star trek movies and shows ranked

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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All 24 Star Trek Series & Movies, Ranked by Trekkies

Between TV shows and films, it’s safe to say Star Trek has become a fundamental pillar of our culture. The best Star Trek series make us reexamine ourselves and our society, which has been key to the franchise’s ability to stay in our hearts and minds after so many years. Really, Star Trek  has the capacity to be just about any genre it wants: an exploration show, an action thriller, or a character piece. Anything works, as long as the writing and acting are good enough.

But sometimes, the quality of Star Trek varies. After all, with hundreds of episodes produced, they can’t all be “City on the Edge of Forever.” Sometimes you get a “Threshold” or a “Spock’s Brain.” But which series are the best? And for that matter, how do they rank against the films? Well, now’s your chance to help us figure it out. Below, Trekkies ranked have every Star Trek  series and movie ever released. Where do your favorites place? Check the list and vote for what you think are the best Star Trek series and movies!

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

In many ways, this movie was the best and worst thing to ever happen to Star Trek . Yes, its story about Khan seeking revenge and Kirk suffering from a mid-life crisis allowed for some of the most human and emotional moments of the franchise, but it dared every film after to live up to its perfect mix of character drama and smart action. It revitalized the franchised even if it had to kill its most beloved character to accomplish the goal. 

Star Trek: The Next Generation

The first two seasons may be rocky, but seasons 3-6 (AKA the Riker's Beard seasons) are some of the best science fiction TV ever made. There are too many standout and classic episodes to count, and it launched the careers of many notable TV writers including Ron Moore and Naren Shankar. The crew of the Enterprise-D has become just as iconic as their original counterparts, and in many ways made a bigger impact on the franchise as a whole. 

Star Trek: The Original Series

The first two seasons are just spectacular television, full of subversive (for the time) storytelling and imaginative world building. The crew of the original Enterprise was so idealistic and charming it was hard not to think of them as family. The stories themselves, including "Balance of Terror," "Journey to Babel," and the "Devil in the Dark" have become true television classics. The third season doesn't quite reach the pinnacle set by the two preceding seasons, but it still isn't too bad.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

One of the few attempts Star Trek ever made at comedy that actually intentionally worked. The idea of a probe looking for humpback whales is a little weird, but it’s played with just the right amount of creepiness and mystery that you don’t question the premise. The fish out of water moments in the second act have become comedy classics in their own right, from Kirk screaming “Double dumbass on you!” to the hysterical chase sequence in a hospital, to Scotty desperately trying to use a Mac. It’s such an earnest movie with a good message and a pure heart, you can’t help but love it…

Star Trek: First Contact

An action movie so well paced it’s hard not to be impressed. Picard’s quest for revenge as he's in danger of losing his future and his ship to the Borg is full of passionate moments, while the humor on the planet actually plays pretty well. Even Data’s new emotion trip is used to enrich his character and the story being told. But as well as the Borg Queen worked, her existence did take away from some of the menace of the collective. 

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

A Cold War thriller that perfectly plays on the hopes and fears that came with the fall of the Iron Curtain. The film smartly doesn’t try to be Wrath of Khan , but instead plays with a murder mystery in space that ties into the very heart of its characters. It not only works as an engaging movie, but as a wonderful send-off for the original crew. Oh, and Captain Sulu rocked our world. 

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Because the show wasn’t in the spotlight of the public zeitgeist the same way The Next Generation was, the writers of DS9 were free to do just about anything they wanted. What we got was a show that not only examined the dark underbelly of Gene Roddenberry’s utopian future, but gave us fantastic characters that grew tremendously over the course of seven years. Oh, and the Dominion War. The Dominion War was just amazing. 

Star Trek: Voyager

Voyager throws Star Trek into the deep end of the Delta Quadrant, with the crew struggling to return home for seven seasons. However, it almost never showed them in deteriorating conditions or questioning their ethics. Many of the characters also don’t get the growth or attention they deserved. But seasons 3, 4, and 5 were very solid TV, the Doctor and Seven of Nine really shined with some wonderful characterization, and it did succeed in giving us strange new worlds and civilizations. 

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Simultaneously a spin-off and a prequel, Strange New Worlds tells the story of Captain Christopher Pike - Kirk's predecessor on the USS Enterprise. Pike and others on his crew had been introduced in previous episodes of Star Trek: Discovery, including a young science officer named Spock. Set in the decade before Star Trek: The Original Series , there's a charming wide-eyed, and optimistic energy that accompanies the retro vibes of the show's design.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

The Search for Spock movie has so much raw emotion that it’s hard not to be swept up in the story. Sure, the idea that they have to put Spock’s soul back in his body is a little silly, but this is character resurrection done correctly: it costs our heroes their career, their ship, and Kirk loses his son. It also gave us the Excelsior and the Bird of Prey… so it made a pretty big mark on the franchise all things considered. We also dare you not to tear up when Spock recognizes Kirk at the end. 

The movie is so well acted, directed, and paced that it completely fools you into thinking it makes sense. While there are plot holes big enough to tear Vulcan apart, it’s also hard to care when the movie is just so much fun. The new cast sizzles, the new aesthetic (one too many lens flares aside) is awe-inspiring, and Leonard Nimoy’s return as Spock is bound to induce more than a few tears.

