Movie Review: Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan

    Probably still the most popular Star Trek film, rivaled only by the 2009 re-launch, The Wrath of Khan is a mixed bag for me.  On the one hand, I love Khan and that it is a direct tie-in to the original series.  On the other hand, this was the movie that turned the series Star Trek into an action movie franchise and away from any semblance of cultural or galactic exploration.  Not that the original show was the ‘thoughtful’ science fiction show some fans claim.  But it occasionally made the attempt, and with the exception of the horrid failure that was Star Trek V, the films never made the attempt again.

    The story is very simple.  A Federation ship accidentally stumbles upon Khan, last seen marooned on a planet by Kirk many years before.  He takes over that ship and goes on a rampage, going after a new scientific development, the Genesis Devise.  Of course, The Enterprise is miraculously the only ship anywhere nearby and is tasked with going to stop him.  And, through monstrous coincidence, the Genesis Devise was created by one of Kirk’s former lovers and their child.  A battle ensues.  The end.  That’s really it.  It’s only slightly more complicated than the story of The Motion Picture, which is about as linier as possible.  The effects are good, the production design excellent, and the score is great.  In fact, though James Horner seems to have a fairly limited range, often lifting from his own previous work for new films, I think this may be the single best Star Trek score.  Technically and visually, this is probably the best of the original cast films.  It also expands on the enjoyable bit of character banter between Kirk and McCoy (and Spock to a degree) in the first film, by giving the characters a lot more interaction, getting humor and humanity into the characters.  The show had a lot of it, and it was nice to have it in the film.  In fact, the bits between the main cast would go on to be the best part of the rest of the series, getting the viewer through even the craptastic Star Trek V.

    There are several inconsistencies here.  The obvious one that many have pointed out is that Chekov was not in Space Seed; he wasn’t even on the show during the same season.  OK.  Fine.  Maybe he was there and we didn’t see him?  Whatever.  But what actually does bother me is Khan’s people.  On the original show, he had a crew of very ethnically diverse genetic super-humans.  And they were all about his age.  Now, all his people are Aryan wet dreams, and look to be in their early 20s.  What gives?  It feels like the easy way out, making them too obviously connected to Nazi myth ideology.  And this makes it easy for challenging questions about Khan’s morality and potential to be completely ignored.  Again, focusing on blowing stuff up instead of thinking about it.  Personal difficulties aside, including hindsight evaluation of the films that would follow, it is a rousing adventure movie with plenty of thrills.  The regular cast members put on good performances, though a few of them get shorted on screentime (Uhura and Sulu hardly present at all).  And Ricardo Montalban is a powerhouse.  He’s rocking it hard enough to face off with Mad Max.  The big battle sequences are impressive.  And of course, the ending is a gut-punch and a half.  If only the next film didn’t mostly negate what happens at the end of this one.

    I understand why this is frequently named as the best film in the franchise.  I do.  And some of my frustrations aren’t completely fair.  But it isn’t my favorite.  It is a very good movie, and I think more than many of the others, totally watchable by someone who knows nothing about Star Trek.  Actually, the three best films in the franchise are good movies first, and good Trek films second, which I think is only right.  My enduring, but frequently abused hope is that Wrath of Khan’s enduring legacy might one day wane, that some different story archetypes might be used.  Maybe a little problem solving (that doesn’t involve fists) some of those ‘new worlds and new civilizations’ might show up sometime.

-Matt

Movie Review: Star Trek The Motion Picture

    People say that there’s some kind of ‘curse of the odds’ thing with Star Trek, where only the even numbered movies are good.  I don’t agree with that.  The Motion Picture gets a lot of flack for being boring, I don’t think that’s the case at all.  It isn’t an action movie, which is something a viewer needs to know from the start.  It is much more the attempt at thoughtful science fiction the show tried (and rarely succeeded) to be.  This is much more in the spirit of 2001 than Star Wars, which is probably one of the reasons it isn’t generally well received.

    The story is, like many of those of the original series, quite simple.  Something big and powerful is heading toward Earth.  Kirk and friends get roped into figuring out what it is and how to stop it.  Spock has lost his spiritual way, and comes back to join Kirk and the rest, looking for something, for a purpose.  That’s basically it.  That’s the so called A plot.  The B plot is about a young captain with a chip on his shoulder, and his alien ex-lover.  In the original show, the crew of the Enterprise came across many godlike beings and many supercomputers.  In some ways, this story is a culmination, or perhaps a distillation, of those episodes.  Elements of Nomad, the Doomsday Machine, the Squire of Gothos among others can all be found.  And then there are the elements that would be carried over into the future.  Obviously, there’s Jerry Goldsmith’s theme which would open Next Gen.  But also, the story of Decker and Ilia would be recreated in Next Gen with Riker and Troi.  It plays out differently, but it’s clearly a dry-run.  There are also elements I think laid some groundwork for what would become the Borg.

    There are problems with the film.  I normally like Stephen Collins, but I don’t like him as Decker at all.  The wormhole sequence is silly and pretty much just waists runtime.  The color scheme is odd, being mostly grey and beige.  And yes, some of the sequences go on for a long, long time.  I don’t mind.  Like 2001, there are extended shots of ships in space, landscapes, etc. with swelling music.  It isn’t action packed.  It takes its time.  I understand why many might not like it, but I’ve come to appreciate these moments of grand exploration.  Once again, taking a page from 2001, this movie is in part about the evolution of humankind, about our children, not individual children, but the children of humanity.  At its heart, the movie is about the nature of being, about the meaning of life, and about the desire to know.

    Like The Cage and Where No Man Has Gone Before, this is a start in a direction I think could have been very interesting.  But it was not to be.  With Wrath of Khan shifted gears as dramatically and definitively as The Man Trap.  Fist fights and space battles would be the name of the game.  Like those original pilot episodes, this feels out of step with the rest of what was to come.  A false start.

-Matt