Khan, the best Trek…ever

Star Trek: Wrath of Khan is the best Star Trek film by a country mile, and just about the best Star Trek of any sort (TV, film, animation, books, whatever). It’s one of the highest ranked geek films ever, and deserves a broad audience, including those who routinely shrug at either Star Trek or science fiction in general. It is why Star Trek will always be better than Star Wars.

Director Nicholas Meyer had a simple attitude toward his project. He wasn’t interested in making a film about spaceships, but was intensely interested in making a film about the people inside the spaceship. From that simple notion came a landmark film that stands up against the best of both Trek and the best of science fiction.

The story was setup in the TV episode “Space Seed,” wherein a Captain James Kirk (William Shatner) met and defeated Khan Noonian Singh (Ricardo Montalban), a brutal dictator from 21st Century Earth. Rather than condemn Khan and his followers to a 23rd Century prison, Kirk allows Khan to choose to colonize the hostile but habitable Ceti Alpha V.

Some 15 years later, the starship Reliant is on a survey mission of the Ceti Alpha star system. They go down to the surface and are captured by Khan and what few of his followers are still alive. Shortly after Kirk left them, the planet was rendered uninhabitable. Khan’s followers have been dying, including his wife – a former member of Kirk’s crew. The Reliant provides Khan both a means of escape and, more to the plot, a means of exacting revenge on now-Admiral Kirk.

Meanwhile, we find that Kirk is suffering a mid-life crisis. He’s an admiral at the Starfleet Academy, the instructor you don’t want, and he’s rotting behind a desk. Consider, if you will, how it might feel to have been a young man of adventure, now only able to train and watch others head off for their own adventures. Much like a caged lion, Kirk is dying in bits and pieces.

A remarkable feature of the film is that Meyers never has the antagonists actually meet face-to-face. The closest they get is snarling at each other via a viewscreen. More often, they are a voice on the radio, each taking turns at taunting the other. This means their primary physical interaction is with members of their own crew, and the tensions that mount between them.

Khan’s subordinate wants to cut and run, leaving revenge either behind or for another day. But Khan’s obsession with Kirk is the same as Ahab’s toward Moby Dick, a theme made explicit by the number of times Khan quotes Melville.

Kirk not only has to shepherd a cadet crew, completely not ready for actual combat, but has to confront the indiscretions of his youth. He is reunited with one of his early loves and the son she told him to stay away from. In one of the film’s best moments, when all seems hopeless and lost, and she asks Kirk to tell her how he feels. He answers:

There’s a man out there who I haven’t seen in 15 years who’s trying to kill me. You show me the son who would gladly help him. How do I feel? Old…used up.

In that moment, Shatner is a superb actor. It’s a good moment for anyone, but for Trek fans, who have only seen Kirk in full swagger, it’s a blow to the solar plexus. Until that instant we’d never seen Kirk defeated, yet here he is, knocked down by a pair of attacks from his own past, from the outside by Khan and from the inside by his own son. These are direct repercussions of his past, his decisions, his choices, now returned not just to haunt him but to kill him. Yet, the worst is yet to come.

Return with me to 1982, when Khan premiered. While Star Trek: The Motion Picture made money, it left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. Gene Roddenberry was removed as producer and Harve Bennett was put in charge. Khan was made on a shoestring budget.

But from the moment the credits began you knew you were in for something different. Unlike The Motion[less] Picture, Khan used Alexander Courage’s opening notes for the TV series. I swear, the audience immediately perked up. The film was well-paced, humorous, and simply delightful. When we got to that spot with Kirk being so defeated, I don’t think anyone was breathing. This film had successfully taken us somewhere Trek had never been.

Later, when Kirk stands, apple in hand, talking to Spock via communicator, people started laughing in honest relief. And then he utters that immortal line: “I don’t like to lose.” The audience went insane. Popcorn flew, people cheered; if they could, they would have danced in the aisles.

But Meyers can be a bit of a bastard. He took us along on this emotional rollercoaster, one that had already shown the Enterprise taking a pummeling, and made us sit there while he killed Spock. Not recklessly, not for shock effect, but as a logical result of the story, with Spock now doing what Kirk had always been willing to do, whatever was necessary to save his ship and his crew.

Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan  is simply superb. No one can really be a Trekkie and think otherwise. Non-fans can enjoy the film because it doesn’t deal in techno-babble; it is, in a word, accessible. And it is great while being 100% faithful to all that led up to it.

I just wanted to make all this clear before May 8, 2009, when the Trek reboot premiers. Early comments and reviews are almost all positive, but every single one of them bows to Khan, the best Trek ever, which is exactly as it should be.