Star Trek Generations

Writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga crafted a script that’s equal parts an exploration of mortality and a mind bending sci-fi mystery. Also, it's pretty great to see Kirk and Picard together and both get some good lines to play off each other with. The film is brimming with emotion and nostalgia for fans of The Original Series and The Next Generation alike.

Star Trek: Enterprise

This series gets a bit of hate, but it’s aged much better than people give it credit for. Sure, it had a ton of growing pains and missteps, but the plot lines that mattered (minus the Temporal Cold War) built on themselves until Enterprise  became the show we always wanted it to be in the fourth season. We got a really fun Wrath of Khan prequel, a mirror universe two-parter, and even an explanation for why Klingons didn’t have ridges in The Original Series . At the center of it was Trip and T’Pol, who by the end actually made quite a wonderful romantic pairing. 

If you're a fan of this one, be sure to vote for the best Star Trek: Enterprise episodes .

Star Trek: Picard

Set 18 years after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis , Picard is a major departure from the tone and style of the upbeat, optimistic  Next Generation TV series. It's a dark, introspective, and deliberately paced series that aims for real-world relevance. The series introduces a Federation that has turned isolationist after a series of galactic calamities, and a Jean-Luc Picard who has retired to his family vineyard in France. When a mysterious young woman comes to him for help, Picard is forced to not only return to space, but also to confront his own mortality. This might be the most grown-up Star Trek series ever.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Star Trek: The Motion Picture  is a film that had a lot to say and in many ways it’s the only one of the movies that has the same spirit of exploration and introspection found at the heart of Gene Roddenberry’s vision. Pacing issues aside, it featured amazing special effects for the era. Fun fact: Originally, Paramount wanted to create a new Star Trek show tentatively titled Star Trek: Phase II , but the success of Star Wars made them reconsider that plan.

Star Trek: Insurrection

This movie went through so many rewrites it’s hard to tell what it was originally supposed to be about. What we end up getting is a story about two not-too-dissimilar groups of aliens battling it out, with the crew of the Enterprise stuck in the middle and having to choose a side. In a plot twist out of left field however, it turns out that both groups of aliens are one and the same. Ultimately, Insurrection feels more like an episode of The Next Generation than either of the two films preceding it.

Star Trek: The Animated Series

While Star Trek fans had plenty to be sad about after the cancelation of TOS, Paramount did at least green light the production of an animated series with all of the major cast returning to reprise their roles. Though it had a short two season run, there were some fairly strong episodes. After the Animated Series was canceled, it would be five more years until any new Trek came out.

Star Trek Nemesis

Few stories in Star Trek , save for some choice episodes, are as action-oriented as Nemesis . Much of the character development from the series is put on the backburner as adrenalin and special effects take main stage in this Trek movie. Tom Hardy plays the villian Shinzon, who is a clone of Picard created by the Romulans but then discarded as a failure. Nemesis is the first and so far only Trek movie to feature the Remans, a offshoot race of the Romulans and by extension, Vulcans.

Star Trek Beyond

A movie that acts as a celebration of everything that came before while still daring to tell a fresh and original story. Beyond managed to feel like an episode of the original series, but still didn’t shy away from the modern attitude that made Star Trek ( 2009) such a success. The call backs were tasteful, the action was inventive, and the characters were as charming as they needed to be. While the villain and his plan were pretty standard stuff, Idris Elba did a fantastic job bringing him to life. 

Star Trek Into Darkness

Star Trek Into Darkness is a well acted, well directed, and well shot re-imagining of Wrath of Khan , with the titular villain played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Trying to one up the original however, the creators thought to put a side-story villain played by Peter Weller. While the film is far from perfect story-wise, it is one of the most beautiful Trek films ever.

Star Trek: Lower Decks

This animated entry into the Star Trek franchise is boldy going where no previous Trek series has gone before - workplace comedy. The second animated Star Trek series since the 1973-1974 series, Star Trek: Lower Decks follows the less prestigious crew members of the Cerritos. Focusing on the ensigns of a not very important ship, the series is primed to play with the tropes and themes deeply familiar and beloved by fans, it's yet unknown if Lower Deck 's embracing  the weird and goofy aspects of the franchise, rather than the somber space show parts, will make for a sucessful mission.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

If Leonard Nimoy could direct two Star Trek movies, why couldn't William Shatner? So direct he did. The Final Frontier's plot is about the Enterprise being hijacked by Spock’s half-brother who is looking for God. Ultimately, the god they find turns out to be nothing but an imprisoned being. Odd plot aside, we have to give writer/director William Shatner credit for trying to say something with this movie. Also, the camp scenes are pretty fun and the sequence where Spock and McCoy face their personal demons is pretty good. 

Star Trek: Prodigy

The third animated series in the Star Trek franchise, this series designed for the younger set is exploring new worlds in Trek audiences. Originally set to air on Nickelodeon, but premiering first on Paramount+, the series also has no human main characters - which makes sense as it begins well outside Federation Space. Rebellious teens commandeer an abandoned Star Fleet ship to escape their mining colony, but luckily a holograph of Janeway is there to assist as they all learn to work together.

