In 2285, an unaware U.S.S. Reliant stumbles across genetically created superbeing Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalbán) and his surviving followers, marooned on a hostile planet for 15 years as punishment for terrorizing the U.S.S. Enterprise and its crew. Khan and his subjects were exiled to the conveniently located Ceti Alpha V by Enterprise Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), and thanks to typical military bureaucracy, no one thought to check on Khan after he was left on the planet, not even to make sure he was still safely exiled and no longer wreaking havoc. The already difficult Ceti Alpha V had been made nearly uninhabitable about six months after Khan had been left there, thanks to Ceti Alpha VI exploding, as both planets and Spinal Tap drummers tend to do. After taking control of the Reliant, Khan seeks out Kirk and the Enterprise with one thing on his mind: revenge. Taken by surprise and staffed with a mostly young crew of trainees, the Enterprise struggles to survive, and to prevent Khan from getting his hands on the Federation’s latest technological feat known as the Genesis Device, a miracle of terraforming able to create as quickly as it can destroy.
When my blogging pal Barry at Cinematic Catharsis posted that he and RealWeegie MidgetReviews were hosting The Adventure-a-Thon, I realized that this was the perfect opportunity to do something I’d wanted to do for years: Write about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, one of my favorite films. It’s the first movie I really remember watching in a theater, though I know I went to see the re-release of The Boatniks (1970) in 1977, and my parents told me I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark (1980) in the theater, though my only memory of that is my dad laughing like a loon when the Nazi archaeologist peeked his head over the edge of a hole to look down at a trapped Indiana Jones, and Indy laughing and muttering “son of a bitch.”
So much of what I love about Wrath of Khan is the memory of it. I love that, even as a little kid, I felt like a part of a huge cultural moment as it happened, especially since I’d been too young to be part of Star Wars. Star Trek is better, anyway. Don’t complain at me. You know I’m right. I also love the vague memory of going to what was at the time a brand new theater in what I thought was Camdenton, Missouri, only to find out decades later that it couldn’t have been, and now having absolutely no idea where I was that night, because I didn’t have to, I was just a kid and the adults were taking care of everything. I love knowing that this was the movie where I discovered I liked the supporting actors better than the leads, most of the time, and where I had my first sneaking suspicion that sometimes people are cast for their looks and you can tell from a mile away when the filmmakers care more about an actress’s lipstick than their performance.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is a beautiful movie. Even when the sets are obviously plywood and cardboard glued together and spray painted in the regulation space gray of interstellar travel, it’s lovely to look at, and despite the constant talk of aging and mortality, everyone looks fantastic. How can you be worried about getting old when you look like that? You can’t.
Much of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan self-consciously deals with aging at a time when it was considered very, very silly for an actor in their 40s to be playing the same character they played in their 20s. Celebrities were supposed to go away when they got too old, a cultural ideal that lasted well into the 1990s; a particularly good example is one of the David Letterman Top 10 lists from 1994, where the Rolling Stones, having announced they were going on tour, were referred to as “grandpas” and “old men” who ate lots of “bran.”
Thirty years later and things have changed. The Stones, some of whom aren’t even alive anymore, are still touring, and William Shatner is 43 years older than he was when he played Captain Kirk getting old, and he’s flying into actual space. We’re on something like the 97th iteration of Star Trek, and we absolutely do not care how old the actors are anymore, except maybe a little, like if the android who doesn’t age suddenly looks old, or if the babes aren’t hot enough anymore.
As Kirk complains about getting old, the far older Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) chastises him for getting bogged down in the past. Chief Engineer Scotty (James Doohan) has also just kept on truckin’, loving his job and his life, and welcoming his nephew (Ike Eisenmann) aboard as a trainee. Spock, a captain now, has also welcomed a trainee on board, a beautiful Vulcan named Saavik (Kirstie Alley) who is given a lot more to do than makes any sense. She basically does Sulu’s (George Takei) job but also sometimes Spock’s, at Spock’s urging, and it’s never explained although I get the impression that her beauty is supposed to be the explanation. Chekov (Walter Koenig) is now on the U.S.S. Reliant with Captain Terrell (Paul Winfield), and they’re the unfortunate duo who happen across Khan and his entourage of strangely young and all-hot hotties.
