original star trek movies ranked

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Star Trek Movies Ranked From Worst to Best

Forget the "odd numbered are bad, even numbered are good" superstition about this franchise. We finally sat down and ranked every Star Trek movie.

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You’d think there wouldn’t be all that many surprises in a ranking of the various Star Trek movies. Official fan doctrine tends to elevate a select handful of them to the very top (and rightfully so, because when this franchise is great, it’s really great) while dismissing, fairly or unfairly, others. But the reality is, there’s such a wide array of tones across Star Trek films that one fan’s skippable entry is another fan’s favorite (well…most of the time).

We chose a panel of our most decorated Starfleet experts to vote on the highs and lows of the Star Trek movie franchise. There’s probably a few surprises in here, but one thing we hope we managed to do, if nothing else, is dispel the “odd number/even number” superstition about these flicks.

13. Star Trek: Into Darkness

It’s hard to imagine any entry in the entire franchise straying further from what Star Trek is all about than Into Darkness . A laughably grim, mean-spirited film that tries awfully hard to conceal its weird “Space Seed”/ Wrath of Khan ambitions beneath some clumsy mystery-boxing and an almost absurd amount of violence, Into Darkness is more akin to a lesser Fast & Furious sequel than it is about “boldly going” anywhere other than into vague nods to absurd conspiracy theories.

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If JJ Abrams’ previous Star Trek (which we’ll get to below) was Trek-as-action-movie, proving that with some gorgeous production values and a talented cast that the franchise could once again compete on the big screen, then Into Darkness is Trek as pop culture ouroboros, foreshadowing the backwards-looking fan apologia of his The Rise of Skywalker by six years. Not even the brilliant cast, stunning special effects, and another great Michael Giacchino score can save this one, with the core crew reduced to delivering performances akin to SNL caricatures and a big “reveal” that everyone saw coming three months out. – Mike Cecchini

12. Star Trek: Nemesis

It’s true, even in a generous appraisal, Nemesis seems unlikely to be anyone’s favorite Star Trek movie. It’s yet another example of how studio execs learned all the wrong lessons from The Wrath of Khan , that amping up the action, and having a genuine, capital-V villain is the key to box office success. Here, a shadowy villain with a vendetta against Captain Picard (hmmmm…where have we heard that before) stages a coup against the Romulan leadership.

It’s not great, and so obviously derivative in its central villainous conceit (despite the twist) that it comes off as a little desperate. It’s notable primarily for being many folks’ first introduction to Tom Hardy as the young Jean-Luc Picard clone, Shinzon, the introduction of the Remans to Trek lore, and Ron Perlman under some cool Reman makeup. We wouldn’t go so far as to say that Nemesis is better than you remember if you were particularly allergic to it out of the gate, but without the weight of expectations surrounding it, and especially now that it’s no longer the final voyage of the beloved Next Generation crew, perhaps we can be a little more forgiving of it. – MC

11. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Ah yes, the one where they meet “God.” The deck was always stacked against The Final Frontier , coming as it did not only on the heels of the beloved Trek trilogy of The Wrath of Khan , The Search for Spock , and The Voyage Home , but also in the same summer that delivered bona fide classics in Tim Burton’s first Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (not to mention other high-profile blockbusters like Ghostbusters 2 and RoboCop 2 ).

The film’s antagonist, Sybok, might be easier to swallow were he not Spock’s half-brother, a needless addition in a high-concept but ultimately convoluted film. William Shatner’s story and directorial ambitions never quite hold together here, with the film further hampered by some of the worst special effects of the entire film series. Still, there’s a hint of TOS -y weirdness to the concept of this one, but it’s not enough to make it feel like anything other than the most disposable entry in the otherwise sterling run of original crew films. – MC

10. Star Trek Beyond

Although 2009’s Star Trek was an undeniable hit, it’s easy to understand the skepticism that greeted 2016’s Star Trek Beyond . Not only did it follow up the misguided Into Darkness , but it also swapped out JJ Abrams with the even flashier, but far more competent, Justin Lin. Beyond certainly does have some of the things that made viewers tire of the Kelvinverse, including a battle sequence inexplicably set to The Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” and nods to classic storylines. But it also had a lot more of what people say they want in Trek : characters exploring, building relationships, and maintaining hope. 

The exploration comes in the form of Jaylah (a variation of J-Law, based on the original plan to cast Jennifer Lawrence in the part), played with undeniable energy by Sofia Boutella. The stranded Jaylah forms a bond with Simon Pegg’s delightful Scotty, but the real pleasure of the film comes from the pairing of Spock and McCoy. The tension between the two has been a hallmark of the series since Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelly were in the roles, but Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban find new ways to antagonize and grudgingly respect one another, grounding even the biggest blockbuster moments of the movie in good ol’ Star Trek hang-out fun. – Joe George

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9. Star Trek: Insurrection

It is time to reevaluate Insurrection . On release it got a bum rap for being essentially an extra long episode the TV show, but in 2023 that’s no bad thing. Yes, there are moments we could live without (flying the Enterprise by joystick, the phaser bazooka, Data’s inflatable arse) but it is also, bafflingly, still the only Star Trek movie about landing on an alien planet and meeting the people who live there (apart from Beyond , maybe, if you squint).

But mainly, this film is really the last time (with the possible exception of upcoming Picard season 3) we get to see the TNG crew being a proper crew , with actors who’ve known each other a decade just hanging out and really enjoying playing off each other. It is much more fun than you remember it being. – Chris Farnell

8. Star Trek: Generations

When reviewing movies, it is always important to review the film you’re watching, not the film you wish you were watching. But that is so hard to do with Generations , even now. The film fans wanted to see in 1994 is still the film we miss now – Picard and Kirk in a buddy movie, their leadership styles clashing as they take on a galactic scale threat together.

Instead, they take on a member of the Enterprise’s bartender’s species while both captains are worrying about how they don’t really want to be captains anymore, and while it might be appropriate Kirk dies after a fist fight on some desert rocks, it still feels anticlimactic. It has some nice moments, but we’re always going to mourn what could have been. – CF

7. Star Trek (2009)

What if Star Trek was just a regular movie? In 2009, the J.J. Abrams reboot film accomplished the impossible: It tricked the general public into thinking of Star Trek as a brand-new phenomenon. On paper, almost nothing about the 2009 reboot movie should work, and it’s hard to imagine a film like this working today, either. Had this come out a few years earlier, or later, it probably wouldn’t have been as successful. But, in an era where the MCU hadn’t quite gotten going, and origin stories ( Batman Begins ) were all the rage, Star Trek scratched an itch the zeitgeist didn’t know it had.

What works about the 2009 reboot is also connected to what doesn’t work. Instead of being an outright remake or reimagining (like the 2003 Battlestar Galactica ) screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci split the difference; this version of 2258 predates The Original Series but is also an alternate dimension from it. Thinking too hard about the mechanics of all of this will certainly ruin your enjoyment of the movie (WTF is red matter anyway?) but what has aged well is the focus on the characters. Perhaps more than any other Star Trek movie, the TOS crew feels like a team of outer space superheroes. And, after seven feature films in which Captain Kirk (William Shatner) was moving through various midlife crises, it was refreshing to have Chris Pine remind us that at heart, Jim Kirk is forever young. – Ryan Britt

6. Star Trek: The Motion Picture

A lot of Star Trek movies want to be The Wrath of Khan , but they could all stand to be a bit more The Motion Picture .

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is, at heart, a pure science fiction movie – possibly the only Star Trek movie that can claim to be, taking its cues from 2001: A Space Odyssey rather than Horatio Hornblower . It is slow moving film, even in the newly released (and much improved) cut , but that’s not necessarily a flaw. In a movie series that is all too often about vengeful madmen and their personal vendettas, The Motion Picture is about voyaging deep into the unknown, and finding ourselves when we get there. – CF

5. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

Arguably the most overlooked of the classic Trek films, The Search For Spock , is, nonetheless, perhaps the most formative Trek movie of them all . It was here that one of the Trek actors — namely Leonard Nimoy — became deeply influential behind the camera. This tradition would carry on for the rest of the TOS film series, and into The Next Generation , too. As a director, it’s easy to say that The Voyage Home was Nimoy’s better film. And yet, if you’re looking for a grab-bag of what made Trek great in the ‘80s, look no further than The Search For Spock .      

For aesthetics alone, it was in this film that Star Trek started to feel like the Star Trek we think of today. Designed by David Carson and Nilo Rodis at ILM, this film gave us the beautiful Spacedock, a design so perfect it reappeared not just in other TOS films, but in T he Next Generation , too (with an influence that extends to both Lower Decks and Picard ) The USS Excelsior appeared here for the first time, as did the immortal Klingon Bird-of-Prey. We also got Christopher Lloyd playing Klingon Commander Kruge, one year before he played Doc Brown in Back to the Future . After negotiations with Kirstie Alley didn’t work out, Nimoy recast Robin Curtis as Saavik. Curtis is the only actor in Star Trek history to play a Vulcan and be cast by Leonard Nimoy, and, in some ways, her take on the character was probably closer to being truly Vulcan than Alley’s take.

On top of all of this, the absence of Spock for most of the film, allowed the rest of the TOS cast to shine in a way they never had before. Based on his experience on Mission: Impossible , Nimoy was inspired to make The Search For Spock more of an ensemble piece than any previous Trek project. The final result is a movie in which the entire classic crew is showcased beautifully, and brings the Star Trek family closer than it ever had been before. – RB

4. Star Trek: First Contact

If you’re trying to explain why Star Trek was such a big deal in the 1990s, the best cultural artifact is easily the 1996 film First Contact . Released on November 22, 1996, just two months after the 30th anniversary of The Original Series , the second feature film focused on The Next Generation crew was a confluence of everything that was happening in Trek at that time, but also, a retroactive origin story about how it all started. Today, various MCU movies check continuity boxes like this all the time, but First Contact was unique because it somehow spanned three ‘90s Trek shows by not only featuring the TNG crew front and center but also referencing Deep Space Nine and Voyager .

Brent Spiner and Patrick Stewart have never been better, but the guest cast for First Contact is the real proof of just how big this film was. Alfre Woodard’s Lily is the perfect audience surrogate for the poor soul who knows nothing about Trek (“It’s my first ray gun”) while James Cromwell reboots the father of warp drive, Zefram Cochrane, with charming (and drunken) panache. To top it all off, Alice Krige’s Borg Queen recontextualized the greatest Trek villain of all time, with a performance that is both understated and unique. In 1996, Trek traded “boldly go” for “let’s rock and roll!” and it worked perfectly. – RB

3. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

It’s funny: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country – the final big screen voyage of the entire original series cast – never seems to get the same type of discussion or analysis as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan , Star Trek: The Motion Picture , or even Star Trek V: The Final Frontier . Which is too bad, because it’s right up there with The Wrath of Khan as one of the finest of the bunch.

It’s no coincidence that it was directed and co-written by Nicholas Meyer, the same filmmaker who was in the center seat for Khan , and just as he did with that film, Meyer here crafts a character-driven space opera filled with excitement, suspense, Big Themes, and some of the best moments ever written for William Shatner’s Kirk and Leonard Nimoy’s Spock. Both men grapple with age, irrelevance, and their own flaws – Kirk’s bigotry on one hand, Spock’s hubris on the other – as they try to determine who wants to sabotage a peace process between the Federation and the Klingons and start a galactic war.

Highlights include a superb climactic battle against the rogue Klingon ship (commanded by an awesome Christopher Plummer ), Sulu (George Takei) in action as captain of his own starship, and a scene in Spock’s quarters between the Vulcan and Kirk that is both poignant and meta (“Is it possible that we two, you and I, have grown so old and so inflexible that we have outlived our usefulness? Would that constitute… a joke?”). By the time the Enterprise literally sails off into the sun at the end, you almost don’t want this to be this cast’s sign-off. But it was, and they went out like a nova. – Don Kaye

2. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Star Trek has always been goofy. Yes, yes, Star Trek can be lots of things, including exciting and romantic and philosophical. But it has always been goofy, with giant Spock heads and Worf assuring us that he is not a Merry Man. So it makes sense that the most popular Trek movie of all time would also be one of its silliest. But whatever you might think about a story that sends the original crew back to 1980s San Fransisco to save the whales, The Voyage Home always laughs with the characters, not at them. 

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Finally embracing his connection to the Trek world and stepping back into the director’s chair, Leonard Nimoy brings the same affection for his co-stars that marked Search for Spock . From that affection, Nimoy brings out the best in the cast, giving them delightful scenes in which Scotty talks lovingly into a computer mouse and Chekov seeks nuclear “wessels.” But as much as the movie shares the attention, the biggest chunk, as always, goes to William Shatner, who more than meets comedic task. That twinkle in his eye when he corrects Catherine Hicks’s marine biologist Gillian Taylor (“No, I’m from Iowa. I only work in outer space”), reminds us why, after all the jokes and horror stories, Kirk is still the captain. – JG

1. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Can you honestly say you were surprised that this is Number One? More than 40 years and a dozen movies later, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is still the gold standard for what this franchise could and occasionally did achieve on the big screen. Conceived in the wake of the successful — but financially and creatively bloated — Star Trek: The Motion Picture as a smaller-scale adventure more in line with the TV show, The Wrath of Khan fulfilled its brief and then some, acting as both a sequel to a classic original series episode while addressing head-on the aging of the cast and the canon itself.

With Trek creator Gene Roddenberry kicked “upstairs” to an emeritus position, The Wrath of Khan proved that sometimes an established IP gets its best entries from people who have no previous attachment to the material. Executive producer Harve Bennett, writer-director Nicholas Meyer, and producer Robert Sallin were all new to Star Trek , yet ended up crafting a movie that felt in tone, pace, and theme like an expanded, outstanding episode of the TV show – a feeling missing from the first film.

Star Trek II also featured the return of arguably the original series’ greatest villain, the genetic superman Khan Noonien Singh, played once again with over-the-top relish by Ricardo Montalban. His obsessive, at-all-costs pursuit of vengeance against Kirk gives the film real stakes, as does the discovery that Kirk – the man who could never settle down and always fled to the stars – has a son he hadn’t seen in decades, who wants nothing to do with him. And then there’s Spock: his climactic self-sacrifice, capping one of sci-fi cinema’s most exciting space battles, never fails to be moving (even if the studio forced Meyer to slightly pull his punch at the very end). This is grand sci-fi, and even grander Trek , and somehow we think it will retain its place at the top of the heap for as long as Earth sails through space. – DK

What are your favorite Star Trek movies? Let us know in the comments!

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Total Recall

Every star trek movie ranked from worst to best, with star trek beyond hitting theaters, we count down every big screen voyage of the enterprise..

TAGGED AS: Sci-Fi

These days, cancellation isn’t necessarily the end for a television series; between DVD sales, the Web, and the ever-expanding cable dial, if a show has a fervent enough fanbase, odds are someone is going to come along to take advantage of it. Such was not the case 50 years ago, however – not that it mattered to diehard Star Trek fans, who so impressed Paramount with their passion for Gene Roddenberry’s characters that the studio brought the property to theaters a full decade after the show was unceremoniously dumped by NBC. Nearly four decades later, as we prepare to greet Star Trek Beyond , the franchise’s 13th feature, your pals at Rotten Tomatoes thought now would be the perfect time to take a fond look back at all the Enterprise voyages that got us here — from the beloved classics ( The Wrath of Khan ) to the ones that never should have made it off the holodeck ( The Final Frontier ). Where does your favorite rank? Read this week’s Total Recall to find out!

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) 23%

After churning out three consecutive installments that pleased fans as well as critics, the Star Trek  franchise was due for a fall – and it got one in the form of 1989’s The Final Frontier . William Shatner directed the fourth sequel, and helped come up with the storyline (which puts the crew of the Enterprise at odds with a God-like being who has nefarious plans for the galaxy), so he’s taken much of the blame for what’s regarded by many as the weakest film in the series – blame that, to his credit, he’s publicly accepted. But to be fair, Frontier  had bigger problems than Shatner; for starters, the 1988 writers’ strike left Paramount rushing to push out another Trek  before the series lost its momentum – and with a budget almost $20 million lower than that assigned to the first film 10 years earlier. Whatever the causes, Frontier  was a failure; although it easily recouped its budget, its grosses didn’t come anywhere near The Voyage Home ’s, and neither fans nor critics were charmed by the film’s comedic elements (including the infamous Yosemite camping scenes) or its thinly veiled attacks on televangelists. “Of all the Star Trek  movies, this is the worst,” wrote Roger Ebert – and for a time, it seemed likely that it would also be the last.

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  Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) 38%

If 1998’s Insurrection found the Star Trek  franchise suffering from what seemed like audience fatigue, 2002’s Nemesis — the final picture to feature The Next Generation ’s crew – represented the onset of a full-on malaise. After over a decade of films that performed solidly at the box office and ran the critical gamut from great to respectable, Nemesis came as a profound letdown – not only with critics, who gave it the worst reviews the series had seen since The Final Frontier , but with the moviegoers who stayed away in droves; its $43 million domestic gross was almost as embarrassing as the fact that it made less than Maid in Manhattan  its opening weekend. In the hands of new director Stuart Baird, Nemesis presented a more action-heavy Trek than audiences were accustomed to; unfortunately, this shift in direction alienated hardcore fans, and the script – partially inspired by an idea from Brent “Data” Spiner – failed to take advantage of its departing cast. In the words of USA Today’s Mike Clark, “As spent screen series go, Star Trek: Nemesis  is… suggestive of a 65th class reunion mixer where only eight surviving members show up — and there’s nothing to drink.”

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) 53%

With a full decade between it and the end of the original series, you might think 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture  would have plenty of time to work out all the kinks – but alas, as the movie’s dismal Tomatometer (and decades of fan gags about “ The Motionless Picture “) can attest, all of Trek ’s time off didn’t translate into an auspicious big-screen debut for the crew of the Starship Enterprise. The problem with the first Trek  film – aside from a dialogue-heavy storyline whose biggest villain was a cloud – actually had nothing to do with the franchise itself; instead, it was a series of corporate shenanigans, including an aborted attempt at a second Trek  television series, that left director Robert Wise with a patchwork script and neither the time nor the money to realize his vision. Although The Motion Picture  didn’t meet commercial or critical expectations (the Chicago Reader’s Dave Kehr called it “blandness raised to an epic scale”), it performed well enough to justify a sequel – and, in the bargain, kicked off one of the longest-running series in movie history.

Star Trek Generations (1994) 48%

After seven years and 178 episodes, Paramount felt the time was right to give the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation  its cinematic debut – and since some members of the Enterprise’s original crew were either unwilling to return (Leonard Nimoy) or not well enough (DeForest Kelley), the seventh Trek  movie seemed like the perfect spot for a changing of the guard. With a behind-the-scenes crew that included a number of Next Generation  vets – including producer Rick Berman, director David Carson, and screenwriters Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga – 1994’s Star Trek Generations  should have been a slam dunk, especially given a plot that put TNG ’s Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) face-to-face with James T. Kirk for the first time, but alas, it was not to be. Though it did well enough at the box office, slightly improving upon The Undiscovered Country ’s worldwide tally, Generations  received a mixed reception from writers like the New York Times’ Peter M. Nichols, who simultaneously criticized it as “predictably flabby and impenetrable in places” and praised it for having “enough pomp, spectacle and high-tech small talk to keep the franchise afloat.”

Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) 55%

After handling screenplay duties for Generations  and First Contact , writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga disembarked from Star Trek ’s film voyage – but at this point, the Trek  creative universe had expanded to the point that producer Rick Berman had plenty of new collaborators to choose from. He settled on Michael Piller, with whom he’d created the Trek  TV spinoff series Deep Space Nine , and together – along with Jonathan Frakes, who returned to direct and reprise his role as Commander William T. Riker – they put together Insurrection , a story that introduced new wrinkles for familiar characters (such as LeVar Burton’s Lieutenant Commander Geordi LaForge briefly acquiring the ability to see without optical implants) while still holding true to the core themes of the series. Unfortunately, at this point, audiences were so used to seeing one Trek  TV series or another that they needed something truly extraordinary to hold their attention on the big screen – and Insurrection , as evidenced by a gross that fell short of First Contact ’s, wasn’t it. Still, even if critics didn’t find it to be the most compelling entry in the series, they weren’t completely dismissive; as Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “[It] lacks the adrenalized oomph of its predecessor, but no adventure of the Starship Enterprise is without its gee-whiz affability.”

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) 79%

Leonard Nimoy a.k.a. Captain Spock, only agreed to return for The Wrath of Khan  because his character died in the last act; fortunately for the franchise, he later had such a change of heart that not only did he come back for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock , he directed  it – and did an admirable job of continuing the series’ resurgence, piloting the third chapter to a respectable $76 million domestic gross and generally favorable reviews from critics like Time’s Richard Shickel, who praised Nimoy for “beaming his film up onto a higher pictorial plane than either of its predecessors.” Though further odd-numbered entries in the series would famously come to represent Trek  at its worst, Star Trek III  cemented Gene Roddenberry’s creation as a viable ongoing concern for Paramount – and set the stage for the film series’ fourth chapter, thus clearing the path for  Trek ’s eventual return to television in 1987 with Star Trek: The Next Generation .

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) 83%

It might have suffered a cinematic black eye with 1989’s The Final Frontier , but the Star Trek  franchise still had at least one thing going for it at Paramount – namely, the 25th anniversary of the series, which the studio was eager to capitalize on, even if it wasn’t willing to commit more than the $27 million spent to film the previous installment. Fortunately, the sixth Trek ended up in the hands of a director who knew how to make the most of minimal budgets: Nicholas Meyer, whose work on The Wrath of Khan was still, at that point, the critical apex of the series. Working from a Cold War-inspired story suggested by Nimoy, Meyer assembled The Undiscovered Country , whose 83 percent Tomatometer and nearly $100 million worldwide gross were not only fitting for a quarter-century celebration, but what ultimately ended up being the final voyage for much of the original cast. With series creator Gene Roddenberry passing away just prior to Country ’s release, and the future of the franchise in question, not a few critics were left feeling nostalgic – like Hal Hinson of the Washington Post, who wrote, “If, indeed, Star Trek VI  turns out to be the last of the series, it couldn’t have made a more felicitous or more satisfying exit.”

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) 84%

After leading the franchise to fresh heights of blockbuster glory, Star Trek  director J.J. Abrams was the natural choice to man the controls for the next installment in the series — and although the result, 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness , didn’t quite match the lofty standards set by its predecessor, it proved the Trek resurgence was no fluke. Continuing to explore the alternate timeline established by Abrams’ first chapter, Darkness  carried the rebooted mythology forward while weaving in some fairly major callbacks to iconic events and characters from the original films — including the nefarious Khan Noonien Singh, whose quest for vengeance against the Federation sends the crew of the Enterprise on a race against (and across) time. “ Star Trek Into Darkness  banishes, at least for the moment, the lugubrious mood and sepulchral look that too many comic-book movies mistake for sophistication,” wrote the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday. “All hail an action film that isn’t ashamed to have fun and to be seen doing it.”

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) 82%

Having explored the outer limits of space, Star Trek  spent much of its fourth cinematic installment in decidedly more familiar environs – namely, the America (specifically the San Francisco bay area) of 1986, thanks to a storyline, conceived by returning director Nimoy, that had the crew of the Enterprise traveling 600 years back in time to retrieve a humpback whale in order to… well, it isn’t important, really. What mattered – at least to the folks who helped Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home  to a $133 million worldwide gross – was that it lived up to Nimoy’s goal of showing audiences “a great time” with a feature that played up the lighter side of a franchise whose humor was often overshadowed by its big ideas. Weathering a number of pre-production storms – including William Shatner’s refusal to come back without a raise and the chance to direct the next sequel — Voyage  triumphantly emerged as what Roger Ebert referred to as “easily the most absurd of the Star Trek  stories – and yet, oddly enough… also the best, the funniest and the most enjoyable in simple human terms.”

