A Far Better Thing
[Spoilers for a forty-year-old movie]
Look, I’m not going to be able to say anything about this movie that hasn’t been said many times over in the forty years since its release. I’m essentially just pointing at it and shouting that it’s great and you should watch it – but in all candor that’s mostly what this blog is going to be as a whole.
In my judgment I simply have no alternative but to take this opportunity to write about it, however. I grew up watching five films every single time I was sick as a child: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and the three Star Wars movies, and of those five, the first was always my favorite. In fact, I suspect I have seen this movie more times than any other in my life, although I cannot be sure – I can’t even remember the first time I saw it. Growing up, I knew it in its tape-recorded form, complete with fast-forwarded commercial breaks. On Sunday, for the first time, I saw it on a movie screen. But no matter how I watch it, it always holds up.
So, where to begin? Well, let’s start with the aesthetics. Of course, my feelings on this aren’t even in the same quadrant with objectivity, and so my aesthetic sense may actually just be a pavlovian response – for instance, the instant I hear that eerie, space-y sound come over the Paramount logo, I get chills. I react to the opening credits the way most people react to a Fast & Furious car chase.
Objectively though, the film looks amazing, which is impressive given how it was made on a reduced budget. There’s a very specific sort of dark-‘80s thing going on with everything from the lighting to the set dressing to the uniforms – weirdly exaggerated collars and jackets, but all in muted reds and browns. This film embraces the darkness of space, and I really enjoy the unusual choice to make our heroes always occupy the darkest, reddest environments, while cold, bright, blue light is reserved for the villain.
Speaking of the villain, Montalban is delightful, and he looks as if he crawled right out of Mad Max. People have made plenty of admiring jokes about his chest in this movie, but you kind of have to acknowledge the power of its rich Corinthian leather. Maybe I should get myself one of those Starfleet pendants.
The real star here are the ships. The Enterprise is of course a reused model from The Motion Picture, so the design aesthetic was set from go. Credit must go, then, to the production designers of the Reliant for coming up with a design that is both instantly recognizable as being made from the same Starfleet stamp as Enterprise, while also being instantly distinguishable from it. Many have pointed out that the Reliant looks intrinsically threatening, a squat boxer of a ship, with a compact bulk that gives it more weight than the Enterprise. Enterprise, on the other hand, is all grace, with the lines of a gothic flying buttress. I love spacecraft and space movies, and I’ve seen many, many spaceships. The USS Enterprise, as it appears in these six original Trek films, is easily the most beautiful spaceship to ever grace the screen.
Wrapping up the aesthetics, the film has a very disciplined color palette – everything is some variation of dark red or pale blue/teal. The liberal use of dark lighting and red alert make the rest of Trek look altogether too bright and clean during battle sequences. And my favorite bit of all is the Starfleet uniforms, which are better here than in any other Star Trek property. Even their 80’s kitsch is appealing, because it gives a certain sense of nostalgic innocence to this vision of the future.
Finally, the score (to which I am currently listening) is perhaps my favorite of any movie. That’s saying a lot, because film scores are the predominant genre of music I listen to. It’s just so rousing and propulsive, and it makes you feel ready to face even the Kobayashi Maru.
But there’s a great deal more to like this film beyond how it looks and sounds. For starters, as a former literature teacher, I love a movie that wears its literary allusions on its sleeve and essentially yells at the audience to go read a book. There’s a closeup of Khan’s bookshelf in the film, and we see there several familiar titles.
Inferno is obviously relevant to Khan’s personal situation on Ceti Alpha V, trapped in a hell from which he longs to escape. But Kirk is also feeling hopeless at the start of the film, and his catharsis is achieved only by descending deeper into pain, until he is able to pass through the encounter with death and see a new dawn, like Dante glimpsing the stars again. Paradise Lost is a reminder of Space Seed, the Star Trek episode this movie sequelizes, where Khan quotes Satan’s speech, framing Kirk as the deity casting him out of heaven. In a way, this only serves to heighten the contrast of Kirk’s loss of control in this film. He’s no longer the swashbuckling captain who laughs at death and always cuts a way through to victory in the end. Instead, Kirk is weirdly passive in Wrath of Khan, as the title reminds us – he is merely reacting to Khan, and ultimately the events of the film happen to him, and he lives through them, much as we live through things that happen to us. He doesn’t save the ship, and he doesn’t really even defeat Khan – Khan self-destructs out of sheer pride. Kirk is saved by being humbled, delivered by unmerited grace in the form of Spock.
Continuing, Lear is an apt choice for the shelf, although it applies to Kirk more than to Khan. King Lear is about growing old and losing control and having to live to see the consequences of your choices and neglect, all of which applies to Kirk. As Khan points out, Kirk never bothered to check on Khan, and thus bears responsibility for what ensues. Moby Dick is quoted several times and is a transparent matching of Khan to Ahab. But what’s not on the shelf is A Tale of Two Cities, which Kirk reads throughout the film. This work provides the poetry to explain the eucatastrophe of the film, how life the joy can emerge from tragedy and death. This redemptive turn is essential to Kirk’s story – it is how he comes to let go of his hubris and discover beauty and life beyond his own.
This is where I think the film really connects for me. It speaks to the feeling that catches up with almost all of us at some point or another – that we have made the wrong decision somewhere, years ago, and now our life is wasted, that our best days are behind us. Khan is trapped there, in his trauma and his past. Kirk, meanwhile, is on autopilot, just going through the motions of living. But Spock’s life-giving death, his dictum that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and his benediction to live long and prosper, all point to the reality, symbolized in Genesis: that beyond ourselves, even in our dying, there is new life and beauty and joy. When Kirk says he feels young at the end, he isn’t literally rejuvenated, and his circumstances aren’t changed a bit, except by loss. But he is not looking at himself anymore. He is looking outward, to new possibilities. That, I suppose, is the spirit of Star Trek: to search out new life-forms and new civilizations – to find life and joy and beauty beyond ourselves.
Live long, and prosper.
