Welcome to another edition of Top Ten Things, here at Enuffa.com!
I've been a
Star Trek fan since about the age of four when my parents were watching the original series on TV and I wandered into the room to see a weird dude with pointy ears and a bowl cut prattling on about space anomalies and whatnot. From then I was hooked, and despite not understanding much of the sci-fi technobabble at that age, I could somehow easily identify with the gallant Captain Kirk, the crotchety Dr. McCoy, and of course the computer-minded Mr. Spock. My fandom increased tenfold in the early 80s when I went to see
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and these characters and their adventures were presented on a much larger scale. We were still treated to philosophical explorations of the human condition, but with much slicker production values and effects.
The
Star Trek films were major events for me every 2-3 years and some of them still hold up among my favorite science fiction movies. Thus far we've had three series of films; from 1979-1991 the original Star Trek cast graced the big screen, and then from 1994-2002 the
Next Generation crew got their turn. Finally in 2009 Paramount rebooted the series completely, recasting the original characters and converting
Star Trek into more of a
Star Wars-esque action franchise.
But how do the 13 movies stack up against each other?
13. Star Trek: Insurrection
Star Trek: Insurrection has to be the weakest in the entire series, with its half-hearted storyline about a society of 600 Ba'ku hogging the life-extending resources of an entire planet at the expense of their dying brethren the Son'a, not to mention the billions of others who could be helped by this age-defying radiation. And for some reason the Enterprise helps the Ba'ku stay there. Huh?? Don't the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? It's hard to get invested in a movie when the good guys are on the wrong side of the issue. F. Murray Abraham did what he could with the weak villain he was given to play, and of the NextGen films this one comes closest to resembling the TV show, but the story doesn't work and this feels like a B-movie.
12. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
Next up is Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, a nigh-unwatchable mess of a film that clearly suffered from a Hollywood writer's strike, leaving director William Shatner without a coherent script. After things wrapped up neatly at the conclusion of The Voyage Home, we now catch up with our gallant crew and their newly built Enterprise (which for some reason is nearly crippled by technical issues), as they're tapped to settle a hostage situation perpetrated by a mysterious Vulcan, who needs a starship to travel beyond the Great Barrier to find God. The filmmakers tried to cram the action of Star Trek II and the humor of Star Trek IV into this one, and failed on basically every level to capture the spirit of either film. Star Trek V cost $33 million, more than any previous Star Trek movie, yet the effects are Original Series bad. Basically everything went wrong here, and Shatner would not be asked to direct another one.
11. Star Trek: Generations

Our final entry to fall short of the top ten is
Star Trek: Generations, the one that kicked off the NextGen films. Man, what a colossal disappointment this was. The first NextGen film that also features Captain Kirk?? How could this be bad?? Well, the filmmakers found numerous and profound ways to screw this up.
Generations has some fun moments but its convoluted plot involving an energy ribbon that somehow absorbs people and lets them live out their wildest fantasies (and travel time and space at will should they choose to leave) simply doesn't hold up to scrutiny, nor does the shoehorned involvement of Captain Kirk. This film united the two iconic Enterprise Captains just to....have an awkwardly staged action movie fight sequence to stop a villain from firing a rocket? Is this real life? And did we really need to see the Klingons and their Bird of Prey AGAIN??
Generations marked the fifth consecutive
Star Trek movie to feature this stupid model, and boy was I tired of seeing it by this point. If this movie set the tone for what the NextGen film series would look like, it's no surprise all four of them fell so drastically short of what the TV series was.
10. Star Trek Beyond
Here's a movie I had high hopes for. I'd read that this was the closest the new series has gotten to capturing the philosophical, character-driven bent of the original show. And while
Beyond has a little of that - Kirk for example laments early on that the ongoing voyage is taking its toll on him and his crew - sadly the film plunges almost immediately into an extended action sequence that leaves the Enterprise in pieces in a matter of minutes. They don't treat poor Enterprise well in these films, do they? Anyway, the crew gets separated during the space battle and we learn a little about the villain Krall. Mostly that his name is Krall. Seriously, this film uses a fine actor like Idris Elba pretty shabbily. He's given nothing to do in the first two acts except bark angrily, and it's not until the final half hour we're told his motivation and his true identity; by then it's hard to care. What I liked about this film: Kirk had some solid character moments, McCoy and Scotty had more to do, the new character Jaylah was very cool and likable, Krall and Kirk had one poignant scene toward the end, and the Spock-Uhura romance was barely present. What I didn't like: Krall is motivated by revenge just like the last three
Star Trek villains, Krall is barely a character beyond that, there's once again too much emphasis on
Star Wars-y action, and Spock's wig looks terrible. Distractingly so.
Star Trek Beyond is the weakest of the most recent series. And what exactly does "Beyond" refer to?
9. Star Trek: Nemesis
Nemesis is a guilty pleasure. It's a pretty terrible, unnecessarily dour affair featuring a young clone of Captain Picard trying to destroy the Enterprise, Romulus and Earth, and contains far too many
Wrath of Khan callbacks and a go-nowhere subplot involving an earlier model of Data, but damn if it isn't entertaining drivel. A young, far less jacked Tom Hardy plays Shinzon, Picard's clone who spent his childhood enslaved on Romulus's sister planet Remus, building up a severe hatred for both his Romulan oppressors and his "father" Picard. He fashions a giant evil starship to exact his revenge, and all hell breaks loose. This template of a revenge-obsessed villain with a gigantic ship would oddly be used in some form for all three reboot films, despite
Nemesis tanking at the box office. Still this film includes some of the best space battle sequences in the
NextGen series, plus Tom Hardy! But it's not good...
8. Star Trek (2009)
The 2009 reboot essentially took the original series characters, boiled them down to their most easily identifiable cursory traits, and turned them into action heroes. This film is an all-thrusters-ahead popcorn movie that vaguely resembles the series we all know and love. Casting was key here, and fortunately Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana, and Simon Pegg do an admirable job of reimagining their characters while staying more or less true to their predecessors. This film is all about setting up the new version of
Star Trek and thus the main plot is fairly forgettable. A revenge-hungry Romulan named Nero has been chasing a future incarnation of Mr. Spock through time in retaliation for Spock's failing to save Romulus from a supernova, and a space battle ensues between the brand new Enterprise and Nero's monstrous vessel.
Star Trek 2009 is full of slick visuals, engaging action and light humor but fails to explore profound human themes the way the original series did. Still it's a fun popcorn movie with characters we can all relate to, so not a total miss.