Star Trek Week #2: The Wrath of Khan
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
A Pornokitsch classic, and one of the greatest geek culture movies of all time, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan needs no introduction. Khan is one of the most histrionic space operas ever written. Khan is one of the gravest cheeseballs ever produced. Khan is the most glorious cult classics to emerge from the cultish swampland of classic Trek. Khan is the primus iner pares - the first among equals. Khan is one of the greatest movies ever made.
An advantage a long-running franchise like Trek has over shows stuck in a more restricted time-frame is that it can revisit plots and characters long after they're first introduced. In the case of The Wrath of Khan, Kirk finds himself forced to face the consequences of decisions he'd made decades before. Years earlier, Khan had tried to overtake the Enterprise. Kirk exiled Khan and his people, genetically-altered supersoldiers, to a lush but dangerous planet and rode off into the sunset, apparently never giving the group a second thought.
Fifteen years later, a terraforming crew (including Checkov) sets down on a barren planet and are captured. The planet, as it turns out, is that same one to which Kirk exiled Khan and his people. Most of Khan's followers, including his wife, died not long after being shunted to the planet, and Khan has nursed a seething hatred of Kirk ever since, holding Kirk responsible for his misfortunes. Khan captures the terraforming device and uses Chekov to lure Kirk (now much paunchier, and in need of reading glasses) back for a final showdown. The film ends with our two titans of scenery-chewing hissing and spitting and yelling at each other, before Khan quotes Moby Dick and tries to blow up the Enterprise, killing himself in the process. Only Spock's heroic self-sacrifice saves the ship.
(The less said about a subplot involving Kirk's ex-girlfriend and unbeknownst-to-him-until-now son the better, although it does reinforce the movie's theme concerning unintended consequences.)
Being a good geek, I naturally own the double-super-duper-platinum/titanium director's cut of Wrath. William Shatner and the much-lamented Ricardo Montalban glower and sweat and whisper and spit in their full digitally-restored glory; Kirk's much-ballyhooed scream of "Khaaaaan!" echoes with extraordinary clarity. (And the director's commentary is one of the few really rewarding and interesting commentary tracks out there.)
As I learned to love the Wrath of Khan from a grainy VHS bootleg when I was young, watching the crisp DVD never fails to give me a little shiver of pleasure. Khan was my favorite of the Star Trek movies in the Eighties, when one's options for favorite were limited to the first four movies; I would watch it on summer mornings when my parents were at work. It didn't matter that I didn't catch the Moby Dick references, or the stuff about aging, or consequences. There were horrible space-earwigs and a glowering, yelling guy without a shirt, and explosions.
The Wrath of Khan is for me, and I suspect many others, the superlative of classic Star Trek. Thousands of gallons of ink, virtual and otherwise, has been spilt in endless discussions of this most classic classic. (Two good A.V. Club reviews may be found here and here.) Khan represents both a high point in terms of art and in terms of darkness that the franchise wouldn't hit again for at least another decade, when The Next Generation began to find its voice.
No post about the Wrath of Khan would be complete without a clip. I therefore leave you with this, Montalban's rasping final lines.