“Galloping around the cosmos is a game for the young, Doctor.”
Okay. Here’s the thing. I grew up with what euphemistically has become known as ‘The Khan Trilogy’. The three films which compose it are as close as Star Trek ever got to serialisation before Deep Space Nine caught the ball. But, as with many things from my childhood, I can’t remember what order I first saw them in. Just like I can never recall if I was ever shocked by the revelation that Darth Vader was Luke’s father in The Empire Strikes Back, I can’t remember if I ever saw The Wrath Of Khan without the foreknowledge that by the time the credits rolled, Spock would be gone.
Of course, he’s not the Spock from the TV series. He, like the rest of the crew is a little older, wiser, more cynical and a little rougher round the edges than the crew we all remember from the TV series. But, it’s the middle of the eighties. The TV series is a foggy memory to most. It won’t get repeated until the early nineties when The Next Generation sparks a resurgence of interest and we have the glorious spectacle of Star Trek on BBC2 for three nights of the weeks at six o’clock. I don’t know who the hell these people are apart from from my association with the movies. He’s ‘Admiral’ Kirk to me, not ‘Captain’. This is my era; the Star Trek that I feel belongs to me, the one that tugs at my heartstrings in a primal manner. So forgive me if this slides out of the ‘review’ frame of mind and into a freefall appreciation of what it does.
It’s a film about death, ultimately. The Search For Spock, which follows (and which really points to the fact that if the unofficial trilogy has a designation it should be The Spock Trilogy, dealing as they do with the death, rebirth and re-education of Vulcan’s finest) is about life, but it bungles it badly. This is a film about pain and loss on both sides. Khan has lost his chance of building his own Empire as well as his wife. Kirk has lost his youth and his command. Over the course of the film, Scotty loses a nephew (and, if the novelisation counts as canon, Saavik loses a very close personal friend) in Peter Preston, the young engineer who dies in Khan’s sneak attack. But it’s not a film about grief; it’s a film about facing up to the inevitable.
We are introduced to Saavik (a wonderful Kirstie Alley, who would never be in anything like this good again) who Spock is grooming to replace him. Spock, ever the logical being, knows that his time, and the time of his crew, is over. Kirk has retired to a teaching post, Chekov has moved on to a new post as executive officer of the Reliant and, just to rub things in just that little bit more, Kirk’s son, David, turns up.
The Kirk we meet at the beginning of the film is despondent and visibly depressed. It’s his birthday and he’s not happy. It’s never stated which birthday it is, but given Kirk’s unhappiness, it’s quite likely that it’s the big 50. He’s lost his way. It’s only when a training cruise goes disastrously wrong, thanks to Khan’s hijacking of the Reliant and a surprise attack which cripples the Enterprise, that Kirk finds his footing.
But let’s be honest here. The Wrath Of Khan is barely a Star Trek film. Like First Contact, which is essentially an action movie, Die Hard on a spaceship, The Wrath Of Khan is a naval war movie. The fact that the main characters wear Starfleet uniforms in completely coincidental. In spite of this, of perhaps even because of it, it embodies all the best ideals of Roddenberry’s universe – the optimism, the equality, damn it, even the humanism (although it is possibly worthwhile pointing out the fact that this is the most human-centric Trek movie, aside from Spock and Saavik, there aren’t any other aliens in the cast and Khan himself is the most human enemy, driven by the purest of human motives, revenge) - which is sometimes forgotten, especially in the sanitised universe of The Next Generation. This is a movie about the future which features a man vacuuming the carpet. It strips away everything about Star Trek that was superfluous and presents us with a submarine movie, akin to Balance Of Terror, one of the classic episodes of the series, without becoming bogged down in techno babble. It’s a movie which anyone can enjoy, unlike The Search For Spock, which plays like a half-finished B-side to this film, replacing Khan’s vengeful Captain Ahab-esque quest with a comic-book villain (and when I say that I mean in the worst possible manner; Kruge is like Bully Beef or Dennis the Menace – his performance is paper thin and his motivations obscure at best) and inverting Spock’s logic, wherein the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few to a platitude that I suppose is meant to ring true as ‘human’ (as opposed to Vulcan) but which reverberates hollowly so that, somehow, in Kirk’s eyes, killing a whole bunch of Klingons, getting his son killed, blowing the Enterprise to hell and throwing his career – and the careers of his trusted friends – away is a worthwhile sacrifice to make to get Spock back.
It is not only disrespectful to the nature of Spock’s death, in which he subjects himself to a fatal dose of radiation to get the Enterprise’s warp engines functioning in order to escape the shockwave of the Genesis device, but brings an unwanted level of what Han Solo referred to as ‘hokey religions’ to what was transpiring to be a hard science fiction space opera.
What all this means I have no idea. The above is just a random grab bag of thoughts and stream of consciousness concerning a film I love. And ultimately I suppose that’s what it’s all about. Love isn’t a rational emotion (I’m sure Spock would argue that no emotions are rational) but this film touches me in a way that I can barely even begin to articulate. Perhaps it’s the age at which I saw it (it’s true that very few films I’ve seen since allegedly becoming an adult have affected me in such a profound way), but there you have it. It’s my favourite Star Trek film It has been for as long as I can remember. It’s not like Star Wars, where I used to love Return Of The Jedi but after puberty I turned to The Empire Strikes Back. Despite the themes of age and the necessity for change, The Wrath Of Khan is essentially timeless.
“Let me show you something that will make you feel young as when the world was new.”
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