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There Can Be Only One

Which actress had the better portrayal of Saavik?

  • Kirstie Alley (TWOK)

    Votes: 35 87.5%
  • Robin Curtis (TSFS, TVH)

    Votes: 5 12.5%

  • Total voters
    40

c0rnedfr0g

Commodore
Commodore
Whose portrayal of Saavik did you prefer? Please only vote based on on-screen performance, not your opinion of the actress or her real-life behavior, etc.
 
for me, robin's line delivery was spot-on, esp the dramatic lines. they were so Vulcan/logical, but barely had some emotion squeak through

"Admiral, David is dead."

"He gave his life to save us."

"David died most bravely. He saved Spock. He saved us all. I thought you should know."

"How many have paid the price for your impatience? How many have died? How much damage have you done? And what is yet to come?"

from what i've heard, the emotional curtis had to be held back from additional emotion/dialogue, but the end result was superb imo.
 
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I prefer neither, but they are so different that I can't really reconcile them as being the same character. As I said yesterday in another thread, they should've renamed the character for STIII. Kirstie Alley's Saavik was a trainee in command school, so why is she all of a sudden a science officer on the Grissom less than two months later in STIII?
 
If you could graft Saavik-Alley's acting onto Saavik-Curtis' look, you'd have the perfect Saavik, IMO.
 
Curtis had far superior Vulcan makeup and eyebrows, but Alley is a superior actress with more skill and range.
 
On the bright side, at least Curtis' Saavik didn't eat an entire deckful of pudding and ribs.:shifty:
 
I liked Kirstie's Saavik simply because she let the character display emotion. Letting us know she's half-Romulan.
 
But was that even canon anymore? That stuff wasn't even put back into the Director's/Special Edition DVD from a few years back. Isn't Saavik officially just a full Vulcan so far as formal canon is concerned? After all, even T'Pol on ENT had more subdued, human-like eyebrows and features and also showed occasional emotion during that show's first two seasons and she was never considered a hybrid of any sort.
 
Curtis had it all except the acting chops and range. She even came back to the TREK universe in later years on TNG("Gambit"), whereas Alley got sidetracked by other projects like her role on CHEERS and distanced herself from TREK as the years passed.
 
Oh, Kirsty Allie any day. Not only did she nail the character just right, but she was hot to boot. Robin Curtis just left me cold. :vulcan:
 
I've only seen Curtis in four things: Search for Spock, Voyage Home, TNG: "Gambit," and a first season Knight Rider episode called "Short Notice."

Now in the first three, she's playing a Vulcan, so I could give her wooden performance a bit of a pass. But she was just as wooden in the Knight Rider episode, and she's supposed to be playing a human, so it turns out she's just a bad actress after all.
 
Whose portrayal of Saavik did you prefer? Please only vote based on on-screen performance, not your opinion of the actress or her real-life behavior, etc.

Kirstie Alley. I always thought it was a shame they could not bring her back for any of the sequels.
 
Had she agreed to do TSFS and had her makeup been a lot more Vulcan-like in the second go-round she'd be an even more beloved secondary film character than she ended up being.
 
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