This article dives into the history of Star Trek films, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses across various eras and creative teams. From the groundbreaking classics to the more divisive entries, the text explores the evolution of the franchise on the big screen.
Star Trek , the venerable sci-fi franchise, finds itself exploring new territory altogether: the straight-to-streaming film. This is the end result of a long, complicated development process where a character that Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh last played in late 2020 was originally going to be an ongoing show, and now will be a Paramount+ exclusive premiere movie.
It’s the first of a potential series of films, though Star Trek almost certainly still has a future on the big screen, whether or not plans to reunite the cast of the Chris Pine films comes to fruition. Television shows are by their very nature uneven, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the films, too, have a wide range in quality, even within the various individual film series featuring William Shatner’s original crew, the gang from , or the Pine reboot. There’s one spectacular film, a number of very good ones, several mediocre ones, and a few godawful ones. They also cover a relatively wide range of types of stories, like straightforward action-adventure and issue-oriented sci-fi, and operate across many levels of scale, from glorified TV episodes to big-budget epics. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, directed by its co-star Leonard Nimoy, and featuring much more comedy than the previous films, led to two things: 1) William Shatner insisting that he was going to direct the next one, and 2) an egregious disaster for the franchise. The result, Star Trek: Insurrection, is a calamity on every level. It repeatedly sells out the characters in search of laughs that never come — like Scotty bragging that he knows this ship like the back of his hand, right before he knocks himself out walking into an overhead beam — and isn’t any better at the serious stuff. The next couple of films on this list have certain elements that are worse than anything here, but they also do at least a few things well, whereas there’s almost nothing worth celebrating in Star Trek: Insurrection. (We make a slight exception of the opening sequence where Kirk, Spock, and McCoy banter around a campfire, but even that gets demerits because their mini vacation is just a shameless excuse for Shatner to film himself rock climbing.) The 2009 Star Trek remake that J.J. Abrams and company spent the run-up to the premiere denying was anything of the sort — is so aggravating, and so antithetical to the spirit of Star Trek, that it’s awfully tempting to put it at the bottom of the list. But Abrams remains a vastly more competent director than Bill Shatner, and some of the action set pieces alone easily elevate this above Star Trek: Insurrection. Star Trek: Nemesis has some interesting ideas, including exploring the culture of the Romulans (who were usually treated as second-class villains compared to the Klingons), and forcing both Picard and Data to confront younger alternate versions of themselves. But the execution — including giving a young Tom Hardy a large prosthetic nose to play Picard’s evil clone Shinzon (see above left) — is silly, and the tone always feels off. And Data’s death feels so abrupt and random that, many years later, Star Trek: Picard had to undo it twice (first by giving him a more dramatic and dignified passing, then by bringing him back). Star Trek: Discovery, in which Yeoh’s Philippa Georgiou goes on a mission for Starfleet’s unofficial black-ops division — is… fine? It ignores the thorny moral questions that were a key part of Section 31 when the group was introduced on-style adventure, teaming Georgiou with various colorful rogues, including Sam Richardson as a shapeshifter. The fight scenes don’t make particularly great use of one of the greatest action stars of all time, but the movie’s got energy, some decent supporting performances, and does a few fun things on the margins of the franchise. Star Trek: Picard took a more modest approach, with a story that’s essentially a longer and more expensive version of a traditional Mission of the Week episode. But the plot — the crew objects to forcibly relocating the population of an idyllic planet with Fountain of Youth capabilities — would have likely been forgettable even on TV. There are some fun moments here and there, like Picard and Worf singing part of a traditional Klingon song to stop an out-of-control Data, but its position on the list speaks more to how bad the bottom three films are than to its own merits. Star Trek: Generations fumbles the chance to put Jean-Luc Picard and James T. Kirk in the same movie. Admittedly, the team-up was undercut a bit by the fact that the series had already done episodes featuring Spock, Scotty, and (in a brief but memorable cameo in the series pilot) Bones McCoy. But the execution of it is still a convoluted mess that seems to misunderstand the basic essence of the two characters. Both captains wind up stranded in the Nexus, a mysterious celestial phenomena that grants its every occupant an eternal paradise matched to their heart’s greatest desire
STAR TREK FILM REVIEW SCIENCE FICTION MOVIE HISTORY PARAMOUNT+
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