It’s hard to summon up much remorse about revealing some of the plot twists in a popular movie that was released more than twenty-five years ago, but just in case, I suppose it is only fair to my readers to warn them. If you haven’t seen ‘Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” and plan to see it some day, then please stop reading now. The same applies if you saw it, but forgot most of it (time does have its way with us) and plan to refresh your memory at some future point.
From what I’ve read in reviews of the latest Star Trek movie (simply titled ‘Star Trek’) I advise you to postpone viewing it as well, at least until after seeing ‘The Wrath of Khan’ because apparently some of the twists are given away there as well. I haven’t seen the new movie yet, but I am already prepared to be slightly disappointed by this one aspect.
OK, if you’re still reading, you can’t say that you weren’t warned.
If you’re a Trek fan, then I’m sure you’ll be in a good position to correct my rapidly fading memory of a movie I haven’t seen since clogs were fashionable for men, but I hope you will not feel any obligation to become offended at my unfamiliarity with the canon. I’m certain that details such as the colors of the uniforms and whatnot are all very important in some larger context, but maybe not for the purposes of this discussion.
The movie opens on the familiar bridge of the starship Enterprise, but with an unfamiliar face in the captains chair–a young woman. Most of the other members of the bridge crew are the faces familiar to any Star Trek viewer. The Enterprise is on patrol near the border of a disputed area (or the neutral zone? The forbidden zone? Whatever). They hear a distress call from a civilian vessel, the Kobayashi Maru (yes, I had to look that up) that has strayed off course with engine troubles into the disputed area. There appear to be no enemy ships nearby, so the captain (commander? again, I have no idea) takes a calculated risk and orders the Enterprise into the disputed area to rescue the civilian vessel. As they approach, enemy warships appear, destroy the civilian vessel, and begin to attack the Enterprise, which takes immediate heavy damage. It’s an ambush. The captain orders the Enterprise to flee, but enemies have cut off the escape route and propulsion is failing. Her weapons are inoperable. The captain attempts to hail the enemy to offer surrender. In response, the enemy fires another salvo, targeting the bridge, killing all of the bridge crew except the captain. The ship is defenseless, surrounded by enemies, and the captain is alone. She does not appear pleased with her circumstances. She is at a loss.
At which point it is revealed that this is only a training exercise. It has all taken place in a simulator. The trainee-captain is baffled. She doesn’t see any way to have saved the Kobayashi Maru. She asks Admiral Kirk (formerly captain of the Enterprise) about it, and he tells her that she didn’t make any bad decisions, but that wasn’t the point. The civilian vessel is doomed, no matter what she does, and the Enterprise is doomed the moment it crosses into the disputed area, but of course there is no way for her to have known that ahead of time. The purpose of the exercise is to see how a prospective officer deals with a no-win situation; to see how he or she acts when faced with the loss of his or her ship, crew, and life. It’s a situation that any commander might face.
But then she learns from someone else that, as a cadet, Kirk did beat this exercise. In fact, he’s the only person to have ever done so. She wants to know how.
As she learns near the end of the movie, Kirk beat the exercise by cheating. He broke into the simulator before the test and changed the parameters so that there was a way to win. He never accepted that there was really such a thing as a no-win scenario, and therefore refused to be tested on one. No additional details are given.
That’s the sort of level of detail I like. I don’t need to know any more, and I usually don’t want to. The interesting thing, to me, is the motivation of why people do things, not the minutae of what they did. This is why I usually like, in terms of contemporary entertainment, either the book or the movie, but not usually both, because the standard treatment seems to be that films focus more on spectacle while books focus more on plot and character. As an example, consider the fraction of running time dedicated to battles in the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies compared to the fraction of the pages used to describe those battles in the books.
The new movie, according to reviews, shows the whole Kobayashi Maru exercise and how Kirk beat it. Do I really want to know? Like the story of Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe and the prawns, it may be that some things are better left to the imagination.
But of course I’ll go see it anyway… for the spectacle, if nothing else.
I haven’t seen the movie, so I only read the first paragraph of this post.
It was a very good paragraph though.
Comment by Prunella Farquar — May 9, 2009 @ 5:39 pm