"He tasks me. He tasks me and I shall have him! I'll chase him 'round the moons of Nibia and 'round the Antares Maelstrom and 'round Perdition's flames before I give him up!"
Thirty years ago today,
Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan was released in American cinemas. I wasn't one of those disappointed in the first
Trek feature; quite the contrary, in fact: I liked it. But there's no denying that
Nicholas Meyer's follow-up was more action-packed, more colorful, and more dramatic than its more cerebral predecessor. As a direct sequel to the TV series' episode, "Space Seed," the story was considerably more personal, and the stakes somehow seemed higher. The threat that V'Ger posed to Earth in
The Motion Picture was almost too big to really grasp, while Khan's motives and the threat he posed to our heroes were a lot more identifiable.
Meyer also managed restore a sense of humanity to the characters, who had often come across as slightly robotic in
Robert Wise's film, pulling probably the best performances of Kirk and Spock out of
William Shatner and
Leonard Nimoy that we've seen in the entire canon. Not to mention the exceptional acting from
DeForest Kelly and the rest of the crew, and the utterly unforgettable, scenery-chewing (yet layered) performance of
Ricardo Montalban as Khan.
Star Trek II remains my favorite of the
Trek films, and sits securely among my top ten favorite
Trek episodes, as well. It's one of those films that hardly seems to have aged at all - every time I watch it (most recently, on Blu-ray), I'm caught up in it as thoroughly as I was the first time I saw it at age 17. It - along with
Return Of The Jedi the following year - really marked the end of the
Space: 1970 era for me; no matter how many good and entertaining genre films Hollywood produced over the next few decades, I was no longer a kid, and couldn't enjoy them
quite the same way. Thank goodness, 1982 was such a great year for sci-fi flicks....
"Space: the final frontier. These are the continuing voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."
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