You don’t have to be a “Trekkie” — a cultish devotee of Star Trek — to appreciate Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, released 40 years ago this month. (I certainly am not.) Thanks to excellent direction by Nicholas Meyer, a solid script, and serious dramatic weight and thematic content, it rises above standard sci-fi fare. But you’d have to be a fool to deny the truth: The sci-fi fare it rises above includes, well . . . every Star Wars movie ever made, for instance.
A lot had to go right for this to be the case. Star Trek: The Motion Picture, released three years earlier, was a commercial success but a real bore, nearly extinguishing the cult of Trek, perpetuated by its obsessive fans for a decade after the cancellation of the original series. To keep Star Trek alive, Paramount realized the series needed new blood. Primary creative responsibilities were removed from series creator Gene Roddenberry and handed over to Trek outsider Nicholas Meyer, who sought both to return the series to its space-naval roots and to reckon with the passage of time. Famously egotistical William Shatner had to give up his hopes to play a perpetually ageless version of Captain James T. Kirk to fit with Meyer’s vision. Leonard Nimoy (Spock) and George Takei (Sulu) had to be persuaded out of their reluctance to join the picture, the former of whom had a dramatic condition for doing so. And one Ricardo Montalbán required a break from Fantasy Island to return as the picture’s villain.
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