Not the new ones, as I didn’t bother rewatching those recently. Those are just parodies of Trek in my opinion. But the old movies are like this in my opinion:
- Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home – This is just too funny and cute. It’s pure fan service across the board as the aging crew does what you want them to do and makes you laugh. Some people don’t rate this highly because of the comedic elements, but it is classic trek with a funky time travel plot which they love to do in episdoes.
- Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country – wrapping up the series, wrapping up the cold war, it’s fun to look at this from a perspective of Chernobyl and the USSR’s collapse. Really well done. The moment at the end where the crew was told to go back to spacedock and you can see the actors tearing up gets me every time.
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture – Really underrated film. It’s long. It’s got too many slow moments, sure, but they were doing technical wizardry and this is really the best actual science fiction plot of out of all of them.
- Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan – You’re shocked i rated this this low, yes? I think it’s a bit overrated. The above three are strictly more interesting while this is a revenge plot. I also hate the scene with the crap going into the people’s ears to mind control them. It’s gross.
- Star Trek III: The Search For Spock – also undderrated. This is pretty fun even if the whole like new Spock body mind transfer thing doesn’t make sense and how would the Vulcans know how to do that? It’s creepy.
- Star Trek: First Contact – TNG’s first appearance on the list. They just didn’t make the movies right like they did the original cast. Still this is a solid movie and worth watching.
- Star Trek: Insurrection – A really long “two parter” episode that didn’t feel like a feature film. Still some good character moments and fun.
- Star Trek: Generations – They shouldn’t have killed Kirk like this. It’s anti-climactic even if he did “save 3 billion lives.” And they shouldn’t have crashed the enterprise. Why do that in film #1 of a new franchise?
- Star Trek: Nemesis – I didn’t bother rewatching this cuz it’s trash.
- Star Trek V: The Final Frontier – I didn’t bother rewatching this cuz it’s trash.
Still, 8 out of 10 movies are watchable. That’s not a bad run, even if Generations barely makes the cut.
I liked Generations better than Insurrection. It was a good Star Trek story, original and not too complicated. Picard has to stop a bad guy from blowing up stars to get back to his space anomaly.
Sure, it had a dumb rocket — possibly due to budget constraints — and Picard needed Kirk’s help because they thought William Shatner had to be in the movie — possibly the cause of the budget constraints. But, as a story, it took me somewhere, and, in the end, Kirk and Picard saved the day. It had a satisfying ending.
Insurrection made no sense. The bad guys want to steal a cloud so they need to move a bunch of people out of the way.
Okay. But that story is only enough for a 40-minute episode. So, they had to have a singing android, put a cloaked spaceship in a lake, and have people running around on the planet wearing greenscreen blankets.
In the end, Picard saves the day by blowing something up so the people on the planet don’t have to move. Also, the millions that the cloud was going to save will die miserable deaths. I guess that’s kind of satisfying.
Contrast The Wrath of Kahn, another movie where the captain saves the day by blowing up the bad guy. It was a simple story but they thought it through.
Why is it up to Kirk to save the day? “She is the only ship in the quadrant.” Sure, we don’t know why, but you could at least imagine they are all off dealing with a Klingon threat after seeing the Kobayashi Maru test. It’s better than contriving a sub-plot where all of the other fleet captains are busy putting on a production of “The Lass That Loved a Sailor” for space orphans.
Moreover, we know that, whether they live or die, it is all on Kirk because he’s got a training crew depending on his leadership. They don’t have to beam him alone somewhere for a phaser showdown to get the message across.
Finally, there was real tension in Kahn. You knew the bad guy was going to get blown up in the end, but at what cost? In 1982, we didn’t know whether 1701 had another voyage ahead of her. Introducing a possible replacement crew at the beginning of the film may not have consciously fooled anyone, but audiences’ brains noticed.
You can have a blow-up-the-bad-guy movie with a simple plot and make it compelling. None of the Next Generations movies managed to do that well. But Generations did a better job of it than Insurrection even if took a knee in the end.