Friday, July 05, 2013

Trek 2: Pros And "Kahns"

By now everyone knows that Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch's baddie "John Harrison" in  J.J. Abrams’ sequel "Star Trek Into Darkness" is really Khan Noonien Singh in the rebooted timeline....


Fan reaction has been pretty evenly split over the decision to use the beloved bad guy. Before the pic opened I was totally against the notion of reimaging Kahn and stated my position loudly...Once I saw the film I was won over in large measure because of Cumby's magnetic portrayal ...

In the Prime timeline Kahn is the genetically enhanced human--An American Sikh of the 1967 episode of "Star Trek" called Space Seed as well as the big screen sequel Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan played by Ricardo Montalban ...He and his followers were launched into space prior to any time shift caused by the events in Star Trek" '09. There was no way Cumby Kahn could ever match Montalban--but in the new timeline as concieved he works well as an adversary for Kirk (Chris Pine) and his crew.

Co-writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman discussed Khan with the Film School Rejects and the difference between homage and remake:

"From the ’09 movie, we thought of getting Leonard Nimoy as freeing us from canon while also honoring it. The movie should harmonize canon. While we were free to do whatever we wanted, we wanted to echo what happened before. For example, in the first movie you have the Kobayahshi Maru. It’s possible in the universe before we came along that was how Kirk and Spock met. Spock may have been the administrator of that test. To free ourselves from canon, we think about what might’ve happened in those days, even if it wasn’t an alternate universe. For us, it’s interesting what could’ve been the same. We didn’t just want to do whatever we wanted. We wanted to free ourselves, but take a stab at what might’ve happened in the previous series. Some people have complained, “Well, they’ve freed themselves, so why even do Khan?” For us, the exciting idea was…we’d freed ourselves, so how can we do the things we know but in a new way? That’s parallels, echoes, and harmonies of what we know as Star Trek, and that’s how we approached it."

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