The Star Trek Movie That Annoyed The Wrath Of Khan Director

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but for “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” director Nicholas Meyer, having another movie pay direct homage to his work was more irritating than flattering. In an interview with Midnight’s Edge in 2018, Meyer revealed that he had some pretty complicated feelings about the 2013 J.J. Abrams film “Star Trek Into Darkness,” which took more than a little inspiration from “The Wrath of Khan.” Despite a marketing campaign that tried to hide the fact that Benedict Cumberbatch was playing a version of Khan Noonien Singh, the genetically-enhanced tyrant previously portrayed by Ricardo Montalbán, audiences soon realized that “Into Darkness” is almost an explicit riff on “The Wrath of Khan” right down to its tragic ending, albeit with a bit of a twist.

“Into Darkness” is the second “Star Trek” film set in the Kelvin timeline, which split from the original series timeline due to some time-travel shenanigans in 2009’s “Star Trek.” While “The Wrath of Khan” is indeed the second movie in the original “Star Trek” film franchise, it’s not like Abrams absolutely had to follow the same path with “Into Darkness,” but he decided that what was familiar was best, apparently. That rankled Meyer just a bit, who had some less-than-kind words about Abrams’ movie.

While Meyer admitted it was a tiny bit flattering to have such a big movie attempt to pay homage to “The Wrath of Khan,” he felt that “Into Darkness” totally failed at doing so and mostly amounted to a bland copy of his own “Star Trek” movie. He elaborated:

“It is, on the one hand, nice to be so successful or beloved or however you want to describe it that somebody wants to do an homage to what you did and I was flattered and touched, but in my sort of artistic worldview, if you’re going to do an homage you have to add something. You have to put another layer on it, and they didn’t. Just by putting the same words in different characters’ mouths didn’t add up to anything, and if you have someone dying in one scene and sort of being resurrected immediately after there’s no real drama going on. It just becomes a gimmick or gimmicky, and that’s what I found it to be ultimately. This is just one person’s opinion, mine […] but I found it more clever than satisfying.”

Given all of the difficulties Meyer faced while making “The Wrath of Khan,” including a feisty Gene Roddenberry trying to sabotage the whole thing, it’s not surprising that Meyer was a little miffed about just how much “Into Darkness” riffed on his film. 

Here’s the thing about “Into Darkness”: it had the potential to be a pretty decent “Star Trek” movie on its own if it just hadn’t tried to mimic “The Wrath of Khan.” It’s far from the worst “Star Trek” film, but it’s a frustrating follow-up to Abrams’ rather fun 2009 film and could have been so much more. The Kelvin-verse cast is pretty great, especially the late Anton Yelchin as the young pilot Chekov and Karl Urban as the Enterprise’s curmudgeonly head doctor, Bones, and Cumberbatch is a fantastic villain outside of the whole Khan designation. In a way, though, that just makes it all the more upsetting that the film is ultimately undone by its far-too-nostalgic screenplay.

“Into Darkness” wasn’t the last time that Abrams was criticized for basically remaking another franchise film in his own image, as he essentially did the same thing with “Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens” (which pulls heavily from “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope”). Maybe the filmmaker just needs to stay away from directing movies that belong to major science-fiction properties for a while … at least until he can get some fresh ideas.