Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan directed Nicholas Myer,
starring William Shatner, Lenard Nemoy, DeForest Kelly, and Ricardo Montalban.
I wanted to watch this movie again since I read about everything
that happened in the new Star Trek movie by Abrams, because it got me so upset
that he copied so much from this movie that I wanted to go back and watch
original. I’m not going to dedicate this
little review to what Abrams did. I’ll
save that for when I see Star Trek Into
Darkness on DVD. I’m not going to
pay money for what essentially is a remake, when there is no need for a
remake. I don’t want to reward laziness.
Don’t think I’m going to buy the DVD
because I’ll either check it out at the library or borrow it from
family/friend.
I haven’t seen this movie in a long time. I should say I haven’t seen most anything
Trek (pre Abrams first Trek movie) since I started hating all things Trek. I grew up on Trek and have watched a lot of
it, but as I got older I just started noticing things, continuity-wise, that
just didn’t make any sense. Thing would
happen in one episode that should effect the next episode, but when the next
episode came around everything was back to normal as if the last episode hadn’t
happened. These types of things just
started to bug me, especially with something like Trek that prided itself on its
mythology. I mean how can you have this
type of immersive mythology and just get lazy on things like that? The more I watched it the more these things
really started to bug me because ultimately there was no reason for them to be there,
except for laziness on the part of the writers.
So knowing all of this, I willing watched Wrath of Khan for the first time since I was kid. Now it
must be said, I haven’t seen this movie in a long time, but that being said
this movie has still stuck with me all of those years. I must say it still lives up to everything I
remember as a kid, even though all the things that both me with Trek are still
there in abundance. Those things didn’t
bug me as much because this storyline is so tight and focused that those little
things are just that, little things.
This movie isn’t trying to disguise a poor story line with
new and flashy effects, instead this movie lets the storyline and characters
build slowly. It does start slow and
doesn’t get carried away with having large action sequences every few
minutes. This movie lets the characters
interact and actually lets the actors, you know, act and build character with that
interaction, which is one of the things that bothered me with Abrams’ first
Trek movie. With this actual acting,
comes an investment with the characters, as they share what is going on inside
of them, I actually cared about what was happening to them as the movie goes on. This movie is clearly focused on Shatner’s
Kirk and how his relationship to just about everything in the movie moves the
storyline forward. But this movie also
has one of the best villains ever in Kahn, played by scene stealing Ricardo Montalban. I’m not exaggerating in saying that either because
he’s the best actor in this movie. It’s
hard not to either sympathize or empathize with his revenge themed plot when he
describes what happened to his people after Kirk dropped them off on a planet. As revenge based themed story lines go, this
is one of the best. I mean I really
understood why Khan wanted Kirk dead and his all out, no holds bar, attempt to
get that done, never for once had a falseness to it. His willingness to risk everything to get
Kirk killed wasn’t a gimmick or based on some mundane, weak plot point. His revenge has history. Has a lot of history.
I know the action scenes in this movie are clearly outdated
and very slow, by today’s standards of action scenes, but one thing these
action scenes have, that most action scenes now-a-days don’t have, is a lot of
heart and investment in them. There is just
so much going on in these scenes as they pertain to the characters. Having the audience get to know these
characters when the movie started slowly, only made the stakes of the action
scenes rise all the higher when they started.
It gave them a lot of weight and that investment in characters at the
beginning clearly became paid off when the action scenes finally came. It even made Spock’s death and sacrifice at
the end all the more heart breaking and gut wrenching when it happened.
Great movie and it only got better with time as the movies
released now don’t even try to match the emotional investment of this movie,
but instead mask everything weakness, with flashy effects, quick editing, and just
plain laziness.
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