Star Trek Beyond (2016) 86%

The original Star Trek movie series was never really known for its blockbuster action, but director/producer J.J. Abrams took things in a far more fast-paced direction when he rebooted the franchise — and that continued after he handed the reins to Justin Lin for 2016’s Star Trek Beyond . Continuing to display the flair for thrilling set pieces he demonstrated during his tenure with the Fast & Furious  saga, Lin sent the crew of the Enterprise hurtling to a distant planet where they found themselves pitted against the alien warlord Krall (Idris Elba) with an axe to grind against the Federation and a dark secret hidden in his past. It’s a setup with plenty of room for pulse-pounding space battles, and Lin didn’t disappoint — but he also left room for the thoughtful progressivism that had always been a hallmark of the earlier films, adding up to a fun Starfleet adventure critics hailed as a tasty bucket of popcorn sci-fi that doubled as a worthy celebration of Star Trek ‘s 50th anniversary. The end result, wrote Katie Walsh for the Tribune News Service, is “everything you want a post-modern Trek  movie to be: funny, poppy, self-referential — and with Captain Kirk punching bad guys in rubber masks.”

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) 87%

Sequels that expand upon their predecessors are exceedingly rare – but then, 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan  is no ordinary sequel. After ponying up the then-princely sum of $46 million for the first Trek , Paramount was looking for two things: One, a scapegoat for the first film’s $136 million global gross (which ended up being series creator Gene Roddenberry, who was exiled from the decision-making process for Khan ), and two, someone who could head up a cheaper second installment. That someone was Harve Bennett, a Trek  novice who quickly immersed himself in the original series in search of a compelling villain for the sequel – and found him in Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban), a superhuman with a thing for mind-controlling eels. Khan ’s thrifty aesthetic may have inspired Bennett and director Nicholas Meyer to cut corners wherever possible – including reusing sets from The Motion Picture  — but the movie didn’t skimp on storyline, much to the delight of fans and critics, both of whom rank the series’ second chapter at or near the top of the franchise. “Here comes a sequel that’s worth its salt,” wrote Janet Maslin of the New York Times, concluding “It’s everything the first one should have been and wasn’t.”

Star Trek: First Contact (1996) 93%

After three decades, seven films, and four television series, most franchises would have long since exhausted their options – but as 1996’s First Contact  proved, the creative horizons of the Star Trek  universe were capable of expanding longer and wider than perhaps even Gene Roddenberry could have suspected. Now firmly in control of the franchise, the Next Generation crew – both onscreen and off – was able to expand upon themes and characters touched on during its own series, specifically the nature of the endlessly assimilative cybernetic Borg collective. Having already proven a worthy adversary during TNG ’s run – particularly during the classic episode in which they assimilated Picard himself – the Borg now propelled Trek to the best reviews (and some of the highest grosses) in its history. A sequel that both paid tribute to longstanding Trek  traditions ( TNG  vet Jonathan Frakes directed, proving Leonard Nimoy wasn’t the only member of the Enterprise crew who could successfully pull double duty) and broke them (Paramount ended decades of parsimony by breaking out $47 million for the budget), First Contact  earned the praise of critics like Time’s Richard Corliss, who wrote that “it stands proud and apart, accessible even to the Trek -deficient” before decreeing that “this old Star , it seems, has a lot of life in it.”

Star Trek (2009) 94%

After bottoming out with 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis , the series entered a state of suspended animation for over half a decade — and if it hadn’t been for the reboot mania that gripped Hollywood during the early 21st century, there’s no telling how long it might have stayed there. As it happened, fanboy-friendly director J.J. Abrams — then riding a hot streak as one of the creators/producers of the hit series Lost  — was handed a set of jumper cables and the keys to the franchise; the result, 2009’s Star Trek , managed to hit the reset button on Trek (along with the requisite hot young cast) while incorporating enough familiar touches to keep longtime fans feeling at home. In the end, Abrams’ Trek earned some of the most positive reviews in the history of the franchise, and its $257 million gross firmed up the future of a film series that had seemed thoroughly uncertain just a few years before. “With Star Trek  Abrams honors the show’s legacy without fossilizing its best qualities,” enthused Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek. “Instead, he’s whisked it off to a planet where numbing nostalgia can’t kill it, and where the future is still something to look forward to.”

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Every Star Trek Movie Ranked

One of the most beloved and influential science-fiction franchises of our time, the Star Trek universe continues to captivate audiences and expand into new worlds – from the Original Series, to the Next Generation, to the J.J. Abrams -led reboots, to the plethora of live-action and animated Enterprise outings on the small screen in recent years.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the all-time classic and many a Trekkie’s favourite, Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan , we’re boldly going where many have gone before, and wrangling the 13 big-screen Star Trek adventures into a definitive order of quality. Here’s Empire’s list of the best Star Trek movies, ranked from worst to best:

13. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

After two films directed by Nimoy, Shatner stepped up for Star Trek V , but it was a troubled production, beset by rewrites, re-shoots and industrial action. The results are, let's say, uneven: a collision of separate stories that don't really mesh, with some jarring tonal shifts. On one level this is a classic Roddenberry concept about exploring the universe and investigating its creation, but that sits alongside Klingon-Romulan-Human politicking and moments of comedy: Kirk and Bones ribbing Spock round a campfire, or Scotty knocking himself unconscious because he doesn't know his way around the new Enterprise. An impressive Dune -like desert sequence gives way to a knock-off Mos Eisley bar scene. Spock suddenly has a renegade brother we've never heard of before. And yet, while the separate parts might not add up to a cohesive whole, there's enough going on that some of it works. Fundamentally, this is a film where Captain Kirk meets God and is unimpressed . That might just be the ultimate Kirk moment, and getting there is worth a couple of hours of janky runaround.

12. Star Trek: Nemesis

A fairly catastrophic failure both critically and commercially, Nemesis did what no Trek film had done before: killed the franchise stone dead for almost a decade. It's still fun to hang out with the Next Generation crew, but that cozy familiarity aside, this is a disappointing experience. It's visually murky, bogs itself down with a leaden plot about Romulan intrigue, has its limelight hogged by Brent Spiner, and suffers from one of the weakest villains in the series: Tom Hardy 's Reman rebel leader Shinzon. This was one of Hardy's earliest roles, and it probably isn't his fault, but he's less than stellar in it and looks borderline ridiculous, sporting a prosthetic nose. His introduction is set up as a huge reveal moment - "Oh my God, it's Picard !" – except he looks nothing like Picard, and the only visual clue that he's Picard's clone is that he's bald. The action periodically delivers and Data's sacrifice – while not a patch on Spock's – gives it a little heart, but as the Next Gen crew's last hurrah, this one saw Picard and the gang go out with a whimper, not a bang.

11. Star Trek Into Darkness

The continuing mission of the rebooted Enterprise has all the pleasure of the 2009 film in its interplay between the principals, and some great San Francisco spectacle. But Into Darkness ' great weakness is its villain: in this instance, Benedict Cumberbatch inheriting the role of Khan from Ricardo Montalban. The problem is exactly the same one that Spectre had with Blofeld: Khan only means something to the audience. He doesn't mean anything to the characters on screen. This Enterprise hasn't even met him in Space Seed. So, the films whole agenda – it's a remixed Star Trek II with another Khan, hold on to your hats! – doesn't work. This Khan is just another bad guy doing generic bad guy stuff. His being Khan is ultimately neither here nor there. "I'm not Harrison, I'm Khan." – are you? Who's that then? If you need a Zoom call with your future self to explain the stakes, you've got more problems than you realise.

10. Star Trek: The Motion Picture

The frequent goofiness of the Original Series sometimes obscured the fact that it was often dealing in strong sci-fi concepts and attempting serious philosophical musing. There was even a high-falutin' pretension to some of the episode titles, like season 3's 'For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky'. So, while in a post- Star Wars world, a straight-up space adventure might have seemed the no-brainer way to approach a Star Trek movie, you can see how Gene Roddenberry would have been more attracted to trying to do Kubrick's 2001 . Years in development, and at one point conceived as a new TV series before flipping back to film again, Robert Wise's film has been dubbed the Slow-Motion Picture by wags, and there's no denying its ponderousness. But where it achieves what it's aiming for is in the sequences designed to inspire absolute awe in the viewer – the early reveal of the new Enterprise in space dock, or Spock's solo float through the unbelievably vast V-Ger ship. It isn't to everyone's taste, it arguably doesn't make the best use of its cast, there's not much action and the new uniforms look awful. But there's a tone and ambition to The Motion Picture that's unique in Trek.

9. Star Trek: Generations

The long-heralded meeting of the generations kind of delivers on its promise, but instead of being great, it's only… fine. Part of the problem with Generations is its set-up, which shunts Kirk off into the time-defying Nexus. The plot device that gets him across the generations leaves all his own crew behind, meaning that the Original Series cast get cameos at best. Nimoy isn't in it at all. So, it's essentially a Next Generation movie with Shatner in it – less Enterprise meets Enterprise, more Picard meets Kirk. There are some Klingon shenanigans (hello TNG stalwarts Lursa and B'Etor), a wry Malcom McDowell is a solid principal villain, and the Enterprise is destroyed (again). But it never feels like the event it should, and Kirk's death, which ought to have been momentous, is badly fumbled; compare it to Spock's death in Wrath Of Khan and it's simply a shrug. Shatner was miffed enough that he brought Kirk back from the dead in a series of novels.

8. Star Trek: Insurrection

Of all the Star Trek films, Insurrection feels the most like a standard episode of the TV series (in this case, the Next Generation). The budget is obviously bigger, the screen wider, the effects more impressive, but strip those elements away and the story would barely have played any differently on the small screen. It's much lighter in tone than its immediate predecessor, First Contact , and therefore feels less consequential. But still enjoyable for all that. Largely a character piece focused on Data – as the Next Gen films increasingly were – it involves the Enterprise crew accidentally breaking Star Fleet's sacred Prime Directive of non-interference while on an observation mission on the peaceful backwoods planet Ba'Ku. The consequences draw the attention of the Son'A: Clive Barker-ish mummified aliens who keep themselves alive with frequent transplant surgery and are led by an unrecognisable F. Murray Abraham . The stakes are on the low side, but the set-pieces deliver. And you get to see Riker and Troi in the bath, if that's your thing.

7. Star Trek III: The Search For Spock

Star Trek III can't help but feel smaller and less urgent than the extraordinary Wrath of Khan , and while clearly we want Spock back, this does feel like an entire film in the service of undoing Star Trek II 's most unforgettable moment. It's less flat-out and simply less fun than its predecessor, and that seems to be a deliberate choice: while not at Motion Picture levels of heaviness, it still seems to be aiming for more weight again. Leonard Nimoy directs – the first of many Trek cast members to make the transition to the other side of the camera – and he's clearly great at getting performances, but less sure-footed with pacing and action. And there's a lot of spoken exposition. The villains, too, don't seem as threatening, just a brigade of ornery Klingons, led, rather oddly, by comic actor Christopher Lloyd. You can argue that he wasn't Doc Brown yet, but he was the Reverend Jim. Even the destruction of the Enterprise doesn't quite have the impact that's intended (although maybe that's a function of our having seen it destroyed again so many times in the years since). Still, it's never less than enjoyable, particularly in the Bones Behaving Oddly strand that largely drives the story. This is amiable, watchable Trek , and sometimes that's enough.

6. Star Trek Beyond

After the misfire of Into Darkness , the clear mission here was simple: forget fan-pleasing that pleases no one, and deliver a straight ahead brand new Star Trek adventure with the characters we know and love, untethered from any weight of continuity or dour intertextual engagement with past glories. Beyond is a breath of fresh air and, creatively, a huge success, benefitting from the gonzo energy of multiple Fast & Furious movie director Justin Lin . Simon Pegg 's Scotty emerges as perhaps the film's MVP (odd that, considering he co-wrote it), and is given an amusing double-act with newcomer alien scavenger Sofia Boutella ("Beats and shouting!"). And Idris Elba is a solid villain, although you might wish the new series would play a different bad guy card than 'grudge against Starfleet'. Still, it's all such a blast that it's hard to mind too much, especially during the air-punching callback to the 2009 film's use of the Beastie Boys' 'Sabotage'.

5. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Aka 'the one with the whales'. A family-friendly, fish-out-of-water comedy adventure, almost entirely set on (at the time) present-day Earth, intent on delivering an environmental message and with no real villain to speak of. An Enterprise crew who don't even have an Enterprise… Star Trek IV shouldn't work, but somehow it's one of the best, and certainly most beloved, films of the series. Maybe that's about its accessibility: it's Trek enough for fans, but un-Trekky enough to tempt the unconvinced. The comedy is great (particularly thanks to the revived Spock, whose befuddled weirdness goes barely remarked in 20th century San Francisco); the extended cast all get decent stuff to do (think Chekov's side-mission to find a 'nuclear wessel'); and Shatner gets a love interest that doesn't play as creepy. The whole film is like a warm hug. Is it Star Trek ? It seems from this evidence that Star Trek is whatever Star Trek says it is.

4. Star Trek (2009)

Star Trek 's big comeback was a reboot and an origin story, re-casting the Original Series crew and telling the story of their first mission aboard the Enterprise, not long out of Star Fleet Academy. The surprise is the extent to which it's also Star Trek 11 : smartly setting up a branching timeline that allows it to remain canonical even as it contradicts the Trek that's gone before. It has its gagh and eats it too. Leonard Nimoy cameos as the Spock we already know, and the new cast ( Chris Pine , Zachary Quinto , Karl Urban , Zoe Saldana , Simon Pegg) do a great job at making their iconic roles feel both familiar and fresh. It's an energetic, colourful, pacy film, revelling in joyful nostalgia and a deep love for these characters. It's just a pity that, with the focus on building the team, Eric Bana 's villain ends up a bit sidelined. Even while he's destroying planets, he's somehow no Khan.

3. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

The near-disaster of Star Trek V almost killed the franchise, so VI was returned to the safe hands of Nicholas Meyer, who'd previously snatched The Wrath Of Khan from the jaws of The Motion Picture . It doesn't quite hit Khan levels of excellence, but it does give the series its best villain since Montalban, in Christopher Plummer 's raging, Shakespeare-quoting Klingon general: a monomaniacal Ahab whose white whale is Kirk. Epic in scale, taking place across multiple ships and planets, the film's main plot hook is nevertheless a more intimate murder mystery, so there's room for character moments and effective storytelling. The obvious advancing age of the principals is explicitly acknowledged (adorably, the climax of the film genuinely rests on whether a portly old man can run up some stairs). And the wider context of peace negotiations between the Federation and the Klingon Empire serves to bridge the gap between The Original Series and the just-starting Next Generation , making this arguably a more effective handover than Generations. While some of the principal cast would return for guest appearances, either in subsequent films or on the small-screen Next Generation and Deep Space Nine , The Undiscovered Country feels valedictory, the last true hurrah of the original Enterprise crew.

2. Star Trek: First Contact

With the Borg the stand-out villains of The Next Generation – they even assimilated Picard in a fantastic end-of-season cliffhanger – their progression to a big-screen face-off was almost inevitable. The results in First Contact make it one of Trek 's nailed-on classics. The implacable Borg's Giger-ish design and body-horror vibe don't necessarily quite gel with the Star Trek ethos, but the film balances those elements with some wide-eyed Roddenberry-ish wonder in a plot about humankind reaching for the stars: specifically the first Warp flight. Some have questioned the introduction of the Borg Queen – they were a terrifying hive mind but now they've got a leader? – but logic aside, she's an undeniably great character, played with insidious relish by the otherworldly Alice Krige. The scenes where she's tempting Data are hugely compelling, circling around one of those big sci-fi ideas that Trek loves and addresses so well: an android choosing to be human.

1. Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan

The film that ensured Star Trek 's future. A major regrouping and rethinking following The Motion Picture , it's thrilling, breathlessly action-packed, and emotionally hefty. The Motion Picture really only had a mystery, but The Wrath of Khan gives the Enterprise crew a truly credible – even frightening – adversary in Ricardo Montalban's aggrieved superhuman, and there's no greater illustration of how genuinely high the stakes of this film are than one of the main cast having to die: the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few. It's a straight-up, knock-down brawl across the galaxy, weaving in lore from deep Star Trek cuts but never alienating a non-expert audience (it's a sequel to a season 1 episode, but you don't really need to have seen 'Space Seed' to get immediately on board). There are new crew members - notably Kirstie Alley's Vulcan Saavik - but The Wrath of Khan proves that the legacy players are far from done, even as the film sweetly acknowledges their lengthening teeth (and faltering eyesight). And there is, of course, that Shatner moment ("KHAAAAAAAAN!"), reminding us that, while there are other space adventure franchises, there are some things that are just uniquely, gloriously Trek . Of all the films we have encountered in our Star Trek travels, this was the most… human.

All The Star Trek Movies, Ranked

This is my definitive list.

There are so many Star Trek movies to enjoy -- 13, to be exact, and soon we’ll have 14 when Michelle Yeoh’s Section 31 movie is available for those with a Paramount+ subscription -- but which among them are the best of the best? That’s what I’m tasked with deciding here today, and I can certainly say there are some I like more than others. 

Opinion, by its nature, is subjective. I’m not sure I’ve seen any Star Trek fan with an identical top list of movies online, but I will say I enjoy most every Trek series I’ve watched. Therefore I wouldn’t expect this lineup to be too controversial, but I’ve been surprised before. Let’s dive in, and boldly go and make a definitive ruling on where each Star Trek series belongs. 

13. Star Trek: Generations (1994)

It’s a shame that Star Trek: Generations is near-universally panned as the worst of the Star Trek movies. Seeing Patrick Stewart ’s Jean-Luc Picard and William Shatner ’s James T. Kirk team up should unquestionably be the greatest thing that ever happened to the franchise. Unfortunately, the movie wasn’t quite all that, and what should’ve been a great introduction to The Next Generation crew making the transition from television to movies is a sloppy movie that delivered one of the most controversial moments in the sci-fi series’ history.

The movie killed off Captain Kirk by having him fall from a collapsing catwalk. I get that death comes for anyone in unexpected ways but in a scripted movie? They could’ve done better even if William Shatner had his reasons for how it was done. Still, the unique time travel elements and story has given this movie its fair share of fans over the years, so I’d say it’s still worth a watch. It wouldn’t be my first, second, or even 12th choice though, hence its rating on the list. 

Watch Star Trek: Generations On Max

12. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

William Shatner has undoubtedly played a big part in Star Trek ’s early success. While his acting work as Captain Kirk will live on for decades, the same can’t be said for his directing. That may sound harsh to say, but when Shatner himself admitted directing Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was a mistake , it’s kind of hard not to agree with him.   

I don’t think it’s unfair to say Star Trek V: The FInal Frontier is the worst of the TOS movies, especially after the streak of movies that came before it. With that said, had it not been for this movie, we wouldn’t have gotten the subplot in Strange New Worlds with Spock running into his half-brother Sybok’s lover Angel , who I do hope we’ll see at a later date. 

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Watch Star Trek V: The Final Frontier On Max

11. Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

Star Trek: Nemesis was, in many ways, a failure. The movie did not perform at the box office like previous movies and ultimately encouraged Paramount to go in another direction with its franchise. Critics panned the movie, and even the cast of The Next Generation was not a fan of the final project. In fact, it was why actress Marina Sirtis was grateful for Star Trek: Picard Season 3 years later, as she felt the cast was robbed of a proper send-off.  

The Next Generation crew dealing with a clone of Picard in control of the Reman people, played by a young Tom Hardy , sounds awesome. In execution, the whole thing fell flat. Even the memorable parts have aged poorly. Data, for example, was resurrected in Picard , killed, and then resurrected again. In fairness, Star Trek fans were glad to see him back in the mix again, but if they’re thrilled about a retcon to something established in Star Trek: Nemesis , it may speak to their overall enjoyment of the movie as a whole. 

Watch Star Trek: Nemesis On Max

10. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

A lot of the older generation would rank Star Trek: The Motion Picture a lot higher than I have, and I think it's a matter of experience. Those who lived through the cancellation of the original series, only to see it return to the big screen after success in syndication? It was a huge coup for a new fandom, and the beginning of great things to come. 

I’m of the mind that Star Trek: The Motion Picture has gotten a bad rap as it aged, and suffered from being the first movie in the franchise ever made. There’s no way for younger generations to understand just how awesome it was to see the Enterprise from front to back. I still can appreciate it, but even the brutality of the transporter accident can’t stop me from glancing at the time on my phone while watching.  

Watch Star Trek: The Motion Picture On Max

9. Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

If there was a list of sins a Star Trek movie could commit to gain the ire of the fandom, Star Trek Into Darkness created perhaps the biggest. Trying to recreate a storyline involving Khan, the most notable villain of TOS , was going to set a high bar. 

Of course, these are the feelings of someone who is a true blue Star Trek fan. The mass audience reception to Star Trek Into Darkness was pretty good, and people were all about Benedict Cumberbatch as a villain. Even so, it wasn’t worthy of comparison to Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan , which is hard to ignore. 

Watch Star Trek Into Darkness On Paramount+

8. Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

Star Trek: Insurrection had the impossible task of following up First Contact , which proved to be a huge challenge. Additionally, Paramount was interested in switching up the tone to something lighter than the previous movie, so the challenge to deliver to producers and audiences was high. 

Insurrection feels like a long episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That's not a terrible thing, but when it comes to movies, the bar should be a bit higher than what audiences can already view on television. Frankly, Insurrection doesn't prove to be more entertaining than the best of TNG . 

Watch Star Trek: Insurrection On Max

7. Star Trek III: The Search For Spock (1984)

Similar to Star Trek: Insurrection , The Search For Spock had the insurmountable challenge of following up the greatest movie to date. Perhaps even worse, the third TOS movie had to reverse the heart-wrenching death of Spock in a way that didn't upset audiences. 

I think it's fair to say the latter goal was a success, but is rescuing Spock's spirit from Bones' mind as thrilling as a face-off with Khan? It is not, but it's still a decent movie, and one worthy of its middling status in this ranking. 

Watch Star Trek III: The Search For Spock On Max

6. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

In hindsight, maybe Nicholas Meyer should've helmed all the Star Trek TOS movies. One can't help but wonder what these movies might've looked like had he kept runnings things post Wrath Of Khan . 

The Undiscovered Country , I think is a look at what could have been, and it's pretty damn promising. Of course, having big stars like Kim Cattrall and Christopher Plummer only bolster the enjoyment of a movie that feels like a return to form for the classic Enterprise crew, right before sending them off into the sunset. 

Watch Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country On Max

5. Star Trek Beyond (2016)

Star Trek Beyond is the newest film in the franchise, as Hollywood struggles to try and make a fourth installment in the Kelvin timeline. Fortunately, if there's never another one, the third movie is a delightful send-off to the Kelvin crew and all they accomplished, after Star Trek Into Darkness left a sour taste in my mouth, Beyond is the perfect palette cleanser. 

If there is any part of Star Trek Beyond that isn’t enjoyable, it’s that the entire crew doesn’t spend a ton of time together. Instead, they’re sectioned off with their own respective storylines, which worked well for the actors and their increased fame. Unfortunately, it feels like if they had found time to do more scenes with the entire ensemble, this might’ve been the best movie of the Kelvin timeline. 

Watch Star Trek Beyond On Paramount+

4. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

The whale one? Yes, the whale one. It's always fun when a Star Trek project travels back to our present timeline, if only to remind us how strange our world would be to them, and how strange they'd be to us. 

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is funny, wholesome, and a good time all at once. It's not the best TOS film, but it's pretty high up there in comparison to everything else that was released. 

Watch Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home On Max

3. Star Trek (2009)

J.J. Abrams ’ 2009 re-imagining of Star Trek isn’t just a great movie, it could be the most significant film in the history of the franchise. The Next Generation crew’s set of movies didn’t perform quite as well as the TOS movies, and Enterprise was the last Trek series in five years leading up to this film. Had this re-imagining of Star Trek in another timeline flopped, the franchise might’ve died. 

Fortunately, that didn’t happen, and the more action-driven narratives of the movie bled into the new generation of Star Trek shows. While there are critics of the modern style of storytelling and increased action, the fact that there are plenty of upcoming Trek shows in the pipeline and people still clamoring for a fourth installment of the Kelvin movies. 

Watch Star Trek On Paramount+

2. Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

Star Trek: The Next Generation didn’t have as much success critically or financially as the TOS movies, but it still managed to make one of the best movies the franchise has ever delivered. First Contact is required viewing for any Star Trek fan, especially those who wish to see the origin of how the story of mankind’s massive leap into space exploration came to be. 

The success of the movie solidified Jonathan Frakes status as a reputed director, and he’s gone on to play a big part in directing episodes of Star Trek ’s new era. This is a movie that I would say is so good, it appeals to even the non- Star Trek fans despite being heavily entrenched in the lore of The Next Generation . For that reason, it’s ranked among the very best. 

