"If there is to be a brave new world, our generation is going to have the hardest time living in it."

I think The Voyage Home might still be my personal favorite just because it's so damn fun, but this is the actual best of the TOS movies. Which is surprising, because I never hear anyone talk about this one!

The idea of a political thriller murder mystery where the assassination of a Klingon ambassador threatens to disrupt peace negotiations is such a rich vein for drama, and the movie delivers on that promise. (Though it also manages to be funny in a much more natural way than the previous movie.) Love that Kirk has very real flaws other than "he cares about his friends too much and will break the rules in really badass ways to save them," and he's confronted on his prejudice and has to grow and change and admit that it's time to step aside and let a new generation take over. Also very cool to see a TOS movie admit that Starfleet isn't always the good guys! As a DS9 fan who loves it when Star Trek gets a little more cynical about the politics of its galaxy this one really does a lot for me. Hard to imagine a much better sendoff for the original Enterprise crew.

This one has some fun and cute character moments with the crew that keep it from being a total slog like Generations was, but man, the plot and conflict here suck.

Let's step back and break down what this movie is about, once everything is revealed, because it's so profoundly stupid. 300 years ago some white people who disavowed technology and wanted to cut themselves off from the rest of the galaxy settled on what turned out to be the Fountain of Youth planet. Some sort of particle from the planet's rings grants immortality and can cure any illness. Anything! We see it cure Geordi's blindness! Everything was hunky dory for a couple hundred years, until a few of their kids got nasty outsider ideas and tried to take over the planet for... some reason? They were exiled and began to age again. Now, 100 years later, they're barely kept alive by medical technology and have to use a machine to stretch out their face skin to keep it from sagging off. They're gross, so that's how you can tell they're evil! Anyway they still want to live forever, I guess, so they work with a Starfleet admiral to formulate a plan to gather up the magic panacea particles from the planet's rings to, again, give the galaxy the ultimate wonder drug that will grant immortality. Except they can't figure out any way to do this that doesn't leave the planet irradiated and uninhabitable, for plot reasons so arbitrary and half-baked that even the admiral can't be assed to give a real explanation when pressed about it.

And so Picard catches wind of this and goes against his superior officer to protect this tiny settlement of 600 people from the evil villains trying to produce a cure for every disease known to man. It is incredibly contrived on every level. The exiled bad guys couldn't just, I don't know... go land on the opposite side of the planet from the village and soak up the immortality particles over there? It's a whole planet with one village! They'd never know! No, they need the WHOLE PLANET all to themselves!

They probably could've made this one work with another draft. For one, maybe don't make literally all of the villagers white humans who want to Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition? It gives off some incredibly unfortunate political undertones when the perfect little white isolationist cottagecore settlers are having their picturesque colonial home stolen from them by the multicultural Federation as part of a secret conspiracy. It's deeply uncomfortable whenever Picard tries to make comparisons to real world colonial displacements. Or maybe they could've said something about how the search for immortality is inherently foolish and perverse—the imagery of the stretched skin on the Son'a seems perfect for this. Instead they landed on "actually immortality is awesome but only these specific 600 Amish people get to be immortal because they lucked out and colonized the immortality planet first."

Also, I kinda just wish they'd made this a DS9 movie. I had this thought every time they mentioned the Dominion, or Worf being transferred to DS9. This feels closer to the kind of stuff that show deals with. I kept having flashbacks to the episode where Kira is ordered to kick that old man off his land because the Federation needs it. They made a subpar TNG episode and stretched it out to feature length, when I wish they'd made a pretty good DS9 episode and stretched it out to feature length instead.

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

The first time the Star Trek film series outright asked "what if we just did a version of Wrath of Khan that sucked ass," and unfortunately not the last.

I really wanted to have a dissenting opinion on this one. I wanted to see the good in it. I love stories about characters who were created to be dark copies of the hero and are tragically doomed because of it. But for one, Tom Hardy just doesn't look or sound like Picard, no matter how bald they make him, so that kind of falls flat. And the plot about him being made the leader of the underclass of slaves from the planet he was banished to and all of them deciding to just start being evil and wipe out all life on Earth is incredibly dumb. But most damning: this movie is just soooooooo fucking boriiiinnnnggggg. I can't believe I stayed awake for that unbearably long third act that's just wall to wall dull action with zero interesting character work going on. I checked the time and couldn't believe I still had half an hour left.

