best star trek movie

• Star Trek: The Motion Picture
  
• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
  
• Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
  
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
  
• Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
  
• Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
  
• Star Trek Generations
  
• Star Trek: First Contact
  
• Star Trek Insurrection
  
• Star Trek Nemesis
  

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I enjoyed "The Voyage Home" the first few times I saw it, but after a few times, it reached the point that I found myself saying, "Oh, yeah. That joke again." While TVH had an important environmental message, I thought "The Wrath of Khan" was far better in terms of movie-making. Like all good sci-fi, it wasn't about the story or the neat special effects, but the characters. In this case, it was Kirk's midlife crisis and feeling that his best years were behind him; it was Khan's destructive obsession with revenge; and it was the very deep bonds of friendship among Kirk, Spock and McCoy.

It was, all things considered, first-rate science fiction, something Star Trek often has fallen short of, particularly in its more recent years.

Second places goes to ST3:TSfS.

"First Contact" had the potential to be a truly creepy monster movie with the Borg slowly assimilating the Enterprise crew, and it had the potential to be a psychological movie as it studied Picard's motivations. It made some solid moves in those diretions, but they really got too goofy when it came to Zefram Cochrane down on the planet. I could have done without a lot of that, and I could have done with a more respectable characterization of him. The way they did it was just ridiculous and made him into a buffoon rather than an inspirational person like Kirk and others saw him as.

They focused too much on the buffoonery and really failed to provide anything about him that would make him a role model or an inspiration, either to the future or to viewers.

Yeah, he came up with the warp bubble, which means he was smart. But even there, what was his reason? To get rich and buy a small island where he could be surrounded by half-naked women all the time. There are people who believe in discovery for its own sake and to improve the human condition. I don't think it would have been unreasonable to ask that Zephram Cochrane be one of those, especially since this is "Star Trek" we're talking about, which has always stressed human exploration and increasing our knowledge of ourselves and the universe.

Actually, if you read the novel "Enterprise," there is a rather compelling characterization of Cochrane there like what I'm describing. I really wish they had followed something like that instead. There are buffoons who accomplish things by accident, and many of our heroes had their weaknesses and things that made them small in ways both subtle and gross, but there are truly great men in history as well, and it demeans us all to forget that or pretend that it is not so.

As far as Star Trek V goes, I understand Shatner was under some pressure from the studio and ended up taking a bit of a fall for things he had no control over.

And it wasn't all that bad. Sybok was *completely* in character. (Interesting trivia point: Originally, the role of Sybok was meant for Sean Connery, but he opted for the role of Dr. Henry Jones in "The Last Crusade," which came out the same summer. Wtiters paid tribute to him by naming the Vulcan paradise after him: Sha Ka Ree.)

The best advice I ever had on "The Final Frontier" was to watch it like it's a very long episode. The feel of the movie actually is a lot like the original series.