DRTJR said:
Owyn_Merrilin said:
DRTJR said:
Owyn_Merrilin said:
DRTJR said:
Owyn_Merrilin said:
DRTJR said:
DS9: is the "best" series of Star Trek, my favorite is ToS but that series has no legitimate end.
Not unless you count the the sixth movie, but then they were only counting the shows themselves here. Anyone who likes Star Trek and hasn't seen that movie owes it to themselves to watch it, though. It's the best of the bunch, with TWoK unfairly getting more love because it came earlier in the series.
Wrath of Kahn is an amazing film! Undiscovered country is a fitting end to ToS and a proper send off but TWoK is everything that made Trek Great, an amazing story that was both old and new in SPACE!
I have to disagree though, because TWoK wasn't quite /everything/ that made Trek great, but TUC was. If one day it's the only piece of of the original series that still exists, future generations will still have a pretty darned good idea of what it was all about. Whereas
Khan, while an excellent story told within the universe, kind of does its own thing with it.
Also,
The Motion Picture is a better TNG movie than any of the actual TNG movies. VI and I are my two favorites in the whole series, then II, III, IV, V[footnote]For execution. On premise it's number 1[/footnote], with the TNG movies all far enough behind that it doesn't really matter how I rank them.
Edit: And I realize the TNG movies were generally better put together than
The Final Frontier was (
Generations aside, that is), but the problem is they fall into the same basic trap that Trek '09 does: they're well put together action movies, not well put together
Star Trek movies, and especially not well put together
Star Trek: The Next Generation movies.
TMP, The Final Frontier, and Nemesis all earn my ire for a singular reason, their failures were almost bad enough to sink the entire franchise. A franchise that I want back on the small screen. Doctor Who is alive and well bopping about time and space, and yet no one is boldly going were no man has gone before? Why is this? It's because Nemesis and Enterprise failed and we suffer from those.
I'll give you the other two, but TMP was actually a box office success that revitalized the franchise. It's remembered as a failure today because it picked up an undeserved bad reputation somewhere during the 80's or 90's, but it made close to three times its budget in the US alone. Source for the budget thing: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=startrek.htm
Edit: Also, the biggest box office success until at least the '09 movie, adjusted for inflation, was actually
The Voyage Home. Part of the reason
The Final Frontier was so bad was Shatner wanted to do something serious, like
The Search for Spock, but Paramount thought something sillier and more comedic, like
The Voyage Home, would make more money. That infighting is why the tone is so schizophrenic.
Edit Edit: Correction, it turns out that TMP was actually the highest grossing in inflation adjusted dollars until Trek '09, with IV being the highest in un-adjusted dollars, and second highest in adjusted. Trek '09 is now the highest in both, but
Into Darkness still ranks below IV. Source: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=startrek.htm
The problem of TMP is that it tried to be 2001 a space odyssey as well as Star Trek. Leonard Nimoy hated doing TMP soo much his condition to signing on to TWoK was that Spock died. The studios were wearied that another Trek project would ruin them because TMP had a monstrous budget, the filming of TWoK did several great things not only on a budget but also with the fact that Ricardo Montalban and William Shatner were never in the same room during filming yet the those two actors shared such great chemistry despite that. That is what makes some of the best Trek, creating art under such great adversity, aslo the uniforms that appeared in TWoK became one of the most icon ones in franchise history.
Which is funny, because the only time they didn't look totally doofy was in that one episode of TNG where Picard had a vision of what his life would have been like if he had never needed an artificial heart. Somehow they finally managed to make the things look cool. But still not as cool as the ones in TMP
And for the rest, I do see what you're saying, I just personally prefer TMP and TUD (though not in that order) to TWoK. It's a good movie, but it really doesn't need to be a
Star Trek movie to work. It could have just as easily been set in the 17th century and be about a marooned pirate trying to get revenge against the man who left him to die. You could give it points for being universal, but it's just missing something for me that keeps it from being the perfect Trek film. The biggest thing is the surface narrative really is the biggest thing the film has going. It explores themes of growing older, friendship, and revenge, but that's just it: they're themes, not a message.
Star Trek without a message isn't really
Star Trek.
Plus, you know, Kirk doesn't get into a fistfight with an alien twice his size or have sex with a weird alien chick. He does that in
The Undiscovered Country
And then he gets into a fistfight /with himself/ (or rather, that alien chick shape shifted into a copy of him), which is just beyond awesome. And then there's that message about the end of the cold war and the collapse of the soviet union, which truly was the "undiscovered country" at the time and oh god I've got to rewatch it again, dammit XD