This is also the worst offender for the TNG movies forgetting that the show was an ensemble series and that there are more characters than just Picard and Data. The latter has to have a big heroic sacrifice at the climax of the movie, because they're echoing Wrath of Khan, but it's so hollow compared to the emotional goodbye Kirk and Spock have on opposite sides of the glass. Data just kind of shows up to save Picard, teleports him out, and dies, and that's it. The movie had already set up that they picked up a spare Data with all of his memories backed up, so it's immediately obvious how they're going to undo the death.

Also, uh. Did we really need a random scene where the bad guys psychically rape Troi while she's trying to have sex with Riker? And Picard tells her to just tough it out if they do it again? Just so they can have a scene where she psychically determines the location of the villains' cloaked ship later? Come the fuck on, man.

Just awful all around. As bad as I thought Generations and Insurrection were, they at least had their moments and some bits that are funny-bad. Out of all ten of the Star Trek movies starring the TV casts, this is the only one I don't think I would ever willingly watch again.

I made it 25 minutes into this. I can't do this. I have to love myself.

I got through the introduction of the team. Every single one of them is more insufferable than the last with all of their obnoxious quirks and the forced attempts at naturalistic cross-talk banter. Imagine The Asylum trying to do a ripoff of Guardians of the Galaxy or Suicide Squad, but in the Star Trek universe, and also someone inexplicably gave them a budget and access to Michelle Yeoh. It's like nails on a fucking chalkboard, but it thinks it's the most cool and badass thing ever. Even without the terrible acting and digital zoom-filled editing this script would be unbearable. It's not so-bad-it's-good, I genuinely just had to turn it off.

And that's before you even get to the politics of it all, with Epic Girlboss Cannibal Hitler from the mirror universe being recruited by what's effectively Starfleet's CIA, operating in the shadows and doing the secret war crimes that are "necessary" for """the greater good.""" And of course the one Starfleet officer on the team is treated as the wet blanket for questioning the morality of their mission.

This is what happens when you approach Star Trek not as a work of art trying to convey certain ideas, but rather a bunch of toys to play with. This movie is hopelessly dependent on familiarity with Star Trek as a franchise, and is probably completely impenetrable to anyone who isn't already a fan, but it also completely eschews everything that's good about Star Trek aside from "it's in space and there's aliens and shit." Every single creative decision made here was the wrong one.

You know what? I don't want to end it here. Let's go out on a high note.

Galaxy Quest (1999)

The (not-so-)secret contender for the best Star Trek movie. I wouldn't say it's quite the best, but it's up there.

I think a big part of the reason why this movie works so well is that it ropes in casual viewers by making it seem like it's going to be a more cynical and mean-spirited parody of Star Trek, echoing common beliefs that it was a cheesy old show with a washed up cast and cringey fans... and then it ends up largely playing its conflict and adventure straight. It pokes fun at Star Trek and Trekkies along the way, but it does so affectionately, and there's still room for genuine excitement and drama. There are real stakes! People die, and not as a joke! Even characters as absurd as the Thermians get some genuinely heartfelt moments. (The way Mathesar chokes out "But why?" when Jason explains to him that the show was all fake is kind of heartbreaking!) By the end the cast has shed every remaining ounce of cynicism they had about their goofy old show and they're all just really into it. There's a reason why this movie ended up becoming a genuine sci-fi cult classic in its own right.

But also, more importantly: this movie is still incredibly funny. Tim Allen is, y'know, fine as the leading man, but everyone else? Perfect. Spot on. Constantly hilarious and delivering so many quotable lines. What a great cast. Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver tend to be singled out for good reason, but I also want to highlight Tony Shalhoub's character who seemed to be at least a little stoned for the whole adventure and faced almost everything with this placid acceptance. His delivery is so good. It's such a funny contrast to the way everyone else is freaking out all the time. I think the moment where he calls for a group hug with the Thermians in engineering is one of my favorite little jokes.