Movie Notes: Star Trek 2: The Wrath Of Khan

May 7th, 2009

= 5 stars

Starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Ricardo Montalban
Directed by Nicholas Meyer

Synopsis

Feeling past his prime, Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner) is pulled into an encounter with an old nemesis, Khan (Ricardo Montalban) who spent the last 15 years stranded on Ceti Alpha VI.

The Good

• The resurrection of a baddie from the original television show — the super-intelligent, revenge-fueled Khan — ups the tension and pacing all around, especially compared to the glacial, cerebral exercise that was the preceding “motionless picture.” Montalban plays Khan with a devious hate brimming just beneath the surface — his line delivery alone sells half the film.
• Solid design and special effects, from the more ornate military outfits, starship design (the Reliant looks like an upside-down Enterprise), the all-too cool hand phaser fire and photon torpedoes, and the final showdown in a swamp-like nebula.
• Recalls the original series in may spots — a bunch of loonies taking control of a starship, Scotty frantically trying to hold everything together, armchair philosophy (the Genesis device both creates and destroys an entire planet of life), quick thinking on Kirk’s part to get out of sticky situations (the prefix code), and Kirk’s love life.
• Many solid, exciting sequences — the tense back and forth between Enterprise and Reliant recalling old seafaring warships, the scary brain-numbing worms crawling into Chekov’s ear, and the initial discovery of dead bodies aboard the research station.
• The start of the quotable Trek movies: Khan quoting King Lear and Moby Dick, Spock’s final, wrenching lines, and Shatner’s now iconic: “Khaaaaaaaaaaan!”
• Shatner turns in a decent performance, not a caricature, and his final moments with Spock and at a funeral show are tops. The ending is a real tear jerker, personally on par with the shock of The Empire Strikes Back.
• Awesome score by James Horner, very thematic.

The Bad

• A few nit picks, well known by all: the Neutral Zone was originally Romulan (although I suppose the Klingons have one, too), Chekov wasn’t aboard the Enterprise in the original series (particularly wrong when Khan says “I never forget a face,”) Saavik crying (I guess she’s half-Romulan, but this isn’t evident in the film), and I wish Kirk’s old flame Carol was an actual love from the original series (so many to choose from, but early drafts suggested Dr. Janice Wallace from the episode The Deadly Years).

Conclusion

Star Trek 2 is easily the best of the Star Trek movies because it gets to the heart of Trek — the characters, and the core friendship between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, with an exciting adventure of space battles. There’s also Spock’s heartbreaking logic of self-sacrifice in order to ensure the survival of others. It feels wrong to our human sensibilities. The heartbreak is that Spock made the right choice in order to save his friends, but we wish he hadn’t.

IMDB: Star Trek 2: The Wrath Of Khan
Wikipedia: Star Trek 2: The Wrath Of Khan
Rotten Tomatoes: Star Trek 2: The Wrath Of Khan