Watch Star Trek: First Contact On Max

1. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

I spent far too many years having not seen Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan , but after seeing it for the first time , I can see the hype. I don’t think there’s any real dispute this is the best film in the franchise, as much as I love First Contact . Seeing James T. Kirk in the Captain’s chair in a battle of wits against a former villain from the series is not only captivating, it’s “fascinating,” as Spock would say.

Speaking of Spock, it's his noble sacrifice that lays out the entire theme of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few. A dark ending, to be sure, though of course, we all know Spock didn't stay dead! This, plus the fantastic showdown between Kirk and Khan make this the definitive best Star Trek movie, hands down. 

Watch Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan On Max

Currently, the Star Trek movies are available to stream either over on Max or Paramount+. It’s really convenient for anyone who wants to make their own ranking list of the movies, though I’d like to think no one can do it better than I just did. 

Mick Joest is a Content Producer for CinemaBlend with his hand in an eclectic mix of television goodness. Star Trek is his main jam, but he also regularly reports on happenings in the world of Star Trek, WWE, Doctor Who, 90 Day Fiancé, Quantum Leap, and Big Brother. He graduated from the University of Southern Indiana with a degree in Journalism and a minor in Radio and Television. He's great at hosting panels and appearing on podcasts if given the chance as well.

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Star Trek movies, ranked

See where all 13 films fall on the franchise list.

13. Star Trek Generations (1994)

Every Star Trek movie has problems. There are nonsense villains, unconvincing pseudo-science, lead-actor ego-stroking, and aimless plotting. There is the shockingly frequent feeling that Starfleet, that great galactic exploratory organization uniting all the cosmos in common cause, is a curiously underfunded goon squad whose security apparatus depends solely on the presence of one Enterprise or another. But only Generations is truly inessential — and only Generations squanders both Captain Kirk ( William Shatner ) and Captain Picard ( Patrick Stewart ), opting to stage the meeting of two pop culture icons as an opportunity for tragically literal horseplay. At least Generations coughs up the impressive Enterprise-D crash scene, one last cool model effect before the franchise (and Hollywood) went full CGI.

Read the full deep dive into Generations here .

12. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)

Spock ( Leonard Nimoy ) dies in Wrath of Khan , and that death scene gets replayed four different ways in the sequel — a recognition of just how powerful the scene was, but also an admission that nothing in Search for Spock comes halfway close to measuring up. This is by far the busiest original-cast Trek film, with several different story threads — the Enterprise heist, Spock-ified McCoy ( DeForest Kelley ), the demise of the Genesis Planet, whatever Christopher Lloyd 's Klingon is supposed to be doing, the sidelong assertion that Starfleet has been entirely taken over by douchebag jocks — and there's a world-buildy attention to unnecessary detail, including an in-depth exploration of Vulcan mysticism at its most Fellini-esque (and least convincing). It's not a movie — it's a bunch of Wikipedia articles, strung together with atrocious outfits and the worst hero-villain climactic fight scene in a franchise full of awful hero-villain climactic fight scenes.

Read the full deep dive into Search for Spock here .

11. Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

There was always a goofy generosity of spirit powering The Next Generation , a sensibility that fell by the wayside in the cast's first two big-screen outings. Insurrection tries to transfer that lighthearted spirit to the big screen. Picard dances to mambo; Riker ( Jonathan Frakes ) flirts Troi ( Marina Sirtis ) into a bathtub; Worf ( Michael Dorn ) grows a zit; Data (Brent Spiner) goes bad, but gets distracted into a Gilbert & Sullivan singalong with Picard. It's a soft-touch comedy. But Insurrection is held back by its central conceit — a New Age-inflected "Fountain of Youth" planet populated by hippie-artisan white people — and its back half becomes an unconvincing guerilla-action romp.

Read the full deep dive into Insurrection here .

10. Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

The fan outrage over J.J. Abrams ' reboot-sequel has overshadowed what is, ultimately, a very expensive-looking not-terrible action movie, with a borderline-surreal plot full of un-shocking "twists" and bizarre exposition. (If you can follow the thread about the Klingon Empire, you've probably given this film more attention than it deserves.) The reduction of Zoe Saldaña 's Uhura to frustrated girlfriend status is actually more disturbing than the film's shameless trailer-baiting "Carol Marcus Strips For No Reason" moment, and the whole Starfleet-Conspiracy angle was much better covered in The Undiscovered Country . But at least this most expensive Star Trek movie is pretty to look at.

Read the full deep dive into Star Trek Into Darkness here .

9. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

Barely finished and tonally inconsistent, the only film directed by William Shatner is a fascinating curio, by turns a goofball Marx Brothers-ish farce and a freshman-year theological inquisition. The dissonance is outrageous — in a typical chunk of time, the film forces McCoy to face the death of his father, recreates the birth of Spock, and then sends them both rocketing through the Enterprise with help from some jet boots. The cosmography feels like it was sketched on a whiteboard — the Great Barrier at the Center of the Universe! — but Final Frontier is some kind of magnum opus for Shatner. I challenge you to find a better Captain Kirk line than this: "I've always known I'll die alone." Wait, here it is: "What does God need with a starship?"

Read the full deep dive into The Final Frontier here .

8. Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

The best villain in the whole franchise is Alice Krige's Borg Queen, a seductive tyrant who swans through the best scenes in First Contact , tempting Data to the dark side. She's a blast of fresh air in a movie that tries hard to add '90s thrills into the franchise, with decidedly mixed results. This is the first true action movie in the series, and the Borg invasion of the Enterprise-E produces some nifty set pieces. But, no matter how cool the Borg look, they're monotone villains from a technophobic era, and they haven't aged well — and neither have the comedic stylings of James Cromwell, Irascible Rockstar Explorer Scientist.

Read the full deep dive into First Contact here .

7. Star Trek (2009)

The first scene of J.J. Abrams' Trek reboot is a colorful blast of in medias res action, inventing Chris Hemsworth out of thin air in a burst of funny-sad self-sacrifice. Then the film begins…and a l-o-o-o-o-o-ong origin-story first act brings everything to a screeching halt. The new cast is game for anything, and Abrams pushes them into everything , with Chris Pine giving what amounts to an Olympic-level athletic performance as a roguish Kirk and Zachary Quinto practically Hulk-ing out as an unrepressed and romanticized Spock. Like First Contact , 2009's Star Trek has some eye-popping set pieces (that space jump!), but the film dead-ends into an oddly plotty final act. Bless Eric Bana , who seems to be having lots of fun playing a different villain every time he shows up.

Read the full deep dive into Star Trek '09 here .

6. Star Trek Beyond (2016)

Here's a big idea for a Star Trek movie: Make it feel like a midseason episode of a Star Trek TV show. That's the thinking behind the first act of Beyond , which finds Kirk and Co. in year three of a five-year mission. For the first time in the film franchise, the rhythms of life onboard don't feel unnecessarily magnified. The crew has an easy rapport, their missions have an intriguing regularity, and things are beginning to feel a bit, well, episodic. They visit the Yorktown space colony, one of the niftiest future locations in any space movie of the 2010s. Director Justin Lin has better action chops than any previous Trek director, and it shows in the first Enterprise assault, a clever hive-mind attack that cuts the starship off at the head. Then the crew crash-lands — and the film crashes with it, descending into a muddled second act. New baddie Krall is all-but-ruined by a curious plot decision that forces Idris Elba to play "vaguely-defined evil" until nearly the end of the film. Beyond wants to ask tough questions about the franchise — but it settles for all the easy answers, descending into precisely the kind of referentiality that everyone loathed in Star Trek Into Darkness .

5. Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

Cut to the bone by a filmmaker who barely seemed to know what Star Trek was, the final film to feature the Next Generation cast is a frustratingly non-final final act for a crew that deserved (and still deserves) a true send-off. (And that Troi brain-rape scene is the lowest point in the franchise.) But there are ghoulish delights in this vampiric B-minus B-movie. A very young Tom Hardy gnashes on scenery as Shinzon, the Picard clone with a whisper-scream. This is Patrick Stewart's finest performance in any of the Star Trek movies, shaded with wonder and sadness — and it's a heartbreaking showcase for Brent Spiner, who double-roles as Data and the loopy android B-4. It all ends with the finest ship-to-ship showdown in the series, an outer-space brawl-smash between the Enterprise-E and Shinzon's flagship.

Read the full deep dive into Nemesis here .

4. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

Slow as hell, beige as dad-khakis, the first Star Trek film is also an intermittently eye-popping gonzo cosmic ride. Special effects maestro Douglas Trumbull worked on the movie practically out of spite — he wanted out of his Paramount contract — but his team oversaw some of the wooziest visuals to ever appear in the Star Trek franchise, with the interior of mega-ship V'Ger rendered as a Freudian techno-organic trip to the cosmic beyond. Characters, psh. Everyone looks bored (besides DeForest Kelley, rocking a memorable beard and then the kind of deep V-neck that got outlawed after 1979). What The Motion Picture very much lacks in character and story, it makes up for with pure sound and image: Jerry Goldsmith's glorious score; the trippy special effects; the pajama uniforms; the sheer volume of extras this runaway production could afford. If you think Star Trek needs to be a fast-paced action movie, this is probably your least favorite film. But, at the risk of sounding like the kind of goofball hippie The Motion Picture seems built for, there are some very groovy chill vibes in this very silly movie.

Read the full deep dive into The Motion Picture .

3. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

Okay, but now let's start talking about awesome movies. Nicholas Meyer steered right into the skid of flagrant topicality with his second Trek directorial effort, rendering the end of the Cold War via onscreen diplomatic negotiations between Starfleet and the Klingon Empire. Meyer always had a cockeyed perspective on Kirk — his films flavor Kirk's heroism with melancholy and rage — and the film springs off the idea of William Shatner playing an aging soldier, watching the times pass him by. Shatner and the whole original Enterprise crew are all giving career-best work here, the dinner scene being a showcase for everyone involved. What's even more impressive — coming from the man who made Wrath of Khan — is that this is still the only Trek film that doesn't try to cough up one single super-bad-guy villain. Undiscovered Country 's Klingons are clever, witty Shakespeare scholars — some good, some nefarious — and even the bad Klingons are only as bad as their Starfleet co-conspirators. The film gets less ambitious as it goes along, but it wraps up with a heartwarming epilogue, sending off the original Star Trek cast on a humane high note.

Read the full deep dive into The Undiscovered Country here .

2. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

KHAAAAAANNNN! Nicholas Meyer's hotblooded debut as a Star Trek filmmaker ignores The Motion Picture and reconceives the utopian series with a naval inflection. It also gives Kirk an identity crisis: Middle-aged and shipless, the Admiral looks a little lost. The film reactivates Kirk by bringing back an old nemesis: Khan, Moby Dick -quoting barbarian genius played with muscular relish by Ricardo Montalban . Montalban gives an ecstatic performance, and his spirit pervades the filmmaking: Meyer stages the ship-to-ship combats with shadowy space-submarine tension and cleverly shoots his tiny sets with a depth of field that makes Khan feel like an epic in miniature. "I feel old," Kirk says at the beginning. "I feel young," he says at the end. You know how he feels.

Read the full deep dive into The Wrath of Khan here .

1. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

A delightfully unserious film about deeply serious things, Leonard Nimoy's masterpiece is a light-footed character comedy. There's a mysterious alien intelligence destroying the Earth — saving the future means saving the whales. The crew travels back in time, and then something quite lovely happens: They go exploring. Shot partially on location in San Francisco, Voyage Home reimagines its space heroes as a comedy team, with Kirk as a hilariously out-of-his-depth "expert" ("Double dumbass on you!") and Spock as a holy-fool Harpo who's not above going for a swim with a humpback whale. The peculiar magic of The Voyage Home is difficult to graph. Co-writer Nicholas Meyer crafted some of the funniest dialogue in the series, and one-off guest-star Catherine Hicks is an energetic addition to the main cast.

And the supporting cast! McCoy gives an older lady a new kidney; Scotty (James Doohan) talks to a computer; Uhura ( Nichelle Nichols ) begs onlookers to point her toward Alameda; Chekov (Walter Koenig) pronounces "vessels" funny. Lighthearted, leisurely-paced, with nary a gun fired or a photon torpedo exploded: There may never be another franchise movie like this — hell, there may never be another movie like this — which makes the blithe miracle of The Voyage Home all the more impressive.

Read the full deep dive into The Voyage Home here .

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Every STAR TREK Film Ranked from Worst to Best

The Star Trek franchise has had a whopping 13 feature film entries over 40 years, and Paramount is said to be developing at least three more movies . For more casual viewers and hardcore fans, the Trek movies are special, largely because the grander “life and death” experiences for the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise were often saved for the big screen. But that’s not to say this series hasn’t had its serious ups and downs over the decades, quality-wise. The highs have been really high, but the lows could be pretty embarrassing.

Before we rank each of the  Star Trek films, a warning: there are major spoilers for all of these movies here, so if for some reason you still don’t know about the major deaths of the  Trek canon, I suggest you bookmark this article, watch all the  Star Trek  films, and then come back. Now lets get started with the worst of the bunch and work our way up…

13. Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

Paramount Pictures

Star Trek: The Next Generation remains my all-time favorite Trek series. But without a doubt, the cast of that show had a rougher go of it on the big screen than the original crew did. Insurrection  isn’t the most embarrassing of the Trek movies, but it is the most boring, and the smallest in scope. You watch it and then forget it instantly.

From the first Trek movie on, the films focused on the big events in the lives of the Enterprise crew. From the relaunch of the ship, to Spock’s death and rebirth, and so on. But Insurrection feels more like a standard one-and-done episode. This at a time when there were two other Star Trek shows on the air each week— Deep Space Nine  and  Voyager —that were arguably better (and free).

The plot of the film revolved around a planet bearing a sort of fountain of youth. Of course, there’s an aggressive alien species who wants it all for themselves. There’s also a corrupt Federation admiral, because there’s always one of those . But it all amounts to a snoozefest. There’s also another hippy-dippy, agrarian humanoid species that wears a lot of cotton—the kind that the ’90s era Trek  shows loved  way too much.

Jonathan Frakes directed this one after the successful First Contact , but he just couldn’t make any magic happen this time.

12. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

After Leonard Nimoy’s directing success with III and IV , William Shatner wanted in on the action too. Unfortunately, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier gives into all of Shatner’s cheesier tendencies. The lowbrow humor often totally conflicts with the seriousness of the main story. How serious is the main story? The Enterprise is hijacked by a religious zealot who is Spock’s long lost older brother. He takes the ship on a mission to find God. Yeah, that  God.

From the get-go, you know this mission will be a failure and that they aren’t going to find God just hanging out on some planet somewhere. So there is no dramatic tension at all about the outcome. And because ILM was busy at the time with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , the VFX were farmed out elsewhere, resulting in the worst effects in the film series thus far.

Still, there is some charming stuff here. The opening sequence with Kirk, Spock, and Bones on a camping trip in Yosemite is fun, for instance. But when you combine it all with a cheap knockoffs of  Star Wars ‘ cantina scene and Lt. Uhura doing a naked “fan dance” to distract the bad guys ? Oh boy. Thank goodness the classic crew got one more outing to get a chance to go out with some dignity. (If Star Trek V: The Final Frontier lacks anything, it’s dignity.)

11. Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

Nemesis is often ranked at the very bottom of the Star Trek movie pile by many fans, but I have to admit, I really don’t hate this one. Yes, it shamelessly rips off  Wrath of Khan with another vengeance-seeking enemy, this time played by a young Tom Hardy . Shinzon is a clone of Picard raised in the Romulan mines who takes over the Romulan Empire and is hellbent on destroying his genetic father, mostly just because the script says so. But Tom Hardy acts the hell out of an underwritten part.

The film ends up fairly entertaining with some nice action, and is a better finale for the TNG crew than  Insurrection would have been. For example, it gives fans of the show the wedding of Riker and Troi after 15 years of “will they/won’t they.” Sadly, outside of Picard and Data , the other characters are very shortchanged. (Perhaps because director Stuart Baird had no previous knowledge of Star Trek .)

The last shot is not the Enterprise boldly going into warp , but in drydock, badly damaged. What a fitting metaphor for the state of the series at this point, as this was the lowest grossing of all the Star Trek films, killing the franchise for seven years. Eventually, though, Star Trek  would rise from the ashes, as it always does.

10. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

After ten years of false starts with various discarded scripts, and a possible new TV series called Star Trek Phase II that almost happened, Star Trek: The Motion Picture finally took flight in 1979. It had a then-astronomical budget of $45 million dollars, and you see every penny of that on screen. The effects were lightyears from the old show, and the Enterprise looked stunning for the first time ever. On top of that, all of the original cast members returned. And with an A-list director like Robert Wise at the helm, what could go wrong?

Well, pretty much everything. The movie is mostly a long and boring chore. Essentially, this is a remake of the original series episode “ The Changeling. ” Both stories center on an old 20th century Earth probe rewired by alien tech. They both become godlike and return to Earth looking for its creator. Except that old episode told the same story efficiently, with fun and humor sprinkled in. Instead of the bright colors of the Trek series, everyone is the film wears drab white or beige uniforms. Captain Kirk looks like he’s wearing a dentist’s shirt for some reason. Did Spock need a root canal or something?

Spock has some of the more interesting stuff going on story-wise in the movie, and actually has a complete arc. But everyone else is just kind of there. The movie made bank though, mostly because Trek fans had waited a decade for it to happen. But the reaction to this movie almost stopped the revival of Star Trek before it started. Luckily, they had one more shot at this, and then everything worked out just fine .

9. Star Trek into Darkness (2013)

Following up one of the best-received reboots in recent memory has to be an unenviable task. Unfortunately, screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman did almost everything wrong when writing Star Trek into Darkness . Even the title kind of sucks.

The first act really hums along and contains great moments., and addresses certain big issues the previous film has. Namely, the fact that former cadet Kirk is  not ready to be captain of a ship yet. And then the movie hits its second hour and it all falls apart. Once Bendedict Cumberbatch reveals his true identity as Khan, everything just hits a wall.

How did timeline disruptions turn Ricardo Montalban’s Khan into a pasty white British dude? Why is it that his master plan makes zero sense? There is no reason for Khan to be in this movie, aside from the fact that there was once another Star Trek II that had a character named Khan in it. And redoing the end of Wrath of Khan , but with Kirk dying instead of Spock , feels totally unearned at this point in the series.

But there is a reason this movie has a high Rotten Tomatoes score . It’s to J.J. Abrams’ credit that he can almost make you forget that the story makes no sense, and that the script has giant plot holes (some might say this is the case also for Abrams’ The Rise of Skywalker , but the plot holes are way bigger in this movie). The film is actually very watchable, especially if you just want entertaining eye candy. It’s just not all that great.

8. Star Trek: Generations (1994)

There is a lot about Star Trek Generations  that just doesn’t work . Even the film’s writers Ron Moore and Brannon Braga admit as much on the film’s DVD Commentary. The writing partners decide to do the opposite of what fans expected with the story of this film. But sometimes, it’s best to just give the people what they want.

Instead of being introduced to the crew in a big action set piece, we are introduced to them in a cheesy holodeck scene. Rather than Picard being the stoic commander we all admire in his first movie outing, he’s seen mostly crying. All of this would be fine if this were just another episode of TNG. But this was their big screen debut, and you don’t really want to see Captain Jean-Luc Picard this way.

Having said that,  Generations isn’t boring, and has some genuinely fun scenes. As with most Trek films, this movie contains major moments in the franchise lore. Data finally gets emotions, and all those scenes with Brent Spiner coping with new feelings are gold. Also cool is the destruction of the Enterprise -D, which gets blowed up real good . And just as it finally got well lit! Generations  should have been a  much better film. But the one we ended up with is hardly the worst thing in the world.

7. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)

There is a longstanding notion that the odd-numbered Star Trek films are the “lesser” entries and the even-numbered ones the “good ones.” While that’s  mostly true, there is one big exception to that rule: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.  At the end of  Wrath of Khan , it was pretty obvious that the producers were giving themselves an “out” should they decide to bring back Spock. The final shots of  Khan  pretty much spell out what the next movie will revolve around.

The best thing about Search for Spock is that the producers realize that when Spock comes back to life, there has to be major story ramifications for Kirk. To get his friend back, Kirk loses so much. A destroyed ship , a murdered son, and a career in ruins. All to save the life of his best friend, who may not even remember him for all he knows. It’s touching, powerful stuff, and it gives the whole movie (directed by Nimoy himself) a satisfying throughline.

The film’s villain, Christopher Lloyd, is still the most ruthless Klingon of all time. The only problem with Search for Spock  in my book is that it’s just not as perfect as  Wrath of Khan , and that’s it. Okay, and Robin Curtis is not as good as the half-Vulcan Lt. Saavik as Kirstie Alley was in the part, whom she replaced for this film. But that’s one very tiny complaint, as this movie is otherwise satisfying from start to finish.

6. Star Trek Beyond (2016)

There were lots of explosions and motorcycles poppin’ wheelies in the trailer for Justin Lin’s Trek , so everyone thought this was going to be a Star Trek in name only. But that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Despite all the heavy action, the film is very much in the vein of the original series’ ethos. It finally gets the Enterprise away from the vicinity of Earth and out exploring the galaxy again.

Taking place three years into the crew’s five-year mission, Kirk and company have fallen into routine. Then, a surprise attack from an unknown species forces the Enterprise to crash land on an unknown world. The assault comes from Krall ( Idris Elba ), an alien commander who needs a valuable artifact that’s aboard the Enterprise . With nothing but their gumption and their will to survive, the crew must now battle a deadly alien race while trying to find a way off a hostile planet.

At first, Krall seems like a generic alien villain. But a reveal in the movie paints him in a whole new light, and makes him far more interesting than he first appears. And while destroying the Enterprise is a cliché at this point, it serves the story in a big way. The crew has to discover who they are to each other without the confines of the ship. Warrior woman Jaylah (Sofia Boutella) is also a welcome addition to the cast. Here’s hoping it’s not the last journey of Pine and Quinto as Kirk and Spock… although right now, that seems iffy.

5. Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

While the  TNG  crew had a rough time of it with their entries in the movie series, they at least got one genuine classic out of the bunch with  First Contact . In many ways, this film borrows from the best of the original series’ features films before it, but does so in a great way. Sequel to a beloved TV episode? Check . A  Moby Dick -inspired revenge story, à la Wrath of Khan ?  Check . Time-travel like in Voyage Home ?  Check .

The plot sees the Federation nemesis the Borg going back in time in an attempt to stop the first contact between the Vulcans and humanity, therefore stopping the Federation from ever forming. Picard and the crew of the newly minted Enterprise -E go back to stop them from interfering with the first ever warp flight, carried out by Zefram Cochrane (James Cromwell). He is a welcome addition to the cast, as is Alfre Woodard as his assistant Lily. Alice Krige as the Borg Queen even takes a bad idea on paper—giving the Borg collective an individual leader—and tops it off with pretty spectacular results.

Although technically an ensemble film, this is really a Picard movie through and through. The Captain has to get through his own anger and trauma at what the Borg did to him on the TV series, when they assimilated him into the collective and made him Locutus. Commander Riker himself, Jonathan Frakes directed this entry, and he gives almost everyone in the crew something to do that matters in the story, but never forgets that this is chiefly a Jean-Luc Picard story. This is the  TNG writing, directing, and acting staff firing on all cylinders, and it never gets better for them on the big screen than in this installment.

4. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

Since Star Trek V met horrible reviews and an underwhelming box office, the prevailing thought at Paramount was to reboot the original characters with a set of younger actors. This gave the Enterprise crew an origin story—something J.J. Abrams would wind up doing 20 years later. But with the 25th anniversary of the franchise around the corner, wiser heads prevailed at the studio. They decide that Shatner, Nimoy, and the rest of the original crew had one more movie left in them. And that they deserved a reverent swan song.

Wrath of Khan’s  Nicolas Meyer returned to direct, working from a story that he and Leonard Nimoy concocted, and together they made sure that  Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was the finale the original crew deserved. Like the best of the classic series, this entry used real world situations as the basis for the story. In this case, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Chernobyl disaster , with the Klingon Empire standing in for the USSR. The Undiscovered Country has that allegorical element with a wonderful whodunit aboard the Enterprise , and a great villain in Christopher Plummer’s Klingon Commander Chang. All the right ingredients come together for a terrific movie, and a great finale for the original series crew.

