Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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My goodness.  1982.  Has it been that long?  I think I saw this movie in the theater but I’m no longer sure.  Okay, so this movie shows all the signs of riding the crest of Star Wars making sci-fi exciting again.  The theme music is obviously aping John Williams’ theme from Star Wars.  Well, of course they did.  They’d have been nuts not to.  This was the second Star Trek movie and after how boring the first movie was, they must have decided they needed to get back to the original formula that made the tv show work, action/adventure with a little science fiction thrown in for window dressing.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

When the movie begins “Admiral” James Kirk is observing cadets responding to a simulation of a space emergency.  Captain Spock is testing his Vulcan student Ensign Saavik to see if she can reconcile reality with regulations.  During these simulations Kirk tells Dr. McCoy that he feels old now that he’s behind a desk instead of commanding a starship.

Meanwhile the USS Reliant’s Captain Clark Terrell and first officer Commander Pavel Chekov beam down to evaluate a planet to see if it is lifeless as required for the next test of the “genesis device.”  This is a system that can take a lifeless planet and both terraform it and create life on it.  But it turns out that the planet is actually the planet that Kirk marooned Khan Noonien Singh and his group of genetically modified supermen on, twenty years earlier.  The reason that the Reliant’s crew didn’t know this is because some cosmic instability blew up one planet and moved Khan’s world where it had been.  This also made Khan’s home a death sentence that he only avoided by his incredible intelligence.  But the death of his wife Khan blames on Kirk.

Putting “super earwigs” into the ears of Chekov and Terrell, Khan takes control of their minds and forces them to betray their ship into Khan’s hands.  Finding out where Kirk was and about the genesis device, he hatches a plan to destroy Kirk and the Enterprise and use the genesis device to destroy the life on an already flourishing world.  Apparently, this is the dark side of the device and why only lifeless worlds must be treated.

Khan captures the genesis device and lures Kirk into an attack by the Reliant.  After almost destroying the Enterprise Kirk uses some trickery to take over control of the Reliant’s bridge and damages that ship enough to get it to retreat.

Kirk manages to rescue the chief scientists of the genesis project.  They happen to be one of Kirk’s old girlfriends and her son who also happens to be Kirk’s son.  The young man despises Kirk for not being a pacifist geek like himself.  Finally, the showdown arrives.  The Enterprise is heavily damaged and can neither outrun nor outfight the Reliant.  So, Kirk lures Khan into a “nebula” where the Enterprise’s weakness will not be decisive.  Kirk manages to get enough potshots off to destroy the Reliant but Khan decides to activate the genesis device in order to destroy the Enterprise which without warp drive will not have enough time to escape its destructive force.

Seeing that time was of the essence Spock leaves the bridge and heads for engineering where to the horror of McCoy and Scott he intends to enter the warp drive containment room.  Spock uses his Vulcan neck pinch to disable McCoy and then uses the Vulcan mind meld to give McCoy some kind of subconscious suggestion and we hear him say to McCoy, “Remember.”  Spock then enters the radiation area and removes the safety housing from the warp drive and with his face and hands in the radiation field, “fixes” the warp drive manually.  As soon as it comes on line, the bridge crew uses the warp drive to escape the genesis blast by a split second.

Then McCoy calls Kirk over the intercom and tells him to come to engineering in time to say goodbye to a dying Spock.  The rest of the movie is Spock’s funeral in space where after the eulogy by Kirk, his coffin is shot out of the ship toward a planet that the genesis device somehow produced out of the nebula where the Reliant was located.  After that Kirk and his son have a reconciliation.  When asked again by McCoy how he feels Kirk says, “Young, I feel young again.”  In the last scene we see Spock’s coffin on the ground in an idyllic setting on the new planet.

Okay.  So just as a point of departure, Star Trek: The Motion Picture; the movie that preceded this one was awful because it was boring and nothing much happened.  So, this movie had lots of action and stuff happens left and right.  I read that they achieved this by kicking Gene Roddenberry upstairs and not letting him play with the script.  So good for them for figuring that out.  Ricardo Montalbán as Khan Noonien Singh is a wonderful hammy villain.  The crew of the Enterprise were very much their old selves from the tv show.  So, what’s not to love.  And the tragic farewell of Spock to Kirk is the climax of the movie.  Sure, it’s hammy tv acting at its worst.  But it’s wonderfully satisfying for any fan of the old show.  How the young respond to it I won’t speculate on.  I highly recommend it to all fans of Star Trek TOS.

Dredd (2012) – A Fantasy Movie Review

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Okay, let’s start with the basics.  This is a comic book hero film.  That’s the excuse for an action movie.  The “universe” this takes place in has a city stretching from the Boston locale to where Washington D.C. was and is called very poetically, “Mega-City One.”  It is walled in and surrounded by an irradiated desert.  There must have been a nuclear war or something.  Somehow it supports 800 million inhabitants and most of them seem to be third world refugees living awful lives surrounded by drugs, gangs and general depravity.

Law and order are in the hands of the “judges.”  They are law enforcement officers who also can dispense justice as judge, jury and executioner at their own discretion.  They ride around on motorcycles and have weapons that can dispense munitions ranging from standard bullets, to armor piercing rounds, to gas rounds to incendiary devices.  They tend to kill a lot of criminals in the course of their work.

In this story a judge named Dredd is bringing a female rookie named Cassandra Anderson on a trial assignment.  She also happens to be a psychic.  This seems to be linked to her parents having died from the effects of radiation.  She doesn’t wear her armored helmet the way Dredd does because it interferes with her psychic ability but mostly because we wouldn’t be able to see her blonde hair.

