Aren't I just weird? I got burnt out doing my Top 30 favorite movies countdown, so I decided to review some random movies, then I got bored with that so I guess it's time to do another time-consuming ranking! I'm going to be a ranking genius after this. This'll be my third ranking of a franchise's movies that follow either one principal story or a principal character, the first being "Ranking the Batman Movies" and "Ranking the Halloween Movies", both in 2016. Now I give you, for the summer of 2018, "Ranking the Star Trek Movies". That's right, now I get to rub my nerddom all up in your faces. Unlike the Halloween movies, in my opinion the Star Trek films aren't quite split right down the middle of the original ten in terms of quality. There are more good ones (six) than bad ones (four), so at least there'll be some consistency.
Some ground rules first. Number one, first and foremost: My cutoff is going to be Star Trek: Nemesis. That's right, I'm leaving the rebootquels out of this. Why, I hear you cry? Well, because Top 13 isn't a very marketable (nor is it a lucky) number. Besides, those are the ones I've seen the least. Number two, I won't follow a set schedule. I set a schedule for Halloween so that I could get them all out in October and I about wanted to give up on the blog and find a new hobby. So now, it'll be business as usual "whenever I get around to it". You might give five in a week or two in a month. Who the hell knows.
So, that means our criteria for ranking is as follows. Star Trek made its big-screen debut in 1979 hot off the heels of Star Wars's success, with Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Yes, that is the full title. Not Star Trek, not Star Trek I, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I guess Star Trek: The Movie sounded a little hokey, so it's "The Motion Picture". We'll get to it, but I'm going to tell you right now there's not very much "motion" in it.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was three years later in '82, and a serious improvement over the previous one. Often considered one of the best by Trekkies and non-Trekkies alike. It was also the start of a housed "trilogy" of films that followed one solid plot outline about a torpedo of life called "The Genesis Device". The second part is Star Trek III: The Search for Spock in '84 and the Genesis story concludes in '86 with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. So far we're following a solid numbering outline, wouldn't you say? Then we have 1989's Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, our first standalone story since the first one. Like the first one, it's notorious for...reasons. That's all we'll say for now.
The original TV show cast gets a magnificent send-off with 1991's Star Trek VI; The Undiscovered Country. They're all noticeably old but it fits the movie and story well and has a fantastic send-off. The torch is the passed to the cast of the hit TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation which had just concluded on television. Hot off the heels of its conclusion is 1994's Star Trek Generations, the seventh film. Notice how the numbers quit coming? Now we're getting out of hand. Generations also was marketed as being the first Trek film to showcase a high-profile team-up of captains, namely Kirk and Picard, but we'll get into that later. The Next Generation cast returned for 1996's Star Trek: First Contact, the movie that made the Borg freaky scary. They probably would've been scarier in The Next Generation if they had a budget to not make them look like discount Halloween costumes. 1998 gave us the ninth of the original ten Trek films, Star Trek: Insurrection and the third to be based around the Next Generation crew. Unlike the original TV series cast, the Next Generation cast didn't get quite a good send-off with 2002's Star Trek Nemesis. For reasons we will very much get into once the ranking starts.
So that was just a preview, hope I already didn't spoil what order I'm going to put them in. Stay tuned...unless you're not a Trekkie and therefore don't give a shit. In which case, sorry.
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