Darren Mooney Profile picture
Jul 21, 2022 22 tweets 9 min read Read on X
#NowWatching “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.”
“The Wrath of Khan” is one of those great movies that has somewhat been flattened in the memory of it. It’s brilliant, and epic, and propulsive.

But it is also elegiac and mournful, the story of old men who lead the young to slaughter while chasing phantoms of glories long past.
It’s no small irony that “The Wrath of Khan” became a past glory that the “Star Trek” franchise would spend decades pursuing.

Like Kirk chases the memory of command, and like Khan chases his vendetta against Kirk.

“The Wrath of Khan” understands the futility of this.
“It literally is Genesis.”

After the very Roddenberry-driven “Motion Picture”, it’s notable that “The Wrath of Khan” defaults back to the paranoia and skepticism of Starfleet more associated with Gene L. Coon’s “Star Trek.”

This is an atomic bomb story, after all.
The Federation has always been an extrapolation of the “American Century” United States into the future.

It’s the myth of Kennedy’s New Frontier, extrapolated to its logical extreme. It’s American self-image as science-fiction.
Notably, the very first season of “Star Trek” makes it clear that the franchise’s future traces its origin back to the start of the post-Second World War order.

“The City on the Edge of Forever” makes it clear that “Star Trek” originated in America’s involvement in World War II.
Indeed, it feels oddly appropriate that the final season of “Enterprise” opens by revisiting this idea, underscoring how rooted the “Star Trek” universe is in the American understanding of the world order following the end of the Second World War.
Of course, this is literally true in the sense that many of the early writers of “Star Trek” were veterans of the Second World War.

Without the Second World War, there would be no “Star Trek.” However, there is more to it than that. It’s about the world after that conflict.
So it’s very clever that “The Wrath of Khan” is built around confronting the uncomfortable and often unspoken side of that world order, the fact that it’s built on the atrocity nuclear weapons.

A world born in nuclear fire. That’s what Genesis is. Destruction and birth.
Incidentally, one of the more underrated aspects of “The Search for Spock” is that Kruge is entirely right.

The Genesis Device is a tool of Federation imperialism and expansionism, the ability to remake entire worlds in their own image.

It’s horrifying and unsettling.
“Sir, you did it.”
“I did nothing… except get caught with my britches down.”

It’s interesting to imagine how fans would react today to a movie treating Kirk how “The Wrath of Khan” treated Kirk in 1982.

(To be fair, they’d probably do what they did in 1982: death threats.)
More seriously, “The Wrath of Khan” largely treats Kirk the same way that “The Last Jedi” treats Luke.

He’s a fundamentally decent person with some very serious blindspots, who made some poor but in-character decisions that end up rippling out to hurt those closest to him.
Kirk assumes that he’s the hero of a romantic space opera, that the rules don’t apply to him, and that he can outrun any consequences.

“The Wrath of Khan” brings all of those consequences home to Kirk, and underscores that he can’t outwit or cheat what’s coming to him.
By the way, this is beautiful. I am a long-time defender of Shatner’s… divisive performance style.

But, like Luke before “The Lost Jedi”, he seemed like more of an archetype than a three-dimensional character.

“The Wrath of Khan” makes Kirk feel like a fully formed individual.
We don’t love these characters because they are broadly-drawn archetypes that represent abstract ideals.

We love these characters because they are complex, multi-faceted, nuanced. They feel human, rich, deep, real.

Kirk becomes a tragic, flawed figure in “The Wrath of Khan.”
(Incidentally, that’s what makes Picard so compelling as well; the fact that, underneath his sophisticated and thoughtful exterior, he isn’t perfect either.

Where Kirk is impulsive and cavalier, Picard is stubborn and prideful. He’s human. He’s fully formed. He’s complex.)
“I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.”

One of the myriad great things about “The Wrath of Khan” is that Kirk spends much of the film actively resisting what the film is trying to tell him.

Even after being confronted with his failures with Khan and David, he isn’t humbled.
It’s a great example of plot and character being tied together, where the universe is trying to tell Kirk something - that some consequence you can’t cheat your way out of - but Kirk refuses to learn, so the price keeps escalating.

It’s a nice way of escalating stakes.
There’s a grand tragedy in the way that *everybody but Kirk* ends up paying for Kirk’s recklessness.

Kirk’s heroic sacrifice would be an easy redemption, and would give him a happy ending.

Having to live with his best friend’s death a son that hates him is a fitting punishment.
As Bill points out, a brilliant aspect of the original “Star Trek” movies is that they are the rare films that are at least subtextually about what it means to adapt a property from television to film.

Different rules apply, so there are tensions that the movies mine for drama.
“The Voyage Home” isn’t about time travellers from the future arriving in 1986 San Francisco.