Star Trek: Discovery

Launched to anchor the new CBS All Access service, Star Trek: Discovery rockets the Trek TV franchise into the streaming era by going back in time to an era before Captain Kirk took command of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Created by Bryan Fuller (who left the show during production of season one) and Alex Kurtzman, Discovery follows the adventures of the experimental U.S.S. Discovery during a turbulent time in the history of the Federation. Some fans find the more emotional, action-packed Discovery (which leans heavily on the style of the JJ Abrams feature film trilogy) to be a welcome change from the more staid Treks of the past. Others see the show as too self-referential and too much of a soap opera. Whatever you might think, Star Trek has once again been successfully reinvented for a whole new generation of viewers.

• Star Trek Franchise
• Star Trek Universe
• Entertainment Franchises
• Adventure Entertainment

Live long, and prosper.

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.

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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.

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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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Den of Geek

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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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 .

Related Articles

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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Screen Rant

Star trek: every movie and tv show, ranked worst to best.

Star Trek is one of the greatest franchises in any medium, ever. But not every Star Trek release is something to be proud of.

Star Trek has been around for many decades. To date, it spans even series and thirteen movies, including three that follow the rebooted adventures of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. The bottom line is: there’s a whole lot of Star Trek out there. Counting every episode and film, there are over seven hundred adventures of our characters exploring strange new worlds and boldly going where no one has gone before.

Because of the sheer amount of Star Trek , it’s often difficult to keep track of everything. Even for long-term fans, it’s difficult to determine which series and films are worth skipping and which are absolutely must-see stories for those who love Star Trek .

However, much like Captain Kirk himself, we don’t believe in the no-win scenario. Presented here is a ranked list of every Star Trek series and movie, including all casts and the rebooted films. We have gone through the entire Star Trek canon and found some hidden bars of latinum as well as some truly rough patches for the franchises.

If you want to check it out, you don’t need to hop through the Guardian of Forever or a lost Iconian Gateway. Just keep scrolling to check out  Star Trek: Every Movie And TV Show, Ranked Worst To Best !

20. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

For a while there, the Star Trek movies were really on a roll. Many of the earlier films with the original cast were critical and commercial hits, beloved by fans to this very day.

And then came The Final Frontier . This movie is a hot mess, from its misplaced humor to the bizarre plot about Spock’s brother finding God (a god that needs a starship, no less). How bad was this movie? Later Trek basically ignores it, like when Captain Picard casually mentions attending Spock’s brother’s wedding - even though he dies in this movie - or when Kirk dies by Picard’s side, even though in  Final Frontier Kirk insists that he’s always known he’ll die alone.

If the franchise doesn't want to remember The Final Frontier , why should we?

19. Star Trek: Enterprise

Arguably, the main crime of Star Trek: Enterprise was bad timing. Years later, both the rebooted Star Trek films and Star Trek: Discovery would show us just how fun “prequel Trek” could really be. However, Enterprise often came across as a show that didn’t know what it wanted to be.

It was basically a diet soda version of The Original Series.

The true tragedy of it all  is that Enterprise got really great in its final season. There were multi-episode arcs that built up Trek mythology, and we even got a fun two-episode romp set in the Mirror Universe.

If Enterprise was this good for all four seasons, it likely would have been on the air far longer and appear much higher on this list. Ultimately, this show ended up hurting the Trek franchise, and it took many years to fully recover.

18. Star Trek: Nemesis

If you don’t already know, Star Trek movies used to have a rule of thumb: the odd-numbered movies ranged from bad ( Final Frontier ) to okay ( Search for Spock , Generations , etc.) while the odd-numbered ones were great: Wrath of Khan , Undiscovered Country , and so on. Unfortunately, the Next Generation crew blew this tradition straight to hell with Star Trek: Nemesis .

This was a movie that wanted to be Wrath of Khan so bad it could taste it. We have Picard squaring off with a clone of himself, leading to several tense action scenes. However, those action scenes all feel hollow, making us endure dreck like Captain Picard pretending to be Mad Max in a dune buggy while completely wrecking the Prime Directive. The only memorable thing about the film ended up being an impossibly young and impossibly thin Tom Hardy as our “nemesis.”

17. Star Trek Into Darkness

If we only had two words to describe Star Trek Into Darkness , “wasted potential” would probably be the ones. After the highly successful 2009 Star Trek reboot, there was an entire universe of new allies, enemies, and adventures awaiting our crew. Instead, director J.J. Abrams chose to do a half-baked Wrath of Khan reboot, complete with Khan as our main villain.

Where did this movie go wrong? Take your pick.

The plot is a repetitive rehash, while Kirk and the white-washed Khan have no chemistry or no history (at this point, the characters have not even met before). There are some highlights, including Peter Weller playing an evil admiral tied to Section 31 - which was introduced in Deep Space Nine -  but it’s not enough.

In a series known for time travel, we really wish they could have gone back and done something (anything) different with this movie!

16. Star Trek: The Animated Series

Ah, Star Trek: The Animated Series . For a long-time, this was the redheaded step-child of the Star Trek family, with only a few fans knowing about or remembering it. Now, the series is available for streaming, and it’s picking up the next generation o f fans.

