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.