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.
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.
– Richard Schickel,
TIME Magazine,
3 May 2009
fresh:
An emotionally satisfying science fiction adventure.
– Variety Staff,
Variety,
26 Mar 2009
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:
Decent SFX, but a little more action wouldn't have gone amiss.
– Derek Adams,
Time Out,
9 Feb 2006
fresh:
This is a good but not great Star Trek movie, a sort of compromise between the first two.