Ultimately, the series ends up being a mixed bag.

On one hand, it’s fun getting additional Original Series adventures, complete with new characters and the occasional old foe. It’s a real treat hearing the original cast reprise their characters. However, it’s relatively short - only twenty-one episodes across two seasons.

Gene Roddenberry himself declared the show didn’t count as canon. This hasn’t stopped decades of writers from making references to the show, though, including Star Trek: Discovery  referencing Spock’s mother's love of Lewis Carroll!

15. Star Trek: Insurrection

Star Trek: Insurrection was a movie that, at the very least, had its heart in the right place. Despite being a Next Generation movie, it was a throwback to many concepts from The Original Series , from aliens being reminiscent of Native Americans to a Starfleet officer violating the Prime Directive in search of a fountain of youth (like The Original Series episode “The Omega Glory”).

However, the movie ends up being decidedly mediocre. It’s cool to see Picard and crew go rogue in the name of Starfleet ideals, and it’s charming to see Picard get a proper romance plot. But much of the action feels dry and joyless, and the humor we do get is weird and out of place.

Let’s put it this way: this movie ends up joking about Worf’s zits and Dr. Crusher’s chest, and those terrible jokes are more memorable than most of the film.

14. Star Trek: Voyager

Voyager  started as mostly forgettable, ended up getting pretty good, and then overstayed its welcome and limped through a Borg-infested finale. It definitely gets points for having the most “Trekky” of Trek plots, with a crew stranded in the ultimate frontier: the Delta Quadrant.

The potential of that plot is never fully realized, though. There are some standout performances like Kate Mulgrew’s Captain Janeway - the first female lead in Star Trek canon - and Robert Picardo’s Emergency Medical Hologram. However, many characters seem wasted: Kes is forgettable, Neelix is a punchline, and Chakotay’s plots were overseen by a fraudulent Native American advisor.

Despite seeming like a ratings grab, the addition of Seven of Nine helped invigorate the show and led to some great stories, but the show’s over reliance on Borg plots and cameos ended up being quite a drag.

13. Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Star Trek: The Motion Picture evokes many mixed feelings among the Trek fandom. On one hand, this movie has breathtaking cinematography and helped to usher in the era of big screen Star Trek . On the other hand, it’s tough to look someone in the eyes and tell them this isn’t one of the most boring Trek films ever made.

For better or for worse, it plays out like a really long episode that is heavy on the philosophy and light on the action. We end up getting great performances from both our returning characters and some new faces such as Captain Decker and Ilia.

The whole concept of “V’ger” as mysterious villain is brilliant.

But the movie is slow and plodding, and it often seems more interested in cool special effects than having a captivating plot.

12. Star Trek Generations

While Star Trek: The Motion Picture had the pressure of making the public care about Trek again, Generations carried an entirely different pressure. This movie came out very soon after the spectacular finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation . Fan expectations were at an all-time high, especially when fans learned that Captain Kirk would play a role in the movie.

Did the film deliver? Well, that depends on what you wanted from it.

It gave us a beautiful and big-budget portrayal of the Next Generation characters and sets, and the entire film looks really stunning. There was cool action, a neat plot, and even a compelling bad guy in the form of Malcolm McDowell’s Dr. Soran. However, the movie was nowhere near as entertaining as the Next Generation finale “All Good Things”, and the Kirk cameo (including his death) seemed like a waste on every level.

11. Star Trek Beyond

Next on the list is the latest movie in the rebooted Trek universe. Out of the three rebooted movies, this one stands pretty firmly in the middle: it actually gives us an original story and villain (unlike the terrible Into Darkness ), but it fails to be as energetic and captivating as the 2009 reboot was.

We’re left with a movie that is basically “middle of the road” in every way.

On one hand, we have actual, emotional arcs for both Kirk and Spock, reinvigorating these characters with meaning and purpose. We get a neat new ally in the form of Jaylah and a cool villain in the form of Krall. However, characters like Sulu and Uhura feel really wasted, and some of the subplots (like Dr. McCoy as fighter pilot jockey) are fairly insane. But hey— at least we got more Beastie Boys music!

10. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

The Search for Spock is actually a relatively good Star Trek movie. It’s a fun sequel to Wrath of Khan that helps continue the story of Spock, who gave his life in the previous movie to save the Enterprise . We get to see Kirk and company play the bad guy and steal their own ship and even see Kirk take on a Klingon villain for the first in in forever.

Ultimately, Search for Spock is a good movie that is held back by a few things.

First, it’s in the shadow of Wrath of Khan — next to that movie, pretty much every Trek film pales in comparison. It’s also annoying to see that fan-favorite character Saavik is played by a new actor. Finally, if we’re being honest, it’s a little disappointing to see Spock come back so soon after making the ultimate sacrifice.

9. Star Trek (2009)

There was every reason for the first Star Trek reboot film to fail. The movie was recasting some of the most iconic characters ever made, and it was being directed by J.J. Abrams, who seemed like much less of a slam dunk choice way back in 2009. Finally, it seemed like we were going in the wrong direction as Trek went back to its past - something that didn’t work out so well for the Enterprise show.