It’s about relics of sixties television and counterculture being abruptly dropped into Reagan’s America.

The movie’s power is in watching sixties television stars in an eighties film.
There is a sense watching the original “Star Trek” films that the television cast is “boldly going” somewhere that they haven’t gone before: into film.

The rules are different, the norms are different, the expectations are different. There is dramatic tension in that.

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More from @Darren_Mooney

Jul 23
The important thing to remember is that Warners put “Barbie” on the same weekend as “Oppenheimer” in the hopes that it would crush Nolan’s film at the box office, to “punish” Nolan for daring to leave them.

Warners built “Barbie” as a spite house, like a jilted lover.
Coming to release, Warners scheduled press screenings of “Barbie” against with press screenings of “Oppenheimer”, trying to force critics to have to choose the more commercial picture over Nolan’s film.

They were also, at the time, holding residuals they owed Nolan for “TENET.”
Warners didn’t even think “Barbie” was going to be a hit.

They were expecting their big hit that summer to be “The Flash.” That is where all the energy and effort went.

Putting “Barbie” against “Oppenheimer” was initially just an attempt to get back at a director who left them.
Read 6 tweets
Jul 19
The Roald Dahl books, while hugely culturally important, did not have the single-minded and rapidly-moving machinery of several international conglomerates working behind them to craft movies, theme parks and online spaces to turn them into an augmented reality - or a lifestyle.
If you loved Roald Dahl, you likely read the books. You probably didn’t even read all the books.

You saw a few of the handful of adaptations that existed and were accessible, and not even all of those, and you went about your life.
If you read the Harry Potter books, you were reading them all, invited to obsess over them in real time online, saturated with news about their publication, watching films that were being made as the books were published, being sold theme parks and theatre shows.
Read 5 tweets
Apr 12
What’s really great - and what I kinda love about Belinda already - is that she really sets the Doctor up for that, by playing along for a line or two before dropping the anvil.

The Doctor absolutely 100% believes he has her charmed, and so walks smack bang into it.
I like the contrast between Fifteen’s bubbly happy personality and the way Belinda punctures it. She knows full well she’s a rebound, and not even for Ruby, but for Sasha.

The Doctor absolutely has “a playbook” for this sort of (platonic) seduction, and she spots it a mile out.
This makes sense. The one thing we know about Belinda’s past is that she had a longterm relationship with a controlling man who tried to dictate her life and was revealed to have something of a god complex.

The Fifteenth Doctor may not be as different as he’d like to think.
Read 9 tweets
Apr 12
It’s honestly very fun and playful that “The Robot Revolution” opens with the revelation that Belinda is secret royalty.

It feels like Davies playing with the relationship between #DoctorWho and Disney+. Is Belinda a Disney Princess? Image
There is something appealing in Davies using that Disney+ money to construct a world that owes quite a lot to the mid-century science-fiction that inspired Lucas.

Rebels, robots, retro-futurism, even some of the advisors look like Jedi.

Crashing #DoctorWho into “Star Wars.” Image
There is also something endearing in Davies’ choice to throw the first ever TARDIS team of colour into conflict with a retrofuturist dystopia, built from recycled imagery that initially appears to be the product of AI, but is revealed to be a world built by a “Rabid Puppy” voter. Image
Read 5 tweets
Jan 11
Assuming this is an earnest question, I suspect it's the same reason so many people had a visceral reaction against it.

That version of the character earnestly grappled with the anxiety of eroding American exceptionalism in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
I'm probably going to regret posting that, because people always have sane and level-headed responses about Superman.

And people are inevitably going to point to, say, Tyler Hoechlin's Superman or whatever, and say he explored the loss of faith in American exceptionalism.
But the thing about Cavill's Superman is that he exists in a world where it honestly feels like America has lost faith in the idea that it is a fundamentally good or decent nation.

Hell, the President of the United States in 2017-2020 and 2025-2028 ran as a heel. As a villain.
Read 8 tweets
Dec 27, 2024
“Joy to the World” was far from perfect, but it was refreshing to see a television show deal both directly and allegorically with the scars left by the global pandemic.

It both justifies Moffat’s old tropes (“the man who stayed for Christmas”) and feels genuine and sincere.
It is probably worth noting that Moffat’s mother passed away in hospital after a long illness during production of the tenth season, just a few years before COVID.

So Joy’s frustration about not being able to visit her mother in hospital feel very well observed.
(As somebody whose siblings worked the COVID ward, and who had an elderly relative in hospital during the height of the restrictions on visiting, that detail rang particularly true.

But also, you know, the Doctor being locked down in a hotel. Like my brother was in Australia.)
Read 4 tweets

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