About the Star Trek Movie Franchise

I use Roku and a streaming television service for my TV viewing.  One of the free channels offered is Pluto, which offers a variety of programming, including old series and lots of movies.  As a movie viewer, I tend to re-watch old flicks that I enjoyed from the past.  One such series is the Star Trek movie franchise, which to date has thirteen movies. I ranked each one according to my liking...the ranking follows the movie's title below. Here's a list of them with their release years:

THE ORIGINAL SERIES CAST

1979 Star Trek: the Motion Picture...11 

1982 The Wrath of Khan...4

1984 The Search for Spock...3

1986 The Voyage Home...1

1989 The Final Frontier...10

1991 The Undiscovered Country...6

THE NEXT GENERATION CAST

1994 Generations...7

1996 First Contact...8

1998 Insurrection...9

2002 Nemesis (not yet seen)

"REBOOT" SERIES

2009 Star Trek...2

2013 Into Darkness...5

2016 Beyond (not yet seen)

So it's been nine years since a Star Trek movie has hit the Silver Screen, although it seems that made-for-television movies are now being made and shown.  The acting and character interaction in the first movie were very stiff and awkward, but I enjoyed the characters for the rest of that first film series as well as for the most recent.  It was the Next Generation movies that kind of alienated me, as I simply could not relate to the different characters and their personalities and attitudes.  It all seemed so heavily soaked in pretentious Woke culture that the actual science fiction adventure aspect often gave way to the back stories of relationships and dialogue...like in the often frustrating TV series.  The first movie "The Motion Picture" was awful, with extra-long stretches in it composed of extended, expensive special effects passing in front of the Enterprise with the crew shown gaping and staring in open-mouthed amazement...yawn, how boring.   My favorite Star Trek character, both original and "reboot", has to be Doctor Leonard McCoy...chief engineer Scotty is a clear second.  And then it goes on to Spock and Kirk, and so on.  With the Next Generation lineup, I genuinely like the Captain Jean-Luc Picard character...and then it all drops precipitously, with the android Data representing perhaps the most annoying character in the series with engineer Geordi La Forge being nearly as irritating.  As for villains, whenever a movie had one (The Motion Picture and The Voyage Home each had incorporeal adversaries), I had my favorite bad guys as well: #1 Khan (Into Darkness), #2 Admiral Marcus (Into Darkness), #3 Dr. Soran (Generations), #4 Commander Kruge (The Search for Spock), #5 Khan (The Wrath of Khan).  Well, I don't know whether the filmmakers will come up with a new Star Trek series of movies, but there are always the old ones to watch...and again and again...

Quote of the Week...from Captain Walker Keel

Damn it, Jean-Luc, I tell you that Star Fleet's top command people are changing! This could affect the very core of our organization.  Officers I've known for years are bluffing their way through talk of old times. 

   ---Captain Walker Keel from Star Trek: The Next Generation

Walker Keel is a guest character appearing in the first season episode Conspiracy in the science fiction television series Star Trek: The Next Generation.  He is the captain of the starship USS Horatio and has called Captain Picard of the Enterprise, along with two other starship captains, to an isolated abandoned planet to discuss what he sees as an insidious conspiracy overtaking the United Federation of Planets leadership.  It's a great episode, my favorite in the series...I highly recommend it!  Yet conspiracy isn't why I quoted this fictional character.  Rather it's what Keel says about "bluffing their way through talk of old times" that reminded me of some strange experiences I've had with people...some of them close to me...over the years and recently as well.  In each case I'll bring up some anecdote they were involved with, to which they deny everything and sometimes even come up with an alternate reality version of events.  And there's no compelling reason for them to lie or conceal anything...these are all harmless memories.  With one person I might say they are deluded with the memory in question, but when I see it with others then I wonder whether their memories are truly intact and that, over the years, they might have rolled over with their identities and conscious memories into another reality.  It reminds me of another sci-fi experience, the end of the Matrix Reloaded movie when Neo meets the Architect and sees all these different versions of himself on the above screens.  Are people just naturally slipping over time from one state into another?  Or perhaps maybe I myself am deluded.  Anyway, it's fun to speculate while going on with life as it is (or seems)...