Then the movie ended up being an absolute blast!

Chris Pine perfectly captured the swagger of Captain Kirk while Zachary Quinto showed us how moody and broody Spock could be when he was pushed far enough. The movie was emotional, action-packed, and led by a really cool cameo by the late, great Leonard Nimoy.

8. Star Trek: Discovery

Star Trek: Discovery is another Trek endeavor that shouldn’t have ended up as good as it was. There was creative turmoil behind the scenes, as Bryan Fuller was running the show right up until he wasn’t, forcing the new showrunners to go in some new directions of their own. People weren’t even sure what kind of show this was: it was originally envisioned as an ever-changing anthology show with a new cast each year, though that idea got scrapped.

Amazingly, though, the show ended up being really great.

Set about ten years before The Original Series , Discovery gets to flesh out some existing Trek mythology while making fun connections and cameos (like multiple appearances by Harry Mudd). We get the benefits of serial storytelling for the entire show and also experience the first Trek that focuses more on a single individual (Michael Burnham) than it does an ensemble.

7. Star Trek: First Contact

If Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is known as “the one with the whales,” First Contact is “the one with the Borg.” This was directed by Riker actor Jonathan Frakes and it delivers on pretty much every level: it’s a cool period peace, a sweet action movie, and centers around Zefram Cochrane, one of the most central figures of Trek mythology.

There are really only a few things holding this movie back from being even higher on the list.

First of all, there is the controversial addition of a Borg Queen, which some fans think ruins the entire concept of the Borg as a race. There’s also the portrayal of Captain Picard as a vengeance-obsessed Borg hater. That doesn’t really jibe with the captain who chose not to murder the whole race back in Next Generation because it was cruel and inhumane.

6. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

There is a lot to love about Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home . For Trek fans, it’s rewarding to see the series trying something bold and new: for the most part, this movie ditches starships and alien locations and focuses on our crew as fish out of water in 1980s Earth. Second, it’s great to see Trek be funny, like when Spock tries cursing. Finally, there is a core message about preserving life and saving the future that feels quintessentially Trek .

As mentioned earlier, this movie also gets full points for being the most casual-friendly Trek movie ever made. Relative to its budget, it was the most profitable Trek ever made, and it sold more tickets than the relatively more ambitious Wrath of Khan and Search for Spock had. After he directed Search for Spock , this movie cemented Nimoy as one of Trek ’s greatest directors.

5. Star Trek: The Next Generation

Star Trek: The Next Generation took a year or two to really find its groove. At first, the show felt a little too much like The Original Series (and not in a good way), and there were things that ranged from cringeworthy (the first Ferengi episode) to outright offensive (“Code of Honor”).

Next Generation eventually came into its own and gave us some unforgettable episodes and characters.

Actors like Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner really brought their A-game as the show explored what humanity was really about. We got awesome new villains like The Borg while also exploring the culture of classic alien races like the Klingons. To top it off, the show had an absolutely crowd-pleasing two-part series finale that’s as good as (or better than) any Trek movie!

4. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is relatively unique in Trek canon. It’s the only Original Series film that was made while Next Generation was being made. Look closely and you can even see some Next Gen sets being used. That meant that it had to find a way to bridge Kirk’s time and Picard’s time, so the movie focused on how peace between Starfleet and the Klingons was finally achieved.

The result: a movie as entertaining as it is bold.

It isn’t afraid to show us how flawed our characters are, with Kirk spitting out “ let them die ” when he hears the Klingon race may come to an end. Thus, Kirk must face his own racism and ugly history with the Klingons as he deals with being framed for the murder of the Klingon Chancellor. It’s a racial metaphor, Cold War metaphor, and great Trek movie all rolled into one!

3. Star Trek: The Original Series

The one that started it all! Without The Original Series , we would not have the entire sprawling Star Trek franchise. This will forever be a show that transcended itself: it was originally pitched as a space western (Roddenberry famously called it “A Wagon Train to the Stars”), but it ended up offering meditations on the human condition, universal exploration, and everything in-between.

The series really holds up, even today.

It got a facelift in the form of CGI ship effects and other enhancements, as you'll see if you stream episodes, and while it wasn’t to every fan’s taste, it made the show look better than ever. It’s fun to go back and see the modern technology Trek predicted (such as cell phones) while also marveling at how directly the show called out the bigotry and nationalism of the time period with thinly-veiled allegories about aliens!

2. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

This may be a controversial pick, but Deep Space Nine made it this far to become our favorite of the Star Trek series. At first, the show looked like it might be a snooze: why do we want to watch people hang around a space station instead of boldly exploring? However, Deep Space Nine wound up giving us so many great things.

Sisko, for instance, becomes an unwilling space Jesus for the Bajoran people, constantly balancing his duties to Starfleet and his duties as “the Emissary.” Characters like Odo and Quark help us explore humanity through the (often hilarious) lens of an outsider. We also get some morally gray characters in the form of former spy Garak and former terrorist Kira.

This show ended by giving us an incredible war arc that remains some of the finest Trek storytelling ever told, ending with the boldest Trek series finale in history.

1. Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan

Admit it: you knew that Wrath of Khan was at the top of this list when you clicked on it! Even after all these decades, this movie remains the pinnacle of what Star Trek can be. And much of this comes down to the fine balancing act performed throughout the movie.

For instance, Wrath of Khan is often thought of as the first real action-centric Trek movie. But that action has the emotional weight of Kirk’s reunion with his son and his clash with former Original Series villain Khan. It celebrates the further adventures of our favorite crew while still giving us fun new characters like Lieutenant Saavik and Dr. Carol Marcus.

Throw in an ending with Spock that is guaranteed to leave you in tears, and this is a Star Trek movie you can re-watch a hundred times without it getting old.

What's your favorite screen Star Trek story? 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) 21%

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) 78%

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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Star Trek Movies Ranked:How to Watch All the Best Trek Films Online

Ghezal Amiri

Official JustWatch writer

The Star Trek franchise has produced 13 feature films spanning over several decades. The original series, which aired in the 1960s, served as the foundation for the franchise's success. The first six films were released between 1979 and 1991 starring the original cast members. These films explored a range of themes, from political tensions to the struggle for personal identity and maintained the series' reputation for thought-provoking storytelling. In the late 1980s, the franchise saw a resurgence with the release of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The success of the TV series prompted the production of four subsequent films featuring the Next Gen crew. These films continued the franchise's legacy of tackling complex issues including the consequences of technological advancement and the ethics of leadership. However, the series saw a decline in critical reception and box office earnings towards the end of the 1990s.

JJ Abrams’ reboot of the Star Trek universe in 2009 was met with critical and financial success despite its more bombastic atmosphere which was not a common component of previous Star Trek entries. The film introduced a new cast with Chris Pine as Captain Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock and Zoe Saldana as Uhura. It is presented in an alternate timeline which made its way for new interpretations of the franchise’s beloved characters. Two subsequent sequels were released with Into Darkness in 2013 and 2016’s Beyond. Here are the 13 Star Trek movies ranked and where you can find them.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

It is the 23rd century. The Federation Starship U.S.S. Enterprise is on routine training maneuvers and Admiral James T. Kirk seems resigned to the fact that this inspection may well be the last space mission of his career. But Khan is back. Aided by his exiled band of genetic supermen, Khan - brilliant renegade of 20th century Earth - has raided Space Station Regula One, stolen a top secret device called Project Genesis, wrested control of another Federation Starship and sets out in pursuit of the Enterprise, determined to let nothing stand in the way of his mission: kill Admiral Kirk... even if it means universal Armageddon.

Star Trek: First Contact

The Borg, a relentless race of cyborgs, are on a direct course for Earth. Violating orders to stay away from the battle, Captain Picard and the crew of the newly-commissioned USS Enterprise E pursue the Borg back in time to prevent the invaders from changing Federation history and assimilating the galaxy.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

After years of war, the Federation and the Klingon empire find themselves on the brink of a peace summit when a Klingon ship is nearly destroyed by an apparent attack from the Enterprise. Both worlds brace for what may be their deadliest encounter.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

It's the 23rd century, and a mysterious alien power is threatening Earth by evaporating the oceans and destroying the atmosphere. In a frantic attempt to save mankind, Kirk and his crew must time travel back to 1986 San Francisco where they find a world of punk, pizza and exact-change buses that are as alien as anything they've ever encountered in the far reaches of the galaxy. A thrilling, action-packed Star Trek adventure!

Star Trek Beyond

The USS Enterprise crew explores the furthest reaches of uncharted space, where they encounter a mysterious new enemy who puts them and everything the Federation stands for to the test.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

Admiral Kirk and his bridge crew risk their careers stealing the decommissioned Enterprise to return to the restricted Genesis planet to recover Spock's body.

The fate of the galaxy rests in the hands of bitter rivals. One, James Kirk, is a delinquent, thrill-seeking Iowa farm boy. The other, Spock, a Vulcan, was raised in a logic-based society that rejects all emotion. As fiery instinct clashes with calm reason, their unlikely but powerful partnership is the only thing capable of leading their crew through unimaginable danger, boldly going where no one has gone before. The human adventure has begun again.

Star Trek Into Darkness

When the crew of the Enterprise is called back home, they find an unstoppable force of terror from within their own organization has detonated the fleet and everything it stands for, leaving our world in a state of crisis. With a personal score to settle, Captain Kirk leads a manhunt to a war-zone world to capture a one man weapon of mass destruction. As our heroes are propelled into an epic chess game of life and death, love will be challenged, friendships will be torn apart, and sacrifices must be made for the only family Kirk has left: his crew.

Star Trek: Insurrection

When an alien race and factions within Starfleet attempt to take over a planet that has "regenerative" properties, it falls upon Captain Picard and the crew of the Enterprise to defend the planet's people as well as the very ideals upon which the Federation itself was founded.

Star Trek: Generations

Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-D find themselves at odds with the renegade scientist Soran who is destroying entire star systems. Only one man can help Picard stop Soran's scheme...and he's been dead for seventy-eight years.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

When a destructive space entity is spotted approaching Earth, Admiral Kirk resumes command of the Starship Enterprise in order to intercept, examine, and hopefully stop it.

