I don’t think it’s a question of stakes. (I quite enjoy humbler stakes than “Oh no! The whole galaxy is in peril againI”) It’s more the manner of the medium. An episodic TV story is to a daily comic what a movie is to the Sunday strips, and long-form serialized TV (in the Game of Thrones sense, not the Flash Gordon sense) is in turn like the long, meandering stories that daily strips would tell.
It’s partly a matter of length, but I think the form of storytelling has some quintessential you-know-it-when-you-see-it essence. The Halloween episode of Community where they do a zombie movie feels far more like a self-contained movie than yet another episode, whereas Wrath of Khan somehow feels more like any old episode of Star Trek that just lucked out on production budget. (Consider Knives Out and any old Sherlock Holmes tale. One whodunnit tells a movie story, and the other tells a TV episode story.)
There are Star Trek movies that fit into both the movie category and the “yet another episode” category. (And then of course there are Star Trek movies that are actually Star Wars movies if you consider the two Abrams flicks.) Maybe it’s not something I should hold against it. I’ve reminded myself that daily strips are not “low art” to the Sundays’ “high art” while writing this, but I do think it broke with my expectations of what I was going to watch. I think I’ll revisit Wrath of Khan with the proper perspective sometime.
I’m trying to think of any TV shows that made the jump to the big screen before Star Trek.
Although the story revisits a villain from the series, that’s not what the movie is really about. It’s about coming to grips with the realities of growing old. It’s about him finally learning how to handle death. To me this feels like a pretty big step up from TOS.
I do think there are Trek movies that feel more like extended episode, but certainly not Wrath of Khan.
I finished watching the movie yesterday. A few random notes, let’s start with the only negative one:
I really didn’t like the nebula battle, even this time around. It’s just so poorly implemented. It’s not like Freespace 2, where your actual visibility is low as you make your way through dense gases. Instead, it’s just that the external cameras are displaying static. The exterior shots show that the ships can see each other just fine, if only those external cameras were working properly. And Khan falling prey to “2 dimensional thinking” just makes me roll my eyes. This is not a tense tactical battle like in submarine movies and Master and Commander. Instead, it’s just a silly sequence that’s poorly implemented.
My favorite sequence in the movie starts in the genesis caves as Mr Saavik asks Kirk how he passed the Kobyashi Maru. “He cheated”, exclaims his son, as Kirk explains he cheated, because he doesn’t believe in a no-win scenario. He gets out his communicator and asks Spock if he’s ready. Mr. Saavik opens his eyes wide as he realizes the earlier communications have been a ruse. The music kicks in just right sending tingles down my spine, as if to jump-start the action. Kirk takes a cheeky bite out of an apple, the crew is beamed up, the external camera shows the Reliant and Enterprise on opposite sides of the planet and there’s a camera panning shot that shows the Enterprise crew raising grills as they as they get ready for battle. Chills I tells ya! Chills! So good! I fucking loved this sequence. I had to rewind and watch it again.
This was the fourth Star Trek movie I watched, after VI, V, and The Motion Picture, but I was still super shocked when Spock died. Now, rewatching it years later after having seen Star Trek III, I have to admit, the seeds they lay for his return are super freakin’ obvious to me, but I missed them at the time. I just couldn’t believe they killed Spock. I mean, yes, I’d seen V and VI, and he was alive in those, so I knew somehow they would bring him back, but that just made it doubly shocking that he died in this one. I had totally missed the gesture of him mind-melding with the knocked out McCoy in this one the first time around too. But it’s all there.
The theme of Kirk growing old, the glasses, the broken glasses at the end, the idea of rebirth through Genesis that he mentions at Spock’s funeral as he launches his body into the Genesis planet, and the final scene where he mentions how he feels young again, it’s all very well done, and something I didn’t appreciate in my previous viewing.
Shouldn’t the genesis planet be inside the nebula? Isn’t that where the genesis device went off inside the Reliant? So this planet was born out of the hull of the Reliant, right? And perhaps absorbing material from the nebula all around it? For some reason in my mind I thought the genesis device had been shot onto a dead planet, transforming it, like the computer simulation they showed near the start of the movie. But no, it was born out of the Reliant, and the nebula.
Khan has a much smaller role in this movie than I remembered. The nebula fight is much shorter than I remember, and Khan doesn’t come off as any kind of mastermind, but just someone easily manipulated by Kirk.
Is Mr Saavik the first transgender character in Star Trek? He’s played by female actresses, and yet clearly prefers the male honorific. I will, of course, respect his selected pronoun.
This has always bugged me. The Genesis Device appears to have created an entire star system out of the surrounding nebular material, which is fine, in that that’s how solar systems are naturally formed on a much longer time scale. However, there’s no indication earlier in the movie that Genesis can do anything of the sort - it’s always portrayed as a terraforming device that requires a dead rock to start with.
I forget where I read it (was there a novelization of the movie?), but somewhere it was explained that the Genesis Device took the gasses and matter in the nebula and used them to create the planet… and maybe the sun too.
I know this is a joke, but that WAS actually the naval parlance at the time. Female officers were referred to as “Mr.” when they were being given orders, though they were supposed to be addressed as “Ma’am” by subordinates when giving orders themselves. I don’t know if that has changed since or not.
Which makes physical sense, in that nebulae form stars and planets, except that if they could do this why were they looking for a dead rock to test Genesis on in the first place? Why not just go find a nebula and create a whole new star system?
In the original script, Saavik was supposed to be half-Vulcan and half-Romulan, hence her propensity for emotions. That was not mentioned in the movie, though I think it might still be “canon”.
In an early script she was supposed to become romantically involved with Kirk’s son, David. That was (wisely I think) excised to keep the film a little tighter.
The only reason I can come up with is that the nebula thing was going to be “phase 4”.
Which is an idea that you can sell, in that it would explain why the Genesis planet is such a mess in 3. Which is how I’ve always taken it, though I don’t think anything of the kind is ever stated or even implied.
I was way behind until this weekend. I have now binged 2-5 all in two days, so I am responding to the movie without having read the rest of this thread. Hopefully that won’t offend anyone.
Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. Generally considered the best of the TOS movies. Not flawless, but certainly entertaining.
The TOS actors feel MUCH more comfortable back in their roles in this movie, as compared to the first. They seem to be having more fun, too. Throw in Montalban chewing the scenery like it was nutritious and you have a fun romp.
One interesting aspect that you see mirrored going forward is that the world of Star Trek is getting darker. Not nearly as clean and shiny as Roddenberry’s idea. It is certainly a fair cop that Kirk just forgot to go back and check on Ceti Alpha VI, and apparently the rest of the Federation did as well. I guess it fell off their calendar.
The weakest part of this whole thing is the whole Genesis thing. Technobabble on a galactic scale. It dooms the third movie entirely.
Side note: I like the Federation outfits a LOT more than the first movie’s costumes. Khan and his rag-tag band of refugees from Flashdance, on the other hand, look terrible. Why can’t indigenees wear, I dunno, t-shirts or something?
All in all, on a 1-5 scale, just comparing against other ST movies, I give it a 4, maybe even a 4.5.
I really think the music in this movie is so great it hides some flaws. But year its my fav star trek movie though actually i liked Undiscovered Country quite a bit (VI?)
