STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982) "Khaaan!" Everybody with me now: "KHAAAAAAAAN!!!!" Sitting through the dreadful Star Trek: Nemesis dropped me into my deepest funk in about two years, and believe me, I know my deep funks. I've been in funks so deep I needed a pack mule to carry my stuff on the way back. This wasn't THAT bad, but it felt pretty crappy to take note of what had become of one of the major sci-fi cornerstones I grew up with. I couldn't even remember the last time I saw a Star Trek offering (movie or TV series) that wasn't total boring vanilla blandness. I attribute this also to getting into Farscape during this time and seeing how it does right, so many of the things Trek's been doing wrong for so long. Enterprise has pretty much been crap, despite a promising setup and its occasional flashes of much-welcome earthiness. Voyager I liked at first, then didn't, then kinda did, and now when I watch it almost every shot, every line is like an anti-treasure trove of things about Trek that have come to either bore or annoy me. Deep Space Nine? Episodes about Ferengi, Julian "boringest Trek guy ever" Bashir, more episodes about Ferengi and everybody's feelings, romances assigned to random characters with no chemistry with each other (Odo and Kira, are you fucking kidding me)? All this has even made me shy away from re-watching Next Generation episodes - not that I haven't seen all of them two or three times by now, but on those occasions when I do revisit them, I find all those things there too...if not to the same extent, and for sure then, they hadn't yet been beaten into the ground and below. Has the format just been exhausted? I think so, sometimes. It certainly needs a massive creative overhaul if it's going to recapture my interest. But at the risk of sounding like a good-ol'-days crank, there was a time when Star Trek ruled, before every character had to be a role model ALL the time, before the gags got so mild-mannered and polite they couldn't raise more than a smile even when they worked, before everybody made every decision based on what precedents they might be setting, before dialogue and personality and plot were replaced by meaningless technobabble, before the vast, theoretically very "rich" Star Trek universe wrote itself into a corner. The year was 1982, and Spock died a horrible and gruesome death. Star Trek: The Motion Picture miraculously made money, but nobody was satisfied enough to assume the same kind of guaranteed fan response for a sequel. Non-fans hated it, and who can blame them? If you weren't already into Trek, it was seventy-six hours of agonizing tedium, compressed into just over two hours. Even if you were already into Trek, you expected more and sure as hell deserved it after standing in line in the rain for two days. A sequel was made with two things in mind: to tighten it up budget-wise, and to make a movie that would appeal to more than the dwindling lot of die-hards who'd fork out for anything with the Trek name on it. The numbers speak for themselves as to the success on both fronts, and as a bonus, this is (probably by a pretty wide margin) considered the best Trek movie even by the fans. I would not deign to disagree; when it comes to big-screen Trek, it doesn't get better than this. The plot is a continuation of the old episode "Space Seed", though you don't have to see that episode in order to enjoy the movie. In fact, if you do, you might wonder why Khan's henchmen haven't aged in fifteen years. The movie doesn't start with Khan though, it starts with the cast anyone's familiar with. Star Trek II opens with the famous "Kobayashi Maru" sequence, in which up-and-coming Vulcan officer Saavik (Kirstie Alley, cast seemingly for a marginal sex appeal that Trek has, until recent years, historically shied away from) is conducting a command exercise where she finds her mission faced with certain doom. We later learn that this is entirely the point, that the test is a measure of character, though one wonders then what purpose there is to Kirk having taken it several times. But (virtual) doom indeed comes to her bridge, "killing" most of the familiar Trek cast in the process, including Mr. Spock, cleverly assuaging widespread rumor at the time that they were actually gonna kill Spock! These fake deaths are very clean and bloodless (pure Trek), and I like the contrast later on to the gruesome violence and messy deaths of a few characters. So we see it's just a test, and soon enough, see what's become of the cast. It's been a number of years since the first movie. Kirk is still an Admiral, but a dissatisfied one who's starting to wish he never got promoted. Even when I was a kid, he reminded me of my dad, promoted to an executive and finding he was happier as an engineer. Spock is the new Captain of the Enterprise which, while a venerable and respected vessel, is far enough behind in the times that it's been relegated to training missions for recruits. I frankly don't remember what McCoy's status was at this point; I remember him being retired in the first movie, but coaxed/drafted back into service by Kirk. Scotty is still chief engineer, and Sulu and Uhura are, I