"Sir, if I may?"
"Excuse me, can't you tell I'm in mourning for my franchise here?"
"Saavik was right -- you never have faced obsolescence."
"No -- I've put out albums, and been in Priceline ads, and parodied myself over and over. I know nothing."
"You knew enough to tell Saavik that how we deal with sh*t movies is just as important as how we deal with good ones. It's called dollar voting."
"Good point. Remind me not to buy the Blu-Ray. Is that all you came here to say?"
"That -- and I that I'm glad you're not Chris Pine."
"Damn straight."
STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN
Talk about a marked improvement. Character, drama, emotion, action, but also theme, depth, meaning -- it's all here and it's all entertaining.
This, folks, is how it's done.
Harve Bennett and Nick Meyer sweep in and save the franchise. Finally, Starfleet is a believable Navy, and even the old TMP sets are lit in a dramatically vibrant style. The cinematography is truly a sight for sore eyes.
This movie is masterful at doing less with more. Reduced to a paltry budget, the new team relies not on fancy visual effects but on a strong solid story with ties to the backstories of the Original Series.
It's clear the writers had seen TOS -- some of the most classic TWOK lines are actually throwbacks to oft-repeated themes and dialogues in TOS, from Vulcans never lying, to there always being possibilities, to Khan's superior everything.
James Horner's fantastic score makes this truly, truly a space opera of Wagnerian scale. Shatner and Nimoy give performances of their careers, and even De Kelley and Jimmy Doohan get great stuff to do. (Scotty's not even fat yet!)
Kirstie Alley is the one and only Saavik. She made that character worth paying attention to. She is sorely missed in III, IV, and VI.
The film moves at a breakneck pace -- you're swept along an adventure that is truly like a swashbuckling epic and we only get time to rest finally in the Genesis Cave, where we pause and reflect in two of William Shatner's best scenes as Kirk. The themes are all there -- and yet, we have not abandoned the core of Star Trek, best exemplified in the scene in Kirk's quarters with McCoy and Spock arguing over the merits of the Genesis experiment.
TWOK is a full twenty minutes shorter than TMP, and where the previous film was slow and plodding, this movie is a mad dash capped with a great deal to say about the human condition -- life, death, maturity, vengeance, mortality, age. In the end, it's a tragedy, and the death of Spock is so tactfully and beautifully handled that you almost wish they didn't bring him back. Almost
. Truly, his death serves the film -- it is not there for shock value or as a cheap pull on the audience.If I had to nitpick about this movie, it'd be that Kirk and Khan never meet face to face -- but then again, that's just a connection to the nautical feel Meyer was trying to emulate. And with Khan's genetically engineered strength and Kirk's age, it'd be a quick fight. Also, it harkens to classic episodes like "Balance of Terror".
Oh! My other nitpick is that while I LOOVE the Monster Maroon uniforms, and they are a vast improvement over BLAND TMP, they always bug me in the back of my head because they just don't feel design-wise like Starfleet uniforms - they look nothing like anything that came before and after. But they're still the best thought out uniforms in Trek.
This movie is Trek's FRWL -- every new entry wants to be it, and they all fail, most notably Nemesis and NuTrek.
Truly, this is a superior motion picture.
9/10
1. STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN
2. STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE
3. STAR TREK
Next Up -- Nimoy Directs Doc Brown as a Klingon B*st*rd!
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