The Motion Picture is this strange road not taken due to its general stately tone, Phase II and all that which influenced a lot of The Next Generation but at least not in the colour scheme. (Side note: as an example of not a lot of people knowing how to do Star Trek this seriously, Marvel got the comics rights and the first issue after the adaptation has the Enterprise finding a haunted house in space and the two-parter runs like a remake of Catspaw with a guest appearance by writer Marv Wolfman’s version of Dracula.) At least the theme tune got a good run.
The Wrath Of Khan is great and so set the template for almost everything else, and watching them all in a couple weeks show that this went too far with a lot of Khan wannabes to follow. And I haven’t rewatched the ultimate example yet. Composer Jerry Goldsmith went on to recycle a fair bit for Aliens. Though not as much as he recycled Aram Khachaturian’s Gayane for the theme.
The Search For Spock is fine. Killing David is harsh but that’s Klingons for you. I do love the unfortunate nervy science ship captain.
The Voyage Home is a lot of fun. The present setting is the kind of gimmick you can’t do often, but it’s particularly nice having a problem rather than a villain, and it’s a shame we never got such an outlier again.
Sybok works in The Final Frontier even if not much else (including the vagueness of his emotional mind meld) does.
I feel like Chang in The Undiscovered Country would have been more interesting as a sincere antagonist. Obviously then you would have needed someone else to be the Klingon representative of the ironic conspiracy, but having him hunting Kirk down for entirely legitimate reasons and ending with an uneasy détente and taking a reluctantly offered open hand would have been a good end for a film about Kirk hating Klingons.
The biggest problem I have with Generations is that (and this is after seeing the deleted original) we give Kirk a great heroic death at the start and a meh one at the end. It also hugely overeggs Picard’s grief and Data’s messy emotions. (Their best scene is in the lovely Stellar Cartography set, which I’m sure gave Sir Patrick Stewart some déjà vu when he saw Cerebro in X-Men.) And pick a uniform!
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