Admiral Kirk and his bridge crew risk their careers stealing the decommissioned Enterprise to return to the restricted Genesis planet to recover Spock's body.
This is a good but not great Star Trek movie, a sort of compromise between the first two.
– Roger Ebert,
Chicago Sun-Times,
23 Oct 2004
fresh:
Decent SFX, but a little more action wouldn't have gone amiss.
– Derek Adams,
Time Out,
9 Feb 2006
rotten:
This 1984 film's few and unimpressive special effects evidently qualify it as science fiction, but the genre it really belongs to is the male weepie: there hasn't been a gooier buddy romance on the screen since Joe Buck took Ratso Rizzo to Miami.
– Dave Kehr,
Chicago Reader,
4 Jun 2007
fresh:
An emotionally satisfying science fiction adventure.
– Variety Staff,
Variety,
26 Mar 2009
fresh:
These are classic directorial occasions, and Nimoy rises to them with fervor, in effect beaming his film up onto a higher pictorial plane than either of its predecessors.