Star Trek: Nemesis

En route to the honeymoon of William Riker to Deanna Troi on her home planet of Betazed, Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise receives word from Starfleet that a coup has resulted in the installation of a new Romulan political leader, Shinzon, who claims to seek peace with the human-backed United Federation of Planets. Once in enemy territory, the captain and his crew make a startling discovery: Shinzon is human, a slave from the Romulan sister planet of Remus, and has a secret, shocking relationship to Picard himself.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

The crew of the Federation starship Enterprise is called to Nimbus III, the Planet of Intergalactic Peace. They are to negotiate in a case of kidnapping only to find out that the kidnapper is a relative of Spock. This man is possessed by his life long search for the planet Sha Ka Ree which is supposed to be the source of all life. Together they begin to search for this mysterious planet.

Every Star Trek Movie, Ranked by Box Office

Live long, and prosper at the box office!

Science fiction has been integral in pushing the boundaries of storytelling forward since the inception of cinema, and the 1950s certainly saw a revival of interest in the genre. However, the debut of Star Trek changed the course of the science fiction genre forever , and continues to influence the way that the genre operates today. Gene Roddenberry ’s classic adventure series included many great episodes centering on the adventures of Captain James T. Kirk ( William Shatner ), Commander Spock ( Leonard Nimoy ), and the rest of the U.S.S. Enterprise crew that would become household names in the subsequent decades.

While the franchise is most often associated with the many television shows in its continuity , the Star Trek film franchise became a blockbuster saga in its own right . With films centered on the original cast, the new characters of Star Trek: The Next Generation , and a rebooted version of the franchise in the “Kelvin Timeline,” the Star Trek film saga is fascinating because of its three unique eras, each of which has both incredible highs and notorious failures. Here is every Star Trek movie, ranked by its global box office gross.

13 ‘Star Trek: Nemesis’ (2002)

Worldwide gross: $67,336,470.

It’s really not all that surprising that Star Trek: Nemesis became the lowest grossing film in the Star Trek series thus far , as enthusiasm for the franchise had dwindled by the time that the fourth film starring the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation hit theaters. Regarded as a resounding creative failure that failed to give the characters a proper sendoff, Star Trek: Nemesis brought in a measly global box office total of less than $68 million when it hit theaters in December 2002.

While the films starring the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation never reached the popularity of their counterparts in the original series, Star Trek: Nemesis wasn’t even successful in satisfying fans of the show . The baffling decision to include Tom Hardy as Shinzon, the villainous clone of Captain Jean-Luc Picard ( Patrick Stewart ), felt like a desperate move by Paramount Pictures to inject some momentum into a franchise that was on its way out.

Star Trek: Nemesis

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12 ‘Star Trek V: The Final Frontier’ (1989)

Worldwide gross: $70,200,000.

While Leonard Nimoy proved himself to be a terrific filmmaker with his contributions to the Star Trek film franchise, the same could not be said of William Shatner. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was Shatner’s directorial debut, and became the lowest grossing film starring the cast of the original series . With a global box office gross of just over $70 million , Star Trek V: The Final Frontier marked a significant downward spiral for the saga based on the rapturous reception that the previous few installments in the series had received.

While the franchise itself was actually on an upward swing, as Star Trek: The Next Generation had premiered to great success two years prior, the poor box office performance of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is representative of its complete creative failures . Regarded as one of the worst in the series, the film failed to get viewers engaged in seeing it multiple times.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

11 ‘star trek iii: the search for spock’ (1984), worldwide gross: $87,000,000.

Although the classic “odd/even” rule among Star Trek fans indicates that the odd-numbered films are the weakest, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock is easily one of the most underrated films in the series . Capitalizing on the success of the previous entry, which had ended on a massive cliffhanger revolving around Spock’s fate, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock reached an impressive worldwide box office gross of $87 million .

While the film gave the series one of its best villains in Christopher Lloyd ’s Klingon warrior Kruge, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock may not have appealed to viewers outside the niche fanbase . The film is largely reliant on references to both the previous films and the original series, and may have struggled connecting with viewers that were stepping into the franchise for the first time.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

Admiral Kirk and his bridge crew risk their careers stealing the decommissioned U.S.S. Enterprise to return to the restricted Genesis Planet to recover Spock's body.

10 ‘Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan’ (1982)

Worldwide gross: $95,800,000.

Often regarded as the best and most emotional installment in the entire saga, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was a box office hit that set the franchise up for future success . While its predecessor had ditched the action-adventure tone of the original series for a more artistic approach, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan felt like a return to form for the franchise. Its gross of over $95 million at the global box office is impressive considering that the original Star Trek show had been off the air for over a decade.

While fans of the franchise appreciated the more mature direction the film took, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan may have struggled to connect with younger viewers due to its dark tone . With significantly more violence and several major character deaths, it’s easily the most intense entry in the entire franchise.

Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan

9 ‘star trek vi: the undiscovered country’ (1991), worldwide gross: $96,888,996.

