If You Only Watch One Star Trek Movie, This Is The One To Stream
Star Trek movies have always been hit-and-miss and not always the kind that Mr. Spock would find “fascinating.” Even though this venerable Paramount franchise is best known for its television episodes, the best of the movies make Star Trek feel epic, and the worst will leave you wondering what the hell nerds ever saw in Trek in the first place. We decided to determine which of the Trek films is the absolute best, and here it is: if you can only stream one Star Trek movie, it needs to be The Wrath of Khan.
One reason that The Wrath of Khan is the best Star Trek movie is that without it, we quite literally wouldn’t have any other Trek films to enjoy. When the franchise ventured into movies with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, critics gave it the tongue-in-cheek nickname “The Motionless Picture” because it was so boring.
Over franchise creator Gene Roddenberry’s protest, Nicholas Meyer gave his own Star Trek movie a nautical theme in an attempt to create what he called “Horatio Hornblower in space.”
Even Paramount executives agreed with this assessment, and they hired Harve Bennett to produce a much cheaper sequel: The Wrath of Khan had a budget of only $12 million compared to the first movie’s staggering budget of $44 million.
Still, the early scripts for The Wrath of Khan were a hot mess, and it would never have become the best Star Trek movie without director Nicholas Meyer. In addition to directing the movie, he wrote a screenplay in only 12 days to accommodate the VFX team and cranked out multiple rewrites as needed, all without getting any credit for doing so.
In retrospect, such credit might have seemed superfluous because Meyer soon became known as the man who kept the Star Trek franchise alive.
Somewhat ironically, he did this by making sure his own Star Trek movie was as little like the last one as possible. The Wrath of Khan replaced the pajama uniforms of The Motion Picture with sharp red-and-black uniforms, and many fans consider these “Monster Maroon” uniforms the best the franchise ever had.
Meyer also built upon an earlier writer’s idea to use The Original Series villain Khan as the Big Bad of the movie, correctly believing that one of the reasons the first film failed to resonate with people was because it lacked a central villain to root against.
While Ricardo Montalban’s Khan was a great villain in The Original Series episode “Space Seed,” he is nothing short of captivating in The Wrath of Khan.
The character has a major grudge against William Shatner’s Kirk, and after stealing his own powerful Starfleet vessel, Khan wages a grudge match against his old foe, with their prize being a technological innovation that has the power to create new habitable planets or destroy them altogether.
Over franchise creator Gene Roddenberry’s protest, Nicholas Meyer gave his own Star Trek movie a nautical theme in an attempt to create what he called “Horatio Hornblower in space.”
The Wrath of Khan replaced the pajama uniforms of The Motion Picture with sharp red-and-black uniforms, and many fans consider these “Monster Maroon” uniforms the best the franchise ever had.
In the end, it all came together beautifully: The Wrath of Khan was beloved by critics, and it currently has an 86 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. It also earned $97 million at the box office against its modest budget of $12 million, meaning that it earned a little less than the first Star Trek movie ($139 million) but cost far, far less to produce.
Paramount loved the numbers and audiences loved the film, which is why we got 11 more movies afterward, and the ongoing popularity of movies based on The Original Series led to the creation of the beloved follow-up series Star Trek: The Next Generation.
If it’s your first time watching this Star Trek movie, you should know that The Wrath of Khan, in the parlance of Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, “gives it all she’s got.” The characters are great: we see Kirk’s anxiety about growing older, Khan’s monomania about proving himself, and Spock’s willingness to literally for his own personal ideals.
All of this great characterization is wrapped in a movie with beautiful special effects and some of the best battles in the entire franchise.
Star Trek Since The Wrath of Khan
Star Trek as a franchise has been chasing the creative and commercial high of this second movie for decades. We’ve gotten inferior throwbacks to the space grudge match in movies like Star Trek: Nemesis, and Star Trek Into Darkness surprisingly brought Khan back as a villain in an attempt to subvert our expectations.
At this point, the only thing that would really subvert fan expectations is if the franchise actually matched The Wrath of Khan’s quality, and since that has proven to be the real “no-win scenario” for Paramount, you’re best off just streaming the movie that will leave you screaming “KHAN!!!!” in your best Shatner voice for the rest of the day.
