Every time I watch Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, I’m struck by the fact that Shatner and Ricardo Montalban are never on screen at the same time. Ostensibly the entire movie could have been shot in two separate studios and nobody would have been the wiser. I guess what makes the movie so great for me is that Ricardo Montalban is so damn good, and William Shatner is, well, so damn Shat.
It’s well known that Shatner is basically a pretentious, self-centered jerk, who has somehow managed to have a great career despite the mounds of well-documented evidence that he is a terrible actor. So terrible in fact, that the story of his rise to theatrical prominence is not only overwhelmingly pathetic, but laced with an irony so repulsive that it could not be written by the hand of man. It is almost as if the universe stumbled through a grotesque, stilited, improvasitory monologue, ran off stage crying, and plonked down at the nearest bar to get so drunk it would forget everything the next morning.
As the story goes, Shatner was cast as the understudy for the title role of a production of King Lear. Unfortunately for the audience, the lead got sick one night and Shatner had to step in. Now if we extrapolate the “pretty good” Shatner of today back through his career to early Star Trek, we can clearly see a certain trajectory of his talent and acting abilities. Namely, it is a near vertical cliff of sucking. Realize that this unfilmed production of King Lear predates Star Trek by quite a few years, which leads me to believe, based on the established trend of the data at hand, that he must have sucked on a level which was several orders of magnitude beyond his earliest documented work. As inconceivable as this may sound, eye-witness accounts of the evening of Shakespeare in question bear out this assumption.
Apparently the performance went from awkward to downright embarassing. Shatner not only fumbled his stage locations, but began botching the dialogue left and right. His memory was so bad that he stuttered his way through most of the script like a child’s music box which is missing several of the important tines. By the end of the night, he was lucky to get off stage with his life, much less out of the dressing room with his fellow actors. However, in what was either an unbelievable stroke of good luck for Shatner or an earthshatteringly bad piece of luck for a certain future cover of Elton John’s body of work, the premier critic in the audience…
...gave him a glowing review for his "artistic pauses" and "dramatic reinterpretation" of the flow of the prose.
Best, most inspiring reinterpretation he’d seen in years in fact, and a truly original talent worth praising in a column for a major newspaper. In other words, when we hear the Shatner deliver and see his mannerisms, we are looking at a man whose ego so enjoyed a stroke that the positive review must have meant he never sucked in the first place. In essence, he blew off himself. Some ignorant moron can’t tell when an actor is completely hopeless, and gives Shatner license to make it his thing in the future. I guess we can argue that it worked, because it’s bought him more quality hair pieces that he has brain cells.
So where’s the horrorshow, you ask? Well, the original King Lear in that production was none other than Christopher Plummer. He was in the Sound of Music as well as a few other fairly well known dramas.
He also spent a huge amount of time doing Shakespeare, because Christopher Plummer is a Shakespearean actor of the first order. He is a real, honest-to-god acting talent who has the capacity to create just about any character you can dream up. Don’t believe me? Why, I bet he could even play a Klingon commander in a certain final film of a certain space franchise. Oh shit.
In fact, Christopher Plummer was General Chang in Star Trek 6, the final chapter of the old guard series, and a more sickening stroke of the scimitar of irony I have never seen. Forty years after Shatner gets his big break because Christopher Plummer comes down with a cold—a break which catapulted Shatner into a role as the greatest starship captain to ever live and a multi-multi-millionaire—the man whose thespian jock strap Shatner couldn't act his way out of ends up playing a Klingon...who spends the entire movie quoting Shakespeare before Captain Kirk blows him out of the sky.
That’s just horrible. And do you know what the last thing General Chang says before Shatner orders the firing of the torpedo that blows him off of the movie set for good?
“To be, or not to be.” Boom. They didn’t even give Plummer the courtesy of his own explosion death. The bogarted the Bird of Prey shot from Star Trek IV.
I would say Jesus Christ, but nothing about that indicates there is a god.