re: Why Wrath of Khan has the best space battle ever

An amazing movie. Everyone immediately jumps to Star Wars for sci Fi score or 2001 Space odyssey. The score for Wrath of Kahn, from start to finish, can go toe to toe with the best Sci-fi has to offer. Star Wars might win publicly on name alone, but it was cool and Star Trek was for nerds... But that score is one of the greatest ever made.

That’s how you follow up the source material and turn it into a great sequel. Going back and looking at the original Trek, it just seemed like this episode had something to it that most others did not. They were able to use the original characters and continue a story which was both imaginative and interesting.

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Then Star Trek Into Darkness comes out, and the movie culminates with Spock beating the shite out of Khan on top of a speeding garbage truck. And there was zero tension.

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"It's perfectly in Spock's character to jump onto a flying hover vehicle and punch someone repeatedly in the face while screaming "I'm gonna murder you, you cocksucker motherfricker"."
-Mike Stoklasa

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The thing that Wrath of Khan gets right with its battle scenes is that it doesn’t go too fast. The action is very easy to follow, and the pace also plays a role in showing you how big these vessels are. It gives you the impression that this is a rare clash of titans. These are dreadnoughts in space, not fighter planes. Too many sci fi shows and movies do space combat fast… even Star Trek itself is guilty of this, where a few shots blow up a capital ship and stuff is flying and zipping across the screen so fast you can’t follow it.

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Yeah, that isn't how dreadnaughts would fight in space. It's all for entertainment and it does a good job at that.

Want a more realistic space battle where you have access to Star Trek level speeds in space, read the Bobiverse book series. You would have crazy high tau effect and it would be crazy fast and hard to follow and over quickly for the human brain to even process. Everything would be done by a computer and programming done before hand or by AI. It wouldn't be entertaining for humans in real time.

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To me Ricardo Montalbán made the move, he was such a good bad guy

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I don't know if this gets said enough.

How often do we see such a memorable villain in a single movie? The only MCU villains that even come close are Loki and Thanos, and of course they're the only ones with character arcs that aren't just "Me evil" or "Me conquer!"

The best villains from those 80s movies that aren't silent ones or, more to the point, not the actual stars (like horror movie villains) were characters like Hans Gruber, the ones seen as both smart and frightening, but Kahn lent something that even Gruber didn't - a reason that the audience could, at some level, sympathize with. Kahn blaming Kirk for the death of his wife and most of his people is a strong motivation beyond "me evil, argh!"

True, we are not left with any sense that Kahn is "good" either - torturing and murdering anyone he deems irrelevant, for example. Kahn is basically how I hope Doctor Doom is portrayed when he eventually makes it back on the big screen (though I don't exactly have high hopes).

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