My goodness.\u00a0 1982.\u00a0 Has it been that long?\u00a0 I think I saw this movie in the theater but I\u2019m no longer sure.\u00a0 Okay, so this movie shows all the signs of riding the crest of Star Wars making sci-fi exciting again.\u00a0 The theme music is obviously aping John Williams\u2019 theme from Star Wars.\u00a0 Well, of course they did.\u00a0 They\u2019d have been nuts not to.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
(Spoiler Alert \u2013 Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)<\/strong><\/p>\n When the movie begins \u201cAdmiral\u201d James Kirk is observing cadets responding to a simulation of a space emergency.\u00a0 Captain Spock is testing his Vulcan student Ensign Saavik to see if she can reconcile reality with regulations.\u00a0 During these simulations Kirk tells Dr. McCoy that he feels old now that he\u2019s behind a desk instead of commanding a starship.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cgenesis device.\u201d\u00a0 This is a system that can take a lifeless planet and both terraform it and create life on it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The reason that the Reliant\u2019s crew didn\u2019t know this is because some cosmic instability blew up one planet and moved Khan\u2019s world where it had been.\u00a0 This also made Khan\u2019s home a death sentence that he only avoided by his incredible intelligence.\u00a0 But the death of his wife Khan blames on Kirk.<\/p>\n Putting \u201csuper earwigs\u201d into the ears of Chekov and Terrell, Khan takes control of their minds and forces them to betray their ship into Khan\u2019s hands.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Apparently, this is the dark side of the device and why only lifeless worlds must be treated.<\/p>\n Khan captures the genesis device and lures Kirk into an attack by the Reliant.\u00a0 After almost destroying the Enterprise Kirk uses some trickery to take over control of the Reliant\u2019s bridge and damages that ship enough to get it to retreat.<\/p>\n Kirk manages to rescue the chief scientists of the genesis project.\u00a0 They happen to be one of Kirk\u2019s old girlfriends and her son who also happens to be Kirk\u2019s son.\u00a0 The young man despises Kirk for not being a pacifist geek like himself.\u00a0 Finally, the showdown arrives.\u00a0 The Enterprise is heavily damaged and can neither outrun nor outfight the Reliant.\u00a0 So, Kirk lures Khan into a \u201cnebula\u201d where the Enterprise\u2019s weakness will not be decisive.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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, \u201cRemember.\u201d \u00a0Spock then enters the radiation area and removes the safety housing from the warp drive and with his face and hands in the radiation field, \u201cfixes\u201d the warp drive manually.\u00a0 As soon as it comes on line, the bridge crew uses the warp drive to escape the genesis blast by a split second.<\/p>\n Then McCoy calls Kirk over the intercom and tells him to come to engineering in time to say goodbye to a dying Spock.\u00a0 The rest of the movie is Spock\u2019s 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.\u00a0 After that Kirk and his son have a reconciliation.\u00a0 When asked again by McCoy how he feels Kirk says, \u201cYoung, I feel young again.\u201d\u00a0 In the last scene we see Spock\u2019s coffin on the ground in an idyllic setting on the new planet.<\/p>\n Okay.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So, this movie had lots of action and stuff happens left and right.\u00a0 I read that they achieved this by kicking Gene Roddenberry upstairs and not letting him play with the script.\u00a0 So good for them for figuring that out.\u00a0 Ricardo Montalb\u00e1n as Khan Noonien Singh is a wonderful hammy villain.\u00a0 The crew of the Enterprise were very much their old selves from the tv show.\u00a0 So, what\u2019s not to love.\u00a0 And the tragic farewell of Spock to Kirk is the climax of the movie.\u00a0 Sure, it\u2019s hammy tv acting at its worst.\u00a0 But it\u2019s wonderfully satisfying for any fan of the old show.\u00a0 How the young respond to it I won\u2019t speculate on.\u00a0 I highly recommend it to all fans of Star Trek TOS.<\/p>\n