The souls of North American men are riven. Behind our slick professional personas and chiselled, rugged features, a battle rages. Star Wars or Star Trek?

As a shellac-skinned and starry-eyed Canadian six-year-old, my head full of hockey and Hasbro merchandise, I had no doubt as to the true faith. I watched The Empire Strikes Back 23 times from a VHS tape so worn out it barely made it to the credits. I dreamed of the Dagobah system. At dinner I mimicked the call of the tauntaun. And I can only thank the galaxies I had no such tool as YouTube to broadcast my impeccably choreographed lightsaber routines.

As a putrid, festering teenager who smelled, as one did, vaguely of goat, my allegiance expanded to include the soothing bleeps of the bridge, the tidy phaser blasts, the two-tone uniforms, the whole warm cultural bath of Star Trek. During endless 2am reruns I laughed at the cardboard sets and cheered Kirk’s fistfighting technique and practised saying “Bones!” “Jim!“

STAR TREK II:THE WRATH OF KHAN Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

It took me time to warm to The Next Generation, but eventually I grew to appreciate Picard’s Earl Grey tea and his “Make it so”, and even tolerated Commander Riker, known to us as He Who Walks Around Trying to Drive His Forehead Through an Invisible Forcefield.

Then I became a man, and put away my childish things.

Except of course I didn’t. At heart, we’re all either children or teenagers. Don’t ask me to choose.

But Star Wars, that juggernaut of cross-platform media franchising, led by the fat-cheeked mediocrity who didn’t even direct his own best film, whom I guarantee even God himself thinks of as the luckiest man in the world, needs no defence. In public, Star Wars won. It’s the quarterback star. It’s got all the trophies.

Which brings me to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

STAR TREK II:THE WRATH OF KHAN Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Let’s leave aside the fact that Kirstie Alley made a very hot uptight Vulcan. Let’s ignore the strong contender for creepiest supporting monster – a big slug extracted from between the scales of an even bigger slug, then inserted into the ear to improve suggestibility. Let’s even put aside whether Ricardo Montalbán, looking positively Gaddafi-esque as he staggers around in a blood-soaked pashmina declaiming stuff like “From hell’s heart I stab at thee!”, is wearing a fake chest.

And can I also ask that we don’t judge The Wrath of Khan – the first Trek film to elbow Gene Roddenberry out of the way – by the unholy Star Trek content-universe it not only saved from death but has artificially animated ever since: the Final Frontiers and Generations, the Deep Space Nines and Enterprises and Voyagers and all the thousands (thousands!) of hours of zombie acting and lack of sexual chemistry that were to come. (It’s no accident that JJ Abrams’s sexy, successful 2009 rebrand “borrowed” most of its big themes from The Wrath of Khan.)

STAR TREK II:THE WRATH OF KHAN Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Instead, consider William Shatner. In 1982, he’s 51. His most recent screen appearance has been on the TV farce Police Squad! in the less than prestigious role of Poisoned Man. And here he is, wheeling himself and his crew of similarly unhirable D-list actors back on to the deck of the Enterprise for what they must have imagined (considering the flop that was Star Trek: The Motion Picture) would be one last voyage. “I feel old,” Kirk says. Well he might. A new generation has taken command, one that plays by the book, led by efficient but humourless young captains like Saavik (Alley in her first film role), who in an aside to Spock says of the legendary James T Kirk: “He’s not what I expected – he’s so human.” “Nobody’s perfect,” says Spock, the driest guy since Peking Man.

Ricardo Montalban as Khan Photograph: Insight Editions

But then Khan storms into the picture: a genetically modified genius with a 200-year-old grudge and a hammy delivery rivalled only by that of Shatner himself. Suddenly Kirk is back in charge, giving amused orders, tearing up the rule book and still turning the ladies’ heads. Watch him marooned in a featureless corridor at the centre of a dead planet, with only an ex-girlfriend and the love child who hates him for company: oh, the yell he produces, shaking with overacting, through clenched teeth as though he’s SO ANGRY HE CAN’T EVEN OPEN HIS MOUTH … KHAAAAAAAAANNNNNNN! Shivers.

Or take Spock himself, science fiction’s greatest character, expressed by Leonard Nimoy entirely through the finely graded raising and lowering of a single eyebrow. A rigorous logician with his emotions in a vice lock, here he reveals a heart big enough to save an entire crew of human beings. “I have been, and always shall be, your friend” – heartbreaking stuff from the great Vulcan to his polar opposite. What bravado to kill this character off! “Of all the souls I’ve met, his was the most … yuman [sic].” I cry every time.

Set phasers to stunning … Kirk and Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

If Star Wars is spiritually akin to Top Gun – Tom Cruise in jackass aviators blasting around in fighter jets – then Star Trek, here in its most dashing manifestation, is The Hunt for Red October: submarines, tactics, cantankerousness. It’s a fundamentally naval representation of life in space, with all that entails: formality and cryptography and bold decisions taken from a seated position. It’s about defeating intellects more than evil – about saving things, not destroying them – and the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, or the one. The Wrath of Khan is the best of true nerdom on film.

And as for whether or not it’s Montalbán’s real skin, I think we can all agree: it’s still a fake chest.