Rewatching/Remembering Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

February 9, 2019

I remember seeing Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan a lot as a kid. It was one of those movies that seemed to always be playing on HBO, and so there are definitely some parts of the movie that I recall well.

There’s the “ear scene,” that kind of sticks out as a trauamtic memory. And of course the final scene itself. But much of the middle remained a blur for me. And in fact, the larger story of what was going on also remained pretty blurry.

As a taste, here’s the trailer:

One of the gifts I got for Liz over Christmas was a set of all the Star Trek movies.. and we’re slowly working our way through them. The first was… less engaging that I had hoped, but today we decided to pop the second one in. For as much as Liz has gotten into Star Trek these last few years, she’s never seen any of the movies.

Overall, the second movie to be much more enjoyable than the first. It’s still pretty dated, but I found myself more taken with the story. There were mercifully fewer long, tracking shots of the Enterprise (still recovering from the first movie)… so that was definitely a bonus.

I remember seeing the original episode involving Khan a while ago, and really liked watching Ricardo Montalbán do his thing again.

Looking back, I didn’t realize how much Kirk grappled with aging in the first two films. There seemed to be a lot more going on, in terms of family, but maybe that’s just been on my brain since yesterday.