3 . Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Having gone through life, death, and life again together, the Enterprise crew needed to lighten up a bit. And that they did in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home , and a little comedy was exactly what this series needed. But just because it’s a lot of laughs that doesn’t mean there isn’t an interesting story going on. Using two of the most often-used tropes of the original series—time-travel and social commentary—this entry in the series winds up working on almost every level.

An alien probe comes to Earth and wreaks havoc because the humpback whale species they are trying to communicate with is now long extinct. The Enterprise crew go back in time to bring the whales into their future in an effort to save the Earth. It sounds silly as hell on paper, but it all works like gangbusters onscreen.

The humor in the film is smart and not slapsticky (see:  Star Trek V ) and the “save the whales” commentary works and doesn’t feel as hamfisted as it could. Each of the crew get a moment to do something important for a change. Nimoy returned to the director’s chair for this one, proving Trek III was no fluke. For years this was the most popular Star Trek film at the box office, because for fans and newbies it was likewise a great time at the movies. It also forms a nice little trilogy with II and III .

2. Star Trek (2009)

Prior to J.J. Abrams‘ big screen reboot of  Star Trek , the franchise was dead as doornail. The previous TV series Enterprise never really clicked with viewers, becoming the first Trek show to get canceled since the original. Then J.J. comes along and reinvigorates the film series with an incredibly rewatchable and fun entry—one that gives the classic Enterprise crew the origin story they never had before. It also finds a way to give Leonard Nimoy’s Spock a proper farewell.

None of this would have worked if the recasting of the original crew wasn’t so impeccable. These were all giant boots to fill, and everyone from Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto right on down to Anton Yelchin as Chekov did their best to evoke the original characters without resorting to impersonations. Okay, maybe Karl Urban is doing a DeForest Kelley impression, but it’s so good I don’t care. There are tons of callbacks to the original series and the first round of films, but it all feels clever and not forced. Yes, it is ridiculous that James Kirk goes from cadet to captain over the course of one film. But J.J. works his magic so that every time you watch it, you just totally buy into it.

Star Trek is a lot of things. That often includes grappling with philosophical questions of great import. It’s also sometimes silly antics like “ The Trouble With Tribbles .” This entry is all about character and fun, and that’s totally okay. I will agree with one often-vocalized gripe, however: there are probably too many lens flares.

1. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

The second  Star Trek  feature film should have been a total cluster*$%#. Paramount had several different scripts they were considering, but they couldn’t find one they liked. Leonard Nimoy adamantly did not want to come back as Spock after the last film didn’t satisfy him, and threatened to fire his agent if he ever mentioned the words “ Star Trek ” to him again. The budget was going to be significantly lower than the previous film. All of this should have been a recipe for disaster.

But then producer Harve Bennett hired a young genius named Nicholas Meyer to direct, who had recently directed the time-travel thriller Time After Time . And he managed to perform a bit of a cinematic miracle. He took the best elements of the various scripts they had and combined them. There was one about the return of TV series villain Khan, another about a device that creates habitable planets, and one about Kirk’s long lost son. Meyer put those scripts in a blender and we got one amazing screenplay as a result.

This was now a story about aging and death, the mistakes of the past coming back to haunt you, and the sacrifices one makes in the name of friendship. Meyer weaved in a great death scene to lure Nimoy back, and it turned into one of the actor’s finest moments. Add to that a killer  Moby Dick -inspired revenge story with a sublime villain (Ricardo Montalban), a submarine-like battle in a nebula, a rousing score by the late James Horner , and you have not only the best  Star Trek  film of all time, but one of the best science fiction films of all time,  period .

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan saved the franchise—without it, we wouldn’t have had a film series, much less a  Next Generation  or any other  Trek series on TV. Spock’s death resulted in new life for the franchise, and the franchise has been “chasing Khan” ever since. It’s almost certain that no matter how many other  Star Trek  movies come down the pipeline in years to come,  The Wrath of Khan  will remain the gold standard.

Featured Image: Paramount Pictures

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From Khan to Beyond: All the Star Trek movies, ranked from worst to best

Star Trek is inarguably television’s greatest space adventure, captivating audiences with exciting, inspiring, and thoughtful stories since 1966. However, like most culturally significant pop culture franchises, Trek also has a long history on the big screen, supplementing its over 800 television episodes with 13 feature films. These large-scale adventures are often the gateways through which new fans find their way into the Star Trek universe , attracting mass audiences on a scale rarely enjoyed by their counterparts on TV.

13. Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

12. star trek v: the final frontier (1989), 11. star trek into darkness (2013), 10. star trek: insurrection (1998), 9. star trek iii: the search for spock (1984), 8. star trek: the motion picture (1979), 7. star trek: generations (1994), 6. star trek beyond (2016), 5. star trek iv: the voyage home (1986), 4. star trek: first contact (1996), 3. star trek (2009), 2. star trek vi: the undiscovered country (1991), honorable mention: galaxy quest (1999), 1. star trek ii: the wrath of khan (1982).

However, as one might expect from a long-running film series that has had multiple casts and behind-the-scenes shake-ups, the Star Trek movies vary wildly in quality. The conventional wisdom amongst fans is that even-numbered Trek movies are much better than odd-numbered ones, an adage that still holds up if you slot in the loving parody Galaxy Quest as the unofficial tenth installment, which, of course, we do.

“A Generation’s Final Journey Begins,” boasted the theatrical poster for Star Trek: Nemesis , the fourth feature film to include the cast of the hit series Star Trek: The Next Generation . It’s also where their final journey ended, at least on the big screen. Nemesis failed to satisfy critics, casual filmgoers, or Trek devotees, opening at No. 2 at the US box office behind J.Lo vehicle Maid in Manhattan and plummeting the following weekend thanks to the debut of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers .

Helmed by an allegedly indifferent director in Stuart Baird and edited to within an inch of its life by producer Rick Berman, Nemesis is a dreary, lifeless slog with none of Trek’s usual heart. There are a few highlights, such as the young Tom Hardy’s performance as Captain Picard’s villainous clone and the light-hearted fun of Riker and Troi’s wedding, but for the most part, Nemesis is just a bummer. It’s no wonder why, decades later, the streaming series Star Trek: Picard would spend its first season trying to rehabilitate it, and its third season outright replacing it as a farewell to the cast of The Next Generation .

During the original run of Star Trek in the 1960s, lead actors William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy had a “favored nations clause” incorporated into their contracts, stating that each actor was entitled to any raise in pay or perks received by the other. This clause remained intact during the franchise’s big screen revival in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, so when Nimoy won the job of directing the third and fourth Star Trek films, Paramount couldn’t refuse Shatner the same privilege. The result was a troubled production and a critical disaster, and if not for Star Trek: The Next Generation finding its footing on television that very same year, it could well have damaged the franchise beyond repair.

The blame doesn’t all fall on Shatner’s shoulders; The Final Frontier faced a number of obstacles, such as a writer’s strike and an unqualified special effects team . Its story is ambitious, sending the Enterprise crew on a mission to the center of the galaxy to meet a being who claims to be God Himself, and there are some truly charming moments of camaraderie between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. For the most part, however, The Final Frontier is a mess, teetering precariously between “so bad it’s good” and just plain bad.

2009’s Star Trek reimagined the brainy space procedural as a shiny, fast-paced action adventure, grabbing mainstream attention on an unprecedented scale. The Next Generation and its spin-offs were well-regarded, but now, suddenly, Star Trek was … cool? Consequently, its sequel was granted a colossal $190 million production budget and preceded by a great deal of hype.

Upon its release, Star Trek Into Darkness couldn’t quite live up to either. It fell short of its predecessor at the box office and flummoxed fans and critics with a contrived, overblown story that retreads the beloved Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan while also stealthily promoting the 9/11 truther movement . It’s a thematically muddled “dark middle chapter” to a trilogy that, thanks to co-writer Roberto Orci’s subsequent departure from the franchise , was jettisoned in favor of Justin Lin’s Star Trek Beyond . And, honestly, we’re better off without it.

Do you ever hear a cinephile refer to a real film that, as far as they’re concerned, “doesn’t exist?” We’re not talking about movies that are loathed and willfully forgotten, like Norbit or The Last Airbender , we mean films that were so promptly forgotten that they provoke no feeling whatsoever even from those who saw them, like Transcendence or The Huntsman: Winter’s War . If not for its place in one of pop culture’s most recognizable franchises, Star Trek: Insurrection would surely fall into this category.

The third film starring the Next Generation cast feels like a very expensive two-part episode of the television series, but not a particularly good one. Its dilemma, which sees Picard fighting to keep Starfleet from exploiting a cosmic fountain of youth, is theoretically compelling but poorly thought out. Most of the highlighted character moments come in the form of funneled-in comic relief, and its attempt to recast this gang of affable middle-aged nerds as rebellious action heroes simply doesn’t work. Like all Star Trek products, it has its loyal defenders, but were it not for its place in the franchise’s canon, we doubt anyone would give it a second thought.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was an instant classic that dug more deeply into the original show’s beloved characters than ever before, expanded the canvas of their lives, and delivered a powerful, emotional ending. So, it’s stunning that its immediate follow-up, The Search for Spock , willfully undermines it at nearly every turn. The Wrath of Khan ’s iconic, tear-jerking death scene is undone; the feeling of hope and rejuvenation implied by its ending is evaporated in the sequel’s very first scene; its three new characters are killed off, recast, and totally absent, respectively.

Despite this, The Search for Spock isn’t actually retrograde, in fact, it’s a surprising lateral move for the characters, who have always been driven by their duty to Starfleet, to put their lives and careers on the line for an unsanctioned mission to rescue their lost friend from a forbidden planet. The concept is exciting and there are warm and wonderful moments of character throughout, but the execution by TV-minded writer/producer Harve Bennett and first-time feature director Leonard Nimoy feels a bit small and underwhelming.

If The Search for Spock is an ambitious story with an underwhelming production, then The Motion Picture is the reverse case. Academy Award-winning director Robert Wise took a screenplay adapted from what was meant to be the pilot to a new Star Trek TV series and, with the aid of an astronomical budget, tried to make it into his own 2001: A Space Odyssey .

The result is a film in which characters silently gawk at the crazy light show they’re seeing out the Enterprise’s viewscreen for minutes at a time. Plot isn’t everything, but when a movie is 132 minutes long but only really has enough story for 90, that laser light show had better be damned compelling. And, heck, it is pretty spectacular, especially if you have the privilege of seeing it on the big screen, but the runtime is so bloated that its character beats, including one of Leonard Nimoy’s best performances as Spock, get totally lost. Even in its more polished “Director’s Edition” form, The Motion Picture is Star Trek at its slowest and most sterile. However, if you’re in the mood for something trippy and meditative, it’s still worth a watch.

Whereas the classic Star Trek gained an obsessive fanbase in the decade following its cancelation, Star Trek: The Next Generation was a legitimate phenomenon in its own time, outshining the original series in terms of both commercial and critical success. With the original cast growing more expensive and less profitable on the big screen, it was practically a given that the Next Gen crew, led by Patrick Stewart, would eventually take their place in the Star Trek film series. Star Trek: Generations , whose production overlapped with that of TNG ’s series finale, sees Kirk passing the torch to Picard in a crossover adventure that fans had been imagining for seven years.

Since there was probably no way for the film to meet the audience’s expectations for a Kirk/Picard team-up story, writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga attempted to subvert them all together and deliver a more personal story about death, loss, and legacy. Audiences found the long-awaited crossover underwhelming at the time but taken on its own merits and judged more as a Next Generation episode than as a blockbuster event, Star Trek: Generations is actually one of the more interesting films in the franchise, and the only one that allows star Patrick Stewart to exercise the full extent of his acting range.

When the first teaser trailer for Star Trek Beyond premiered online, die-hard Trekkies went into full panic mode. “It’s bad enough that Paramount hired the Fast & Furious  guy to make Star Trek ,” the nerds cried, “but now they’ve got Captain Kirk riding a dirt bike? Star Trek is ruined forever!” It surely was not, in fact, we’d argue that Justin Lin’s Star Trek Beyond does a better job capturing the sense of fun, friendship, and wonder of the original Star Trek than any other feature film, save for the next entry on our list. At the same time, it also steps out of the shadow of the franchise’s dense mythology after J.J. Abrams’ two nostalgia-driven adventures.

With no legacy cast or famous villains in their way, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldaña, and company finally get to have their own Star Trek , one in which all of their iterations on the Enterprise family feel like fully formed adults without sacrificing the youthful vigor that attracted new fans to the rebooted Trek films in the first place. It’s delightful, both as its own film and as an accidental bookend to the Kelvinverse Trilogy.

Star Trek is often serious business, an arena for complex characters to confront difficult ethical dilemmas that help audiences to confront the adversity and inequity they encounter in real life. But, it’s important to remember that Star Trek can also be very silly and that many of its most memorable moments are born from its dalliances in farce. The Voyage Home is a wry fish-out-of-water comedy in which the crew of the Enterprise (who, following The Search for Spock , are now fugitives from Starfleet) travels back in time to 1980s San Francisco in order to kidnap a pair of humpback whales in the hope that one of them might be able to talk a powerful space probe in the 2280s out of destroying the Earth.

The story has blockbuster-level stakes, but they all but disappear for a solid hour of the film in favor of a charming light adventure that prioritizes Trek’s memorable cast over flashy effects or high drama. Thanks to a clever script and terrific comedic chemistry between William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy (who also directs) and guest star Catherine Hicks, The Voyage Home is a total crowd-pleaser and was even the franchise’s biggest box office hit before the 2009 relaunch.

1996 could be considered the apex of Star Trek ’s cultural relevance. The franchise was celebrating its 30th anniversary, both Deep Space Nine and Voyager were on television every week, and there was an absolute deluge of books, PC games, and other merchandise available. The cherry on top was Star Trek: First Contact , the second film to feature the cast of The Next Generation and the only one to catch fire with general audiences.

A dark action-thriller that has as much in common with Aliens as it does with The Wrath of Khan , First Contact pits Captain Picard and the crew of the new Enterprise against their most famous enemy from their television hay day: the Borg. At the same time, First Contact serves as a sort of origin story for Star Trek itself, as its time travel plot takes our characters to an event in our future that is pivotal to their history. It’s a terrific “gateway Trek,” an approachable popcorn flick that explains the franchise’s values and aspirations for a better future within the context of a relatively dark and creepy action movie.

Though rejected by Trek traditionalists for its mile-a-minute pace and cranked-to-eleven characterizations of young Kirk, Spock, and the rest of the classic Enterprise crew, J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek reboot was a massive popular success that breathed new life into a franchise that had completely run out of gas by the early 2000s. Not everyone may be a fan of just how far it pushed Trek into the realm of “big dumb action blockbuster,” but the truth is that, after 18 continuous years under the same creative management, Trek desperately needed a refresh.

Abrams and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (the latter of whom remains at the helm of the franchise to this day) radically changed the visual aesthetic and the tempo of Star Trek from classical to classic rock, and in so doing restored an element that had long been lacking in the film series: Joy. Emotionally intense and startlingly sincere, Star Trek more than earns its place near the top of our list of Trek ’s best theatrical outings.

Being an episodic drama from the 1960s that got canceled during its third season, the original Star Trek never really got a “series finale.” As was commonplace in television at the time, when Star Trek ended, it just stopped. Thanks to its revival on the big screen, Trek got a new lease on life, a grand legacy, and — 25 years after it first appeared on television —a proper ending. The Undiscovered Country reunites the entire classic cast one last time, along with writer-director Nicholas Meyer, the man behind the No. 1 entry on our list, to tell the tale of the final voyage of Kirk’s Enterprise, one that provides closure to the crew’s growth over the course of the five preceding films.

In proper Trek tradition, it’s also an incisive political allegory about the end of the Cold War (one of The Original Series ’ most common subjects) and the difficulty of putting aside old prejudices and embracing change. The Undiscovered Country doesn’t paint our Starfleet heroes in the most flattering light, which provoked the ire of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, but that’s the entire point: to see characters who we’ve grown up with confront their own learned hatreds so that those who come after them can live in a better world.

While not technically not a Star Trek movie, Galaxy Quest is a loving parody that captures the essence of classic Trek as well as any film in the canon. The story of a band of washed-up actors who are abducted by aliens who believe them to be the gallant space travelers they played on TV, Galaxy Quest skewers sci-fi fandom and tropes while also telling a heartfelt story about friendship, compassion, and imagination. I

t’s no wonder that this film has been adopted by Trekkies as an unofficial yet essential part of the Star Trek movie canon. Should you choose to include it, slot it right here on our rankings, beneath…

The phrase “ad astra, per aspera” meaning “to the stars through hardships,” has been adopted by many a starry-eyed enterprise (including Starfleet itself), but it also applies perfectly to the production of Star Trek II . Produced with a third of its predecessor’s budget by an inexperienced director who had only twelve days to rewrite its script , The Wrath of Khan could very well have been a disaster. Instead, it’s almost universally considered to be the best Star Trek film and one of the most enduring science fiction films of all time.

Functioning as a sequel to the classic episode Space Seed , Khan pits William Shatner against a worthy, equally hammy foil in Ricardo Montalbán, and their tête-à-tête is pure movie magic. The submarine-style battle at the film’s climax is one of the franchise’s strongest action sequences, but it’s Admiral Kirk’s inner journey that gives The Wrath of Khan its soul, as he confronts the cost of a life spent cheating death and hopping galaxies. Star Trek is not always literature, but The Wrath of Khan is a genuine work of art, a treat not just for Trekkies or genre fans, but for all lovers of cinema.  

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Planet of the Apes is one of the most unlikely film franchises in Hollywood history. The 1968 original is a social sci-fi thought experiment best remembered for its shocking twist ending. But rather than simply becoming one of cinema’s most ubiquitous spoilers, the revelation that the Planet of the Apes was Earth all along opened the door to a variety of new stories about power, oppression, compassion, hubris, societal self-destruction, and redemption. Now, over half a century later, the saga of a world whose evolutionary ladder turned upside down is still in top form, delivering its most intriguing and compelling installments yet. They may not all be winners, but from Chimpan-A to Chimpan-Z, nearly all of them are interesting.

10. Planet of the Apes (2001) Yes, despite the existence of four, increasingly cheap sequels from the 1970s, the Tim Burton remake is still the worst Planet of the Apes movie. Though the special makeup effects applied to Helena Bonham Carter, Tim Roth, Michael Clarke Duncan, Paul Giamatti, and company are marvelous and the production designers clearly put their hearts into designing the ape city and culture, it’s all in the service of an awful script and loathsome characters. It is a remake of a famously thought-provoking sci-fi classic, and yet it is brainless. It is an adventure movie starring first-rate actors as very convincing talking apes, and yet it is joyless. There’s no need to even get into specifics about the plot or the weird twist ending — this one’s a stinker. 

From Darth Vader to Emperor Palpatine to Jabba the Hutt, Star Wars has been given us several iconic villains. But for all its many well-known villains, there are still those who have been all but overlooked by general audiences. Such a lackluster reception may be due to limited appearances or questionable story choices regarding their character.

In this massive franchise, there are many characters who should get more recognition from audiences, and these seven prove themselves to be the unsung villains of the Star Wars universe. 7. Darth Bane

This is sure to be an unusual year for Hollywood cinema. With the regular cadence of franchise blockbusters disrupted by the Hollywood strikes of 2023, there are fewer surefire bets at the box office. And some of the studios’ supposedly safer gambles, like Madame Web and Argylle, have already fallen flat upon release. Of course, this doesn’t mean there hasn’t been anything worth seeing in theaters or streaming at home. In addition to a few standout franchise entries, the year to date has seen a number of terrific smaller-scale dramas, horror flicks, and indie comedies, many of them by debuting filmmakers. With luck, the relative lack of competition for audience attention will allow one or more underdogs to make a big cultural splash.

10. Abigail

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Every Star Trek movie, ranked

Boldly go on a ranking of all 13  Star Trek  films.

Credit: CBS via Getty Images

In 1979, Star Trek warped from television to the big screen. The franchise expanded faster than V'Ger. On December 6th, one of the franchise's best movies (and one of our favorites), Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country , celebrates its 30th anniversary.   

The films began with the original cast from Star Trek: The Original Series . After six films, the movies transitioned to feature the cast from Star Trek: The Next Generation , and then in 2009, a new timeline of films branched off with recast legacy characters and much bigger budgets. What will the next Trek movie be, and which crew will it feature? Who knows, but it’s only a matter of time before some Trek project boldly goes to the cinema once more. 

In the meantime, we’re going to rank all of the existing 13 films in the canon. It’s more of a celebration than anything else; most of these movies we love. We don’t dislike any of them. Which one are we going to throw on at any given moment? It depends on the day, it depends on the hour, it depends on which crew we want to journey with. 

Full impulse and prepare for warp, because only Nixon could go to China. Here’s our ranking of the 13 Star Trek feature films. 

13. Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

J.J. Abrams' last Star Trek movie as director, Into Darkness , is his worst film. His much-loved “Mystery Box” approach, which only really works as a marketing tool, fails him on a story level when we learn who the villain really is (as if we didn't know already). It's a movie where the head of Starfleet is totally fine violating Federation principles and risking war with the Klingons to cover up his secret plans with an all-out military strike (which, as cover-ups go, not very discrete), but, if you’re Jim Kirk and you're caught lying, then he must uphold the very rules he's taking seven photon torpedoes to. If you like movies where heroes lie to save their own ass and put their crews’ in a wringer, or stories that lurch from one set piece to another with inconsistent characterizations and little emotional resonance, or that remix bits from Wrath of Khan without earning it, then appreciating why it is the best, then Into Darkness is for you.

12. S tar Trek: Nemesis (2002)

Traditionally, even-numbered Trek  films are high points for the franchise. The tenth installment, and the fourth film featuring the Next Generation  cast, broke that tradition.

Nemesis is a dull, rough draft of a movie that feels and operates like big-budget fan-fic, one that is surprisingly tone-deaf in regards to how to portray these characters — especially, and frustratingly, Picard in the first half. An overabundance on Romulan political intrigue gets in the way of enjoying or appreciating what few moments in the story are truly worthy of our attention, as Tom Hardy's Shinzon (a young and bald clone of Picard) challenges his (wait for it) nemesis in a big CG space battle where Shinzon's massive planet-killing ship and Picard's Enterprise collide. The movie bombed, killing future missions from this crew. It would take Paramount seven years to recover with J.J. Abrams' reboot.

11. Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

Saddle up, lock and load! The second Trek movie directed by Jonathan Frakes is, rightfully, the movie that gave us the "Riker Manuever." Turns out that it has nothing to do with the way Riker sits in chairs. 

Picard and the Enterprise crew get swept up in a rather uneventful conflict between the nasty Son'a and the ever-peaceful Ba'ku. The latter alien race inhabit a lovely planet that keeps you young and has various other magical powers. Starfleet wants to work with the Son'a to harness the planet's abilities, thanks to another wicked Admiral, and he's dealing dirty with the lead Son'a... played by none other than Oscar-winner F. Murray Abraham. Picard won't stand for it, so he launches the titular insurrection and goes after Space Salieri to save the Ba'ku. 

Insurrection  plays like an extended episode of TNG ; no more, no less. Donna Murphy plays a love interest to Picard, and though we are big fans of hers, giving more screentime to, say, Beverly Crusher, would have been a better choice for this story. After the glory of Star Trek: First Contact , the stakes felt a little small but we still enjoy it. 

10. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

"What does God need with a starship?" Good question.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier got clobbered in the Summer of '89 by the likes of Batman and Indiana Jones; William Shatner's directorial debut's low, low budget and really bad special effects just couldn't compete with the other blockbusters. Neither could Final Frontier 's messy and largely passive story that tries too hard to capture the lighting-in-a-bottle mix of comedy and sci-fi that turned Voyage Home into a hit. Despite being one of the lowest grossing Trek s ever, this misfire does feature a few strong moments, especially when God-searching Sybok confronts his half-brother, Spock, and McCoy with their secret pains. (And we don't mind the funny campfire scene with Spock and "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" either.)

9. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

The one with V'Ger.

The first big-screen Trek movie is definitely an acquired taste. Legendary director Robert Wise made a great science fiction movie, but it doesn't always feel like Star Trek . The pace is slow, but the ideas and themes the movie explores during its slog of a runtime are incredible. You just have to get past the blaring alarms, the nonsensical murdering transporters, and the cabana boy beach uniforms. 

