Every Star Trek Movie Ranked From Worst To Best

You would have thought that having a decade to get their house in order after the end of the season would have put Paramount and the original Enterprise crew in a strong position to launch the film franchise strongly. Sadly, that wasn't really the case.

The film's biggest crime is that it struggles to justify its own existence beyond the call from fans for more Star Trek. It isn't nearly as cinematic as it should have been and it's not thrilling enough, nor full of sufficient spectacle. It also features a sentient robot cloud villain whose only real malevolence manifests thanks to it being bored.

The film's production history says everything about the issues you see on screen: it was the product of difficult circumstances, to put it lightly, as NBC attempted to get another Star Trek series off the ground. It struggled through several stages of development from there, leaving Robert Wise with a painfully poor, horribly imbalanced script to work with and no money to make it work.

Still at least the blandness didn't kill the movie franchise before it even began.