So I know next to nothing about Star Trek except for the recent movies but I'm hearing good things about Wrath of Khan and want to check it out. I was just wondering if you need to see the first one first to understand it (I hear less good things about that one)?
You don't really need to see the first movie. It only has a very short reference in a conversation at the beginning of the film. What you want to see first is the TOS episode Space Seed which introduces Khan. A special showing of TWOK will be playing at some theaters one more day this week if you want to catch it on the big screen.
The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.
After just rewatching TWOK I have to correct what I sad about a reference to the first film. I thought I remembered that Bones briefly mentioned the events of TMP during a conversation with Kirk at his home. But apparently I was wrong. Maybe it was in the novelization.
The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.
I just finished binge watching TOS, and watched TMP right after that, and...nope, you can go into TWOK without watching TMP. But you really DO need to see "Space Seed" - both to see Khan's backstory and to see how we ended up with the situation of TWOK. Little about who Khan once was, is in TWOK. You need to see "Space Seed" to see Khan's charismatic power over women, for one thing. In TWOK he's a vengeful Ahab with Kirk as the white whale.
TMP, for the record, should be regarded as a kind of noble failure--grandiose, super-cinematic, and a then-astronomical budget to make a movie based on both "2001: A Space Odyssey" and a show that had gone off the air 10 years earlier but had been kept alive in reruns by fans over the course of that decade...and they partially missed the mark because they ran out of time in 1979.
FFF!!!!! No!!!!! Personally, I think this is a quite a fine entry point.
"No talking from things that don't talk!" - Jaye Tyler
The events of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, are not referenced in this film at all. As other's have said, you will definitely want to watch the Original Series episode "Space Seed" that introduces the character of Khan. It might also be helpful to view two or three other episodes of the original series to get some familiarity with the characters (as portrayed by the original cast), chemistry, style etc.
Some good space battle episodes are:
"Balance of Terror"
"The Doomsday Machine"
"The Ultimate Computer"
"Journey To Babel"
"Elaan of Troyius"
This artist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMPvcgejKpw