Here's What The Worst Critic Reviews Said About Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan
The general consensus among sci-fi fans is that Nicholas Meyer's 1982 film "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" is the best of the 13 extant "Star Trek" movies. Watching the film, it's easy to see why it has this reputation; it's a corker of a thriller. It's a film that deals with Kirk getting older and having to face the consequences of his reckless younger days as a captain, facing the fact that he may not be the hero he thought he was. Moreso, though, the film features a very non-Trek villain in Khan (Ricardo Montalbán), a vicious ultra-human hellbent on revenge. Khan was such a powerful villain that he kind of altered the way "Star Trek" movies were perceived, and many of the more recent Trek flicks eschewed the show's typical bent toward diplomacy and science in favor of morally simplistic, violence-ready hero-vs.-villain stories.
Trekkies have a wonderful time debating which of the Trek movies is best — I'm personally more fond of "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" and "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" — but ineffable pop opinion still seems to regularly push "Khan" up to the tops of retrospectives and ranking listicles. As such, openly declaring "Khan" to be a bad film may be considered a faux pas of massive dimensions.
But not everyone loves "Wrath of Khan," and looking back at some of the reviews — handily archived by Rotten Tomatoes — there are some legitimate complaints about the way Meyer's film ultimately shook out. Even some of the positive reviews had some critiques about structure and ambition. Roger Ebert gave the film three stars, saying that he also preferred the headiness of "Motion Picture" over the character-forward writing of "Khan."
Here are a few other notable criticisms of "The Wrath of Khan."
David Denby
David Denby, writing for New York Times Magazine in 1982, declared the demonstrative Khan to be an over-the-top figure, describing his dialogue as "Miltonic doggerel." He also felt that while "Khan" was a decided improvement over "The Motion Picture" (which he described as "one of the most boring pictures ever made"), he still felt that it wasn't terribly engaging. "Meyer has worked a few jokes into the formulas and added some physical movement," Denby wrote, "but there's still nothing to excite the senses. It's TV all the way: The actors race up and down plastic corridors in the same old story about the universe almost coming to an end."
Denby then spun out into a lamentation on the state of modern cinema. Why, he felt, are we bothering with uncreative rehashes of old TV shows when time would be better spent exploring the cinematic form with a modicum of thrills? He continued:
"When you see stuff like this you wonder if the movies haven't died and someone simply forgot to bury them. A film based on a TV series is a hopeless, self-defeating idea. What people loved about the material on TV is obviously what they're eager to see onscreen, so the director has his hands tied from the beginning. If the movie had any energy of its own — if it looked and sounded like a movie — the audience would probably feel betrayed."
Note that 1982 was a time when TV was decidedly considered a lesser medium than film both in and out of the industry. Denby's complaints were about a changing media landscape that, even in 1982, seemed to be eating its own tail. One can see his point.
Derek Malcolm
Some fans would bristle at Derek Malcolm's review in the Guardian, as he spoiled the film's twist ending right up front. For those unaware, Spock (Leonard Nimoy) sacrifices himself to save the U.S.S. Enterprise during the film's climax. Knowing that the following sequel is called "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock," it's safe to assume he won't stay dead for long. That franchise cynicism, however, was sensed by Malcolm while watching "Khan," so he felt fine spoiling the ending, knowing we were well into crass commercial territory.
Malcolm also felt that the dialogue was dumb and that Meyer's direction was merely adequate, serving nostalgia rather than engagement. He wrote:
"The dull thud of Nicholas Meyer's direction, which mized the custardy platitudes of the original television series with some of the less thunderous special effects of latter-day cinema, has everything in place, like a tidy housewife's kitchen. And the dollars are rolling in to prove we are all children at heart and wish to remain so."
Both the 1980s and the 2010s were cinematic epochs devoted to special effects and childishness. More and more money was going to simple, kid-friendly entertainment properties, and less was being given to complex, adult dramas. This has been a critical complaint for generations, it seems. Malcolm felt that "Khan" wasn't terribly mature, and merely capably told an action story. He clearly longed for more. "Star Trek II," he said, didn't do anything new or unexpected. It simply did more "Star Trek" stuff. Spock's death, Malcolm felt, was hardly novel, and didn't move the needle in terms of introducing daring narrative notions; he knew Spock would be back, so why bother killing him?
David Kehr
Writing for the Chicago Reader, David Kehr penned a mere capsule for "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," and was dismissive, saying that the story was nonsensical, but at least engaged the viewer on the level of a thriller. But, he continued:
"If only director Nicholas Meyer had grasped the implications of his tale more fully and enthusiastically, this might have become a classic piece of cornball SF poetry, but as it stands the tepid acting and one-set claustrophobia take a heavy toll."
Reading these reviews, one can get a sense of certain critics keying into the smallness of "Wrath of Khan." "Star Trek" often played with bigger sci-fi concepts, and the original series frequently featured powerful, ineffable space deities whose morals transcended that of ordinary humanity in a self-serving, Nietzschean way. "Wrath of Khan" was a tiny character piece about petty blood revenge and a magical terraforming device. Larger philosophical ideas have clearly been put aside in favor of a more cinematic thriller. It's a fine-enough thriller, Kehr seems to say, but it's hardly reaching for grandeur, or "cornball SF poetry," which he clearly would have preferred.
Paul Taylor
Cruelest of all was Paul Taylor, writing for Time Out. His capsule review was aggressively unamused by the treacly, sentimental frontiersmanship of "Star Trek," feeling its tone to be harmfully corny. One of the more popular criticisms of "Star Trek" is that, despite all its hifalutin speeches about diplomacy and egalitarianism, still espouses a vaguely colonialist philosophy at its core. It follows military protocol and is hung up on a certain kind of "good-mannered" propriety that many non-Trekkies find dull at best, and naive at worst. In a bitter world full of suffering and violence, Trek's core ethos of "can't we all just get along?" strikes some — and fairly so — as being childish and old-fashioned. Colonialist frontiersmanship will not save us. Taylor wrote:
"Foregoing the special effects bonanza of its predecessor, it settles for low camp humanoid melodrama. The aging Shatner and his equally self-amused Enterprise cohorts now 'boldly go' wreathed in soft focus, smiling down on a shipful of apprentice Trekkies. [...] The net effect, between embarrassed guffaws, is incredulity: a movie at once post-TV and pre-D.W. Griffith."
It's bigger than a TV show, but, Taylor notes, as backward in its ideas as the films of D.W. Griffith, the filmmaker behind the staggeringly racist polemic "The Birth of a Nation" in 1915.
It's fair to point out that we critics tend to look for different cinematic facets than many audiences in the mainstream. We see so many movies that we recognize — and get tired of — certain tropes more quickly. A capable action film isn't going to be worth noting unless it does something truly extraordinary with its action or contains striking and interesting themes.
For Taylor, "Star Trek II" did nothing extraordinary.