suppose, lucky to be there when cool stuff happens. Yeoman Rand and Nurse Chapel don't count, so only Chekhov is absent. He's serving on the Reliant, investigating an odd blip of what might be life on a supposedly lifeless planet. This planet is scheduled to be turned into an instant ecosystem with the experimental Genesis device, and even a microbe would ruin everything. So he and his captain (Paul Winfield) beam down and find a hell of a lot more than a microbe - they find Khan (Ricardo Montalbahn) and his tribe of sweaty, grungy, mutant supermen! (this is why Jean-Luc never beamed down unless he absolutely had to) Khan recognizes Chekhov immediately. You might note that Chekhov wasn't even on the show yet when "Space Seed" was made, but only the most hard-hearted churl - check that, only the biggest fucking Comic-Store-Guy fanboy dork would hold that against this movie. Khan explains his (quite understandable) side of the story of how he came to be abandoned and forgotten by Kirk on a planet that, while fertile at the time, had about six months before it turned into Tattooine. He then uses disturbing methods to secure information and obedience from his two captives, and sets in motion his plan to finally bring his long-sought vengeance against the hated James T. Kirk. Man, I love that little sand creature - in looks and in actions, it packs a visceral punch that no Trek episode or movie has ever come close to. Aside from the duel between arch-nemeses, the major theme of Star Trek II is that of Kirk's hard time dealing with his own mortality, and growing old. This starts with an early scene in Kirk's San Francisco home (lots of armor and antique guns). Kirk really isn't growing old gracefully. This is about the point when, finally during this viewing (probably my fifteenth, at least), I noticed the hairpiece that everybody's been poking fun at for decades. McCoy gives him a pair of reading glasses - note Kirk's very quiet "Damn!" when he actually has to use them later on. William Shatner is, er, reputed to be a little on the vain side, and that only makes me love this movie more. Where else did we ever get to see Kirk so fallible? Aside from his ungraceful aging, we also see how his captaining skills have atrophied in his first, careless encounter with Khan, and how his having cheated on the Kobayashi Maru test was a bratty copout from a snotty kid, not the clever out-of-the-box solution he'd long believed. Kirk here is a man who's finding out the hard way that the battle against time is inevitably a losing one. Kirk must also contend with some other figures from far enough back in his past that serve as further reminders to how old he's getting - notably, the scientist in charge of the Genesis project (Bibi Besch), and the son she had with him many years ago. Do the math - this kid would've been born before even the first season of the TV series. To this movie's credit, there isn't a full-on re-romance between Kirk and his old flame, but more of a reconciliation of two estranged people who care about each other but who know it just wouldn't work. Uhura and Sulu don't get any special moments of their own, Chekhov expands his torture-victim resume even further, and Scotty has a good scene involving the violent death of his nephew that's effective, if a little strange (why'd he bring the kid up to the bridge? Did he try to press the "sick bay" button in the turbolift, but miss?). These movies have long been about the three principals, which sometimes makes me wish there was more attention paid to the smaller players, but Kirk and Spock (maybe not so much McCoy) have enough to do here that I don't mind. I didn't like Merrit Butrick as Kirk's whiny, self-righteous son, but I did like Besch as the scientist. It's easy to see why a guy like Kirk, who obviously had his pick of half the female population of a thousand worlds, might've taken an interest in her. Exactly why the two of them decided that Kirk would have nothing to do with the kid's upbringing is a little unlikely - that she wouldn't want him to take after his father seems to me like a grave insult that Kirk wouldn't take sitting down. It was probably hard enough at the time for fans to buy that this captain, who they'd followed for one movie and three seasons of TV, was a father the whole time and they were never told (this would crop up again in Star Trek V, with the introduction of Spock's brother). Nicholas Meyer's direction is all about economy - while things look overhauled from the first movie at first sight (new, much-improved Starfleet uniforms for everybody), in fact there's a lot of recycling going on. Many effects shots are re-used from the first movie, some out of context (the V-Ger cloud becomes the Mutara Nebula), some pretty much identical (the Enterprise in dry dock). Which doesn't mean that the movie looks cheap by any means; the ship-to-ship battles between Khan and Kirk were spectacular in 1982 and, while fairly minimalistic by today's standards (the second half of this movie is kind of like a submarine movie in space...lots of sneaking around), have aged impressively well. The only effects I didn't like are the new transporter effect (I like the