The even-numbered Star Trek movies are always the better ones, and this is the film that started the trend. After the long, slow staring contest of the first movie, it felt like somebody finally remembered what made the show work, so we got a ship, a crew, a villain with a grudge, and a ticking clock. The Wrath of Khan is one of those movies I’ve watched many times and never once felt like I was putting in the hours. It just works, from the first scene to the very last, right up to and including the death of Spock, which is genuinely heartbreaking every single time.
Kirk feels old
It opens on the Kobayashi Maru, the no-win test for cadets, and for about five minutes you think the Enterprise is in real trouble before it turns out to be a simulation. That’s a smart way to start a story that’s really about a man who’s never had to lose. Kirk’s an admiral again, gruff about his birthday, hanging around Starfleet while Spock trains the new cadets on the ship, and he’s got that restless look of someone who’s been put out to pasture and knows it. (There’s even a whole Kobayashi Maru novel I reviewed years back, which tells you how much that one test has grown into its own thing.) McCoy gives him a book for his birthday, tells him to get his command back before he gets old, and the rest of the film is basically Kirk finding out exactly what that costs.
And the thing that drags him back is a ghost from an old episode. Chekov and Captain Terrell are beaming down to what they think is an empty planet when they find Khan, left there years ago by Kirk himself, and who’s spent the whole time since marinating in bitterness while his people died off. It lands because you don’t need to have seen the episode (I’d seen it, but you really don’t need to). Someone Kirk dumped and forgot about has had all the time in the world to plan what he’d do about it.
Khan, and why he works
Khan is an excellent villain, plain and simple. He’s smart, he’s patient, he’s got a charisma that fills up every scene he’s in, and his hatred of Kirk isn’t about conquering anything, it’s personal. He wants Kirk to suffer, and he’ll burn through his own people and a whole lot of Starfleet to make it happen. I love that he’s so thoroughly a match for Kirk rather than just a guy with a bigger gun, because it means every exchange between the two of them has weight, even when they never share a room. And he quotes Moby Dick at the end, which is exactly the kind of thing a man like that would do, still screaming at the whale as the ship goes down around him.
I’d put him up against Zod in Superman II any day, since both come back from exile furious and both want the hero on his knees, but Khan has the edge for me because he’s actually clever. The fight in the Mutara Nebula, two damaged ships feeling around blind in the gas and dust, is a proper chess match, and Kirk wins it by remembering that Khan only thinks in two dimensions. After all that, the broken warp drive is what finally decides it.
The needs of the many
Everything the movie’s been building leads to the engine room. Spock walks in, shuts the door behind him, and goes into the radiation to get the warp drive working again, and I know exactly what’s coming and I still tense up. He talks to Kirk through the glass, says the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and the line that gets me is the quiet one, that he has been and always shall be Kirk’s friend. When I wrote about Leonard Nimoy’s passing this was the scene I kept coming back to. Putting a hand up in the Vulcan salute against the glass, with McCoy looking on, is one of the best things the franchise ever did, and it’s why people keep writing about that ending forty-odd years later.
What I love most is what it does to Kirk. The man who never lost a test, who cheated the Kobayashi Maru, finally has to stand there and accept the one outcome he can’t change. There’s a funeral, the casket gets fired off towards the Genesis planet that Khan’s last gasp helped create, and then Kirk, who spent the whole film feeling ancient, says he feels young, and his son and McCoy are standing right there to hear it. It’s a wonderful ending, sad and hopeful at the same time, and I think that’s the real trick of the whole film.
Which character’s moment hits you hardest in this one, Kirk’s, Khan’s or Spock’s? Tell me in the comments.