My Favorite Move Scenes – Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan – Enterprise vs. Reliant, Round One
The Setup: Admiral James Kirk is piloting the starship U.S.S. Enterprise on an emergency mission. A space station, Regula One, has called for help. Regula One is working on a device called Genesis, which can transform planets into new planets capable of sustaining human life. Meanwhile, the starship U.S.S. Reliant has been hijacked by Khan Noonien Singh, a man whom Kirk had fought decades before and was stuck on the planet Ceti Alpha V. Now Khan has his sights on revenge against Kirk, who doesn’t realize that the Reliant has been taken over.
Reason(s) why I love it: I have talked before about the importance of a musical score in a film, and this scene provides a great score to go along with the action. It’s not as iconic as the scores from films like Star Wars (though John Williams sets the bar ridiculously high with his scores). This scene also has some fantastic action and dialog, and I would argue that this movie, as a whole, should rank high on any sci-fi fan’s list of great films.
But the thing I want to point out here are some of the small bits that are sort of in the background. When Reliant starts firing on Enterprise, there’s a second where you get the beeps from a monitor showing the phasers about to hit the Enterprise. There’s that second when the Red Alert displays on the screen, with the lines phasing in towards the message. There’s the small part where all these different people are attempting to radio the bridge at once, and Kirk has to bark at Uhura “Turn off those damn channels!” so he can communicate with Scotty, his main engineer. Each of these things is just around a second of the scene as a whole, but I feel they add so much extra energy and excitement to the scene. You feel like you are there on the bridge of the Enterprise, as everyone goes from being professional and doing their jobs to suddenly getting thrown around and having consoles blow up in their face.
I would encourage people who view this clip, who have never seen the movie, to please give it a try. You don’t need to know the backstory of anyone to appreciate this gem of a movie.