Check out part one here!
Star Trek: Insurrection
Unlike the newer Star Wars movies, Star Trek has used its cinematic outings to explore the aging process instead of having older characters turning up for symbolic deaths and muttering something about legacy. Insurrection explores this via Picard and his crew defending the rights of a small group of people who have slowed the aging process due to settling on a particular planet. Out of the TNG movies, Resurrection feels like a two-part episode that could easily fit into the prime of its run. It would be higher if the villains weren’t a little lacklustre.
Star Trek
JJ Abrams’ Star Trek reboots may be abominations to some, but without them, I wouldn’t have explored the rest of the franchise and found all the shows and movies that inspired it. Star Trek is the perfect encapsulation of Trek as a pure action movie: the cast is fun, Chris Pine is an excellent Kirk, the action is frenetic with spectacular special effects, and the the way it rushes the crew into their iconic positions (the amount of battlefield promotions in this movie has me questioning Star Fleet’s admission policies) is frankly hilarious. It’s a great movie, but the rest of this list is just that bit more Star Trek.
Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country
After the disaster of The Final Frontier, the sixth and final TOS movie needed a safe pair of hands in Wrath of Khan director Nicholas Meyer – along with a story that tapped into the fundamentals of what Star Trek was and what it had become with The Next Generation. Basing the movie around the peace treaty with the Klingons (without it there would be a Worf-shaped hole on the bridge) The Undiscovered Country challenged Kirk’s emotional fallout after decades of fighting the old enemy with Spock’s logical call for peace. It also has time to be a light-hearted adventure film (only Star Trek could send Kirk and McCoy to Klingon prison and make it vaguely comedic) and a supremely fitting ending to the original crew’s voyage.
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
Most of the other movies on these list are part of my cultural memory because I grew up in the nineties and some form of Star Trek was always on British television, but I had never seen The Search for Spock until last month. I was shocked by just how much I enjoyed The Search for Spock. Despite the plan to bring Spock back from the dead not being in stone by the end of Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock acts as a proper sequel, picking up exactly where the last one left off. Even more than that, I just love Kirk versus the Klingons, especially if those Klingons are led by Christopher Lloyd. Also, Robin Curtis is the best Saavik and I wish she was in more Trek media.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Fourth movies are rarely the best of a franchise (Fury Road, that’s it) but The Voyage Home breaks that rule completely. – definitely is is Trek’s funniest movie, a classic fish out of water tale that flings the crew back in time to save some whales. The Voyage Home is probably most famous for the abundance of scenes in which the cast has never been funnier – Chekov’s Cold War ignorance, Spock’s Vulcan observations feeling more out of place than usual, and Kirk in the whole bloody film.
Star Trek: Wrath of Khan
After the unwise attempt at putting Star Trek through the Kubrick filter, this sequel had to not only please the fans, but the cast as well. The solution? Combine one of the original series’ best villains with one of its best episodes. That villain was Khan, and that episode (which is also my favourite) is Balance of Terror. What we get is a two-hour space battle that harks back to old submarine war movies, as two master tacticians try to outfight and outthink each other. It’s the best Star Trek movie, hands down. Except I’m very biased for the number one spot.
Star Trek: First Contact
The Next Generation is Star Trek for me. I love the original series, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, but if I was pushed for a favourite, it has to be Picard and his crew of poker obsessives. My favourite Trek villain is the Borg, so any movie that explores the traumatic relationship of Picard and the Borg, something that the Next Generation writers said they couldn’t do as much as they wanted due to the nature of episodic television, put it straight in my veins. First Contact is a reward for a very specific fan, a category which I fit right into, while also celebrating the Trek legacy with James Cromwell’s warp drive inventor that is clearly a tribute to the troubled genius of the late Star Trek creator, Gene Rodenberry.
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By Kevin Boyle
(header image via The Hollywood Reporter)
No But Listen 