Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Movie review by Charles Cassady Jr., Common Sense Media
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan Poster Image

Common Sense says

age 10+

Thrilling, philosophical installment of popular space saga.

PG 1982 116 minutes
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Parents say

age 12+

Based on 9 reviews

Kids say

age 10+

Based on 19 reviews

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A Lot or a Little?

The parents' guide to what's in this movie.

What Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is a more violent feature than the original Star Trek: The Motion Picture, with assorted character deaths and torture. One of the biggest stars of the series dies. While the TV Captain Kirk always seemed to have girlfriends on every planet, this is the first time it's acknowledged that one of them bore him a now-adult son, and their paternal relationship is not close or cordial.

Community Reviews

AllAges
AllAges Adult
August 13, 2020
age 12+

Wonderful, but would be PG-13 now.

Unlike the first, this entry has more violence and space battles, with grisly (albeit excellent) prosthetic wounds. PG-13.
Mark H.
Mark H. Adult
July 12, 2017
age 13+

Ok film with pretty brutal violence

Wrath of Khan is an OK film, but is pointless to see until you've watched the original show first as it's a direct sequel. Based on violence, this movie would probably get an R today. Khan, the antagonist, brutally murders several scientists and leaves their bloody corpses chained to the ceiling. A young hero crewman has half his face burned off. A ship captain possed by a brain eating worm vaporizes himself with a pistol. A worm crawls out of another person's ear leaving a bloody trail. Khan himself also loses his face to fire. It's all really gruesome.

This title has:

Too much violence
See all 9 parent reviews

What's the Story?

STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN takes place 15 years after "Space Seed," an episode from the original Star Trek series. In it, The Enterprise discovered a vessel whose crew were placed in suspended animation, banished form Earth in 1996. When Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) realized their leader, Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban), was still as dangerous some 200 years later, the Enterprise marooned him and his followers. Now 15 years later, Khan has managed to escape with his people and hijack a well-armed Federation starship of his own. Obsessed with wreaking vengeance on Kirk, he lures the Enterprise into a devastating battle while plotting to steal the Genesis project, a bomb-like device capable of creating or destroying new worlds.

Is It Any Good?

This sequel combines passionate acting, great music, fine effects, philosophy, ethics, and derring-do to create what some fans consider the best of the Star Trek features. The script contains observations about friendship, aging, military misuse of science, contentious father-son relationships, and the futility of revenge. Since the chance of any further Star Trek movies was iffy -- and Leonard Nimoy was hoping at the time to sign off playing Spock for good -- viewers get the feeling here everyone is really giving the material all the respect it's worth, just in case this turned out to be the final Star Trek as we knew it (it wasn't, of course).

It was good to be a science-fiction movie fan in 1982. Out-of-this-world features released that year, which seemed to reach a pinnacle of entertaining scripts, mind-expanding concepts, and cutting-edge special effects, included E.T., Blade Runner, The Road Warrior, Tron, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. This last one even proved that sequels from adaptations of TV shows could be better than originals (talk about mind-blowing concepts), since the first Star Trek: The Motion Picture was a bit of a disappointment. Director Nicholas Meyer claimed to have very little prior knowledge of Trekdom when he came aboard. Instead, he said, he took inspiration from his favorite Napoleonic-era naval adventures, novels in the C.S. Forester Horatio Hornblower series. That's indeed how Star Trek II plays out, as a seagoing military epic transplanted to deep space, with questions of command and leadership, duty, and sacrifice for the welfare of the crew.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about the parallels between Khan's obsession with avenging himself on Kirk and one of the books glimpsed in Khan's personal library, Moby Dick. How is the theme of vengeance similar in both works?

  • What do you think of Spock's code of sacrifice for "the needs of the many"?

  • This movie added to Trekkie lore a Starfleet Academy flight simulation test in which a practice captain faces a seeming no-win battle scenario. Why do you think this is important training? What would you do in this scenario?

Movie Details

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