| Review : |
Maybe because it was the set-up for the best Trek film of the lot (IMHO) I was looking forward to this one. Having seen it, it was good, but didn't quite live up to that. The plot had a few holes. Kirk must have been extremely complacent to allow Khan access to the technical manuals (which ought to be classified). No wonder he hushed it up! Marla McGivers seemed to be a bit of a pushover and a very weak character, but that was a fault of many women in TOS. Still, she did come to her senses in time to save Kirk. However, the good points outweighed the bad by a very long way. The main good point was Khan himself, who came accross as ambitious, ruthless and arrogant, but not genuinely mad or evil. This suggests decent performance from Ricardo Montalban, which is exactly what we got. The idea behind the episode is interesting as well, where the consequences of something that I'm sure the eugenicists must have thought was helpful to Humanity turns out to be a disaster. How many times has that happened? Then there is the direct link from a foreseeable future to the Trek future. Finally, there is the pacing (bang on) and the sense that something might be wrong right from the beginning. The new CGI made the Botany Bay look like a battered old derelict, which was just about right, and I liked the way she had lost attitude control at the start. Very effective. Fourteen years after the Botany Bay's supposed launch, technology has got nowhere near that level. Still, perhaps people really thought that they would get this far in the heady world of sixties spaceflight. All I can say is that, much as I would love to see ships like the Botany Bay flying for real, I'm extremely glad that the writers got this future very wrong. |
