Okay, so... didn't expect to be getting to this so soon, but here we are. And on the year of the fortieth anniversary of it, no less!
I am approaching this review with equal parts eagerness and trepidation. I technically have covered this before, but that was essentially a "review" of me complaining about/comparing this film with Star Trek Into Darkness. It's almost impossible to adequately describe the love I and many other Trek fans have for this movie and, at the risk of gushing like a fanboy, it is a love that is entirely earned.
And it is here, on this glorious April 4th - a mere forty-one years before the day before First Contact with the Vulcans (unless you're somehow reading this then, in which case - HI VULCANS! Thank you for saving us from our own stupidity!) - I bring to you... the myth, the legend, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
So, after The Slow-Motion Picture, Paramount was in a bit of a pickle as to where to take the franchise. The movie had made enough to justify a sequel, but they didn't want to make the same mistakes as they had with the first movie. Enter producer Harve Bennett, only a few weeks into his contract with Paramount. When asked if he could make a movie with a budget of under $45 million dollars (accourding to what I've read, the budget ended up being somewhere around $12 million), he told the executives that he could and the deal was struck then and there. The only problem? Harve Bennett had never seen a single episode of the original Star Trek.
However, in what I call the gold standard for creators, Harve did the unthinkable and actually watched all 79 episodes of the original series. Every single one. It was in watching the episode "Space Seed" that the idea for The Wrath of Khan began, with the episode itself posing the question of what the villain - Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban) - and his band of Genetically Enhanced Human Beings would send up creating on the rough, yet liveable world of Ceti Alpha V. Spock posing the question as to what such a society would look like in a century or more...
... Harve decided to move up the time table just a wee bit.
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| "Stop playing Galaga and fly my damn ship!" |
I'm not going to, but I could. As it stands, I've decided to just speak on the film itself and the absolute masterpiece that it is that it almost wasn't.
Our film begins with one of the most fantastically done bait and switches in cinema history - the Kobayashi Maru test being taken by Starfleet Lieutenant Saavik (Kristie Alley). We don't know this at the beginning, however, as we are shown an effective facsimile of (that is, the actually set for) the bridge of the Enterprise and have all of the main bridge crew besides Kirk in attendance. Picking up a distress call from the Kobayashi Maru, Saavik makes the command decision to violate the Neutral Zone and gets the Enterprise destroyed by a trio of Klingon ships for her trouble.
Needless to say, she fails the test... or does she?
It seems that Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner) is teaching at Starfleet Academy and is feeling the weight of his age. He thinks that the best years of his life have passed him by, much to the dismay of his former bridge crew. Kirk oversees a training cruise being undertaken by the Enterprise under the command of Captain Spock (Leonard Nimoy). All seems above board. Unfortunately for Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise, both new and old, an old enemy has indeed risen. Khan has escaped from Ceti Alpha V - which was turned from a rough, wild planet into a barren wasteland when Ceti Alpha VI exploded.
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| Effects done by Industrial Light and Magic |
Having taken possession of the Federation ship Reliant, Khan plans to take control of the project known as Genesis, an attempt to terraform planets spearheaded by Kirk's old flame Carol Marcus (Bibi Besch) and their son David (Merritt Butrick). When they do go head to head, it will be for the first time in fifteen years... and for Khan, revenge is a dish that is best served cold.
And it is very cold... in space...
Trying to critique this film is almost nigh-impossible for me. To quote Ian of Passion of the Nerd on YouTube (check out his Buffy and Angel guides if you haven't already), it's "like being tasked with critiquing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or like... the perfect grilled cheese sandwich." The Wrath of Khan does indeed fit very well into that metaphor, as it is nothing if not the perfect grilled cheese sandwich. Calling it perfection would be selling it short. The acting, the writing, the direction, the pacing, the music (thank you, James Horner! Rest in peace!), everything coalesces into this astounding, beautiful, and unique thing that is often imitated but has never been replicated.
I'm just gonna say it. This is Star Trek's answer to The Empire Strikes Back. It is nothing short of a masterpiece of fiction.
Deserving of the highest praise is Ricardo Montalban, who has lost none of his menace as Khan since "Space Seed" and delves into wells even deeper than that. He is a bitter, angry man who has lost everything twice and has a sole target of his rage - James T. Kirk. He is a man so hellbent on revenge that he is willing to destroy everything, and I mean everything, to bring Kirk down. The best part is, unlike some other cases where the villain clearly has no chance, several times in the film Khan has Kirk and the Enterprise crew on the ropes. This film is, arguably, the highest the stakes have ever been for the Enterprise crew up to this point.
Not only is Khan back, not only has he taken control of a Federation vessel, but he has taken into his hands a weapon that can wipe entire worlds clean with destructive force the likes of which have never been seen. Heavy stuff. Definitely helped by the tense and dramatic space battles between the Enterprise and the Reliant, which never undersell the drama or let those stakes get anywhere near lower. I wish I could go back and watch this movie again for the first time, not knowing I'll be spending most of my time on the edge of my seat.
If it were just a simple revenge story, that might be enough, but you also have Kirk's issues with aging and the themes of growing older and thinking his best days are behind him. In the beginning, he even tells his crew that "gallivanting around the galaxy is a game for the young", showing that he's basically hung up his hat... and yet, he feels ill at ease with life outside the captain's chair. He is encouraged by both Bones (DeForest Kelley) and Spock to get his command back, Spock himself saying that being a Starfleet captain is his "first, best destiny" and that "anything else is a waste of material".
By the end, Kirk finds a new inspiration to live through the death of Spock (spoiler alert) and the re-discovery of his son, David. He has faced life and, thanks to the sacrifice of Spock, he has faced death. At the end, in spite of Khan's attempts to kill him, Kirk has found his zeal for life once again.
. . .I mean, ignore that Kirk's own brother got killed by space puke.
. . .no, seriously, that's a real thing that really happened.
...huh? Oh, yeah, Spock dies. It was the only way that Leonard Nimoy was enticed to come back to the franchise once again, getting a heroic death for Spock. He thought for certain that it was going to be the last Star Trek film... which is funny in retrospect just from this film alone.
The Wrath of Khan made almost $96 million on a budget of around $12 million as I said before. To say it was a massive success is, like many things about this film, underselling it. It reignited interest in the Star Trek franchise like never before and would lead to four more films for the Original Series crew. Unfortunately, while three of those films are pretty okay and only one is truly, deeply awful... it's all downhill from here.
Other Trek films would try to revisit the well that The Wrath of Khan was drawn from but, as we will see, had no chance of being able to replicate this. It was a masterpiece forty years ago and it's a masterpiece now. It's thematically appropriate that Wrath of Khan was the one that Leonard Nimoy thought was going to be the last one, given how heavily it leans into the themes of death and aging and given how Spock ended his life by sacrificing himself for the Enterprise crew to escape the Genesis Wave.
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| "No, audience in 1982, the story isn't quite over yet. Promise!" |
Appropriate, too, how the film was the one that breathed new life into the franchise, bringing us to the next film - Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. See you then!
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is brought to us by Paramount Pictures.
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