Star Trek Film Rankings Part II

9. Star Trek: The Motion Picture

            The first film featuring the Original Series cast suffered from a distinct lack of action spread out over  the longest of all the Star Trek films. The Enterprise approaches a mysterious object (one of the Voyager space probes) hurdling toward Earth for ten minutes of the movie. For a two hour film trying to incorporate in the Original Series characters, introduce new characters, and launch a movie franchise spending ten minutes just travelling towards a mysterious space cloud is a colossal waste of time. The costuming of the film is ridiculous to the point of distraction. The cast seems decked out in Star Fleet’s line of casual lounge wear. The two new characters (left over from the planned reboot of the TV series) feel artificially tacked on to the established dynamic of the Trek cast. Tellingly they are both written out of the film by the end—leaving the Original Series crew intact. 

8. Star Trek Generations

            The first film adventure for the Next Generation crew is a mixed bag. The film slogs along while the Enterprise searches for a mad scientist trying to get caught up in a magical energy ribbon. His ruthlessness and appetite for destroying solar systems prompts the Enterprise to intervene. Along the way, Picard enlists the help of Kirk, long since thought dead, but actually caught up in the energy ribbon. The film gives the original Enterprise a nice send off, featuring a warp core breach and a crash landing of the saucer section. The film fails in its treatment of Kirk’s death. Kirk and by extension the writers in charge of the Star Trek universe had always known that Kirk would die alone. He makes that explicitly clear in Final Frontier. The presence of Picard at Kirk’s death did not make it any more meaningful or purposeful. It did not seem to serve a clear purpose at all.

  

7. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

            The Search for Spock struggled to balance the devotion of Kirk and the rest of the crew to Spock and incorporate other elements to the plot. The film begins well with Kirk and crew orchestrating the theft of the Enterprise to go and retrieve Spock’s body from the Genesis planet and reunite it with his consciousness (fittingly left in the brain of Dr. McCoy). The film drags with Christopher Lloyd’s Klingon villain. He appears out of nowhere and decides to kill Kirk and steal the Genesis device. Why? It’s never really made clear other than that he’s an evil Klingon. Most of the time spent on the Genesis planet seems to drag down the plot of the film. Even after retrieving Spock’s body and killing the villain the crew must still restore his soul. The film features the spectacular destruction of the original Enterprise, shown streaking across the sky of the Genesis planet, and the death of Kirk’s son David at the hands of the Klingons.