Forty years after its release, this Star Trek film endures as a sci-fi spectacular that also transcends its genre through surprising depth and maturity.
Forty years after its release, this Star Trek film endures as a sci-fi spectacular that also transcends its genre through surprising depth and maturity.
Y ou don’t have to be a “Trekkie” — a cultish devotee of Star Trek — to appreciate Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, released 40 years ago this month. (I certainly am not.) Thanks to excellent direction by Nicholas Meyer, a solid script, and serious dramatic weight and thematic content, it rises above standard sci-fi fare. But you’d have to be a fool to deny the truth: The sci-fi fare it rises above includes, well . . . every Star Wars movie ever made, for instance.
A lot had to go right for this to be the case. Star Trek: The Motion Picture, released three years earlier, was a commercial success but a real bore, nearly extinguishing the cult of Trek, perpetuated by its obsessive fans for a decade after the cancellation of the original series. To keep Star Trek alive, Paramount realized the series needed new blood. Primary creative responsibilities were removed from series creator Gene Roddenberry and handed over to Trek outsider Nicholas Meyer, who sought both to return the series to its space-naval roots and to reckon with the passage of time. Famously egotistical William Shatner had to give up his hopes to play a perpetually ageless version of Captain James T. Kirk to fit with Meyer’s vision. Leonard Nimoy (Spock) and George Takei (Sulu) had to be persuaded out of their reluctance to join the picture, the former of whom had a dramatic condition for doing so. And one Ricardo Montalbán required a break from Fantasy Island to return as the picture’s villain.
That villain is Khan Noonien Singh. Though it is more than possible to enjoy The Wrath of Khan without having seen the original Star Trek episode to which it serves as a sequel (producer Harve Bennett’s idea), as this background is explained in the film, watching “Space Seed” does add to one’s enjoyment. There one sees in youthful prime the intelligent, seductive, and driven machinations of a genetic superman dictator from Earth’s past, exiled in space cryosleep but encountered and awoken by the Enterprise crew. He proves quite the challenge for Kirk and co. Though they defeat him, Kirk’s sentence for him amounts more to a challenge than a punishment: to exile him and his remaining followers on a harsh but habitable planet, letting him do with it what he will. Fifteen years later, however, a chance encounter from another Starfleet vessel on what was believed to be a different planet reveals a great catastrophe: a nearby world had exploded, rendering Khan’s domain barely tolerable, and killing many of his followers, including Marla McGivers, a member of the Enterprise crew he had seduced many years before. He blames Kirk for this, and, in classic villain fashion, sees himself as the protagonist of his own quest for vengeance.
The Kirk forced to confront this threat is a man reckoning with his own life and mortality. No longer boldly going anywhere, now-Admiral Kirk is restless, and aging; he feels “old and worn out.” Reinforcing this is a birthday gift he receives from his friend and Enterprise chief medical officer Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley): a pair of reading glasses. As part of his duties, Kirk boards the Enterprise, now captained by Spock, on what he expected to be just a “training cruise” with several new officers mixed in among the familiar crew, also of course including communications officer Nyota Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) and engineer Montgomery Scott (James Doohan). But answering a distress call that turns out to be a trap launched by Khan, who has seized his own Starfleet vessel, requires Kirk to face his old foe once more.
What results is a thrilling sci-fi actioner, but also much more than that. To be sure, many of the bells and whistles are present: We get our fair share of space battles and other spectacle. But as this was an era before CGI robbed everything of even a token need to appear rooted in reality, much of the effects are achieved via practical means, such as models and matte paintings. It’s a bit dated here and there, but the actual appearance of things more than makes up for it.
And for an action film, it conspicuously lacks one thing: a physical confrontation between hero and villain. “Space Seed” included a laughingly bad fight between Kirk and Khan that used obvious stunt doubles, wide-angle shots, and dubious choreography. Here, in an oddly relatable touch, given the modern omnipresence of remote communication, Kirk and Khan only ever interact through viewscreens and communicators, in scenes that weren’t even filmed at the same time. Perhaps this (as well as the multiple takes Meyer employed to wear down Shatner’s hamminess) made it easier for Meyer to restrain the scenery-chewing tendencies of the film’s two main actors. They are, instead, at their best here, brought to the very edge of performative excess without falling over into outright camp. So when Khan intones, “Do you know the old Klingon proverb that says, ‘Revenge is a dish that is best served cold.’ It is very cold . . . in space,” or when Kirk shouts, “KHAAAN!,” it doesn’t take you out of the proceedings, but only drags you in further.
And they are helped in this regard by a story with unexpected dramatic weight and thematic depth. The vicissitudes of Kirk’s struggle force him to confront unexpected aspects of his past: not just Khan, but also a lover he had long discarded and a son he never knew he had. To defeat Khan, Kirk simultaneously must learn to accept maturity, not just the weakness but also the wisdom it brings — an emotional journey that, upon its completion, he ironically says has made him feel “young.”
Khan, too, has a journey, but one that follows a classically hubristic arc. The man who initially left Kirk’s company invoking Satan in Paradise Lost is now guided by Ahab in Moby-Dick to pursue his vengeance “’round perdition’s flames.” He does so even when he has successfully escaped exile. “You have proved your superior intellect, and defeated the plans of Admiral Kirk,” says one of Khan’s loyal henchman. “You do not need to defeat him again.” But he ignores this counsel, and it proves his undoing. Other meditations on aging, death, sacrifice, friendship, regret, and more arise naturally from what unfolds on screen.
These transcendent themes help explain why The Wrath of Khan endures. And it also perhaps explains why the movie’s DNA remains present in our pop-culture landscape. Sometimes literally so, as in J. J. Abrams’s reboot-sequel Star Trek Into Darkness, which borrowed much of its plot and attempted to pilfer much of its dramatic heft from The Wrath of Khan (without much success). In other instances, the debt other films owe it is subtler but still recognizable. Skyfall also builds a plot around a protagonist thought past his prime who must confront a threat out of his past and defeats him by inducing a level playing field — yet also with great sacrifice. And it’s not hard to figure out where the misbegotten Snyder faux-fantasia Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice got the idea to accompany a heroic funeral with “Amazing Grace” on bagpipes. The Wrath of Khan also became the benchmark by which subsequent Star Trek media have been judged.
So, can’t we just leave it at that? Why make a proclamation so inflammatory as its being better than any Star Wars movie? It’s not because I’m a Trekkie. I’m not whatever you call a Star Wars fan, either; my true passion lies elsewhere in the universe of science-fiction. But it seems to me obvious that, in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek gave us something no Star Wars film has: a story of serious dramatic and thematic intent that is also enjoyable and traces characters over serious journeys, that doesn’t simply depend on a familial twist or on hokey Force nonsense or on endless nostalgic recurrence. The Wrath of Khan reveals that Star Wars is, at the end of the day, really just for children. Even if Star Trek, a lot of the time, is as well, we should expect better of our sci-fi when we can. The genre, at its best, uses the unfamiliar to further our understanding of the human condition. So score one for the Trekkies here. And let Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan live long and prosper.
