Star Trek Films in Review

Part of my desire for writing these reviews is to express my opinions on the themes I see in the ten original films. I believe the newest film, Star Trek, contains far different themes to cope with a newer and wider movie audience. While it does contain the primary theme the other ten movies portray, it takes place in the opening ten minutes of the film.

What is this primary theme? I believe it is “sacrifice” - more specifically, “self-sacrifice”: the importance of placing one's ideals and/or loved ones ahead of one's own life. As I review each movie in turn, I will show where this theme repeatedly occurs. It is especially effective in some of the films, and culminates in the tenth movie.

A few other ideas I will be exploring are as follows:

The first five movies portray a “spiritual” aspect that the later movies do not contain. I feel that this was Gene Roddenberry's original vision of the Star Trek universe: a universe where science and technology could co-exist with spiritualism and culture. How else could Vulcans be so purely logical, yet so bent towards ritual and meditation?

While I may pick on some of the more far-fetched ideas in the films, these will not be a primary focus at all. Most reviews I watch and/or read tend to constantly complain about the unlikely or illogical concepts in the Star Trek films and I do not want to repeat these complaints unless something particularly bothers me. Fact is, there are almost endless complaints to make and equally endless explanations to deal with those complaints. Go ahead and read some Star Trek novels and you will almost always find references to various film events and even direct movie tie-ins. When I review Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, I will refer to a Star Trek novel that was an actual sequel to this film.

With the exception of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the original Star Trek films all have a lighter “feel” to them. They deal with some pretty heavy issues without being typically science-fiction-movie dark and depressing. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan sets a tone that continues on until Star Trek: Generations takes a necessary turn. This change makes sense since there is an entirely new crew, timeline, history and (to some extent) audience to deal with. My personal opinion is that Generations makes this transition fairly smooth. By the time it is over, the audience is ready for something completely new and I believe that Star Trek: First Contact totally delivered with the best Star Trek film to date...well, until Star Trek came out in 2009 – although even that is debatable.

Of course, First Contact was followed up by Insurrection and Nemesis: arguably the worst two movies in the entire Star Trek franchise. However, I will not discuss that point here except to say that even the worst two movies in the entire Star Trek franchise are far, far better than most of what Hollywood dumps on its viewers year after year.

On to the reviews: Star Trek: The Motion Picture will be first, of course.

As an addendum, perhaps it should be mentioned that I will be reviewing the director's cut of each film except for Star Trek since that has yet to be released.