William Shatner brings a lot of hubris to this new Kirk, and Kirk makes some bad decisions because of it. Leonard Nimoy is the highlight of the movie (shocker), giving us a Spock that wants to purge himself of emotions. That changes when he discovers the V'Ger entity. The mysterious being that is moving toward Earth is cold and unfeeling, and Spock realizes that he doesn't want to be like that. V'Ger's true identity, once revealed, is a great payoff. 

Still, most of the movie features one ship trying to stop a giant cloud. Patience will be rewarded here, and the rewards include some of the weirdest and most beautiful images in any Trek movie. Jerry Goldsmith's score is likely the movie's greatest asset, as none of it (especially Kirk and Scotty's famously long shuttle approach to the Enterprise) would work without it.

8. Star Trek: Generations (1994)

The one with Malcolm McDowell.

After Picard and company sailed off at the end of their television finale, they flew right into this 1994 film from David Carson. It was the first big-screen showing for the TNG crew, and it brought some old favorites back as well. Captain Kirk, Chekhov, and Scotty start off by christening the Enterprise-B back in their era, and, in record time, the ship gets caught up in an anomaly called the Nexus. Kirk is lost and presumed dead. Cut to the TNG era, and a dimly-lit Enterprise-D encounters the Nexus' number one fan, the sinister Dr. Soran (McDowell). He wants to get back to the Nexus, having survived the encounter that Kirk didn't aboard the B. The Nexus is pure joy, and it is only there that Soran feels he can escape the pain of having lost his family to the Borg years ago. 

Captains Kirk and Picard finally meet to stop Soran and save the galaxy, but the end result is rather "meh." A great (if too long) crash sequence involving the Enterprise-D and vivid cinematography are among the film's few high points, unless you have always wanted the greatest captains ever to meet-cute over (we sh** you not) chopping firewood and making eggs. And Kirk's death lacks the emotional impact that both the iconic hero and his fans deserve.

7. Star Trek Beyond (2016)

The best odd-numbered film since Star Trek III: The Search for Spock , Star Trek Beyond is waaaay better than its predecessor, Star Trek Into Darkness (Phew.) It celebrates what makes Trek  so great, its themes and characters, while honoring the franchise's 50th anniversary with a very entertaining mix of humor, heart, and spectacle. We'd rank it higher if not for the problematic execution of villain Krall (a surprisingly ineffectual Idris Elba), whose motivations (while solid  on paper) are denied the necessary screentime to truly connect. But director Justin Lin (of Fast & Furious  fame) mostly overcomes that, as well as certain tonal and narrative bumps, thanks to making the first of these nuTreks to feel like a $200 million episode of The Original Series . Beyond leaves us feeling that which STID failed to do: Wanting more.

6. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)

Leonard Nimoy returns as Spock with his feature film directorial debut that bridges the events of  Star Trek II  with  Star Trek IV  with an earnest and assured, if not visually dynamic, approach. The story packs a considerable emotional punch, as well as some of the series most iconic moments — the death of Enterprise, Kirk's heartsick reaction ("Klingon bastards!") to the murder of his son, David — as the Enterprise's crew puts their careers and lives on the line to save both a resurrected Spock and a compromised McCoy. The latter is suffering from the effects of a super Vulcan mind meld; Spock used it to transfer his essence and consciousness into McCoy like one would backup files to the Cloud. 

The Search for Spock  competently explores the toll of Kirk's efforts to prove to Spock that sometimes the needs of the one outweigh those of the many, even if it means stealing the Enterprise in a stirring sequence. While Trek III  isn't the most ambitious or exciting  Trek  movie, it is one of the most heartfelt adventures in the series. A necessary throat clearing of sorts before the franchise can reach its then-highest point. 

5. Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

While Star Trek: First Contact is the second film featuring Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) and the rest of the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew, it is the first full solo outing for the TNG cast. The hit sequel, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, also proved to be better than TNG ’s maiden big-screen voyage, 1994’s uneven Star Trek: Generations . Free from the studio-imposed story mandates that Generations had, writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga delivered an action-packed and emotionally compelling adventure that pit Picard against his most lethal enemy: The Borg, a race of cybernetic beings hellbent on going back in time to assimilate Earth at a vulnerable point in its history. Making the stakes that much higher was how Picard’s past trauma with the Borg threatened to get in the way of saving humanity’s future, as his experience being assimilated into their collective boiled over into revenge. 

In between explosive space battles and tension-filled set pieces featuring a Borgified new Enterprise, first-time feature director (and Next Gen actor) Jonathan Frakes gave fans a Star Trek movie unlike any other; a riveting, action-horror sci-fi blockbuster that was only the second Trek film at the time to ever achieve crossover audience appeal outside the core fanbase. (The first was 1986’s time-traveling, “save-the-whales” romp Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home ). 

4. Star Trek (2009) 

It’s telling that J.J. Abrams has remade Star Wars twice and that his actual Star Wars movie is the second-best one.

2009’s Star Trek  is still a nearly unparalleled dazzler, a canny prequel and inspired reboot that feels wholly fresh and original, with a nifty plot (involving time travel and alternate timelines) that wisely (albeit in a complicated way) doesn’t negate the films that came before it. Abrams brilliantly cast the movie, introducing a host of fresh faces playing iconic roles that, by the time the film was released, had become more punchline than anything else. ( Star Trek: Nemesis was an inglorious end to the Enterprise’s big-screen adventures, critically lambasted and commercially ignored.)

Breathlessly told, Star Trek  has some of the biggest and most inventive set pieces (the opening attack sequence, particularly when the sound drains away during a key moment to leave room for only Michael Giacchino’s soaring score, is enough to bring tears to your eyes), as well as  memorable new characters (Eric Bana’s Nero is a wry and scary baddie). After the promise of Mission: Impossible III , Abrams showed himself to be an honest-to-goodness filmmaker, able to improbably invigorating moribund franchises with vitality, humor and boundless energy. It feels like we have watched Star Trek a thousand times and it also feels like we could watch it a thousand more.

3. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

The one with the whales.

It's not just the funniest Star Trek movie, it's one of the funniest movies ever. Large credit goes to director Leonard Nimoy and the movie's late producer and co-writer, Harve Bennett. 

A weird probe (its origins never explained) comes to 23rd-century Earth looking for whales. Humpback whales, specifically. But, since they are extinct, Kirk and his crew aboard a stolen Klingon vessel must slingshot around the sun to travel back in time to 20th-century San Francisco and save two whales just in time to warp back to the future and save the day. 

It's such a cockamamie plan, sure, but part of the fun is seeing the characters both acknowledge it is a stretch and then commit fully to it. There are no consequences to messing with time, the crew just romps around San Francisco and does what they want. They alter history (hello, transparent aluminum!) and invade Naval vessels. But along the way, the movie takes some big comedic swings with the hilarious "fish out of water" story Spock and Kirk find themselves in as they don't need photon torpedos to save the day. Just their wits. The film is full of sweet, funny, and surprisingly poignant moments and still remains, 35 years later, a classic comedy and essential  Trek  film.

2. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

It’s fitting that one of the filmmakers responsible for putting Trek ’s big-screen franchise back on track would return to wrap up the voyages of the The Original Series cast. Wrath of Khan writer-director Nicholas Meyer’s second Star Trek feature, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is, at times, arguably more confidently executed and rich with character beats than his former (and well-regarded) entry. The movie embraces the characters’ twilight years as a plot point by putting the aging crew of the past-her-prime Enterprise in the middle of a conspiracy that threatens to light the fuse on continued conflict between the Federation and the Klingons.

The Cold War parallels here between the then-fall of the Berlin Wall and our sci-fi heroes and their nemesis lend Trek VI  an urgency and intrigue on par with ‘60s political thrillers, with Meyer’s propulsive whodunit of a script (cowritten by the late Denny Martin Flynn) affording the franchise to boldly go explore new genres like the murder mystery and POW, Great Escape -esque war dramas. (There’s also some great courtroom drama flourishes as well, on top of an exceptional Run Silent, Run Deep -inspired space battle between the Enterprise and a Klingon bird-of-prey that can fire while cloaked.)

From Kirk sporting grey hair, to the characters expounding upon their relevancy and usefulness as they are all that stand between us and the brink of full-scale war, Star Trek VI is a taut, clever picture that always puts story and character first and never fails to deliver on the emotional resonance of either.

1. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

Following the events of "Space Seed" in The Original Series , Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban) comes to get revenge on Admiral...  Admiral ... James T. Kirk in the rousing intimate epic that is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan . A cat and mouse game of dueling starships ensues, with Kirk commanding an Enterprise full of trainees. A dangerous science project called "Genesis" is in the mix, too, and Khan wants it to help him conquer the galaxy. Kirk wins in the end, bit loses his best friend in the process.

The most thematically and emotionally rich film in the series,  Khan  is still the benchmark to which all subsequent Treks aspire to match or exceed. Not only is it the best big-screen mission ever for the Enterprise, it's also one of the best science fiction films of all time.

This movie set a new bar for Trek greatness. We don't think we're being hyperbolic when we say that it is damn near perfect. We'll watch it "'round the moons of Nibia, and 'round the Antares maelstrom, and 'round perdition's flames before we give it up."

Watch Resident Alien

• Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan
• Star Trek Into Darkness

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Star Trek movies, ranked worst to best

Journey into the strange new worlds of the Star Trek movies, ranked worst to best. Live long and get some popcorn.

We're leaving the Neutral zone and taking a stand with our list of the best Star Trek movies.

Star Trek is going through a bit of a retro renaissance at the moment, thanks to a successful first season of Strange New Worlds, which takes place before Kirk ever took over as Captain of the Enterprise. It’s put many a Trek fan in the mood for more classic Trek action. You could cherry-pick the adventures of Kirk and Co. by watching the best Star Trek: The Original Series episodes or if you’re feeling more cinematic, pull from this list of Star Trek movies ranked worst to best. 

Some viewers will be tempted to skip to the top of the list — we get it, your time is valuable, so why bother with the losers? — but there’s something worth experiencing about each and every entry on this list. Even the misses have something interesting to say about Trek in general or the Enterprise crew specifically. This list includes all the Trek films, not just those of the original crew, so you can explore the Kelvin timeline as well as the Next Generation. And if you want to see how all the timelines fit together, check out our guide to watching the Star Trek movies in order too.

Here, then, is the definitive ranking of the best Star Trek movies. Don’t bother arguing with us: We know we’re right. If you’re still in the mood for intergalactic cinema, check out our list of the best space movies or see how the Alien movies ranked . 

13. Star Trek Into Darkness

• Release date: May 16, 2013
• Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana

How this film managed to make Khan a boring antagonist is a mystery that will baffle scholars for years to come. No shade to Benedict Cumberbatch, but he doesn’t have the charisma necessary to persuade viewers to overlook the plot holes and bizarre character choices that make Into Darkness unwatchable. The sacrifice that is so poignant in Wrath of Khan falls flat because the relationship between Kirk and Spock – roles reversed for the climactic moment – barely reaches the level of roommates, let alone dear friends. And don’t get me started on Carol Marcus in her underwear. 

12. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

• Release date: June 9, 1989
• Cast: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley

Final Frontier ’s core idea is actually pretty good: Spock’s half-brother hijacks the Enterprise so he can fly it into the middle of the Milky Way and meet God. Unfortunately, a writers’ strike grounded the script before it got off the ground. What remains is a muddled mess that still may have been watchable were it not for William Shatner. He’d been promised a turn in the director’s chair and this was what he did with it. If you’ve ever wondered if the stories about Shatner’s unbearable ego were true, look no further.  

11. Star Trek: Insurrection

• Release date: December 11, 1998
• Cast: Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner

Even hardcore Star Trek fans forget what Insurrection is about. Not because it’s confusing, but because it’s the cinematic equivalent of a filler episode. Starfleet decides to relocate a small (but immortal? Ok) population so that the Federation can claim their planet’s unique natural resource for itself. Feeling betrayed by Starfleet’s apparent disregard for the Prime Directive, Picard gets very, very annoyed. Nothing about this movie is particularly good or bad. It’s all just kind of there . Watching Insurrection will neither ruin your day nor make it any better, so do as you will with it. 

10. Star Trek: Nemesis

• Release date: December 13, 2002

Before he was Bane, Venom, or Mad Max, Tom Hardy was Picard’s clone, Shinzon. He kills the Romulan senate, lures Picard and crew to Romulus under the pretense of peace negotiations, and oh, yeah, he has an android that looks just like Data. The plot is a hot mess of mistaken identity, telepathy, and revenge that never has stakes – or characters – worth caring about. Even the movie’s most emotional moment, when Data sacrifices himself to save Picard, is immediately undercut with a “Just kidding! I downloaded my brain into the android who looks just like me!” Troi and Riker got married, though, so that’s nice. 

9. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

• Release date: June 1, 1984

On the plus side, it has Christopher Lloyd as a Klingon. On the minus side... is everything else. After his sacrifice saves the Enterprise from certain destruction, Spock’s casket is shot into space, eventually settling on the Genesis planet. Thus begins a “how do we get Spock’s consciousness back into his newly reborn body” reverse-heist film that is crammed full with awkward moments. Spock going through puberty? Yikes. Klingons murdering Kirk’s son? Oof. Also, the entire film looks bizarrely cheap. You could generously call it an homage to Trek ’s humble beginnings, but it’s very strange after the lush visuals of Khan . At no point is a viewer not acutely aware that this movie had to happen to get Spock back on the Enterprise, and it almost isn’t worth it.   

8. Star Trek: Generations

• Release date: November 18, 1994
• Cast: Patrick Stewart, William Shatner, Malcolm McDowell

Generations was intended to pass the torch from the cast of The Original Series to that of The Next Generation , with Kirk and Picard teaming up to defeat not-quite-a-villain-he’s-just-sad-really Malcolm McDowell. The shoehorning of Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov into a film set a century after they were zipping around the universe is less than elegant, more than gratuitous. Generations spends so much time waving goodbye to the old crew that it never really gets going as a film, but it did its best with an impossible task. 

7. Star Trek Beyond

• Release date: July 22, 2016
• Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban

I’d put this here just for the line about the “beats and shouting,” if I’m honest. Featuring an unrecognizable Idris Elba as its villain, Krall, Beyond isn’t overly concerned with nuance. It’s fast and loud, the very definition of style over substance. Does the scene set to the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” make any sense? Not a lick, nope, but damn, does it look cool. This is the Trek film you watch when you want to sit back, turn your brain off, and enjoy a lot of colorful, exciting fight and/or chase scenes. Now that I think about it, “beats and shouting” is a pretty apt description of Star Trek Beyond . 

6. Star Trek: The Motion Picture

• Release date: December 7, 1979

The ponderous pacing and pure 70s-ness of the costumes makes The Motion Picture a slog, but at least it’s a spectacular slog. The plot is pure Trek : An energy cloud housing a living machine is headed for Earth, destroying everything in its wake. The Enterprise is the only ship within intercept range of the cloud, because how else is Kirk going to have an excuse to take over command? The Motion Picture shows its age more than most of the other films of the franchise, but was a perfect vehicle to move the Enterprise and her crew from the small screen to the theater. It has interpersonal conflict, heroics, hubris, and a brilliant reveal about V’ger’s true nature.

5. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

• Release date: November 26, 1986

Aka “The One With the Whales”, Voyage Home leans heavily on humor to great effect. It eases off the sci fi, instead going for a classic fish-out-of-water scenario. An alien probe is trying to communicate with Earth, but the only creature that could respond, the humpback whale, is long since extinct. The crew of the Enterprise travel back to 1980’s San Francisco to snatch a mating pair of humpback whales and return them to the future, preventing the unanswered probe from destroying the planet. The ecological message wasn’t exactly subtle, but Voyage isn’t preachy. Chekov asking anyone if they know where the “nuclear wessels” are, Scotty cooing “Hello, computer” into a mouse, Kirk yelling “Double dumbass on you!” to an angry driver – it’s all immensely charming and genuinely funny.

4. Star Trek

• Release date: May 8, 2009
• Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Simon Pegg

Is it a great Trek film? Maybe. Is it fun to see Kirk and Spock’s origins stories? Absolutely. Watching baby Spock beat the snot out of someone at school is highly gratifying, as is seeing the father whose shadow Kirk can never quite escape. The story does a good enough job twisting the timeline so that the reboot won’t be hamstrung by everything that came before it, and Leonard Nimoy is a delight in his final turn as Spock. Star Trek embodies the spirit of unfettered adventure exhibited by The Original Series while simultaneously making the crew into more than just set dressing there to push buttons and open hailing frequencies. And “Hi, Christopher, I’m Nero” is straight up one of the greatest line reads in all of Star Trek . 

3. Star Trek: First Contact

• Release date: November 22, 1996

Jonathan Frakes (aka Commander Riker) directed this absolute treasure of a movie, and his deep love of Trek comes through in every scene. This is a Trek movie for Trek fans, with nods to TV series Deep Space Nine and Voyager in what is essentially the conclusion to Picard’s arc in the legendary The Next Generation episode “Best of Both Worlds.” The Enterprise follows the Borg back in time to prevent them from disrupting First Contact, the event that introduced Earth to the universe. Picard must face the Borg queen (silkily played by Alice Krige) even as Data is tempted by her promise of humanity. The Earth-based subplot about getting First Contact back on track explores a different aspect of humanity, namely how people step up when they’re called to lead. 

2. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

• Release date: December 6, 1991

Some of the entries on this list are little more than over-inflated episodes, but this... this is a movie. Not a film, thank you very much, a get-more-popcorn-and-shut-the-heck-up-until-the-credits-roll movie . The Klingons desperately need the Federation’s help after their moon explodes, and Kirk – whose son was murdered by Klingons just a few films ago – has to serve as liaison. That’s the set up for a murder mystery that will see Kirk and McCoy imprisoned and Spock turning the Enterprise upside down to find the true culprit. Christopher Plummer is having an absolute blast as a Shakespeare-quoting Klingon who has no interest in peace. Fun fact: This is one of two Trek films directed by Nicholas Meyer. The other one is... 

1. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

• Release date: June 4, 1982

First, and most importantly, yes, that is Ricardo Montalban’s real chest. Secondly, if you’re only going to watch a single Trek film, this is the one. Picking up the threads of The Original Series episode “Space Seed”, Khan is a retelling of Moby Dick as the genetically superior Khan chases his white whale, Admiral James T. Kirk. Montalban and Shatner are at the top of their games, effortlessly owning every scene they’re in, yet providing the perfect counter for each other. Director Nicholas Meyer, who also wrote Khan , shows exquisite patience in the film’s climactic showdown, drawing out the tension as Kirk and Khan hunt each other in the Mutara Nebula. The other Trek films are great space romps, but Khan feels deeply, deeply personal as you watch these great men spit and claw at each other with unfathomable rage. 

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Susan Arendt is a freelance writer, editor, and consultant living in Burleson, TX. She's a huge sci-fi TV and movie buff, and will talk your Vulcan ears off about Star Trek. You can find more of her work at Wired, IGN, Polygon, or look for her on Twitter: @SusanArendt. Be prepared to see too many pictures of her dogs.

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The best and worst Star Trek movies, ranked

How does the new Star Trek Beyond movie rank within the 12 prior films? Let us count (down) the ways.

With every new Star Trek movie, there’s a chance for greatness or awfulness. We’ll either be beamed up by the series-long spirit of rousing intergalactic adventure and warm crew camaraderie, or we’ll be gutted by dramatic gestures that felt exhausted decades ago. (Sometimes this happens within the same film.) Still, sci-fi movies wouldn’t be the same without Star Trek , and the 13 installments to date have supplied their share of action over the years. Here’s our definitive ranking—a list that includes summer blockbuster   The Wrath of Khan and  Star Trek Beyond , one of the best new movies to see—based on years of faithful Trekking.

Been there, done that? Think again, my friend.

Best and worst Star Trek movies

13.  star trek: nemesis (2002).

• Science fiction

More like Star Trek: Nadir . Future Mad Max Tom Hardy bores us as a power-mad dictator. A overall sluggishness signaled creative exhaustion. Were it not for rebooter J.J. Abrams, this would have been the tombstone.

12.  Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

Fatigue sets in as Patrick Stewart’s Picard goes rogue in defense of an alien planet (and also gets it on with one of its inhabitants). The plot was about beneficial radiation, a hint of how confused this script was.

11.  Star Trek Generations (1994)

Despite a fresh crew, the Next Generation team never got the big-screen vehicle it deserved, despite boasting strong writing on the TV show. Kirk is killed by Malcolm McDowell’s baddie, an undignified end.

10.  Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

• Action and adventure

After 2009’s thrilling reboot, audiences couldn’t help but be let down by this merely okay sequel (sort of like the franchise’s Quantum of Solace ). Coyness about Benedict Cumberbatch’s Khan was a major waste of time.

9.  Star Trek: The Final Frontier (1989)

Tellingly, William Shatner directed the most swooningly egotistical chapter in the franchise. It’s about an encounter with a self-proclaimed alien “God,” and includes plenty of manly showdowns with Klingons.

8.  Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

Reinventing the wheel with new ship designs, better special effects and more robust action, First Contact felt like a respectable sci-fi film—a modest goal in light of what this fan base expects (and deserves).

7.  Star Trek Beyond (2016)

The fun returns, as does a strong vibe of the ’60-era TV series. The latest Trek boasts strong special effects via the alien swarm, and much unexpected pathos with every onscreen shot of the late Anton Yelchin.

6.  Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

It certainly starts off well, with Jerry Goldsmith’s soaring main theme virtually serving as the main character . But for a first chapter, this sure takes its time; audiences emerged from screenings light-years older.

5.  Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)

Excuse me, have you by any chance seen Spock around here? Pointy ears, implacable expression, given to mock profundity? If you run into him, tell him we’re looking for him. Thanks.

4.  Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

A fine send-off to the original cast, this sixth film rebounded strongly from The Final Frontier’ s dullness, thanks to returning Wrath of Khan writer-director Nicholas Meyer and an abundance of Nixonian geopolitics.

3.  Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

It’s still the funniest of the series, and that goes a long way given these films’ usual solemnity. Kirk, Spock and crew travel back in time to (then) present-day Earth to save the whales.

2.  Star Trek (2009)

Captain Kirk and company get an action-packed reboot in J.J. Abrams’s paean to space travel and lens flares. A fresh cast led by brash, rascally Chris Pine breathed vigor into the old character chemistries.

1.  Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

Of course it’s in our top spot, for its killer villain (Ricardo Montalban) and nuanced development. This is the one in which Spock “dies,” but it also has one of the most moving final lines of any SF film: “I feel young.”

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Star Trek Movies Ranked From Worst To Best

In the four decades since  Star Trek:   The Motion Picture hit the big screen,  Star Trek — a franchise already more than a decade old when it first made the leap to cinemas — has flourished , spawning five more television series, countless novels, toys, comic books, video games and, most importantly for our purposes, a whopping dozen additional films with three different casts. 

An impressive and expansive history like that is bound to spawn debate, and the flames of those debates are always fanned by the intense passion that comes with  Trek fandom. With that in mind, figuring out which  Star Trek film is the best and which is the worst can be a tricky process. You have to weigh a lot of things — casting, sci-fi storytelling, faithfulness to the "spirit of the franchise," which itself carries a different meaning for everyone — and no matter how carefully you weight them you'll always find a few people ready to tell you how wrong you are. Still, the upside is that through ranking each  Star  Trek film, you get to boldly go where no one has gone before more than a dozen times. With that in mind, here's our ranking of every  Star Trek film so far, from the worst to the best.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

At this point in the history of the franchise, labeling The Final Frontier the worst Star Trek movie ever made almost feels like cheating, as if fans are meant to search for some angle of re-appraisal that will allow it to rise above its reputation if only for a moment. Alas, it feels like that will never happen. The film starts with a particularly ambitious premise: a rogue Vulcan full of mystical ideals wants to lure the Enterprise to his planet so he can essentially head to the center of the galaxy and find God. But the story keeps crumbling in one way or another along the journey before finally delivering an anticlimactic conclusion. 

In the end, what holds it together is the chemistry of the original cast, whose roles fit them so well at this point that they could probably play their parts in their sleep, but that's not enough to save the movie. An uneven tone ( Uhura does a sultry fan dance at one point on this quest for God), rocky plot, and subpar special effects weigh The Final Frontier down despite its lofty ideas.

