A disappointment

Last Saturday, I finally caught up with a film I had desired of watching for ages - Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  It featured a reappearance of the character Khan Noonien Singh, a genetically enhanced warlord exile from the '20th century' (as Trek history would have it) woken from suspended animation aboard the spaceship Botany Bay, who appeared in Star Trek (retrospectively known as The Original Series or TOS) in the episode Space Seed.
I thought I should see the initial storyline and despite a vaguely silly backstory for Khan (a totalitarian who ruled a quarter of the world before the rest of the world rose up and overthrew him in the '1990s'), Space Seed was an enjoyable episode, capped with the brutal, demanding charm with which Ricardo Montalban invested his portrayal.  Captain Kirk was remarkably magnanimous in letting Khan, his 'people' and an Enterprise crew member he had seduced settle on a tough, empty but habitable planet after Khan tried to seize the Enterprise.  So I keenly anticipated the cinematic sequel sequel.
Star Trek films have acquired a mythos about their production, with the odd-numbered movies tripe and the even-numbered decent or better.  I watched Wrath and I watched and I watched and frankly I was not impressed.  It was satisfactory, just about but I can't square it with fans who rave about how great it is.  The loose remake (and fan-loathed) Star Trek: Into Darkness isn't perfect but it is superior.  In Wrath, Khan is more a space pirate than a galaxy-threatening megalomaniac - this latter is hinted at by achieving possession of the 'Genesis' device, a life creating (or rewriting) torpedo, but Khan does almost nothing with it, not even specify a target for us to be concerned about.  He is more consumed with rage at Kirk for, as he perceives it, abandoning him but his 'wrath' never manifests itself more than chasing Kirk and the Enterprise around like eighteenth-century ships skipping round the Caribbean, loosing off broadsides every now and again.  Not exactly a rip-roaring adventure.
Montalban, reprising his role, walks away with the movie and comfortably dominates every scene he is in.  He is even a figure of sympathy with an acceptable grievance, though his means of redressing that grievance are not.  His genetically enhanced comrades are wasted in mostly passive roles.  Yes, he maroons a Starfleet crew in his stead after his planet being knocked off its orbit by its neighbour exploding, wrecking the ecosystem.  Yes, he slaughters the crew of the spacestation.  Yes, he implants hideous beetles into Pavel Chekov and the new captain he serves under, that has echoes of Alien and a forerunner of Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Conspiracy.  Yet at no point does Khan do anything other than small-scale banditry or pose a wider threat.  The brief allusions to his '20th century' past are just that brief and of no further consequence it seems.
There are attempts at developing characterisation with Kirk sunk in gloom at being an Earth-bound admiral rather than a starship captain and that's it, really, the actors reinvesting their roles with the old traits and attributes.  The addition of Lieutenant Saavik adds another dimension, principally female to a generally male cast and Kirstie Alley is game, even if they must refer to her as 'Mr Saavik' in some bizarre form of equality.  The big macguffin of Mr Spock's death has been so done to death that though it might have been surprising to Roger Ebert reviewing it on release (raising it in his estimation) and other Trekkies more intimately entwined with Leonard Nimoy's Vulcan (albeit half-human) logician, it no longer carries the same impact.  You're waiting for it to happen rather than a shock plot twist.  It's like being told that Darth Vader is Luke's dad before seeing Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.  To mix metaphors, once you know Santa isn't real, the genie can't be put back in the bottle.  By comparison, Kirk finding out he has a son is rather underplayed and leads to an uncertain mood..
There are other inconsistencies - why does the bug crawl back out of Chekov's ear unprovoked, to be destroyed?  Why does Scotty take a severely injured cadet to the bridge instead of sickbay?  There's a continuity error of Khan developing a laceration across his chest that wasn't there before while sitting around talking to Kirk.  The admiral is not Q.  Biggest of all, one might say, is that for someone with 'superior intellect', Khan doesn't display much of it, even if it is obscured by rage - the script goes as far as to acknowledge this when Spock critiques Khan displaying 'two-dimensional thinking': another contradiction.  One is led to conclude the scriptwriters didn't really know what to do with Khan and were more obsessed with inserting Spock's death and Kirk's son into the scheme of things.
Wrath I think got its reputation with posterity being far better than its predecessor Star Trek: The Motion Picture and its successor Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (which is essentially just that, with some Klingons thrown in to bulk it out, plus the deaths of both Kirk's son and the Enterprise - if you didn't know, it's a poor film, so I've saved you the effort of watching it).  Star Trek IV and VI advance their plots rather than have them stationary and have more at stake.  Space Seed is on another level to its big-screen spin-off.  Wrath could have been so much more with the richly malevolent figure it had, but as it is, barring Star Trek: Insurrection (which killed off Trek films until J.J. Abrams brought them back, if in a parallel dimension), it is the weakest of the even-numbered Trek saga.