Saw it last night as part of the Fathom Event series. It holds up really well both as a story and the special effects and is my favorite Star Trek movie. Three things about it:
Khan has got to be in the top 5 of OG movie villains. Montalbam’s acting was phenomenal knowing when to pull it back or respond with a look.
Mentally I switch Chekov’s and Sulu’s roles. Yes we all know Chekov was not in Space Seed with Khan (so Khan and him remembering each other doesn’t work) but also, Sulu’s career path would have him as the XO on the USS Reliant while Chekov’s would have him as a chief helmsman.
Remember how Grace Lee Whitney reprised her role as Rand in ST:TMP? She was the transporter chief when it malfunctioned early in the movie. Until last night, I didn’t realize that John Winston reprised his role as Lieutenant (now Commander) Kyle, bridge officer on the USS Reliant.
Last year I saw ST:TMP as a Fathom Event. I wonder if they will do ST3 next year. If so, I’m there.
The local movie theater chain (Harkins) does a Tuesday Classic Movie night. I happened to have some work which took me close to the theater on a Tuesday, and they were showing TWOK. I met a friend for dinner and the movie, and we both agreed that it held up really well, and looked great on the big screen.
I still can’t get past the confusion over the identity of the two planets. Would not all the sophisticated equipment on a starship prevent the crew from making such an obvious mistake?
Behind the scenes, Roddenberry hated Wrath of Khan feeling it made Star Fleet too militaristic. It probably didn’t help that he was essentially removed from the production and his original idea for a sequel was scrapped. But, yes, it’s one of the best Trek movies out there, and it’s amusing looking back and seeing Kirk talk about growing old when we have Patrick Stewart playing Picard in his late 70s and early 80s. I was all of six when I first saw it and could scarcely hold back the tears when Spock died.
Someone probably just didn’t think to check, but you’d think there’d be some sort of evidence of a planet’s destruction floating around out there.
Montalban is terrific and Khan’s single mindedness works extremely well.
One of the problems I do have with the movie is that we are TOLD, many times, that Khan is a genetically engineered superhuman, with incredible intelligence. We never see it. Movies should show, not tell, and Khan really doesn’t come off as brilliant. He gets the drop on Kirk in the first space battle but it’s an incredibly simple ruse that only worked because Kirk was lazy and complacent, and Kirk IMMEDIATELY fools Khan to switch the situation. Later Khan does manage to slip two mind-controlled assassins into Kirk’s party, thus allowing him to locate and steal Genesis, but it only half works and, again, it’s not really some sort of brilliant plan.
It’s still a great movie but it’s a shame they couldn’t work in some way to show Khan being brilliant, because that makes his obsession all the more interesting as a character flaw, as it would allow for the classic story of a tragic flow overwhelming the character’s strengths. Twice we see Joachim try to get Khan to see reason, and twice Khan just refuses to, but in the absence of his alleged genius it kind of takes away from the impact of that.
It’s been a while since I last saw it, but doesn’t it make it more plausible that the crew of the other starship (ie. Chekov’s one) would be less likely to realise they had come across the planetary system where Khan and gang were dumped, if none of them had been present on the Enterprise in TOS? In other words, if it had been Sulu, there’d have been a bit of a plothole as to why he’d not realised?
you would think they would have reviewed star charts and survey data for the system and went ‘hmmm… something seems to be missing’.
Now -they could have dismissed that as an error in the data, but Chekov should have mentioned “oh yeah, we marooned a guy in this system a few years back”.
The usual fanwank is that, during the first season of TOS, Chekov was a newly-commissioned ensign who was stuck doing drudge jobs somewhere in the lower decks.
In the novelization of the movie, Vonda McIntire tries to explain the mixup of planets by saying that the Ceti Alpha system was on the far frontier of Federation territory. It had only been surveyed by an unmanned probe that just did a quick flyby, and such surveys were known to be error-prone. Chekov remembered stranding Khan on an earthlike world. The desert planet didn’t jog his memory until he saw the wreckage with the name Botany Bay on it.
This is fanwank cause there’s no way the writers went this far back into the original episode and tied this into the movie, yet didn’t mention it in the movie:
The Feds are way too reliant (heh) on their technology. As Khan says in the TOS ep “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed…” ,no wait…“I am surprised how little improvement there has been in human evolution. Oh, there has been technical advancement, but, how little man himself has changed.”
IOW, there SHOULD have been some kind of space buoys around the system warning ships off. But as I’ve said elsewhere, the Feds losing Memory Alpha to the Zetarians IMO fucked up all kinds of things, and Khan being marooned just got lost in the shuffle. So the Reliant just obliviously went in no one knowing that Khan was even in the system, nevermind on what planet.
