You have two characters as great as Kirk and Spock. You have a villain played by Ricardo "Fantasy Island" Montalban. You gave him fucking super strength and gave him a bunch of genetically engineered super soldiers to follow him around doing his evil bidding. Collect your money.
Right?
RIGHT?
Here's my impression of one of the Wrath of Khan script meetings:
WRITER #1: So we decided to use the genetically engineered superhuman Khan for the villain. He was in the Original Series episode Space Seed...
WRITER #2: Wait, whoa, whoa whoa. You said he's genetically engineered?
WRITER #1: Yeah...
WRITER #2: A superhuman? As in super strength?
WRITER #1: Yeah, that's what he's like in the original episode.
WRITER #2: It's just...
WRITER #1: What?
WRITER #2: It's nothing.
WRITER #1: No, tell me.
WRITER #2: Well, it's just that... I always thought that if you were super-strong, you'd also get super-tired and also do a lot of super-resting when you used your super-strength.
This movie could have been called "SITTING: The Motion Picture" and had the same effect. For a movie that boasts exploration of strange new worlds and a villain as great as Khan, we spend an awful lot of time sitting in the bridge. Ricardo Montalban is an intimidating guy, but he never stands up. Not to get a cup of fucking coffee and not to exact his revenge.
That poster makes a million promises of adventure and excitement, with Khan standing, as if to say "I might walk somewhere at some point", and Kirk with his phaser as if to say "I might get into a close-quarters confrontation where I have a conversation with someone", and some dudes in hoods in the background as if to say "we might do something dynamic, like put tape over the cracked hull in a ship or repair the broken air conditioning on the USS Reliant" and some words exploding as if to say "nobody does anything boring like read in this movie, because every time they try, the words fucking EXPLODE".
Nah. The whole movie is sort of aimless wandering, and nothing ever seems like it's at stake because no one even bothers to stand.
Montalban plays the supervillain Khan Noonien Singh, fifteen years ago exiled by the crew of the Enterprise to the dying planet Ceti Alpha 5. There, Khan has spent a lot of time reading, playing with giant insects and doing push-ups. When the USS Reliant docks nearby, Khan and his race of genetically engineered super-soldiers kill the entire crew and take over in the best scene that they don't show.
Kirk and Khan sitting in their chairs chatting it up over the view screens is not particularly exciting. It was the first time, but after a while I was just really crossing my fingers that they would get a face-to-face confrontation. The dude has super-strength and Kirk is, well, motherfucking Kirk. He'd probably blow up Earth if it meant he took out a handful of his enemies, and he's probably blow up a star system if he came face-to-face with someone as excellently evil as Khan.
And let me underline that Montalban totally deserves his legacy as a great villain. Is he a fantastic villain, even if he sits the entire fucking movie? Yeah. Can I imagine the Trek universe doing better? Absolutely. Maybe if Matthew McConaughey played a man that fused with the moon, and he grew anthropomorphic features like eyes and a mouth and a little stubby, nightmare-inducing torso and floated around the galaxy fusing himself with other planets. Man, I wish I had $40 million for these things.
Instead, the whole film feels rather lethargic. The special effects are nowhere near as impressive as they were in The Motion Picture and the space battles are staged with very little flair or suspense. Again, rather lethargically. They seem to move at a crawl.
I loved Ricardo Montalban's performance just as much as everyone else who sees this movie does, but I can't get over how lazy this film feels. When I see a Star Trek film I want to see great special effects and alien worlds and Kirk and Spock using their whiles against a superior threat. Instead what I got was Kirk and Spock with the infinite resources of Starfleet blowing the holy fuck out of a small insurgence of impoverished rebels using stolen Starfleet technology to try and appeal their sentence. For the record, I don't think trying to steal a spaceship is worth spending an eternity on an inhospitable, god-forsake planet.
I rooted for Khan from start to finish. Kirk was just being an asshole.
4/10
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