Seeing ‘Wrath of Khan’ on big screen made this old journalist feel young. You can too

When you reach a certain age, you quit being surprised that something you remember like yesterday was 40 years ago.

And so it is for me with “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” the best Star Trek movie ever — and the one that saved the franchise and everything Trek that’s come since.

On Sunday, I relived the experience of watching “Wrath of Khan” on the big screen in a 40th-year revival with my son Kyle, now 27. We’d seen it on video before, but it just wasn’t the same as in the original Panavision and before scenes were cut to make it fit a VHS tape.

I saw the movie on its opening night, June 4, 1982. I’ve seen every Star Trek movie on opening day, even the one that came out two weeks after my twin sons were born.

As years have passed, I have increasingly found myself the only member of the audience who actually watched first-run Star Trek on television. I’ve been a Trekkie, or Trekker if you prefer, since 1967.

The first episode I ever saw, at a neighbor’s house, was called “Arena.” In it, Captain James T. Kirk subdues a reptilian enemy commander with a makeshift cannon he MacGyvered together when MacGyver was a teenager. Show third-grade me a space captain blowing up a lizard man with homemade gunpowder and you’ve got a fan for life.

I didn’t fully understand just how edgy the show was for its time.

Women officers — including a Black woman — served alongside men. At the height of the Cold War, the ship’s navigator was a Russian and one of the Enterprise’s sister ships was the Potemkin, which I much later discovered was the battle cruiser from Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematically classic but propagandistic salute to the Russian Revolution.

Star Trek was full of thematic episodes that dealt with Nazism, slavery, client-state wars, organized crime, cultism and race relations, including the first dramatic kiss between a white man and a Black woman on network TV.

It makes me laugh when I see comments on social media complaining that the latest iterations of Star Trek — “Discovery,” “Picard” and “Strange New Worlds” — are too “woke,” largely because they prominently feature LGBT characters.

It’s always been woke.

Growing up in the most remote, backward and unenlightened corner of the remote, backward and unenlightened state of Idaho, Star Trek was my window to a future beyond mines and timber. It woke me to think that we could be better than we are, if we could just put aside prejudices and stupidity and stride forward together.

Original Star Trek was canceled in 1969. But about 10 years later, Paramount decided there was still some mileage left in the Enterprise. That year, the studio released “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” which was way over budget, pretentious, ponderous, and all around pretty awful.

Star Trek very nearly died there, but the studio decided to give it one more shot with a sequel that cost about a quarter of “The Motion Picture” budget.

It was an instant hit and restarted the Star Trek voyage that led to 11 more feature films and 10 more TV series.

Ricardo Montalban, then in his 60s, brilliantly reprised a role he’d played in the original as a genetically engineered superhuman, awakened from cryogenic sleep 200 years after fleeing an Earth devastated by the nuclear war he’d started.

“Wrath of Khan” centers on his Ahab-like quest to get revenge against Kirk, who stopped him from trying to take over the galaxy and stranded him and his followers on an uninhabited but fertile world that was later laid waste by a cosmic cataclysm. And yes, Montalban’s pecs were the real thing.

A subplot of the movie is an aging Kirk, struggling with failing eyesight and facing a future as a deskbound admiral because “galloping around the cosmos is a game for the young.” As I look around at our young newsroom, sometimes I feel the same way about journalism.

But Kirk’s last line in “Wrath of Khan” is “I feel young.”

And after watching it on the big screen 40 years later, I do too.

Dion Lefler: 316-268-6527, @DionKansas