The Wrath of Khan sucked. Yes. It did.

This week, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan turned 30 years old (Oh!  My back!), which is naturally resulting in people all over talking about how this movie was the greatest of the Star Trek franchise, bar none.

I say: Horta-marbles.

So, I’ve waited thirty years; now, I’m going to tell you why The Wrath of Khan was a lousy movie, a lousy Star Trek movie and a lousy science fiction movie.

We know that Wrath was developed from the original series episode Space Seed, in which Khan and his followers, products of the Eugenics Wars, were discovered in a sleeper ship hundreds of years after they (take note) lost their war.  These so-called physical and intellectual supermen tried to take over the Enterprise, but (again) lost, and were banished by Captain Kirk to a small uninhabited planet “to rule.”

Which should tell you right off that these guys weren’t the great s#!+s they thought they were.

Fast-forward about 25 years, to a movie that depicts an Enterprise being used as a training vessel (yeah… for the most celebrated ship in the fleet, that makes sense), and a survey vessel from that same Federation that is apparently not smart enough to notice that the solar system they’ve entered, which has been mapped by Federation ships before (including the Enterprise) is missing a planet.  In fact, another planet has supposedly been moved out of its original orbit (something else the crew of the Reliant should have noticed), but instead of changing the temperature severely, the planet gets stoopid dust storms.  Naturally, they find the surviving members of Khan’s group, but can’t say the words “Beam us out!” fast enough to avoid being captured.

A great deal of my angst over this movie is in its bad story and editing, leaving characters hollow and pointless: Saavik, for instance, has her part Romulan heritage left on the cutting room floor; characters like Scotty’s nephew become nameless footnotes, lessening the impact of their later death scenes; Chekov and Terrell can’t just beam out of Khan’s world before Khan’s guys can cross a few dozen yards of sand to catch them; Khan “remembers” Chekov, despite the fact that they never met in the original story; Khan, the “superior intellect,” apparently responded to the loss of his wife and the change in his planet by going insane, but none of his superior followers has the stones to explain his obsession to him or take steps to prevent their all being destroyed by the man; Khan’s son is the only one of the baddies group, other than Khan, who utters a word through the entire movie (besides “Aaugh!” when their ship is attacked); we discover Kirk fathered a son and never met him or kept in touch with his mother… and we’re supposed to actually care; how one of the worms Khan dropped in Chekov’s ear could have been dropped into the ear of just one of the scientists in order to find the genesis device, preventing the need to torture the rest of them; Khan’s followers are mute slabs of meat, and in the end, we feel nothing about their being blown up; and let’s face it, the whole Moby Dick theme (with lines from Melville’s book altered to use celestial references that Khan couldn’t possibly know) is lame, even when it’s presented by Ricardo Montalban, the one man in the universe who seems to be able to out-overact William Shatner.

So, we come to the part that everyone says is the best part of the movie: The starship fights.  Okay, considering this is the first time in the history of the franchise that we see the Enterprise (and the Reliant) taking serious modern-special-effects battle damage, the battles were notable and memorable.  Beyond that… meh.  We see two starships close enough to spit at each other, which still miss each other with regularity.  We get the whole “Khan displays two-dimensional thinking” bit, and we’re supposed to buy the premise that a “superior intellect” man who could rule a world (albeit temporarily), steal away on a sleeper ship, steal a starship, who has presumably thought about attacking and killing Kirk for many moons, and who’s probably heard of submarines, has never figured out three-dimensional space warfare.  We see the old TV-series holdover of having bridge equipment blow up when a piece of ship dozens of decks away gets hit with a phaser blast… so you know they’re connected.

And finally, we have the Tech-Of-The-Day, a device the size of a man that can change the life-potential of entire planets; and the stereotypical “countdown to disaster” when the genesis device is started—but they never just go off, do they?  No, we have to suffer a countdown for it to happen; but the Enterprise is crippled… oh no!  Will they die?  No, because Spock manages to get the engines fixed mere seconds before it’s too late.  Whew.  And oh, yeah, Spock is now going to die of radiation poisoning.  On a ship that runs on antimatter, in which everyone in engineering is dressed like the Michelin Man to protect them from something, but no one goes where Spock dares to tread, and after we’ve seen radiation sicknesses cured with hyposprays in episodes of the original series…

You see where this is going, I’m sure.  Khan isn’t consistent to Star Trek, not the original series nor the particular episode in which it was birthed.  It’s not consistent with science fiction, not even the Trek brand of sci-fi.  And on top of that, it’s just not well put-together.  Everything in this movie just comes off as being contrived in order to push some incredibly obvious emotional buttons, while ignoring how much (or little) sense they make.  It’s showy, it’s pretty, it has more colorful Star Fleet uniforms… and it’s stupid.  It’s about as realistic as The Blues Brothers, complete with stupid Nazis.

And this is the movie that fans declare is the best Trek film ever. 

IqnaH QaD.  (Go look it up.)

It’s funny how Trek fans, who like to proclaim the intellectual superiority of their program of choice, are amazingly unsophisticated when it comes to their preferred Trek movies.  The even-numbered movies that most cite as “the best” are in fact the worst when it comes to science fiction realism, Trek continuity and downright story quality.  And Khan leads the pack of guilty movies (okay, it’s second, right after The Voyage Home, and barely preceding the disaster right after that, The Final Frontier… but it has the virtue of being iconic of all of them).

The Wrath of Khan was a redshirts movie: Let’s do stupid stuff and beat up on each other, yargh!  It was designed to impress Star Wars fans, who (let’s face it) weren’t nearly that concerned with trifles like science and storylines.  It was fluff… pure, unadulterated fluff.

You want good Trek movies?  Star Trek: Generations is probably the best, in my opinion; followed by Star Trek: Insurrection.  These movies had action, but they also had stories consistent with Trek continuity and the pseudo-science fiction universe that Trek was based within, paid close attention to the established behavior of Trek characters and didn’t go in any phenomenally stupid plot directions.  Were they perfect?  No; but let’s face it, Star Trek has never been a “perfect” show.  But Star Trek has (almost) always had a way to look at the future that was thoughtful, humble and optimistic, and both Generations and Insurrection embodied that attitude.

So, I’ve said my piece, and you can now judge me according to my opinions of Star Trek movies.

Next week, I’ll discuss Lost In Space.