The gist of the story is that Dredd and Anderson have captured a member of the Ma-Ma Madrigal gang.  Anderson can tell that he’s guilty of some recent murders so he’s being brought in for interrogation.  But Ma-Ma knows that he would end up spilling the truth about her involvement in the deadly “slo-mo” drug distribution.  So, they lock down the 200-story housing complex where she resides and traps the two judges inside.  The rest of the story is Dredd’s fight to stay alive until help can arrive from outside.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Alright, the spoiler alert is kind of silly.  This is a comic book movie.  Judge Dredd kills all his adversaries and ends the movie virtually the same as it begins, walking off to fight crime in Mega-City One.  In between we meet Ma-Ma, her henchmen and a few of the hopelessly oppressed residents of Mega-City One.  At the end of the movie Dredd approves Anderson’s probationary service.  But when she hands in her shield at the end of her probation I couldn’t tell if she still wanted to do the work.  Oh, and at the climax Dredd throws Ma-Ma Madrigal off the 200-story building to her death.  Of course he did.

Alright, who is this movie for.  Well, it’s for comic book movie fans.  I guess most action movie fans will enjoy it.  People who don’t like gratuitous gun violence probably won’t.  By and large I’ll say I enjoyed it.  It was mindless fun.  A little crude and full of the usual vulgar language so not for kids but no harm for grownups.  Your milage may vary.

Trump Decriminalizes Carbon Dioxide.  photog Claims He Never Inhaled

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Trump, you magnificent bastard.  You did it!!!

Read this Headline:

Trump’s EPA revokes scientific finding that underpinned US fight against climate change

Do you hear that sound?  It’s the sound of rejoicing as sanity is restored to the American economy.  And probably also the sound of a million climate activists crying as their funding disappears.

“The Trump administration on Thursday revoked a scientific finding that long has been the central basis for U.S. action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change, the most aggressive move by the Republican president to roll back climate regulations.”

“President Donald Trump called the move “the single largest deregulatory action in American history, by far,” while EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called the endangerment finding “the Holy Grail of federal regulatory overreach.””

He’s right.  There is such a thing as too much winning.  But it’s too late I’m addicted to it now.

“Trump called the endangerment finding “one of the greatest scams in history,” claiming that it “had no basis in fact” or law. “On the contrary, over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty all over the world,” Trump said at a White House ceremony.”

Can’t you just feel the leftist rage boil?

“The endangerment finding “led to trillions of dollars in regulations that strangled entire sectors of the United States economy, including the American auto industry,” Zeldin said. “The Obama and Biden administrations used it to steamroll into existence a left-wing wish list of costly climate policies, electric vehicle mandates and other requirements that assaulted consumer choice and affordability.”

The endangerment finding and the regulations based on it “didn’t just regulate emissions, it regulated and targeted the American dream. And now the endangerment finding is hereby eliminated,” Zeldin said.”

This will have so many effects on lowering the cost of living for Americans.  Gas prices and fuel prices will decline as regulation will be lifted over many parts of the production cycle.  Automobile prices will decline as all the regulation can be stripped out of the process for selling cars with regular gasoline engines.  When Trump ends the CO2 emissions requirements for power plants, the cost of electricity will also decline.  Well, except in places like California and New England where they punish fossil fuel plants just for the sake of virtue signaling.  This is despite the fact that places like New York State have recently admitted that their citizens just cannot afford to pay the energy bills their state has mandated in the absurd goal of eliminating everything but “renewables.”

And most importantly, Barack Obama will be sad.  This monstrous law was his baby.  He foisted it upon us and trillions of dollars were wasted in trying to fulfill the insane dream of powering the world on solar panels and windmills.  Hopefully this revocation will help revive this country and educate people about how a modern industrial civilization works.  It’s based on power density and not virtue signaling.  Boy, I can’t wait for summer to fire up the grill and broil some rib-eyes.  Man, those are good.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 12FEB2026 – LOR OR VOR

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There are 3 basic strategies to get to the moon. Direct is the is the first, the ship/capsule takes off from Earth goes to the moon, lands and then some part of that capsule/ship takes off from the moon and returns to earth. Because you’re carrying LOTS of weight you don’t need at various points (e.g. the reentry shield on the capsule is dead weight as you land on the moon) the whole thing is VERY heavy. The rockets to do this are immense (e.g. the early NOVA concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_(NASA_rocket) later repurposed but never used for mars exploration). The other two alternatives are Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR) or Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR). In EOR, you go up to a waiting lunar specific lander board it and use it for the earth to moon trip land and return to your Earth/space vehicle. This is the Von Braun/2001 model. It’s one weakness is it usually requires in space refueling of your lunar transit/lander vehicle. This is kind of what I suspect the initial SpaceX model SEEMS to be headed for with a combination of Dragon Crew, Starship cargo/fuel ferry, and Lunar Starship for transit and landing. The Apollo (and current Artemis) use LOR, with Apollo sort of used a mixed model to keep the LEM as light as possible (for a great dramatiztion of this find episode 9 of From the Earth to the Moon, also good discussion of LOR vs EOR). I think SpaceX/Musk have realized lunar Starship is overkill for the task presented, thus making EOR more feasible. They also know Starship overall depends on refueling; if they can’t do that it is kind of game over for Starship for any purpose other than LEO delivery of cargo/ satellites.