Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan remains perhaps the best-loved of the Star Trek movies and for good reason. Not only did it present the franchise with some of its key moments -- topped by the death of Mr. Spock himself -- but it helped course-correct after a bumpy transition from The Original Series. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was intended to be the saga’s game-changer, launching it into direct competition with George Lucas’s Star Wars. Instead, Wrath of Khan took up that banner, and The Motion Picture was left a singularly bizarre misfire.
Star Trek II succeeded in part because it understood what the first film got wrong. It restored the beloved characters to the forefront and used the science fiction components as backdrops. But more importantly, it identified how Star Trek needed to change from The Orginal Series and did so without throwing out the elements that made Trek great.
The Motion Picture arose through a labored development process that saw all manner of ideas presented and discarded throughout the 1970s. That reflected Star Trek’s unique position at the time. Fans loved The Orginal Series and wanted to see more of the characters’ adventures, but beyond that, the producers weren’t entirely sure what they had in Star Trek. At the same time, two massive sea changes had arisen in the science fiction world: 2001: A Space Odyssey, which premiered late in Trek’s run in 1968, and Star Wars, which turned moviemaking upside down in 1977.
Against those prevailing trends, Gene Roddenberry and the producers couldn’t be certain what would and wouldn’t work. The pop-art style of The Orginal Series felt out of touch, and everyone agreed that they didn’t want the movie to feel like just another episode of the TV show. Unfortunately, their efforts to bridge that gap ultimately took them in the wrong direction. The Motion Picture infamously focused on an epic concept -- in this case, a massive artificial intelligence heading towards Earth -- that dwarfed the characters beneath it. Director Robert Wise slowed the pace to focus on the effects shots, resulting in slow, laborious sequences that failed to advance the story.
In addition, the overall look of the film suffered from efforts to emulate the workaday grit evinced by Star Wars. The bright colors of The Orginal Series were watered down to dull beiges and blues, augmented by a surprisingly sterile new Enterprise design and visual effects that dwarfed beneath abstract imagery. They reflected the times in all the wrong ways, losing Trek’s unique identity while adding a sterile and anonymous visual stamp in its place.
The film did well enough to justify a sequel but fell short of expectations, and the decision was made to reduce the scope for The Wrath of Khan. That alone moved the franchise in the right direction. Without the option of grandiose spectacle, the best course of action was to put the focus back on the characters, which The Motion Picture had lost track of. It meant finding new ways to use previous footage since there wasn’t money to shoot new effects. That, in turn, meant getting the perfunctory elements (such as leaving space dock) out of the way quickly before the audience noticed they were looking at re-used footage. The pacing improved by default, and the film moved with the swiftness audiences expected from blockbuster science fiction.
It also benefitted from new creative blood in Nicholas Meyer, a filmmaker who not only hadn’t worked on Star Trek before but didn’t profess to be a huge fan. His previous work found new sides to well-known characters, most notably in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution which dealt with Sherlock Holmes’s drug addiction, and Time After Time which put H. G. Wells in his own time machine. Meyer’s lack of context meant that he wouldn’t treat the characters with kid gloves, but also that he had to respect them for the sake of Existing fans. Hence, he was able to delve into an aging Admiral Kirk facing the long-avoided consequences of his actions, as well as the death of Spock, which intrigued Leonard Nimoy enough to get him to sign on again.
Visually, he hit upon the notion of Napoleonic navy battles in the tradition of Horatio Hornblower with the Enterprise essentially exchanging broadsides with enemy ships. That led to a redesign of Starfleet’s uniforms to the wine-red tunics and other mild changes. The combination gave The Wrath of Khan a distinctive look that the first movie lacked.
The results delivered one of the franchise’s high points and set the trend for subsequent Trek movies. By the time they had run their course, Star Trek: The Next Generation had taken up the baton and five of the original crew’s six movies looked and felt of a kind. That left The Motion Picture a strange anomaly caught between two eras in the franchise and distinctive for all the wrong reasons.
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