Star Trek: Insurrection

The most common criticism you're likely to encounter with regard to Star Trek :  Insurrection , the third outing for the Next Generation cast, is that it plays mostly like an extended episode of the TV series. That's still a fair observation 20 years after its release. The film follows the Enterprise crew as they visit a planet emitting a radiation that rejuvenates the inhabitants, rendering them basically immortal. Of course, another race hopes to take the planet and harvest that radiation for themselves, with the help of forces within the Federation. Picard and his crew rebel against direct orders to stop it, even as they experience certain effects of the planet themselves. 

It's a solid concept, but it falters when stretched to a feature length film. The pacing can't compare with the other films of the TNG era, particularly First Contact and Nemesis . As with The Final Frontier , though, the cast is well-versed in their respective characters, and each one of them has an opportunity to lend some charm to the film, from Data belting Gilbert and Sullivan to the resurgence of the Riker/Troi romance. Patrick Stewart is also brilliant, as usual, but even his commanding presence can't lift this film very high.

Star Trek Into Darkness

The second film in the " Kelvin timeline " reboot continuity that began with Star Trek in 2009 has a lot going for it. The near-flawless cast from the first film is back, along with the addition of Benedict Cumberbatch as the film's villain and the return of J.J. Abrams in the director's chair. As a result, the film is peppered throughout with memorable moments, from ambitious action setpeices and character comedy to some truly thrilling sequences when everything really does come together. 

Unfortunately, if you look at the film as a whole, everything actually comes together pretty rarely overall, and the central problem is the Khan reveal. The "twist" that Cumberbatch is not playing "John Harrison" but instead this timeline's version of Khan Noonien Singh (something fans suspected for months before the film's release only to be told over and over that they were wrong ) is a twist that only exists for the audience, not the characters, and it drags the film down. From there, everything devolves into a weird mirror universe Wrath of Khan remake that's not nearly as satisfying as the film that inspired it, and far too many things happen just to move the right pieces into place to achieve this. It becomes a film engineered to deliver a few key moments, and everything around those moments suffers.

Star Trek: Generations

The first film to feature the Next Generation cast is also the film that finally gave an answer to one of the ultimate Trekkie questions: What would happen if Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) met? The answer: not as much as you'd like. In Generations , the crew faces a villain played by Malcolm McDowell who wants to find his way back to a realm called The Nexus, where the laws of time don't seem to apply and you can live out your deepest desires. To do this, he's willing to destroy any stars and planets in his path, and that's where Picard and Kirk, who entered the Nexus after seemingly dying decades earlier, come in. 

There are a few wonderful sequences here, including the first meeting of the two captains and an unforgettable crash landing of the saucer section of the Enterprise, but overall Generations is a very mixed bag. It stutters in its pacing, pulls back from big ideas just when they seem to be getting interesting, and sometimes even sacrifices what could be great character moments for scenes of things like horseback riding instead. For a film with such titanic characters at the center of it, it's sadly underwhelming.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

The first big screen outing for the Star Trek franchise ever is famously — or infamously — slow, even by the standards of 1970s science fiction. In the years following the blockbuster success of Star Wars , the environment was finally right for the original crew of the Enterprise to see their return to live action. And while it's certainly a sentimental favorite for many fans, the thrill just isn't there, or at least not as much as it should be. 

On the positive side, there are many truly gorgeous shots of the Enterprise gleaming in all its Hollywood glory...so many of them that you sometimes start looking at your watch waiting for a plot point to come along. There are also the familiar faces from the original series cast, who somehow feel like they never lost a step between the cancellation of the TV series and the beginning of the film. The film also has the advantage of some big sci-fi ideas to help carry it to an at least semi-compelling ending. But then there's the rest of it...the dragging plot, the drab uniforms , and the overall focus on the spectacle of finally getting a Star Trek movie instead of actually delivering a Star Trek movie that was truly worth waiting for. It's a milestone, to be sure, but better things lay ahead.

Star Trek: Nemesis

Nemesis , the final film to feature the Next Generation cast, is not a great Star Trek film, but it is a ridiculously entertaining one. The film sees the crew of the Enterprise — fresh off celebrating the wedding of Riker and Troi — visiting the Romulan homeworld of Romulus, where a new praetor (Tom Hardy) has taken over the Empire. The big twist: He's actually a clone of Picard, created by the Romulans years before to serve as a covert replacement for the captain, until the Romulan government changed hands and he was left to die as a slave. Now he's back, he's seized power, and he's ready to wipe out of the Federation with a superweapon. 

It's far from the most intellectual of Star Trek films, but the whole cast shines in their respective roles, and Hardy chews every piece of scenery in sight as the newcomer Shinzon. He's gloriously campy, and it sets just the right tone for this dark, strange film that's as close to B-movie sci-fi glory as any Trek film gets. It's a fun, if very flawed, installment, and a solid send-off for the second generation of the franchise's stars. It might be goofy, but it's definitely not boring.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

The best way to follow a classic like The Wrath of Khan is to do everything you can to avoid copying Wrath of Khan , and in that respect The Search for Spock succeeds very admirably. It does take another risk, though, and that's making the driving force of the whole film a mission to essentially undo the great emotional punch that came to define The Wrath of Khan . Every Trek fan knew going into this film that Spock was dead, and yet the idea that he would live again was right there in the title. How do you possibly pull that off? By making the film about Kirk and McCoy suffering to save their friend — Kirk through the ultimate death of his son, and Bones through the mental anguish that comes from having Spock's life force knocking around in his head. 

It makes the trinity of stars at the heart of the original series cast shine even when they're not sharing the screen. Throw in a new Klingon menace led by a wonderful Christopher Lloyd performance and the gorgeous green Klingon Bird of Prey, plus a fun and funny ship-stealing sequence, and you have a winning third installment that kept up Trek 's hot streak.

Star Trek Beyond

This Star Trek film from 2016 completes a trilogy of movies starring the Kelvin timeline cast and succeeds, in part, by both running away from Into Darkness and by doing some of the things that film did — but better. Like the second film in this franchise iteration, the focus is again on a villain intent on vengeance against Starfleet, someone who seems to be thinking several moves ahead of the Enterprise crew. Unlike that film, however, Beyond more-or-less kicks off with throwing away many of the franchise hallmarks, crashing the Enterprise and leaving the crew with whatever hope they can find on an alien planet. 

The same energy that drove the first two films is there, the cast still looks like they're having fun, and the setpieces this time around are far more inventive than the more formulaic approach of Into Darkness . Plus, this film's climax heavily depends upon playing a Beastie Boys song as loud as possible. That's always fun, but it's especially fun in space.

Star Trek (2009)

The film that began the most recent big-screen timeline of Star  Trek films had a very tough assignment from the start. Not only was it an attempt to jump-start a franchise that hadn't been at the multiplex for seven years and hadn't released a new episode of television in four years — it was also an attempt to jump-start the franchise with familiar characters played by entirely new faces. How do you recast Kirk, or Spock, or Uhura? How do you possibly replace faces that have loomed in the public imagination for decades, and through six fairly recent films of their own? Somehow, J.J. Abrams and company pulled it off. 

The first great success of 2009's Star Trek is in its casting, which is stellar across the board but particularly in the forms of Chris Pine as Kirk, Karl Urban as McCoy, and Zachary Quinto as Spock. Then there's the story, which found a way to render everything in a new way without sacrificing the old timeline. The film, in fact, even incorporates some of it thanks to Leonard Nimoy's return as an older, alternate Spock. It's not a perfect film, particularly when it leans too much on action and not enough on character, but it's about as good as we could have dared hope for in a reboot of this kind.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

The last ride of the original series cast is a timely Cold War metaphor that still holds weight nearly three decades after its release. The film begins with a big Chernobyl metaphor when an energy-producing Klingon moon explodes, then transitions into a story about the Klingon Empire essentially wanting to bring down the wall that separates them from the Federation, which could, in effect, render Starfleet obsolete. Led by Kirk — who has no love for Klingons, the Enterprise crew is sent to escort the Klingon negotiators, only to have it all fall apart as a conspiracy unfolds around them. 

It has everything you want from an original series cast movie: big ideas, high stakes, a cool space battle centerpiece, Kirk and Spock being best friends, Kirk kissing a pretty alien woman, a Klingon quoting Shakespeare, and Spock taking command of the ship for a little while. Plus, everyone seems to know it's their last hurrah, so the film is packed with unforgettable sendoff moments.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Even people who have a hard time calling it the objectively "best" Star Trek film will rather quickly admit that The Voyage Home might at least be their favorite film in the franchise. The Voyage Home — or "the one with the whales," as it's known to casual fans — is perhaps the best example ever of Star Trek 's ability to adapt itself to fit different genres, and sometimes even fit more than one genre into a single story. 

The  Voyage Home begins with a sci-fi high concept: the crew must go back in time to rescue some extinct whales because they're the only beings capable of communicating with a dangerous object out in space in the present of the timeline. Soon it evolves into an endlessly charming character comedy once the gang arrives in 1980s San Francisco. Even Kirk, the self-proclaimed expert on past human culture, is a fish out of water, but any sense that you're about to watch something far too silly for Star Trek is quickly washed away by the film's overall arc. It's Star Trek at its most pure fun, but it never sacrifices the core of the franchise.

Star Trek: First Contact

The Next Generation cast got to make their own time travel movie too, and it's the best film of their era by a large margin. In First Contact , the Enterprise crew follows a Borg ship through a time vortex to prevent the cybernetic race from altering history and assimilating all of Earth through intervention on the 2063 day when humans first made contact with Vulcans. 

So, the element of fun that's inherent in the franchise's time travel plots is there almost from the beginning, but then the film gets into deeper territory. It retains all the fun and charm of the Next Generation series at its best moments (including a very clever Holodeck sequence) while also becoming a meditation on the nature of history, how we define our heroes, and what it means to be human. Plus, it's a chance for the franchise to finally showcase the Borg in all their terrifying glory on the big screen, a spectacle that still holds up today.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

It is exceedingly rare to find a sequel that surpasses the first film in a series . There are a few of them — The Godfather Part II , Terminator 2: Judgment Day , The Dark Knight — that arguably fit the bill. But perhaps none loom larger in the history of a franchise than Wrath of Khan . 

After Star Trek: The Motion Picture arrived — pretty and ambitious, but lacking the energy the franchise needed to survive on the big screen — the future of Star Trek 's films got revamped, and we got a revenge tale about an old enemy from the TV series rediscovering the Enterprise crew and wreaking havoc on them. Ricardo Montalban is deliciously nasty as the title villain, and the film manages to be a showcase for everyone else in the main cast while it barrels forward through threat after threat. 

The space combat sequences are wonderfully tense, the mental chess match between Kirk and Khan is unforgettable, and of course the climactic moments that built to the loss of Spock make the film an inarguable classic. You can show Wrath of Khan to almost anyone, even someone who's never cared about Star Trek at all, and odds are they'll find something to like in it. It's not just the best Star Trek film. It's one of the best science fiction films ever made.

All 13 Star Trek movies , ranked from worst to best

Fight me...

Star Trek has (arguably) always worked better on TV than in theaters, but it's still one of the biggest sci-fi feature film franchises of all time

Here's our ranking of every Star Trek movie from worst to best.

10 Best ‘Star Trek’ Movies and TV Shows of the Franchise (So Far)

By Clayton Davis

Clayton Davis

Senior Awards Editor

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Captain James T. Kirk, better known around these parts as William Shatner, turns 90 years old on March 22. The actor, director, producer and writer has had a seven decade careers, with a community of devoted fans that revere not just his place as a figure in the universe but the entire canon of “Star Trek” and its various entities in film and television.

We’ve seen multiple starship captains and leaders over the decades, including Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), three Pikes (Jeffrey Hunter, Bruce Greenwood and Anson Mount), Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula), Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks), a rebooted James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and the ultimate badass Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), arguably the best of them all.

The entire franchise has spawned seven spin-off television series, 13 feature films and two animated series. The original series ran from 1966 to 1969 on NBC and was canceled just after three seasons. After which, we moved to an animated series (1973-1974), “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (1987-1994), “Deep Space Nine” (1993-1999), “Voyager” (1995-2001). “Enterprise” (2001-2005), and the three still ongoing “Discovery” (2017), “Picard” (2020) and “Lower Decks” (2020).

In the film sector, the original series delivered six films — “The Motion Picture” (1979), “The Wrath of Khan” (1982), “The Search for Spock” (1984), “The Voyage Home” (1986), “The Final Frontier” (1989) and “The Undiscovered Country” (1991). “The Next Generation” provided four – “Generations” (1994), “First Contact” (1996), “Insurrection” (1998) and “Nemesis” (2002) while “The Kelvin Timeline” or rebooted version has given three “Star Trek” (2009), “Star Trek Into Darkness” (2013) and “Star Trek Beyond” (2016), with all three having the highest box-office grosses of any film in the whole franchise. The 2009 film is also the only one to win an Academy Award for best makeup (Barney Burman, Mindy Hall and Joel Harlow), along with “The Voyage Home,” garnering the most nominations at four.

There are still more in development under Paramount Plus and on the studio side. “Star Trek: Prodigy,” an animated series co-written and created by Dan Hageman and Kevin Hageman that focuses on a group of teenagers who get onto an abandoned starship, is set to drop later in 2021. From creators Akiva Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet, “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” is a spin-off of “Discovery” and a prequel to the original series, following Captain Christopher Pike (Ansel Mount) and the crew of the USS Enterprise. Rebecca Romijn and Ethan Peck will also reprise their roles as Number One and Spock. Still yet to be confirmed, there is reportedly a Khan Noonien Singh limited series on the table, which explores the storyline from “The Wrath of Khan,” tentatively titled “Ceti Alpha V.”

Live long and prosper, Mr. Shatner.

Check out the full ranked list.

Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

Released : November 22, 1996 Written by : Brannon Braga, Ronald D. Moore (screenplay by and story by) and Rick Berman (story by)

Cast : Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden. Marina Sirtis, Alfre Woodard, James Cromwell, Alice Krige

Defining moments : “Jean-Luc blow up the damn ship” and Data saying “resistance is futile.”

“The Next Generation” struggled the most when translating from television to the big screen. Of the four features, “First Contact” was the most enjoyable, assembling interesting set pieces and a few memorable one-liners. Deservingly picking up an Oscar nomination for best makeup for Michael Westmore, Scott Wheeler and Jake Garber (losing to “The Nutty Professor”), it’s Jonathan Frakes’ (First Officer William T. Riker) first outing as a feature director. What makes the film a success is it abandons the notion that all roads have to involve James T. Kirk, which is one of the main reasons “Generations” really missteps.

Deep Space Nine (1993-1999)

Series run : January 1993 to June 1999 Created by : Rick Berman and Michael Piller

Cast : Avery Brooks, René Auberjonois, Terry Farrell, Cirroc Lofton, Colm Meaney, Armin Shimerman, Alexander Siddig, Nana Visitor, Michael Dorn, Nicole de Boer

Defining moments : Resistance with the Maquis, The Dominion War and The Mirror Universe

Commanding Officer and later Captain Benjamin Sisko (Brooks) was the best part of a series that wasn’t as consistently entertaining as its predecessors. Brooks is a grieving widower whose wife is killed by the Borg, an we follow him, along with his son Jake (Loft), and the rest of a fun crew that includes the Changeling Odo (Auberjonois), Medical Officer Julian Bashir (Siddig), Science Officer Jadzia Dax (Farrell), Operations Officer Miles O’Brien (Meaney) and a cult favorite Quark (Shimerman). The last two seasons of “The Next Generation” are set in the same years as the first two of “Deep Space Nine,” which then lines up with “Voyager” for the last five seasons.

Discovery (2019)

Series run : Premiered September 2017 (still running) Created by : Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman

Cast : Sonequa Martin-Green, Doug Jones, Shazad Latif, Anthony Rapp, Mary Wiseman, Jason Isaacs, Wilson Cruz, Anson Mount, David Ajala, Rachael Ancheril

Defining moments : The betrayal of Lieutenant Commander Michael Burnham

This series is still finding its footing and has lots to proud of thus far. It’s the first of the franchise to focus on a First Officer rather than the Captain, taking place about ten years before the original series. In the universe, we typically see someone going against orders for the “greater good.” Still, this series has taken that premise and expanded it with Commander Michael Burnham (Green), leading a mutiny against Captain Phillipa Georgiou (Yeoh) and starting a war against the Klingons, leading to the death of her captain. That alone creates a new type of storytelling for the franchise to explore and could help pull in more viewers of Paramount Plus’ show. It won a Primetime Emmy Award last year for outstanding prosthetic makeup for a series, limited series, movie or special, the first for the show thus far.

The Undiscovered Country (1991)

Released : December 6, 1991 Written by : Nicholas Meyer, Denny Martin Flinn (screenplay by), Leonard Nimoy, Lawrence Konner, Mark Rosenthal (story by)

Cast : William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, Kim Cattrall, David Warner, Christopher Plummer

Defining moments : The final sign-off (“If I were Human, I believe my response would be, go to hell…if I were you human.”)

The original series saga’s final installment in feature-length form is enjoyable, showcasing a possible peace between the Klingon Empire and the Federation until a secret agenda is revealed that puts all our favorite heroes at risk. It also marks the final group appearance of the major cast members of the original series, with the late Christopher Plummer as the one-eyed Klingon General Chang, who is having the time of his life. We also have a cameo appearance by Christian Slater, whose mother, Mary Jo Slater, was the film’s casting director. The film was ultimately nominated for two Oscars (best sound effects editing and makeup) and, at the time, was the highest opener for the franchise. Before “Avengers: Endgame,” a reminder that the moving closing credit signature sequence was delivered in “The Undiscovered Country.”

Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994)

Series run : September 1987 to May 1994 Created by : Gene Roddenberry

Cast : Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton. Denise Crosby, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Brent Spiner, Wil Wheaton

Defining moments : Tasha Yar’s death in episode “Skin of Evil”

The evolution of “Star Trek” was helped immensely by “The Next Generation,” which delivers the classically trained Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard, with one of the entire franchise’s best crews. Sleeker, with more interesting characters (admittedly not as well explored as they could have been), the show also encompasses one of the most notable deaths of any of the television outings with Tasha Yar (played by Denise Crosby). In the 23rd episode of the first season, we’ve already grown a connection to the Enterprise-D crew. With a behind-the-scenes request by Crosby to be removed from her contract, the act gave us one of the most emotional episodes of the franchise. Also…the creature Armus is TERRIFYING.

The Search for Spock (1984)

Released : June 1, 1984 Written by : Harve Bennett

Cast : William Shatner, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, George Takei, Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, Merritt Butrick, Christopher Lloyd

Defining moments : Spock’s “death.”

Let the great debate begin. Before #FilmTwitter quarreled about the merits of “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” (spoiler alert: it’s the second-best of the entire franchise), there was a discussion on the qualities of the third installment of the Kirk saga. It was a huge sequel weekend in June 1984, as it opened against the second weekend of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and the fourth week of “The Natural,” emerging victorious. It also marks the directorial debut of Leonard Nimoy, who was the first cast member ever to helm one of its films.  The visual effects are really where the movie comes alive, showcasing beautiful sequences developed by Industrial Light & Magic. What the film does is give heft and agency to the friendship between Kirk and Spock, and although the death of Kirk’s son is done haphazardly, the action sequences are pulse-pounding.

Voyager (1995-2001)

Series run : January 1995 to May 2001 Created by : Rick Berman, Michael Piller, Jeri Taylor

Cast : Kate Mulgrew, Robert Beltran, Roxann Dawson, Jennifer Lien, Robert Duncan McNeill, Ethan Phillips, Robert Picardo, Tim Russ, Garrett Wang, Jeri Ryan

Defining moments : “Same to you old friend” from “Year of Hell” episode with Janeway and Tuvok

Nostalgia and purists will say that the original “Star Trek” is the best because without that, we don’t have anything else that follows. While correct, in terms of quality, acting, and sheer audacity of the canon, “Voyager,” is behind-the-scenes, the best of them all. Kate Mulgrew’s Captain Janeway is vivacious, and she’s undoubtedly one of the best actresses to grace our screens (as also seen in Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black”) and Tuvok (played brilliantly by Tim Russ) is simply amazing. Also, “Seven of Nine” was my everything in my childhood, leading into my teenage years.

Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-1969)

Series run : September 1966 to June 1969 Created by : Gene Roddenberry

Cast : William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley

Defining moments : “The Doomsday Machine”

You have to respect the origins of a franchise, and we should properly genuflect before the series that started it all. The entire cast goes for it, with little budget and strange scene constructions, but it has more highs than it does lows, featuring numerous memorable moments. Many will say that the defining episodes of the series fall somewhere between “City on the Edge Forever” (with the death of Edith Keeler) or the Kirk and Spock battle in “Amok Time” (thanks to “The Cable Guy” with Jim Carrey), but “The Doomsday Machine” has the most tension and an outstanding turn from guest star William Windom as Commodore Matt Decker.

The Wrath of Khan (1982)

Released : June 4, 1982 Written by : Jack B. Sowards (screenplay and story by) Harve Bennett (story by)

Cast : William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Walter Koenig, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, Bibi Besch, Merritt Butrick, Paul Winfield, Kirstie Alley, Ricardo Montalbán

Defining moments : Spock’s “death”

If “Skin of Evil” defines the emotions on television, then “The Wrath of Khan” represents the silver screen for the franchise property. Our favorite Vulcan’s self-sacrifice, paired with Kirk’s eulogizing friend, is a tough one to stomach. It obviously is undone with the next entries of the cinematic universe, but it holds up immensely as a moving tribute to a beloved character. Sadly, no major awards love came for the film, which in many circles stands as the best in the franchise. Add the bombastic score of James Horner, and you receive amazing results.

Star Trek (2009)

Released : May 8, 2009 Written by : Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman

Cast : John Cho, Ben Cross, Bruce Greenwood, Simon Pegg, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Winona Ryder, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Anton Yelchin, Eric Bana, Leonard Nimoy, Chris Hemsworth

Defining moments : The final battle (“Fire everything!”)

Let’s get this out of the way nice and early.

Star Trek” (2009) received four Oscar nominations – for sound mixing, sound editing, visual effects, and makeup, which it won – it’s the one film of the franchise that should have been nominated for best picture, especially in the first year of a guaranteed 10 films for the Academy’s top category. I would also put it on a ballot for adapted screenplay and film editing. You don’t get an action-packed film like this rebooted entry that focuses beautifully on the beloved characters’ origin stories, giving them alternate timelines that don’t feel forced and still capture the spirit of what makes the franchise so great. SAG Awards should have also jotted it down for best cast ensemble. While the sequels have never recaptured that early magic, J.J. Abrams has proven he knows how to set up a story arc properly (sticking the landing is still up for debate). I only hope as Paramount Plus progresses forward in the universe, they take plays from the Kevin Feige playbook and give themselves a long roadmap that will pay off to something truly extraordinary.

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Every Star Trek Movie, Ranked Best to Worst

This is a list of all Star Trek movies, ranked best to worst by fans, casual critics, and people like you. This votable list includes every Star Trek  film to date. Certainly, several Star Trek  films could be considered among the best space movies . Which one is the greatest ever made? That's decided by voters, so be sure to cast your vote up or down for each film listed. Trekkies, this one's for you. Also: You can re-rank this list of great Star Trek  films in any order you want.

Generally speaking, many Star Trek  fans consider 1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan  to be one of the best, if not *the* greatest Star Trek  movie ever made. It's hard to deny that this film isn't awesome, with battles between the crew of the starship Enterprise and the evil Khan Noonien Singh.

The Star Trek  movie franchise has enjoyed a revival, thanks in large part to J.J. Abrams's 2009 movie Star Trek  and 2013's Star Trek Into Darkness . Where should these modern era Star Trek  movies fall in comparison to the classics? Are they also among the greatest sci-fi movies of all time? History will ultimately decide, but for now, you can - by voting!

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

• Released : 1982
• Directed by : Nicholas Meyer

Star Trek: First Contact

• Released : 1996
• Directed by : Jonathan Frakes

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

• Released : 1991

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

• Released : 1986
• Directed by : Leonard Nimoy

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

• Released : 1984

• Released : 2009
• Directed by : J.J. Abrams

Star Trek Beyond

• Released : 2016
• Directed by : Justin Lin

Star Trek Generations

• Released : 1994
• Directed by : David Carson

Star Trek Into Darkness

• Released : 2013

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

• Released : 1979
• Directed by : Robert Wise

Star Trek: Insurrection

• Released : 1998

Star Trek Nemesis

• Released : 2002
• Directed by : Stuart Baird

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

• Released : 1989
• Directed by : William Shatner
• Entertainment
• Star Trek Universe
• Watchworthy

Live long, and prosper.

