually play off of each other and build to a peak as they finally merge at Genesis planet. While the other two Starfleet captains are still sorely lacking when compared against Kirk, they are drastically improved over their original roles. The removal of the Bones side-story on Earth is a welcome relief as it added nothing to the story. What was once a complete jumbled mess is now a very lean, well-integrated story of friendship, loyalty and sacrifice for a greater good. The themes that were buried are now front and center. 10/10. This is easily now my go-to version of the film, it is not even close!

Extras
The DVD menu is identical to Bob’s previous edits with updates to music and images. It is a default template and not terribly exciting (and repetitive if you're watching more than one of his edits at a time ) but I don't mark down for menus, I'm here to watch an edit after all. Again he provides a nice little "About this movie" bit that is enlightening and fun. Also, the inclusion of the Enterprise Self-Destruction comparison between this film and the one used in the Original Series episode is also fun.

Overall
BionicBob has now run the gamut of fanediting, from improving failed movies, dramatic new interpretations of great movies, and sifting through the wreckage of a movie that should have been good, and presenting it as the movie it should have been all along.

Like Bob’s previous edits, for me the only thing that holds this back from a perfect 10 is the video quality, which drags this down to an 8.5 out of 10 so rounding up I give this a 9/10. This is an incredible improvement over the original film. For my money, I think I enjoy Perdition’s Flame more, but that’s simply because it is such a fantastic story to begin with, but in terms of improving the original, this is BionicBob’s best work to date.

This was my first time revisiting this film since I was a kid, and the first time I realized why so many have called it a bad movie. It's not bad, and especially not in BionicBob's fanedit...but it's sure a big drop from The Wrath of Khan.

I wrote general thoughts about the film here: https://letterboxd.com/nottheacademy/film/star-trek-iii-the-search-for-spock/ but for this entry I'll focus on Bob's edit. In general, I'd say the little trims to the story manage to mostly improve the flow of the narrative and even enhance the emotional impact in several areas. I particularly appreciated his use of flashbacks via old footage to visualize the ending sequence. On the other hand, the flashbacks during that flight of the Enterprise over Genesis veered too much into fan service for me. It's something that I could've accepted in the actual final last Star Trek film, but not here. Most of the scenes cut out weren't really missed, though I felt David's fate was not shown clearly enough and it seemed an ambiguous and dodgy removal that lessened his character.

In terms of the other main focus of this edit, the TV-style presentation, I think Bob continued to improve in that area and it works even better here than in STI or STII. The opening recap especially felt like the old show and fit very well. However, all in all it's a bit of a mixed bag, as some of the music fits this feeling and some clearly does not. Some of the fadeouts and freezes fit and some seem to frustrate the flow of the film. The ending of the film is mercilessly left untouched by "commercial breaks"...which is both gratifying but also departs from the way the rest of the edit is cut. So I'm iffy on this main idea of the fanedit, though it's certainly a valid alternative to the main film.

All in all, this is an improvement on the theatrical version, so I can definitely recommend it. I'll be coming back for STIV.

I'm going to keep this one short. This was an excellent edit of a really bad movie. In fact, I had forgotten entirely how bad this movie was! And it looks really cheap too (not this edit, but the movie itself).
This is the perfect movie for the make-it-seem-like-the-tv-show format, because it feels like a tv movie. The captain of the ship orbiting the Genesis planet especially seemed like a guy who might have failed an audition to be on one of the Trek spinoffs. And Reverend Jim Romulan was laughable as well.
I think Bionic Bob made this terrible movie as good as it could be.

I know a lot of people have issues with the aspect ratio or screen size, but I watch these on VLC media player on the laptop, through a hdmi wire to a big flat screen tv, and set on overscan. It looks perfect to me--like a hi-def letterboxed movie. No complaints about the picture here.

Review by Neglify — August 2, 2012 @ 8:25 am

Bob doesn’t fully resurrect Star Trek 3 but it’s a heck of a lot better. Another enjoyable Bionically Enhanced Trek movie!

Review by Sunarep — October 27, 2010 @ 5:58 PM

It’s been a while since I watched search for spock, so it’s not that fresh in my head.

anywho, this edit like the other two bionicbob edits is a fun quick ride. I always liked Search for Spock but I was never a fan of spock’s “puberty” and with that thing gone in the edit it really becomes more enjoyable, similar to perdition’s flames we spend most time with Kirk and Co and where Perdition’s Flames felt like a Season Finale Episode, this edit is the Season Opener, bringing back the Crew and Spock, it hurt a little thinking how awesome a series like this could have been… well…

Presenting it in the frame of a TV series also has it’s advantages, the death scene of the antagonist looks bad by today’s standards (maybe even back then) but with the TV-theme in mind this looks totally intentional, like the bad video quality of TMBTM’s war of the stars, so the special effects enhance the TV-feeling a lot
Also the fact that in Perdition’s Flames we never saw the scene with McCoy adds to the TV-feeling. If only these edits would exist it would feel as if they killed of Spock at the end of Season 4 to shock us and when the new series rolled they had to come up with something that was never hinted at, why Spock is now back – works really funny (in a good way). Also everything fits, the story (like perdition’s flames) works tremendously well even without many cool scenes from the original

The only thing I didn’t like was the ending montage of spock’s memory, the idea of playing it reverse the second time. The idea per-se is not bad, i just don’t like the fact that they are static images, which makes it look more like a picture compilation than a montage for a movie… but i understand that it’s quite the work to get all those specific scenes together, so i don’t wanna be too harsh

At the end of the movie it says: To be concluded… i hope not, I hope that Bob will also tackle Star Trek V and VI… hell I’d be curious if he could turn Star Trek XI in a TV-Movie like the rest

Where does it stand in Bob’s Trilogy?

I’d rank Bob’s edits like this:

3) V’ger Incident – 7/10
2) Ressurection – 8/10
1) Perdition’s Flames – 8/10

Flames had the best overall balance, the fades to black worked so well. They are still cool in Ressurection but Flames was just perfect timing, also Flames had the best opening, like a classical star trek episode, which got me immediately hooked, but Ressurection is recommendable as well