Star Trek Sundays: "The Wrath of Khan" gives Trek new life
Featuring thoughts from writer/director Nicholas Meyer himself!
It’s Sunday, and we’re going through all 13 theatrical STAR TREK films, a series that includes a number of pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). We continue today with one of the all-time great sequels, STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN. Enjoy…
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
1982, Dir. Nicholas Meyer
Originally published in 200 Reviews, based on a capsule review from 2013 and notes from 2022
In the sweep of the franchise’s history, The Wrath of Khan is both lynchpin and turning point for Star Trek, the film that effectively bought the series a second lease on life, made future movies and spin-offs possible, and remains the most universally agreed-upon touchstone for what good Trek look like. Everything that makes the series great can be found in this one perfect movie, which for my money surpasses just about any big-budget ‘genre’ film ever produced in the Hollywood studio system. The film is expertly, tightly arced, presenting through the characters of Kirk, Spock, and Khan a legitimately, devastatingly powerful exploration of what it means to not only to be human, but what it means to truly live – and how death, horrible and terrifying as it is, plays an undeniable part in the value we place on our living experiences. Major philosophical concepts like that have always been at the heart of Star Trek, and they hit home here as hard as they ever have, existing alongside some of the most thrilling space action sequences ever to grace the silver screen. J.J. Abrams may disagree, but real Star Trek action is all about slow-paced, nautical warfare in space – intellectual, not bombastic, in nature – and the tension elicited by director Nicholas Meyer and his team throughout the film is a wonder to behold. So it goes for the film as a whole – Wrath of Khan may well be one of the greatest films ever made, and certainly one of the best pieces of sci-fi cinema ever produced.
I actually got the chance to hear from Nicholas Meyer in-person about his work on Star Trek when he was on a panel at the University of Iowa (his alma mater, and the school I’m currently getting my Ph.D. at) on October 13th, 2022. It was one of the coolest experiences of my academic life; Meyer is one of the wisest and most engaging people I’ve ever heard speak, a walking encyclopedia of influences who will passionately tell you about all of them. The question I asked him was about my Dad, our shared love of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and the influence of Shakespeare on Meyer’s work, a topic he brought up throughout the evening.
That exchange was a moment I’ll never forget, but he also spoke at length about the creation of The Wrath of Khan, and in fact ended the panel by presenting his original storyboards for the film to the University’s library, where they would be archived for future study. A key insight he gave into the film’s creation was actually just how much of an outsider he felt to the world of Star Trek. It wasn’t something he ‘got’ at first, he emphasized, not understanding the look of the uniforms or why the bridge of the Enterprise looked, in his words, like a ‘Holiday Inn,’ instead of a submarine or battle cruiser; he also felt there wasn’t enough humor. He had been reading the Horacio Hornblower stories by C.S. Forester when he came onto Wrath of Khan, and felt his way into the film was to treat it as ‘Hornblower in outer space,’ leaning on the cast – who knew the characters and their world better than anyone – to let him know when and where he was going wrong. In a particularly juicy moment, he talked about the year he spent working on Star Trek: Discovery, an experience that didn’t sound particularly positive. He felt the creators of the show were extremely preoccupied with the fans, with catering to and satisfying their expectations, and that this was detrimental to the creative process. “I don’t give a fuck what the fans think,” he told us. “The fans don’t know what they want until they get it. Art isn’t a democracy. Art is a dictatorship.”
Strong words, but I think Meyer has a point – and you can see the logic at work in Wrath of Khan. The film has proven to be so beloved by so many, and so influential to so many future Star Trek works, that I think it’s easy to forget how many innovations Meyer made, and how his outsider status and many non-Trek inspirations served as a crucial course correction for a series that had a lot of trouble getting back off the ground after those first three seasons of The Original Series. I may love The Motion Picture to death, but I will be the first to admit it’s hardly the blueprint for a sustainable, ongoing franchise – you can only do the things that movie is attempting to do once – and the film’s troubled production and long history of failed TV projects attests to the fact that reviving Star Trek in this period proved extremely difficult. Meyer had a vision, though, and because that vision was predicated on expanding and revising the definition of what Star Trek could be, rather than simply searching in vain for the elusive ‘core’ of what it already was, The Wrath of Khan delivered to the fans something they may not have known they wanted, but learned in short order they needed – and has in turn created a whole lot of new fans over the years.
