Talking About Star Trek: What was the worst Star Trek movie, and how would you have made it better?

What was the worst Star Trek movie, and how would you have made it better?

As a Star Trek fan who has every Star Trek film (six with The Original Series cast, four with The Next Generation cast, and the three Kelvin Timeline movies), I’d have to say it’s a three-way tie between:

1. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
2. Star Trek: Nemesis
3. Star Trek Into Darkness

How would I have made them better?

With Star Trek V, the fault is not in who directed the film - William Shatner - but rather the story that Harve Bennett, David Loughery, and Shatner chose to tell. Clearly, pitting the Enterprise-A against a heretical Vulcan who is on a quest to literally meet God was a horrible idea; maybe having Kirk and his crew go off on a deep-space mission of exploration and discovering that the Organians have mysteriously vanished and a Klingon warlord is preparing the Empire for a second war against the Federation would have been better.

Another thing I would have done to make Star Trek V better would have been to get Paramount to spend more on special effects. Bran Ferren & Associates did Shatner no favors by providing the worst effects for a Star Trek feature film in the history of the franchise.

Star Trek: Nemesis is a horrible mess. Describing its flaws would take me all afternoon and possibly eat up some of my early evening hours. In short, I’d scrap the entire script, especially the Shinzon-is-a-Picard-clone and the overt homages to Star Trek II. Also, I’d hire Jonathan Frakes as the film’s director instead of Stuart Baird.

Star Trek Into Darkness…I used to like the film, but each time I watch it now I like it less and less. The only element that I still like is the notion that Kirk and his crew still have not started their five-year mission, plus I love the off-ship Starfleet uniforms with the military-looking caps. There were so many story possibilities in this Kelvin timeline, so even though I think Benedict Cumberbatch is a terrific “guest villain” casting choice, it was a bad idea to basically retell Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan but with the destinies of Kirk and Spock reversed.

How would I fix it? By telling Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman to not try to mirror-image the Original Series films and boldly go where no Star Trek film had gone before.