Star Trek Movies Ranked Best to Worst

1. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

2. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

3. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

4. Star Trek: First Contact

5. Star Trek

6. Star Trek: Nemesis

7. Star Trek Into Darkness

8. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

9. Star Trek: Generations

10. Star Trek Beyond

11. Star Trek: The Motion Picture

12. Star Trek: Insurrection

13. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

More to explore, recently viewed.

Where Should I Start With Star Trek?

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The Star Trek franchise shows no signs of slowing down, with an upcoming Starfleet Academy series gearing up to premiere and fan-favorite series like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds setting its phasers for a return. Yet with all the TV shows and movies released over the years, finding an entry point into Star Trek can be a tricky prospect. Fans also have opinions on what the best Trek entry point is, but for my money, there's one series that serves as the perfect entry point to the world of Star Trek ... and that's Star Trek: The Next Generation .

Taking place a century after the events of Star Trek: The Original Series , Star Trek The Next Generation follows the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise-D on their own voyage across the stars. Yet it stands on its own two feet, thanks to its incredible cast and the way it introduced and then built upon concepts and characters that would come to define the Star Trek universe for years. Star Trek: The Next Generation is also notable for being the last major Star Trek project that Gene Roddenberry was involved with before his death, and it would even reignite interest in the franchise over time.

‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ Thrives Due to Its Ensemble Cast

Star Trek is well known for its ensemble casts, and The Next Generation might have one of the strongest ensembles in the franchise's history. Each character was able to shine across seven seasons, with plenty of episodes that spotlighted their individual strengths . But the biggest draw is the character dynamics between the U.S.S. Enterprise-D's crew. Captain Jean-Luc Picard ( Patrick Stewart ) has a close friendship with his first officer, William Riker ( Jonathan Frakes ), and buckets of romantic tension with Dr. Beverly Crusher ( Gates McFadden ); Geordi LaForge ( LeVar Burton ) and Data ( Brent Spiner ) are not only close friends, but they share some of the series' best episodes. Even characters like Wesley Crusher ( Wil Wheaton ) had their time in the limelight, which provided some much-needed variety that kept viewers tuning in week after week.

Star Trek: The Next Generation also thrived because it wasn't a carbon copy of Star Trek: The Original Series . The Enterprise-D crew has their own unique traits and struggles; Worf ( Michael Dorn ) wrestles early in the series with whether to embrace his Klingon heritage or continue serving with Starfleet, which is a direct contrast to how Spock feels split between two worlds because of his half-human heritage. Picard is also more of a strategist than James T. Kirk but struggles with developing closer relationships. Seeing these characters grow and change is part of the appeal of The Next Generation, and a great reason why it'll appeal to Trek newcomers.

'The Next Generation's Best Episodes Showcase Everything Great About Star Trek

Star Trek, at its core, is about humanity's desire to be better than it is — and Star Trek: The Next Generation puts that element at the forefront of its best episodes . Take Data; the android's quest to learn more about his humanity results in some compelling stories that explore what it means to be human. The Season 2 episode "The Measure of a Man" remains the best of these episodes, as Data is part of a trial to determine whether he's Starfleet property or his own individual. Picard's impassioned defense of Data remains one of the series' high points, especially as it taps into that essential Star Trek element of being better than you were. The episode "Elementary, Dear Data" also is a reminder that for all the heavy topics it tackles, Star Trek can still have a little fun with itself - especially in an episode that sees Data and Geordi reenacting a Sherlock Holmes story.

The episodes that truly stand out introduce characters or ideas that would return to affect the cast of The Next Generation . In the Season 2 episode "Q Who," the Enterprise-D crew encounters the cybernetic intelligence known as the Borg, who assimilate entire worlds into their collective. The Borg would continue to make appearances throughout the series, including " The Best of Both Worlds ," which saw the Borg kidnapping and assimilating Picard. This episode has everything that makes Star Trek great, as the crew of the Enterprise uses their knowledge — particularly in Geordi and Wesley's case — to beat back the Borg. There's a major human dilemma; can the Enterprise crew save Picard, or will Riker be forced to take down his friend? The Borg themselves remain a frightening presence, especially in this day and age where artificial intelligence is a major point of contention in the creative arts. "The Best of Both Worlds" is often cited as the moment where Star Trek: The Next Generation cemented itself as a true successor to the original Star Trek, but I'd argue that it's also one of the episodes to show newcomers if you want them to understand what Trek is about.

This ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ Episode Was Banned in the UK

British television would not air this Season 3 episode for political reasons.

Some of the Best Star Trek Shows Wouldn’t Exist Without ‘The Next Generation’

As Star Trek: The Next Generation grew in popularity, it paved the way for a number of spinoff shows as well as a series of feature films. These projects were allowed to go in new directions thanks to the groundwork laid by The Next Generation , and it resulted in some great Star Trek stories. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine showcased the darker side of Starfleet, and also featured a strong connection to The Next Generation in the form of Worf, who played a key role after joining Deep Space Nine in its later seasons. The Next Generation film Star Trek: First Contact dealt with the fallout of Picard's abduction by the Borg, resulting in one of Stewart's best performances as the character.

The Next Generation continues to have a massive impact on Star Trek projects , as its characters and storylines have inspired everything from the final season of Star Trek: Discovery to key plot points in Star Trek: Prodigy . The biggest example would be Star Trek: Picard , especially its finale "The Last Generation," which not only reunites the original cast of The Next Generation but has them piloting the Enterprise-D to once again battle the Borg. Once again, everything that makes Trek great is on the screen — and fans have Star Trek: The Next Generation to thank for it. The series is the perfect entry point for those new to Trek, both in terms of how it serves as the perfect introduction to this world and how it laid the foundation for some truly great stories.

Star Trek: The Next Generation is available to stream on Paramount+ in the U.S.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Set almost 100 years after Captain Kirk's 5-year mission, a new generation of Starfleet officers sets off in the U.S.S. Enterprise-D on its own mission to go where no one has gone before.

Watch on Paramount+

• TV Features

Leonard Nimoy's 5 Best Movie & TV Roles Outside Of Star Trek, Ranked

It's hard not to love Leonard Nimoy. The gifted actor, writer, director, and photographer was not just the absolute perfect person to bring Spock to life on "Star Trek," but he was also, by all accounts, a genuinely wonderful human being . Nimoy always brought a sense of kindness and respect to those he met, and feedback from fans would indicate that he was always a genuine soul, right up until the day he passed.

Although fans will likely debate this fact until the sun burns out, Spock is what elevated "Star Trek" beyond "good" into "great," and his character laid the groundwork for how "Trek" stories should be told in every iteration moving forward. His character was the embodiment of how logic and emotion are at the core of just about every conflict a being could face, making him both an outsider to the humans he worked alongside ... yet, given his emotional honesty and social awkwardness, perhaps the most "human" of them all.

But Nimoy was so much more than just Spock, and it's been long overdue for /Film to pay tribute to his best roles beyond "Star Trek." Here are his five best roles beyond Spock.

5. Paris - Mission: Impossible

"Star Trek" somewhat pigeonholed Nimoy in the realm of science fiction, but one of his earliest roles following the end of "The Original Series" was on the CBS television show "Mission: Impossible." Yes, the series that would later inspire the film franchise led by Tom Cruise. Nimoy appeared as "The Great" Paris, a master of disguise, actor, and sometimes magician who was a member of the Impossible Missions Force. The character was introduced in season 4 as a replacement for Martin Landau's character, Rollin Hand. Nimoy's presence was an injection of fun and flair, as Paris donned flamboyant, brightly patterned shirts that put him in stark contrast to the serious suits of the rest of the team. There's a bit of Paris' DNA in Nimoy's performance in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" as well.

"Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One" recently paid homage to the character with the introduction of Pom Klementieff's Paris, a deadly antagonist who ends up fighting Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). She's bold, deadly, and constantly wearing flashy outfits. The characters are related by name and aesthetics only, however, as this Paris is much more of a baddie than Nimoy's stylish spy.

When Nimoy first joined the show, "Mission: Impossible" had, up to that point, been a pretty serious series. Paris was fun, funny, and as a master of disguise, constantly transforming into different identities. Nimoy is visibly having a ball of a time playing him, and the role truly showcases his strengths as a character actor.

4. Xehanort - Kingdom Hearts Franchise

Leonard Nimoy did a fair bit of voice acting throughout his career, with memorable roles including Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in "The Pagemaster," Sentinel Prime in "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," and Kashekim Nedakh in "Atlantis: The Lost Empire." He had a profound, sonorous voice capable of soothing the audience in emotionally charged moments or threatening with an authoritative bellow. This provided him with a wide range of characters to voice, but Master Xehanort in the "Kingdom Hearts" video game franchise is arguably his greatest. The character serves as the Big Bad of the Dark Seeker saga, appearing directly as the main antagonist of "Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep," and Rank I of the real Organization XIII in "Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance" and "Kingdom Hearts III." Nimoy voiced the character until his death, after which he was replaced by a fellow genre legend, Rutger Hauer.

Nimoy was a hero to all as Spock, but Xehanort gave him the space to be ruthless. His commanding timbre made a feast of the dialogue, and I'm sure younger generations immediately ran to look up what a "feckless neophyte" meant the second his character barked it out. There's an argument to be made that Nimoy's Xehanort is one of the greatest Disney villains ever crafted, and his performance is undoubtedly central to the character's effectiveness.

3. Himself - Narrator

While we're talking about Nimoy's voice, it feels shameful not to highlight what a prolific and powerful narrator he was. Despite what many may think, the art of narration is not for everyone — even for many prolific and talented actors. 

Nimoy, however, is no ordinary actor. His voice has guided audiences through IMAX documentary specials like "Titanica," the premiere documentary "The Harryhausen Chronicles" in honor of special effects legend Ray Harryhausen , all 145 episodes of the mystery show "In Search Of," 91 episodes of "Ancient Mysteries," and so much more.

His thoughtful delivery would suck the audience into whatever the subject was at hand, expertly shifting between a sound of genuine curiosity and one of expertise. His work as a narrator is arguably his most underappreciated, and the fact that "In Search Of" is not readily available on streaming is a true shame. In fact, when the show was revived in 2018, Zachary Quinto, who played Spock in J.J. Abrams' "Star Trek" movies, took over as narrator in a bit of poetic beauty. While Robert Stack and Rod Serling are the two usual go-to's when thinking of excellent narrators for genre projects, Nimoy is right up there with them.

2. Dr. William Bell - Fringe

At the end of 2008, J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, and Roberto Orci unleashed "Fringe" onto the world: a truly fantastic (and criminally underrated) sci-fi series that combined elements of the procedural drama with parallel worlds, body horror, timeline chaos, and science-gone-awry. Not only are all of the bizarre and unexplainable mysteries of the world real — but the FBI is fully aware of it and has a special task force known as the Fringe Division to keep things in order. As Hoai-Tran Bui wrote for us in an impassioned plea for folks to check it out , "Fringe" is "this weirdo, pulp sci-fi show with occasional bursts of violence and occasional nuggets of wisdom. It's a procedural that transformed into something weirder, and while it may not necessarily be airtight, it's still darn good sci-fi TV."

In his final acting role (outside of appearances as himself, Spock, or in voiceovers) Nimoy appeared in 11 episodes of "Fringe" as Dr. William Bell, scientist and former partner of one of the series leads, Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble). Bell was a groundbreaking figure in the field of fringe science, dabbling in alternate realities, advanced technology, telepathic communication, and transportation devices. Bell also used the alias "Dr. Paris," a nod to his character in the original "Mission: Impossible" series. Bell initially appears as an anti-hero of sorts, but as the show went on, he evolved into a full-blown villain. Bell was a complicated, dastardly, fantastic role for Nimoy, and a perfect way to cap his acting legacy.

1. Mel Mermelstein - Never Forget

Holocaust denialism is a very serious subject, and as of 2024, it's estimated that there are still roughly 250,000 survivors of the Holocaust still with us. Unfortunately, as more survivors pass on, it gets easier and easier for conspiracy theorists and straight-up antisemitic weirdos to pretend that the Holocaust never happened. Even worse, Holocaust denialism is not a new thing. In the 1980s, a man named Mel Mermelstein made history when he was challenged by the antisemitic hate group called the Institute for Historical Review to "prove" that gas chambers were actually used at Auschwitz. As the sole survivor of his family's extermination, Mermelstein puts himself, his business, and his family at risk to prove in court what happened at Auschwitz, and won.

In 1991, Nimoy starred as Mermelstein in "Never Forget," a made-for-TV movie about the case. Much of the film plays out beyond the courtroom drama often attributed to adaptations of this case and, given the limited budget, "Never Forget" often struggles with a lack of production value. But where the film falters, Nimoy more than makes up for it. 

The passion Nimoy has for this story and the real man in question is palpable, and watching him act opposite of Dabney Coleman as Memelstein's lawyer William John Cox (playing against type, no less) is nothing short of brilliant. Spock was a character who had expert control of his emotions, and that restraint is well on display in "Never Forget," especially in a scene where Holocaust deniers laugh directly in Mermelstein's face in the middle of an interview about his experiences at Auschwitz. But "Never Forget" also provides an outlet for Nimoy's emotions to become justifiably and understandably explosive, serving as his greatest performance outside of "Star Trek."

10 Sequels More Rewatchable Than the Original Movie

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Movie sequels can often be hit-or-miss, with many ruining the original film that fans loved so dearly. However, Hollywood has occasionally produced some sequels that build on their predecessors perfectly, becoming fan-favorite films in long-running franchises.

On rare occasions, certain sequels prove to be better than the originals. In these cases, the sequels are often better to revisit than the often exposition-heavy and slower films that preceded them. From The Wrath of Khan to The Empire Strikes Back , these are the most rewatchable movie sequels.

10 Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan Vastly Improves On The Original

Wrath of khan creates star trek's biggest plot hole, and the real-life explanation is hilarious.

How Khan recognized Chekov in The Wrath of Khan is Star Trek's biggest plot hole since he wasn't in the TOS episode. Walter Koenig has the answer.

Based on the classic sci-fi television series, Star Trek: The Motion Picture brought the adventures of the U.S.S. Enterprise to the big screen for the first time. Three years later, a sequel, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was released. This time, Captain Kirk and his crew face off against a villain from his past, the maniacal Khan.

The original Star Trek movie received lukewarm reviews from fans and critics, who felt that it was too long, contemplative, and filled with droll conversation rather than the exciting action that viewers had hoped to see. The Wrath of Khan took all of these notes and built a much more enjoyable film that is largely regarded as the best in the franchise. While a Star Trek fan might groan at the idea of rewatching the original film, The Wrath of Khan is a much more rewatchable adventure.

Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan

With the assistance of the Enterprise crew, Admiral Kirk must stop an old nemesis, Khan Noonien Singh, from using the life-generating Genesis Device as the ultimate weapon.

9 Spider-Man 2 Is One Of The Best Superhero Films Of All Time

Spider-Man came to the big screen for the first time in the first installment of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy starring Tobey Maguire. The film was a massive success, helping kickstart a new era of movies based on Marvel Comics characters. Two years later, Spider-Man 2 was released, pitting the titular wall-crawling superhero against the villainous Dr. Otto Octavius, a.k.a. Doctor Octopus. The sequel also proved to be a major success for Marvel and Sony, leading to a third film in 2007.

Spider-Man 2 is widely renowned as one of the best superhero movies ever made, elevating the stakes of the original without comprising its story or characters. Moreover, after 20 years, Spider-Man 2 still holds up whereas the original film feels somewhat dated. If a Spider-Man fan is to turn on one of Raimi's films, there's a high chance that it will be the second rather than either of the other two.

Spider-Man 2

Peter Parker is beset with troubles in his failing personal life as he battles a brilliant scientist named Doctor Otto Octavius.

8 Puss In Boots: The Last Wish Is A Masterpiece

Puss in Boots originally appeared in the Shrek franchise but received his spinoff franchise in 2011. The original movie was a by-the-numbers animated adventure that primarily appealed to children. Eleven years later, the long-awaited sequel, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish , finally reached audiences--and changed everything.

Sporting a dazzling new animation style, The Last Wish is leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessor. The movie deals with surprisingly adult themes, including the nature of death, and can be enjoyed by mature audiences just as easily as younger ones. The film was a fan-favorite installment of the Shrek franchise and even went on to be nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

When Puss in Boots discovers that his passion for adventure has taken its toll and he has burned through eight of his nine lives, he launches an epic journey to restore them by finding the mythical Last Wish.

7 Captain America: The Winter Soldier Is A More Action-Packed SpyThriller

5 most likely captain america: brave new world plot theories, explained.

With Captain America: Brave New World on the way, here are some of the main plot theories for Sam Wilson's big screen starring turn as Captain America

Captain America first joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe in his own solo film, Captain America: The First Avenger . The movie took place in World War II as Captain America fought alongside the Union armies against the forces of Hydra. The First Avenger was the first installment in a trilogy of films following Chris Evans' Steve Rogers, which continued in 2014's The Winter Soldier.

While The First Avenger is a modest period piece that is perhaps underrated by MCU fans, The Winter Soldier is rightfully placed on a pedestal as one of the best entries in the Infinity Saga. The movie not only elevates the stakes with its epic action-thriller story but also delves deeper into the character of Steve Rogers, exploring his adjustment to the modern world.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

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As Steve Rogers struggles to embrace his role in the modern world, he teams up with a fellow Avenger and S.H.I.E.L.D agent, Black Widow, to battle a new threat from history: an assassin known as the Winter Soldier.

6 Aliens Is Faster-Paced Than The Original Movie

Alien is one of the best horror movies of all time, crafting a suspenseful and claustrophobic narrative as a xenomorph hunt down the crew members of the spacecraft Nostromo . The film kickstarted a massive franchise, beginning with the 1986 sequel Aliens by director James Cameron. Sigourney Weaver returns as Ellen Ripley in Aliens , which follows her character as she teams up with Colonial Marines to fight even more xenomorphs than last time.

While both films are held in high esteem, especially above their two lackluster sequels, Aliens is a much easier film to rewatch than Alien . The sequel is much more action-packed, whereas its predecessor builds tension over a long period before finally getting into the fun part of its story. There is a place for both kinds of movies in the world of cinema, but Aliens is certainly a much more entertaining film to revisit.

Decades after surviving the Nostromo incident, Ellen Ripley is sent out to re-establish contact with a terraforming colony but finds herself battling the Alien Queen and her offspring.

5 Terminator 2: Judgment Day Improves On The Original

Terminator zero's biggest mysteries left unanswered.

Season 1 of Terminator Zero is a time-traveling mind-trip that leaves quite a few mysteries hanging as Malcolm Lee and others try to stop Skynet.

James Cameron catapulted into the sci-fi scene with 1984's The Terminator , which dealt with a dystopian future that one young time traveler seeks to prevent. Pursued by a relentless killing machine, he teams up with the future mother of the leader of the resistance. Hailed as an immediate classic, no one thought that The Terminator could be topped until Cameron returned with T erminator 2: Judgment Day .

Judgment Day perfectly raises the stakes after the original movie, introducing the T-1000, a new model of Terminator that proves even deadlier than the first. Fans enjoyed the flipped dynamic of the film, as the original Terminator now works to protect John Conner from the T-1000. A true standout in this epic sci-fi action flick is the effects, which are remarkable given that the movie came out over thirty years ago.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

A cyborg, identical to the one who failed to kill Sarah Connor, must now protect her ten year old son John from an even more advanced and powerful cyborg.

4 The Empire Strikes Back Made Star Wars A True Franchise

Star Wars is a landmark film in cinematic history, practically inventing the modern blockbuster. Fans everywhere loved the unique sci-fi world that George Lucas created for the film and were doubly excited to see the 1980 sequel. The Empire Strikes Back was the second Star Wars movie and it immediately proved to be an even better film than the original.

The Empire Strikes Back has more action, more dynamic characters, and better twists than the original, which was already a top-tier movie upon its release. Both films are endlessly rewatchable, but Star Wars fans find themselves drawn to the sequel more than the original. It was The Empire Strikes Back that turned Star Wars into a bona fide franchise.

Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

After the Rebels are overpowered by the Empire, Luke Skywalker begins his Jedi training with Yoda, while his friends are pursued across the galaxy by Darth Vader and bounty hunter Boba Fett.

3 Blade Runner 2049 Is More Palatable Than The Original

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is considered to be one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time but struggled to find its audience upon its release in 1982. The film however became a cult classic and eventually got a sequel in 2017, with Denis Villeneuve directing Blade Runner 2049 . The film also failed to produce adequate numbers at the box office but was generally regarded as a worthy successor to the original film.

Blade Runner 2049 may not have been a financial success, but it is in many ways a more palatable film than the original. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is long and at times exhausting, spending too much time in the deep contemplative mind of Rick Deckard. Moreover, the endless debate among fans about which of the seven different versions of the film is best makes trying to watch Blade Runner nearly impossible. Blade Runner 2049 cuts away all the fluff and makes a much easier film to watch over and over again.

Blade Runner 2049

Young Blade Runner K's discovery of a long-buried secret leads him to track down former Blade Runner Rick Deckard, who's been missing for thirty years.

2 Return Of The King Perfectly Ends The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy

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Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy is a standout among big Hollywood blockbuster franchises. Shot back-to-back, the three films make for one of the best book-to-screen adaptations of all time. The story begins with The Fellowship of the Ring , which plays directly into The Two Towers . Things finally come to an end with the third film, The Return of the King .

While the first two films are also beloved, The Return of the King has a special place in the franchise. The sequel finishes the trilogy perfectly, delivering on its every promise and raising the stakes, as any good finale should. The movie was so well-received that it won multiple Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Moreover, fans love to rewatch this particular installment to revisit its epic action scenes, from the Battle of Pelennor Fields to the Battle of the Black Gate.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Gandalf and Aragorn lead the World of Men against Sauron's army to draw his gaze from Frodo and Sam as they approach Mount Doom with the One Ring.

1 Logan Is The Best Installment Of The X-Men Franchise

The X-Men franchise was a massive cinematic universe built around numerous popular characters from Marvel Comics. With the popularity of Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, Fox decided to give his character a franchise of his own. The trilogy got off to an infamously bad start with X-Men Origins: Wolverine , which is considered to be one of the worst installments of the superhero franchise. Nevertheless, the trilogy continued, finally concluding in 2017's Logan .

Logan is a brilliant character piece focusing on the last days of Hugh Jackman's Wolverine. The film serves as the perfect swan song for the character, finally letting him rest after centuries of difficulty and strife. The movie excels above its predecessors and, though it is often heavy, is much easier to watch than the truly inane antics of Origins .

In a future where mutants are nearly extinct, an elderly and weary Logan leads a quiet life. But when Laura, a mutant child pursued by scientists, comes to him for help, he must get her to safety.

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20 Essential Winona Ryder Roles, Ranked

Few actresses are as synonymous with Gen-X excellence as Winona Ryder, and even fewer have managed to transform that generation’s sarcastic, disaffected, secretly yearning appeal into an enduring career. That’s because Ryder, for all her goth-princess beginnings in Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands , and her fuck-normalcy counterculture edge in Heathers and Reality Bites , has never been just an aesthetic.

Ryder’s reunion with filmmaker Tim Burton in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a celebration of her spooky allure and a recognition of how key her performances were to the director’s early filmography, but there’s so much more to Ryder than her ability to deadpan and how great she looks in choppy bangs. The actress has been delivering cunningly layered, unapologetically sensual, and exaggeratedly comedic performances for decades now. This woman has stolen scenes from Daniel Day-Lewis in two different period pieces! She deserves our respect! And here we are to give it to her, by breaking down 20 of her essential performances across movies and TV.

20. Show Me a Hero (2015)

One of Ryder’s two collaborations with The Wire ’s David Simon, Show Me a Hero is a true ensemble series; Ryder is just one part of a sprawling ensemble featuring Oscar Isaac, Alfred Molina, Jon Bernthal, Catherine Keener, and Clarke Peters. She doesn’t have a ton of screen time as Vinni Restiano, the Yonkers City Council president who advocated for integration of the city’s middle- and upper-class neighborhoods through low-income housing. But what she provides is a sense of steadiness — there’s a lot of political posturing, ambitious striving, and racist and classist hatred from the series’ other characters. In contrast, Ryder’s Restiano radiates sureness. You’ll look for her in scenes for that energy, which is a nice change of pace from the more flighty persona of her younger years.

