For this uninitiated casual fan, it’s an ambivalent experience watching this in 2022 for the first time on a massive screen. How did a film with such dated/dodgy special effects (which wasn’t that wonderful even back in 1982) and a fair amount of overacting from its central cast, manage to attract such adoration from people who would scoff otherwise, while making grown men (and women) weep? After its lacklustre first attempt to move from the small to the big screen, this sequel boldly takes inspiration from s1e22 of the TV show as its starting point. After being exiled to an uninhabitable planet with his motley crew of New Romantics rejects many years ago, a chance happening allows Ricardo Montalban’s Khan to escape and exact revenge on Captain Kirk and the SS Enterprise. With Nicholas Meyer’s proficient directing, acting levels that vary from pseudo-Shakespearean to shouting to William Shatner, and a screenplay introducing Bibi Besch and Marritt Butrick’s mother-and-son scientists-in-peril, this space soap opera is ready to go where many (writers) have been before. The film is, to borrow Spock’s famous assessment, illogical, yet no matter how naff or silly it is, its warm fuzzy nostalgic charm simply cannot be denied, and perhaps here lies the key to the appreciation of this film. Behind the scene politics might have accidentally bestowed a poignant ending here that commercial considerations later will unravel, but it’s one of its few true emotional moments that explains why this franchise still maintains such a fiercely loyal following four decades later. I may find this dated and I’ve still got more questions than answers about its dubious plotting but, fans or not, one can’t really begrudge a film that gifted us that wonderfully camp yet ridiculously endearing Khhhhhaannnn!! meme, which perfectly sums up the film for me.
@SubtitledFriend 