The original series and Star Trek: The Motion Picture hint a bit at a Federation bogged down by bureaucracy, but Wrath of Khan is the first to truly address it, albeit indirectly. WOK is almost entirely about Captain Kirk, and the conflict here was created by Kirk’s decision to offer an unconventional punishment to an unconventional man, but it also forces us to ask: why did a single starship captain have that kind of power, anyway? It makes sense when you think of it as nothing more than another plot in a late-60s, candy-colored show geared toward kids, but once Star Trek becomes a franchise and its world extends beyond that of the original series, a lot of the show’s morality starts to seem a bit sketchy. The franchise has addressed this more often as the years go by, and I’d go so far as to say the entire Picard series is about the inherent tension that exists in a world where a single man can make such universe-altering decisions. Still, Captain Picard taking the brunt of the hostility from both public and Federation never felt true, because Picard was never the kind of captain that Kirk was. In terms of irresponsibility — and I’m gonna get chewed out for this, but that’s okay, I’ve been chewed out before — Janeway and Sisko had a far more Kirk-like sensibilities than Picard ever did.
At any rate, it’s a little weird to see a whole series like Picard wangsting about two decisions the captain made over the course of an entire career, when every episode of the original Star Trek had Kirk making a half-dozen decisions like that every morning before his delicious breakfast cubes.
Bibi Besch does a lot of work holding the B-plot together, especially since I find Kirk’s implication that Carol essentially denied him the chance to be a father unconvincing. Carol consistently brings Kirk back to reality, kindly, and Besch’s straightforward performance keeps the whole thing from turning into that old stereotype where an exceptional man’s behavior has to be grounded by a pragmatic woman. She looks fantastic, too, especially when she’s not in that white Lego space doctor outfit in the shape of a trapezium, because sharp angles equal space stuff.
Montalbán also looks great, and anyone who tells you that the film’s enduring success doesn’t have anything to do with Khan being hot as fuck is lying to you. To this day I am endlessly entertained by the fact that people were so shocked by Montalbán’s impressive chest at his age — 61 at the time of filming — that they made up stories about it being faked. There are still plenty of rumors out there that the chest was a prosthetic, which is hilarious if you look at the fake ears used for the tiny evil ear armadillo scenes. They’re not convincing, and if you couldn’t make a convincing ear in 1982, you couldn’t make a convincing torso in 1982.
At some point — I like to think it was when Trekkers gathered on the internet to rationally and politely discuss the show, as they do — enough people pointed this out that one of my favorite wild movie rumors was born: That the chest prosthetic was created by the terrible, horrible, magnificent minds of the scientists behind the convincing prosthetic dongs of all the biggest 1970s cinematic porno hits! Only they had the technology needed for such a magnificent feat!
I’m about to disappoint the hell out of you: the source of this rumor is lost to time. I heard it on the interhole, I can tell you that much, and I can also find a Usenet post of mine from the impossible year of 2000 that mentions I’ve heard the rumor, which means it must date to the 1990s, but the internet is not actually forever no matter what anyone says, and the original comment seems to be gone. If it makes you feel any better, a lot of the Mad Max-style hotties in Khan’s entourage were Chippendale’s dancers.
One of my favorite Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan facts is that Airplane II: The Sequel was released almost exactly six months later, with Shatner as Captain Buck Murdock, astronaut. I think he was an astronaut. It’s kind of hard to tell. See, the plot of Airplane II is the exact same plot as Airplane! except it takes place on a spaceship instead of an airplane but is still titled Airplane, because that is the kind of humor a Zucker Abrahams and Zucker joint guarantees to you, the viewer. Buck Murdock flew in the war over Macho Grande (he’ll never be over Macho Grande) and appears to be an airplane pilot, but he’s helping navigate a whole-ass spaceship back to Earth, so hell if I know what’s going on.
The good news is that Shatner didn’t know what was going on, either, but he never let a little thing like that stop him.
Maybe it was hard to see that Captain Kirk and William Shatner were headed for some sort of cultural permanence at the time, and it was definitely hard to see it immediately after, too, what with the Airplane II and the T.J. Hooker and the TekWar, but we’ve all heard the stories of Shatner’s ego on the set of all things Star Trek, and it can’t have been easy even back then to force him into the role of a member of an ensemble cast. They couldn’t do it on the show, but by God they did it in Wrath of Khan, and that turned a good film into a great film, one that somehow both transcended the science fiction genre but also launched an entire science fiction franchise at the same time.