19. Destination Wedding (2018)

Ryder and Keanu Reeves have worked together numerous times and played love interests more than once, but Destination Wedding is perhaps the most straightforward version of that coupling: It’s a rom-com! The two bicker and banter and then fall into bed together! On paper, it should be pretty charming; in actuality, Victor Levin’s film is a little too woodenly written and a little too rotely directed, and, well, Reeves is playing an incel. But Ryder has always been great at falling in love onscreen, and although she and Reeves are both playing jerks, there’s still enough chemistry there to make you wonder when someone else will write a better, Ticket to Paradise –style flick for these two.

18. Alien Resurrection (1997)

Alien Resurrection is not a particularly good movie, but it does feel like an omniscient one. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and writer Joss Whedon have more ideas than they know what to do with, but a few of those ideas — human experimentation, hybrid cloning, trying to “tame” the alien — would actually end up shaping the franchise for decades to come. Still, amid all this overstuffed plotting, Ryder has a nice action turn as mercenary and secret synthetic Annalee Call. She doesn’t do many films in this genre, but she handles herself well shooting at the aliens, running around the Auriga ship, avoiding acid blood, and projecting that slightly detached do-gooder vibe that the franchise’s synthetics are supposed to have unless their coding goes haywire. And while a seductively feral Sigourney Weaver as the human-Xenomorph queen clone Ripley 8 absolutely runs away with the film, her performance works so well because of Ryder’s wide-eyed affect as the skeptical, scared Call; the contrast between the two women, like in a scene where Ripley 8 tears out the internal second mouth of an alien and offers it to a disgusted Call as a “nice souvenir,” gives this film its personality.

17. Drunk History , “Boston” (2013) and “Philadelphia” (2014)

Sometimes it’s nice just to watch Ryder have a little fun! She pops up in the first two seasons of Drunk History (RIP), and in each gives a performance that’s big, broad, and zany. In “Boston,” she plays Mary Dyer, a Quaker woman who was eventually hanged for her religious beliefs and for refusing to leave the Puritan-led colony that tried to banish her, and in “Philadelphia,” she plays Peggy Shippen, Benedict Arnold’s spy wife. Dyer’s story is a lot sadder than Shippen’s (in the latter, narrator Erin McGathy compliments Shippen more than once by calling her a cunt), but Ryder is lovely as each woman. As Dyer, she projects a confidence and capability that sparks well against Michael Cera’s hotheaded Puritan leader, and as Shippen — in a gigantic, Marie Antoinette–style wig — she’s just hilarious, mugging at the camera with shrugs and eye rolls even when she’s having missionary-style sex. It’s too bad that Drunk History was abruptly canceled during COVID, because Ryder is a great mime who certainly could have done more on the show.

16. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Legacy sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice cycles through all the great moments from Tim Burton’s 1988 film (which, yes, ranks higher) without changing too much of the original’s formula. The Deetzes’ Victorian mansion still has the miniature of Winter River in its attic; Michael Keaton’s titular character is still gravelly voiced and gross; and the afterlife underworld is still a German Expressionist nightmare of bizarre angles and a jukebox playground of yesteryear pop hits. This is nostalgia bait, sure. But it’s undergirded by a consciously adult, steeped-in-sadness performance from Ryder, whose Lydia hasn’t had the best go of it in the nearly 40 years since her father and stepmother moved into this quirky, haunted town. She’s a reality-TV star who hates her job; she’s in a relationship with a man she’s only barely interested in; and she’s had to weather her daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), never believing in her ability to see ghosts. Ryder plays the character as barely held together, gulping down pills and snapping at anyone who says the name of the demon who tried to marry her at the end of the first film. Lydia is emotionally battered, and Ryder makes us feel that in her combination of manic fear of Beetlejuice’s return and exhausted weariness when dealing with Astrid. When her stepmother asks Lydia “where’s the obnoxious little goth girl who tormented me all those years ago?,” we’re meant to sympathize with how much time has worn down Lydia, and we do. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice lets us feel the burden of nostalgia and what too much of it can do, and Ryder’s performance is central to that feeling of discomfort.

15. Girl, Interrupted (1999)

Like Alien Resurrection , James Mangold’s Girl, Interrupted is another one where Ryder is overshadowed by a co-star, in this case, Angelina Jolie, whose mercurial performance rightly won her the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2000. But also like Alien Resurrection , Ryder is doing important work here as the straight woman for that flashier performance to play off of. She’s believable and pitiable as 18-year-old Susanna Kaysen, who, after a nervous breakdown and an overdose, ends up in the women’s ward of a psychiatric hospital. Girl, Interrupted leans a little too much on all of the other committed women having noticeable quirks or defining traumas (Susanna’s is the promiscuity caused by her borderline personality disorder), but Ryder is solid as a woman yearning to be liked and to belong to other people, and her performance blooms against those of Jolie, Brittany Murphy, Clea DuVall, and Elisabeth Moss. Ryder’s wide-eyed gaze gets overused, but that pixie cut really did open up her face.

14. Friends , “The One With Rachel’s Big Kiss” (2001)

A few elements of this Friends episode, in which Ryder plays Rachel’s sorority sister Melissa Warburton, who meets up with her for the first time since college, haven’t aged well. The central tension of the episode is that Rachel insists she and Melissa kissed, and Melissa insists they didn’t — and Melissa’s “maybe I passed out and you did stuff to me while I was sleeping” getting a laugh-track response isn’t great. Some things are better left in the early aughts! But, of course, the two women did actually kiss, and Ryder’s comedic timing and physical performance sell that reveal. Her face melts when Rachel kisses her in the present to prove a point, and her body goes slack. Her voice gets hoarse and breathy when she says of the college kiss, “I think about it all the time,” and after Rachel rejects her come-on, it goes up a few octaves during Melissa’s panicked “Shut up!” Friends has tons of these little one-episode cameos, but not many of those guest actors did so much with so little as Ryder.

13. Star Trek (2009)

The Star Trek cast weren’t complete nobodies in 2009 — Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, and John Cho all had a few credits before signing onto the franchise reboot from director J. J. Abrams and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. But the ensemble needed an established face to help draw us in and establish narrative stakes, and as Spock’s human mother, Amanda Grayson, Ryder did that beautifully. Her gentle wisdom and unbothered love for Spock help soften Quinto’s super-constrained version of the character — like when she fusses with his uniform collar before his emotion-purge ritual and tells him whatever he chooses, “you will have a proud mother” — and Ryder plays her with such poise and dignity that her tragic death is probably the most impactful moment of that whole trilogy. This is the role that feels most like a warm-up for the maternal warmth Ryder would eventually exude on Stranger Things , and she adds exactly the humanity Star Trek needs to feel like a worthwhile new version of a story whose beats we already know.

12. The Plot Against America (2020)

It’s rare for Ryder to play a true villain, but in The Plot Against America — her second collaboration with Simon, who has described her as having “the standing of the great American ingénue” — she comes pretty close. In the alternate-history miniseries based on the 2004 novel by Philip Roth, Ryder plays Evelyn Finkel, a Jewish woman who falls in love with John Turturro’s Rabbi Bengelsdorf. Out of self-loathing, a desire for power, or some other mysterious reasoning, the rabbi is a collaborator with the antisemitic administration led by aviator turned president Charles Lindbergh, and as his relationship with Evelyn deepens, she gets pulled into that hateful project, too. Ryder plays Evelyn as a woman so deep in love that she can’t see the consequences of her actions: She’s so head over heels for Bengelsdorf and so captivated by the elite worlds he pulls her into that she nearly immediately lets her own definition of Judaism and Jewish identity be pulled into his. Over six episodes, Ryder walks an impossibly thin line between vulnerability and selfishness, until finally, when it’s too late, she realizes the gravity of what she’s done in separating children from their parents, rubbing shoulders with Nazis, and forcibly relocating Jewish families. You’ll hate Evelyn, but Ryder makes it so you also can’t help but feel awful for her, and for what the madness of love will make you do.

11. Stranger Things (2016-present)

Perhaps the role that skews closest to Ryder’s own real-life spontaneity, battery-bunny energy, and exasperation with the youths, Ryder’s Joyce Byers is — like her Amanda Grayson in Star Trek — the character who draws us in because of our nostalgia and our recognition, but keeps us coming back to feel her raw emotion. As the desperate and demoralized single mother searching for her missing son, Will, Ryder’s performance in the first season of Stranger Things is crystal clear in its angst, grief, and trauma, and all of the character’s quirks are in service of that. Her flightiness and her paranoia, her shrillness and her brusqueness — they all combine to help Joyce feel fully realized from the first episode. The series’ increasing scale and globe-trotting in its following seasons unfortunately resulted in Ryder being sometimes siloed from the main action; so many of her romantic-relationship beats and her obsessive concern for Will feel like regurgitations of her season-one arc. But there’s a reason why Stranger Things ’s most defining image still is Joyce in her living room, surrounded by Christmas string lights she’s using to communicate with her missing son. That’s when the show’s emotional devastation felt most real and its fantastical possibilities most exciting, and Ryder was the reason why.

10. Reality Bites (1994)

Maybe it is blasphemous to place Reality Bites on the outer edge of the top ten, but isn’t this a sign of how stacked Ryder’s career actually is? Reality Bites is arguably Gen X’s most defining film (no matter how much star Janeane Garofalo resists that description ), and Ryder’s performance as aspiring documentarian Lelaina Pierce is a wondrous thing, all lit up from the inside with the glowing potential and prickly edges of Ryder’s youth. She’s all at once an ideological purist and a phony, a romantic and a cynic, and Ryder was more than skilled enough to guide Lelaina through the minefield of so many contradictions. Her relationship with Garofalo, as her best friend, Vickie, was joyous; her sexual tension with Ethan Hawke’s aspiring musician, Troy, was hot; and her sarcastic “What’s money to an artist?” during one of Troy and Lelaina’s fights was an all-timer of a line delivery. She was a hypocrite, but she was our hypocrite!

9. Black Swan (2010)

Ryder is basically only in one scene in Black Swan , and man, does she make it memorable. As Beth, the New York City Ballet prima ballerina forced into retirement so that Natalie Portman’s upstart, Nina, can take over, Ryder is essentially a jump scare, a makeup-smeared woman lurking on the edge of Nina’s vision who hissingly calls her “such a frigid little girl” and waves her drink around like a weapon. Her facetiously toasting Nina with a derisive “You make the most of it, Nina!” is the film’s only laugh-out-loud moment, and it’s a welcome one. The film treats Ryder’s Beth as the evil hag witch who the virginal hard worker Nina has to beat to achieve her dreams, and Ryder plays that role with relish and gusto. More opportunities for Ryder to play an old-dame bitch, please!

8. Beetlejuice (1988)

Ryder was 15 years old when she filmed Beetlejuice , but what remains so astonishing about her performance decades later is that there’s no precociousness or artifice to it, no overly cutesy adolescent quirks. She doesn’t play young, although she actually was young. Instead, Ryder’s goth-teen Lydia Deetz is just effortlessly cool, a shrugging mass of black fabric, powder-white makeup, and choppy bangs who oozed disinterest in her yuppie father and stepmother and legitimate fascination with the Maitland couple haunting the Connecticut Victorian mansion into which her family has just moved. As ghosts, Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis help us understand the world of the undead, but Ryder’s Lydia helps us understand the world of the living and why humans can choose to be so closed off or ignorant of the paranormal and spectral. She handles that responsibility well, giving the film some of its most memorably wacky moments — her delighted floating-in-air dance to Harry Belafonte’s “Jump in the Line (Shake, Señora)” — and holding her own against Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice. Every expression she makes when he tries to forcibly marry her in the film’s final act is perfect; has anyone ever possessed so many different kinds of disgusted smirks?

7. Little Women (1994)

As aspiring writer Jo March, Ryder perfectly embodies all the independence, hopefulness, and ambition of Louisa May Alcott’s iconic protagonist; she is, as your grandparents might say, “spunky.” Ryder keeps all of Jo’s defining qualities in perfect balance, from her slight superiority because of her writing talent, to her selfless support of her sisters, to her frustration with other people not accommodating her dreams and desires, to her not-love for brother-figure Laurie (Christian Bale). Jo can sometimes read as too much , but Ryder tempers that extra-ness with physical economy that allows us to understand the effort Jo takes to connect with and not disrespect others: how still she stands when Laurie kisses her against her will, how she lovingly pages through the books in her future husband Friedrich’s (Gabriel Byrne) office. She might not have gotten a “Women!” meme moment like Saoirse Ronan’s version of the character in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation , but Ryder inspired a generation of nerdy and independent-minded young women in her own right. Rory Gilmore wouldn’t exist without her.

6. A Scanner Darkly (2006)

One of Richard Linklater’s most groundbreaking films visually, A Scanner Darkly improved on the rotoscoping technique the director started using in his previous film, Waking Life, and also gave Ryder one of her most complex roles to date. The adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s same-named 1977 novel is, admittedly, a film that demands multiple viewings, since it deals with double and triple identities and a piece of technology called a “scramble suit” that changes how characters look. You gotta pay attention! Ryder, though, is a grounding force here, playing a woman named Donna who is addicted to a popular drug named Substance D and who tentatively starts a relationship with Keanu Reeves’s Arctor; unknown to her, he’s an undercover cop trying to figure out who her dealer is, but she has motivations of her own, too. To say more about the plot would spoil the film too much, but Ryder is really a chameleon, flickering between quiet melancholy, genuine affection, and darker, more selfish concerns, and the rotoscoping art style accentuates the expressiveness of her face. A moment when she and Arctor clasp hands as they talk about the future, only for her to let go first, is gorgeous and despondent in equal measure.

5. Edward Scissorhands (1990)

I dare you to watch the scene where Johnny Depp’s titular character carves an angelic figure modeled after Ryder’s Kim from a gigantic block of ice, creating flakes of snow that Kim dances under, and not feel like your heart is tearing in half. This is the movie that cemented Ryder’s status as a goth icon (and the first she made with Depp, whom she dated for four years and was engaged to for three of them), and this scene is perhaps Ryder at her softest — her twirling under the snow communicating a sense of wonder, and the smile on her face conveying that she knows she’s loved. (Director Tim Burton smartly keeps his camera on Ryder’s face as she whirls, and lets her beatific joy take up the frame.) Of course, nothing would ever be that happy again in Edward Scissorhands , and it’s a beautiful, shattering moment.

4. The Crucible (1996)

The second of Ryder and Daniel Day-Lewis’s collaborations, The Crucible — written by Arthur Miller, adapting his own 1953 play — revolves around Ryder’s performance as teenager Abigail Williams, whose accusations of witchcraft against her neighbors in 17th-century Salem are fueled by jealousy, hysteria, and spite. This performance came years after Bram Stoker’s Dracula and The Age of Innocence , so it wasn’t a surprise that Ryder could be so conniving, cunning, and sensual as Abigail, whose romantic obsession with former lover John Proctor (Day-Lewis) fuels her to start making up lies about the devil communing with Salem’s residents. But she shows a powerful command of language in The Crucible , injecting lust, megalomania, and contempt as required, and she does well in the many toe-to-toes with Day-Lewis that the script demands. Her little smirk at Day-Lewis’s commanding “You will never cry witchery again” is simultaneously adolescent and threatening, which is one of the modes Ryder did best in her 1980s and ’90s early career.

3. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Sometimes you gotta writhe around in a diaphanous nightgown while sucking blood off an ancient vampire’s chest, you know? Francis Ford Coppola’s film is so maximalist and melodramatic that it’s easy to get lost in just how luscious this thing looks — Eiko Ishioka’s animal-inspired and historically influenced costumes, Dante Ferretti and Thomas Sanders’s extraordinarily detailed production design. But to focus only on the aura and atmosphere would be a disservice to Ryder’s dual performance, which drives everything in the movie. Ryder plays both Vlad Dracula’s wife, Elisabeta, who dies by suicide when she mistakenly hears that he’s been killed in battle, and 19th-century well-to-do woman Mina Murray, the wife of Dracula’s solicitor with whom he becomes obsessed, believing that she’s Elisabeta reincarnated. As Elisabeta, she has to make enough of an impact for us to understand Dracula’s renouncing of God and embrace of vampirism to deal with his grief, and as Mina, she has to be beguiling and pure enough to make Dracula leave the sanctity of his castle to pursue her, and Ryder easily does both. Her performance is the film’s emotional core; through her innocence, we understand what humanity has to offer, and through her corruption, we understand the depths of what Dracula has lost. The fluidity with which Ryder goes from standoffish when she first meets Dracula, to full-body horrified when he tries to feed on her for the first time, to her eventual eroticization and overwhelming desire as he begins to turn her into a vampire, is phenomenal. This was Ryder’s first grown-up role, and she made the transition with seemingly no effort at all.

2. The Age of Innocence (1993)

This is Ryder in stone-cold-killer mode, and she excels at it. Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel is one of his absolute best films ; between this and Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula , we really were feasting in period-piece aura and atmosphere in the early ’90s. The Age of Innocence is primarily about a love triangle between wealthy New York City lawyer Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), his younger, seemingly naïve and vacuous fiancée, May Welland (Ryder), and her more worldly, sophisticated, unconventional older cousin Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), but the film — as with all of Scorsese’s work — quickly becomes an allegory for the American experience at large, about how the strictness of social conventions and public propriety stifle the individual. The film’s heat is within Day-Lewis and Pfeiffer, who are so unbelievably sexy together that a simple hand caress feels pornographic. It’s Ryder, though, who demonstrates an ability for precise cruelty; a scene where she dominates an archery competition, shooting arrow after arrow into a bull’s-eye target, is an indication of her yawning need for control and perfection. Every accommodating smile feels barbed, every curtsy an attack, every look of serene placidity a mask. The politeness with which she tells Newland that she’s “afraid you can’t” travel to Europe to see Ellen again after she flees New York is a knife in the gut; Ryder is solely responsible for the film’s tragic final act, and she nails it.

1. Heathers (1988)

The Ryder performance that has been often imitated, that influenced countless teen movies to come, and that has never been replicated in its verve or confidence. From director Michael Lehmann and writer Daniel Waters, Heathers is a bona fide classic, the black comedy that jettisoned Ryder and her co-star Christian Slater into the upper tiers of teen fame and also crystallized their unique appeal. So many of the qualities we associate with Ryder still — smart, sassy, scoffing — are born in this performance as self-loathing popular girl Veronica Sawyer, in her precise comedic timing while trading barbs with Slater’s J.D. and in her exhausted weariness with her frenemies the Heathers. Heathers has been redone in the years since ( a musical , a TV series ), but they’re just not the same without Ryder as Veronica, the cynic who eventually grows a soul (and grabs the friend group’s totemic red scrunchie for herself). Plus, no one has ever made a monocle look this cool before, and no one ever will again.

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5 Iconic Star Trek Characters That Need Their Own Movie

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Today at Screen Rant, we look at other crucial characters from Star Trek, each of whom deserves their very own spinoff movie.

​​Star Trek: The Vulcan Nerve Pinch, Explained

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Star Trek Fans Debate Who Deserves Credit For Defeating Khan

Star trek: how discovery changed the way we see spock, 15 spock memes only true star trek fans will understand, quick links, what is the vulcan nerve pinch, notable uses of the vulcan nerve pinch in star trek, is anyone immune to a vulcan nerve pinch, is the vulcan nerve pinch based on a real-life technique, key takeaways.

• Spock first introduced the Vulcan nerve pinch in Star Trek: The Original Series and it's been used over 60 times since.
• While Spock's originator Leonard Nimoy invented the ability, there's no set in-universe explanation about how it works so effectively.
• The nerve pinch is not exclusive to Vulcans but is difficult to learn and not effective against every opponent.

Star Trek has served up many distinctive races, but the definitive alien character will always be Spock. Leonard Nimoy established a relatable non-human character on TV like never before, setting many characteristics that have pushed the Vulcan species into pop culture. Everyone knows the traits that mark Vulcans out — pointy ears, eyebrows, logic, and mind melds. But there’s also a particularly effective technique to subdue enemies.

It didn’t take long for Spock to introduce the Vulcan nerve pinch to the show — a skill that arguably became more ubiquitous in the broader franchise than the race that created it. While Spock has popped up more iterations of Star Trek than any other character, the technique he first demonstrated has appeared in every series and most films.

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Simply put, the nerve pinch is a technique by which Vulcans and some non-Vulcans can induce unconsciousness by pinching a pressure point at the base of the neck. It’s a highly effective stealth technique — while not guaranteed, a nerve pinch will often render a victim unconscious before they can cry out, without causing them any serious harm.

Spock first demonstrated the nerve pinch in the first season of the Original Series . “The Enemy Within” saw a transporter accident create an evil ‘negative’ Kirk, who at one point is subdued with a nerve pinch by the Enterprise’s first officer. It quickly became a staple and has subsequently appeared in the franchise over 60 times.

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The technique is not exclusive to Vulcans. Characters like Borg Seven of Nine and Changeling Odo have successfully used the nerve pinch. However, it's notoriously difficult to teach. Spock couldn’t pass the skill on to James T. Kirk, and Dr McCoy was terrible at it when possessed by Spock’s katra In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock . Captain Jonathan Archer proved to be inexplicably proficient at it in the Enterprise episode “Kir'Shara,” while Jean-Luc Picard seemed to learn it following his intense mind meld with Spock’s father Sarek.

In Star Trek lore the technique is regarded as a quintessential part of being a Vulcan. Outside the franchise, it’s quickly spread into pop culture, earning references in Spaceballs , The O.C. , and a playful Audi advert called ' Leonard Nimoy vs. Zachary Quinto .’

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While mostly reserved for humanoids, the nerve pinch was effective on non-humanoids. In The Animated Series episode “Yesteryear,” Spock successfully nerve-pinched a horse. In Star Trek: Voyager , Tuvok could also use the technique on a member of Species 8472, albeit in the guise of a human.

Spock is clearly a master of the technique, even employing a two-handed version to knock out an Andorian and a Tellarite in “Whom Gods Destroy.” Probably the most famous use of the nerve pinch came in 1986’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home when Spock used it to knock out a punk playing loud music on a San Francisco bus, earning a round of applause from his fellow passengers.

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The Vulcan nerve pinch has proved widely effective against humanoid life forms across the galaxy, although there were exceptions. The Vians of Minara were notably immune, as evidenced during the Original Series . While Cardassians and Ferengi have shown resistance to Vulcan mind melds, both species were susceptible to the nerve pinch.

Humans were highly susceptible, although highly-tuned individuals have proved immune. During “Assignment: Earth” the flawlessly conditioned human Gary Seven resisted the Vulcan nerve pinch. Similarly, Khan Noonien Singh felt severe pain but could withstand the technique when subjected to Spock’s attempt in Star Trek Into Darkness .

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The nerve pinch is entirely fictional. Behind the scenes, it was Nimoy who invented the move. While the script suggested that Spock knock out the Kirk duplicate in “The Enemy Within” the actor, with his quick and brilliant grasp of the character, sought a more dignified maneuver that befitted the Vulcan. In the 1992 VHS documentary 25 Year Mission Tour , Nimoy credited William Shatner with finally persuading the episode’s director, Leo Penn, that the nerve pinch was the right move.

Despite inventing it, Nimoy’s preferred explanation for the technique hasn’t held up in Star Trek Lore. Despite the creator suggesting it connects to Vulcan telepathy, it has been successfully deployed by artificial lifeforms like The Next Generation ’s Data and Voyager ’s holographic Doctor.

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Another authoritative source offered a simple solution in The Making of Star Trek . Published in 1968, when the Original Series was still on air, Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry’s book suggested that the ‘Spock pinch’ temporarily blocked blood and nerve responses heading to the brain. For a more scientific explanation, the EMH is on hand — the holographic Doctor described the pinch as rupturing nerve fibers in the trapezius neck bundle during the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Cathexis."

Part of the nerve pinch’s appeal lies in the lack of a full in-universe explanation. But despite being as impossible to learn in reality as it is challenging to master in-universe, it remains a perfect gift for young Star Trek fans nearly six decades after it first appeared. It’s a distinctive character trait, non-fatal, and ideal for roleplaying without any props. It’s no wonder the timeless technique has remained such a recognizable part of Star Trek .

Star Trek: The Original Series