Take the Horatio Hornblower connection, for instance. Star Trek had always had a similarity to naval literature, and some of the best episodes of The Original Series, like “Balance of Terror,” leaned hard into the ‘naval warfare in space’ conceit the series naturally lent itself towards. But Meyer was the first to really imbue the entire project with a holistic sense of naval fiction. The look of the uniforms, the sense of procedure to everything, the focus on crew operations, and especially the space combat all feel like they could be adapted, with minimal alterations, to a ship fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. It’s cool, obviously, especially if you, like me (or like Meyer) are a nut for this kind of stuff, but it also grounds everything in a sense of internal realism, giving it all a palpable weight and immediacy that’s tremendously involving. Thinking about the Enterprise as a real ship on a real mission gives the film inspiration to do incredibly smart, surprising things with the action, like taking into account the vertical plane of action in space combat. Where a lot of outer-space sci-fi with naval inspirations adopts the horizontal plane of action inherent to actual naval encounters on water, space is, of course, a 360-degree arena, with no such thing as up or down, and extending that logic leads to great moments here like the Enterprise getting the jump on Khan in the nebula by going above him, after a long, tense build-up that’s all about strategic positioning.
The naval lens also, I think, informs the film’s greatest triumph, which may be the sheer sense of camaraderie The Wrath of Khan captures amongst the crew. The friendships here feel so genuine, everyone’s experience as a group of actors mirrored in their characters’ long histories together, and Meyer inaugurates a tradition, followed in subsequent Trek movies, of making sure everyone on the crew has at least one big moment to shine, and usually more. Meyer may have been an outsider to Star Trek, but he clearly had a good sense of what he had in this great group of actors, and built in a lot of space for the characters to shine, both individually and as a unit.
Aside from Khan himself, Kirk and Spock shine brightest here, and not just at the heartbreaking climax. I have always found it fascinating how this movie positions itself as something of a soft reboot to the franchise, but only partially. It repeats Kirk’s arc from The Motion Picture, where he is an Admiral feeling his age and longing for his youthful adventures as a Captain, but it clearly respects the growth Spock displayed in the first movie, with him now recommitted both to Starfleet and his human connections. And the movie actually leverages that difference in really interesting ways. It intentionally positions Kirk as unsettled and Spock as very collected, the latter’s character arc essentially ‘complete’ by the time this movie begins, while the former still has a fire raging inside. Shatner and Nimoy both play it beautifully, and that differing positionality they enter this story with is the friction that animates the entire movie – and, of course, culminates in perhaps the greatest scene in the history of Star Trek. Spock’s death is simply a marvelous piece of direction, and one you can really learn a lot from by watching it carefully. Meyer has a great, visually striking set to work with here, but he constructs the sequence to give maximum latitude to Shatner and Nimoy as performers. It’s only a few shots, most of it done in one long take that follows Spock and Kirk to the ground, separated by the glass they cannot cross. It is all designed to emphasize the performances in real time, and to give Nimoy and Shatner not only the space and time to act, but crucially, to act opposite one another, to actively feed on one another’s’ energy and serve their emotions back and forth. It’s almost theatrical, except that it’s too close-up and intimate to exist on the stage.
Meyer followed up his point about ignoring the whims of the fandom by emphasizing how there is no formula for making art. He told us he works on the assumption that if he likes what he’s working on, other people probably will too; sometimes that’s right, and sometimes it’s wrong. “Movies are like soufflés,” he said. “Sometimes they rise and sometimes they don’t and no one knows why.” In the case of The Wrath of Khan, he made a delicious soufflé indeed, and while we obviously can’t pinpoint every decision that made the recipe for this one work out so well, I think there are all sorts of big picture lessons anyone making movies, on any scale, can continue to learn from here. The Wrath of Khan is what happens when one treats a property seriously, but not reverently, willing to change things and challenge traditions in the name of deepening and expanding the world, to make a richer playground for the characters to inhabit. Few have ever done it better.
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