“Wrath of Khan” is a great movie. Not a great Star Trek movie - a great movie, period. It’s one of the ten best science fiction films of the past forty years. It’s a rare action film that marries the action with theme, working equally well as a meditation on aging and obsolescence, and as a crackling submarine war film. It has a great script, impeccable pacing, visual effects that hold up well even today, and features the some of the strongest acting of the original series episodes and movies.
Shatner’s performance, in particular, is by far his best work (and, not coincidentally, his least hammy performance, “KHANNNN” aside). Seriously - go back and watch Spock’s death scene, and this time focus on Kirk. Shatner actually, if anything, underplays it - but his eyes convey such devastation that you don’t need histrionics or weeping to understand that Kirk is completely shattered in that moment. As for Montalban, his performance, while certainly theatrical, explodes with character and charisma in a way that later villains in the series could only dream. It helps that he’s given some fantastic monologues, and his conversations with Kirk are mesmerizing because, even though the two characters are never even in the same room (and thank god we were spared an unnecessary hand-to-hand fight scene), you *feel *the clash of wills every time they interact.
The remaining Star Trek movies range from disasters to solid space opera, but none of them approach “Wrath of Khan” as legitimately good films in and of themselves.
“Into Darkness,” meanwhile, is a middling action movie with one of the worst scripts I’ve ever encountered. Whereas “Wrath of Khan” took pains to convey every major character’s motivation in detail, and then ensured that every piece of plot advancement emerged organically from those motivations, “Into Darkness” careens from mindless plot twist to plot twist without ever bothering to establish internally consistent reasons for any one of the characters to do whatever insane thing they are doing, much less give the audience any reason to care. And that’s just the first two-thirds of the film. In the third act, rather than try to create new and exciting moments to pay off what setup there was, it basically copy-pastes all of the memorable moments from “Wrath of Khan,” but with none of the understanding of what made those moments work in the first place.
As an example: Spock’s sacrifice in “Wrath of Khan” works because he spends the entirety of the film gently reminding Kirk (and, through him, the audience) that he believes “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.” The Kobayashi Maru reinforces this aspect of his philosophy, and throws his viewpoint in sharp contrast with that of Kirk’s. Spock’s death is the culmination of all of this - his putting into action what, up into then, were merely words. It proves that he meant what he said, and that it wasn’t just a series of semi-cryptic aphorisms. “Into Darkness,” on the other hand, basically gets as far as thinking, “HAY GUYZ WHAT IF KIRK WAS THE ONE WHO SACRIFICED HIMSELF?!” before ripping out the last few pages of the “Wrath of Khan” script and find/replacing all instances of Kirk’s name with Spock’s, and vice versa. It’s pandering at its worst, because the only reason these scenes exist is so that people who have seen “Wrath of Khan” will go, “oh hey, I recognize that!” It serves no thematic purpose, illuminates no aspect of the characters, and ultimately doesn’t even fucking matter to the plot because Khan’s magic blood revives Kirk instantaneously anyway.
Ugh. I liked the 2009 reboot movie all right - despite a similarly convoluted plot, it was at least fun, and made some effort at trying some new things. But “Into Darkness” was basically the worst case scenario for a reboot in my mind - one that slavishly adheres to the exterior form of the original, without any understanding of the core spirit that made the original great in the first place. It is the palest form of imitation.