effect in ST:TMP better) and a less-than-convincing fake heads used for when the Ceti eels slither into people's ears. The story and script by no fewer than four people - usually a pretty bad sign - has a few head-scratchers (Ceti Alpha 6 exploded, and nobody noticed?) but it moves, and the natures of the four principals (Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Khan) are captured perfectly, except for Spock's home decorating. There are cool, almost Manowar-ish pledges of loyalty, friendship, and vengeance. One of the most quintessentially Trek scenes is after Kirk, Spock and McCoy first learn of the Genesis project and what it's supposed to do. Spock finds it interesting, and McCoy is horrified, going off on a rant about playing God. Spock tells McCoy that his emotions will be his undoing, which sounds like foreshadowing but it never worked out that way (McCoy was last seen as, I think, a retired 130-year-old admiral). I think it's an accurate testament to opinions based on strong emotion that McCoy seems to change his mind entirely when he sees the "stage two" version of Genesis for himself. Khan is a bit like McCoy taken to the next level - his emotions really are his undoing. It's easy to pick on Ricardo Montalban as a cheesy actor - hey, just like Shatner! - but I can't think of anyone who would've done as good a job with Khan. His face is always expressive of one thing, that he's always thinking, contemplating, coming to conclusions. Khan isn't specifically evil, but driven as powerfully by his philosophy as we would soon find Spock is by his - but his philosophy demands vengeance for misdeeds, and in the heat of battle, he overlooks that the enactment of vengeance can come at a much greater price than it's worth. Khan and his supermen don't survive to the end of this movie, but a version of them, in the form of the "Nietzscheans", remain today as possibly the only really interesting aspect of the TV show Andromeda (aside from the cute female cast), created out of (to my understanding) notes and proposals left by Gene Roddenberry from before his death. There's a spooky look around an abandoned space station with a grisly payoff - obviously shades of then-recent hit Alien, which suggests to me an early example of Trek trying a little too hard to fit in with what's popular at the time, but it works, especially when seen today and compared to the 23 seasons of TV Trek since. More grue would show up later in the battles between the Enterprise and the Reliant; horrible cuts and burns, making this a hard PG rating for the time (PG-13 hadn't been invented yet) and a pretty nasty adventure by any Trek standard. People are always breaking their arms, getting "phaser burns", injuring themselves, and they never seem injured. It's never a big deal. They go to the doctor and get completely healed in seconds - and more grievous injuries (torture, simulated lifetimes spent in an alien prison or as an old man in another world), are almost always completely forgotten by the next episode, having no apparent lasting effect on the characters except for Jean-Luc playing a flute once in a while. Space has never seemed so safe. Well, space ain't so safe in this movie. Of course, the major thing people were talking about after seeing this movie was Spock's death. I don't think you can overstate how beloved this character was among fans. In fact, just a few years ago, I remember reading of some study where, worldwide, the face of Spock (TV-era) was the most universally recognized face in the world, ahead of Jesus! It wasn't just that he died, or that he died heroically, which was to be expected. There's more to it than that. I like how the pacing and cutting of this scene has us bear witness to his sacrifice, but put it in the back of our minds while we focus on more immediate concerns for the rest of the crew, an expectant shot of Spock's empty chair jarring us suddenly back to what he'd done. I liked that his death was not a clean and sudden one like Data's - this guy didn't just die, but if his melted face was any indication, he suffered terribly. His last words with Kirk, separated by glass, are a clear and unmistakeable demonstration of his life's philosophy, and why he was able to follow it through even to this ultimate end. While Spock's was not the only death on the Enterprise, his is the only funeral we watch - even about fifteen years later, my eyes welled up a little when a train I was on slowly passed a group of bagpipers playing "Amazing Grace". That song, unfortunately, gets the full-on cheese orchestral treatment in the film's denoument which unsubtly sets up these borderline religious possibilities which would be exploited in the next sequel. I didn't like that movie nearly as much as this one, due in no small part to that, and the way it cheapens Spock's sacrifice by bringing him back to life. But that's a whole other review. BEST TREK EVER. This is everything Trek did right, and as few of the things it's done wrong as I can find in a single Trek adventure. If Enterprise bores the shit out of you but you really wanted to like it, here's the cure for what ails ye. BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE