Thursday, December 08, 2016

The Wrath of Khan


Wrathy enough? Too Wrathy? Are the Wrathy levels just right? I think that consensus is behind "enough Wrathyness." I agree and remarkably, so does Derek.  

It's always hard to quantify what goes right instead of what goes wrong. Khan has weight and depth, even if his actions are two-dimensional. Sulu and Uhura don't do much more here than they do in The Motion Picture, but Scotty and Checkov do. The Genesis device is one of the most MacGuffin-y of MacGuffins, but it doesn't magically resolve the plot. Quite the opposite really.

What is it that makes "Wrath of Khan" work?

The trailer we're watching can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wzG1u4zStMI hope you like spoilers.

17 to 01 is available on iTunes. It updates Thursday mornings at 2:00 AM ET / 1:00 CT. We're also amazingly on Stitcher.

2 comments:

SkilTao said...

You can't really respond "peace and long life" to someone dying in front of you, huh.

It's interesting how the movie starts with some subtle bits, but none of them stays subtle- obviously, there's Khan's obsession with defeating Kirk, which gets more explicit as the movie goes on; there's hints about Kirk's son before the movie explicitly acknowledges it; and there's Saavik trying to understand how she should have approached the Kobayashi Maru test, which culminates with Spock's death - whose temporariness also plays into that particular theme. I don't know that this is something the movie did *right* (that's surely down to Ricardo Montalban and fixing known errors of TMP), but I imagine it helped in patching or obscuring any weak points.

100% agree with Derek about the appeal of handdrawn wireframes.

I think the Enterprise is shot darker here to match how it was shot dark in TMP. (I would guess it was shot dark in TMP for better contrast with lighting effects.)

Ahh, so Riker docking the saucer over Farpoint is a callback to Savik taking the ship out of spacedock; and since Saavik taking the ship out is preceded during the shuttle approach with Kirk telling Sulu "I'm glad you're at the helm, these cadets can't fly," I don't think Kirk's distrust is Saavik-specific.

It would amuse me if Kirk's collection of antique weapons etc mirrored Trelane's.

It's nice that Chekov is first officer now, given his apparent apprenticeship to Spock in TOS.

Oh hey, I realized Khan was quoting Moby Dick, but I didn't catch how that reflects on his self-awareness. Good call.

VanVelding said...

I can imagine Admiral Kirk going back to Trelane's planet, shrugging as everything is still there, and then just looting the place.