Which was always Roddenberry’s blind spot. How exactly DO you have a huge organization with heavily armed starships and a militaristic rank structure, and a secondary mission of Federation defense, without it being militaristic?
You see, the planets are numbered sun-out, and let’s say there are 13 planets in the C-A system. The Reliant simply counted in: 13-12-11 and so on until they got to six, not realizing they skipped one (because it ex-ploded) and we actually orbiting C-A Five.
Now, I love the film, but…Marcus sends the Reliant to find a completely lifeless system. No so much as a microbe or the show’s off. And yet, they can’t even detect 20 people and the C-A eels! What good is sending a mini-Starhip if it can’t detect 20 humans?
Why didn’t they just look for a planet with no atmosphere to start with? Find another moon like the one they were orbiting.
And McCoy was right! The Genesis device is an awesome weapon! Every Starship should have one for things like the Borg. Even if it doesn’t make stable planets, it still makes a satisfactory rubble pile.
At the beginning of this voyage, Chekov had expected it to be boring, but short and easy. How difficult could it be to find a planet with no life? Now, several months later, he felt as if he were trapped in a journey that was boring, unending, and impossible. Lifeless planets abounded, but lifeless worlds of the right size, orbiting the proper sort of star, within the star’s biosphere, in a star system otherwise uninhabited: such planets were not easy to discover. They had inspected fifteen promisingly barren worlds, but each in its turn had somehow violated the experimental conditions’ strict parameters.
The novelization of Star Trek III indicated that the Klingons and Romulans sought multilateral parity on the Genesis Device. David wanted to give it to them, but to Starfleet, it was completely out of the question-- the Klingons and Romulans could lay waste to Federation planets, after all.
I don’t know if it was always his blindspot. In the original series, there were instances were Kirk referrs to himself as a military man and there’s an episode called “Court Martial.” This is something that seemed to manifest itself in the 1970s and was especially visible to fans when TNG launched. I do run into people who defend the idea that Star Fleet isn’t a military organizing by comparing it to the United States Coast Guard, never mind that the USCG is one of the branches of the Armed Forces…
I’ve seen that comparison, and it’s always left me wondering: okay, if Starfleet is like unto the Coast Guard, then what’d be like unto the Navy? What’s the name of the ship that hits hardest during a war?
Vietnam turned a lot of the popular culture against the military. I don’t know if Roddenberry became a real pacifist, or if he was just jumping on the bandwagon.
He was adamant that people in the future would be more enlightened and benevolent than we 20th Century savages. What started as pleasant optimism in the 1960s seemed to morph into an ideology in the 1980s.
I mean, it’s hard to let the movie off on this. Enterprise JUST LEFT EARTH, and is “the closest ship” to deal with the problem. That’s not consistent with a distant, poorly known star.
There is an actual star called Alpha Ceti, not Ceti Alpha, but that’s basically the same in star nomenclature. (One word refers to the constellation, the other, the Greek letter, is just sequentialization of the stars in the constellation.) That doesn’t help at all though - Alpha Ceti is 220 LY from Earth, which in the Star Trek universe is not all that far from Earth, well within the inner territory of the Federation.
I’m slogging my way through [The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek: The First 25 Years https://a.co/d/gIzuhTR](The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek: The First 25 Years https://a.co/d/gIzuhTR) (it’s 576 pages!) and I just finished the chapter on the second movie, so I’m sad that I missed the big screen event. The book is all quotes from the people involved and has a few interesting tidbits, such as the fact that Shatner and Montalban never recorded any scenes together, they only talked on viewscreens in the movie.
It also describes the director, Nicholas Meyer, taking over writing the screenplay after many others failed, and he did it in twelve days, before the start of a writer’s strike. He didn’t want to delay the filming any further with credit negotiations so he voluntarily gave up writing credit. It sounds like a miracle that the movie had such a solid story at all.
Roddenberry was so difficult to work with on the first movie that they essentially told him to bugger off, but to keep him satisfied they let him see the scripts and to make comments, which were mostly ignored. GR was so pissed off about the militaristic tone of the movie that he leaked the script, including the fact that Spock dies. They knew it was him, because the seven copies of each script had punctation marks in various places as identifying marks, and the leaked script was the one given to GR. (He also didn’t like that the Enterprise was destroyed in the third movie, so he leaked that script too; the studio was upset but decided to show the destruction in the trailer just to blunt his tactics.)
