This isn’t contextual to anything. There’s no anniversary or anything that has sparked my thoughts on this topic, no new Blu-ray edition that’s coming out. But the other day I started thinking about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and decided to revisit the marketing for that movie.
What got my head churning was just a random thought about the marketing for Star Trek: Into Darkness a while ago and the nature of what does or doesn’t constitute “spoilers.” That campaign had, of course, taken pains to hide the identity of the character played by Benedict Cumberbatch, calling him “John Smith” or some such when in fact he was playing Khan in a minor new take on the character.
So how, I wondered, did the marketing for 1982’s Wrath of Khan handle what could be considered the spoiler of Khan being the movie’s villain? After all, the character had appeared in an episode of the original TV series and it would be a big word-of-mouth coup to spring that surprise on the audience and get them talking, encouraging their fellow Trekkies to go see it because they won’t believe the big card the filmmakers played.
The answer is…not at all. And yes, for the sake of making a point I’m going to drive right past the fact that “Khan” is in the movie’s title and imagine this were just called “Star Trek II.”
There were other posters but the main one, the one that everyone recalls when they think of the movie, is a bold, striking visual that puts Khan – and his motivations – front and center for the audience. Notably, it doesn’t use photos of the cast (it would be another decade or so before photos became the default on one-sheets) but is an artistic rendering of the characters and the ships.
Khan towers over the top of the design, his family of followers behind him on a rocky, barren landscape. Below him we see Kirk, Spack and Saavik (Kirstie Alley) looking ready for action. Between them is a shot of the Enterprise shooting at a space station, something that’s not actually in the movie. At the top along with Khan’s visage is the copy “At the end of the universe lies the beginning of vengeance.”
Now let’s be clear: In retrospect this lays out a lot of the movie’s story, putting aside that starship attack that doesn’t happen. We see Khan there and can see thanks to the copy that he’s on a mission to enact vengeance against Kirk and his crew. But at the time this was a one-sheet that spoke more clearly to fans of the Trek franchise than it did the general audience.
To the former audience they likely were super-excited to see Khan there. After all they were probably the only ones to actually recognize the character and connect the dots between this and the TV episode that featured his first appearance. So I’m sure this got them speculating and talking about how this character was back and he didn’t look happy. To the latter, the general audience that maybe wasn’t familiar with Trek lore but just like sci-fi movies this looks like a pretty standard space epic, which is still pretty appealing. But it doesn’t have the allure and, more to the point, wouldn’t be any better served by keeping Khan’s presence on the poster.
The theatrical trailer takes a similar “Nope, he’s right there in the spotlight” approach. During a trip through a star field we’re given the backstory on Khan and told how he’s a “genetically superior tyrant” who was banished by Kirk but who’s now back for vengeance. We get a quick shot of Khan talking about his quest for Kirk before we’re thrown, for just about the entire rest of the trailer, into a space battle that pits the two of them against each other. The trailer shows a lot of the Genesis sequence (though what that actually is is never hinted at in the trailer) but for the most part this is sold as a big, bold movie filled with starship battles.
I wonder how much of that “action first” approach in the trailer was driven by the criticism of the first Star Trek movie, which was dinged by critics and audiences for being so talkative, with little actually happening for long stretches at a time. And how much was informed by the success of The Empire Strikes Back a couple years earlier, which is filled with one dramatic action sequence after another?
But the trailer doesn’t spill much of the actual story beyond Khan’s search for the head of the man who marooned him. There’s nothing about Kirk’s son, Project Genesis or anything else. There’s nothing about the discovery of Khan and his group on Ceti Alpha V…there’s no setup at all. It plops the audience right into the action and asks them to hold on. The inclusion of the Genesis Effect was, I’m guessing, something not so much driven by the desire to tease an element of the story to the audience but by the desire to show off what in 1982 were pretty amazing computer-generated special effects.
Again, I acknowledge that I’m doing a bit of rhetorical cheating by ignoring the obvious, which is that the studio was so unconcerned about the antagonist’s identity being known that they put his name in the title. But I think that, combined with Khan’s huge and obvious presence in the campaign, shows an assumption of maturity in the audience that is no longer around the age of mystery boxes and spoiler warnings. While certainly a lot of story points aren’t shown here they’re not shown because there are other facets that are more important to convey, not because we’re trying to keep some big reveal a secret from the gossipy fans.
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