While it failed to reach the financial highs of some of its predecessors, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country served as a perfect sendoff for the cast of the original series . Ostensibly marketed as the “final adventure” for Kirk, Spock, and the rest of the classic U.S.S. Enterprise crew, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country grossed over $96 million at the global box office .

While it was hardly one of the biggest blockbusters in the saga, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country helped redeem the series after the disastrous performance by Star Trek V: The Final Frontier . By incorporating a memorable new antagonist in Christopher Plummer ’s General Chang and reflecting on the era, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country ushered out the first iteration of the franchise, giving room for the series to evolve in its future installments.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

8 ‘star trek: insurrection’ (1998), worldwide gross: $117,800,000.

While the show itself produced countless great episodes , the films starring the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation never occupied the same place with audiences that the original series cast had. While Star Trek: Insurrection performed surprisingly well at the box office considering the highly negative reviews, the film underperformed in comparison to its two direct predecessors, grossing a little over $117 million at the global box office.

The main issue was that the films starring the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation never felt like “events,” as the series itself had only just wrapped up a few years prior. Considering audiences were used to seeing these characters on television, there was less enthusiasm behind seeing them on the big screen for what ostensibly felt like a two-part episode of the series. A lack of action and odd physical comedy certainly didn’t help Star Trek: Insurrection endear itself to fans of the show.

Star Trek: Insurrection

7 ‘star trek generations’ (1994), worldwide gross: $120,000,000.

As the first of the films starring the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation to hit theaters, Star Trek Generations generated a lot of enthusiasm based on the popularity of the show. While the original Star Trek series was canceled after three seasons, Star Trek: The Next Generation was a major television hit that earned multiple Primetime Emmy Awards and generated enthusiasm for its memorable cast of characters . While Star Trek Generations generally failed to live up to the hype, it nonetheless succeeded in grossing $120 million at the global box office .

In addition to seeing the beloved characters hit the big screen for the first time, Star Trek Generations got a boost in popularity thanks to an appearance by Captain Kirk . Shatner’s appearance in the film was enough to generate interest from audiences who had seen the character in previous films.

Star Trek: Generations

6 ‘star trek iv: the voyage home’ (1986), worldwide gross: $133,000,000.

While many franchises begin to run out of creative juice by the time they reach their fourth installment , Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home outperformed its predecessors by adding more comedy and heart to the series . Although it continued the storyline introduced in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home brought the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise to San Francisco for an adventure that felt like a typical 1980s comedy. With a greater appeal to non- Star Trek fans than previous entries, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home grossed $133 million at the global box office .

While it certainly pleased fans of the franchise with its references to the past, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is best remembered for its important message. The film’s pro-environmentalist themes have given it much more longevity than other entries in the series.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

5 ‘star trek: the motion picture’ (1979), worldwide gross: $139,000,000.

The science fiction genre was completely re-energized by the success of Star Wars in 1977, inspiring other studios to quickly release new films within the genre by the time that the decade concluded. While it had been over a decade since the original series had been canceled, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was a box office smash hit that revitalized interest in the franchise. Earning a global box office total of $139 million , Star Trek: The Motion Picture became one of 1979’s top grossers.

The success of Star Trek: The Motion Picture is somewhat surprising considering how offbeat and cerebral the film was . Opting for a nuanced approach to sci-fi similar to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was certainly an interesting first entry in the series due to its vast tonal and aesthetic differences with its sequels.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

4 ‘star trek: first contact’ (1996), worldwide gross: $150,000,000.

While Star Trek Generations has been a modest financial hit and earned mixed reviews from hardcore fans of the series, Star Trek: First Contact became the most successful film starring the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation . With its global box office total of $150 million , the film clearly managed to satisfy both fans of the series and appeal to broader audiences.

While the storyline involving James Cromwell as the scientist Zefram Cochrane spoke of more optimistic elements of the series, Star Trek: First Contact was an action film first and foremost . By pitting Picard and his crew against the villainous Borg aliens, Star Trek: First Contact was easily the most intense entry in the series since Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan . Considering the boom in popularity of action cinema in the 1990s, it's unsurprising that Star Trek: First Contact ’s action-heavy tone yielded it great success.

Star Trek: First Contact

3 ‘star trek beyond’ (2016), worldwide gross: $335,673,708.

Despite a box office total of over $335 million at the global box office, Star Trek Beyond was a significant financial failure that put the future of the franchise in serious jeopardy. Despite a massive budget of $185 million and a strong marketing campaign, Star Trek Beyond grossed over $100 million less than its predecessor. Star Trek Beyond ’s underperformance is disappointing considering how thoughtful, heartfelt, and entertaining the film is in comparison to more recent iterations of the franchise.

Star Trek Beyond ’s financial underperformance has stalled work on another sequel, as a fourth entry in the “Kelvin timeline” series has been stuck in development hell for nearly a decade. Given how radically the cinematic marketplace has changed in the years since the film’s release, the Star Trek franchise will need a bold reinvention to once again rank among the industry’s most valuable franchises.

Star Trek Beyond

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2 ‘Star Trek’ (2009)

Worldwide gross: $386,839,614.

The Star Trek franchise was considered dead in the early 21st century, as the failure of the film series involving the Star Trek: The Next Generation cast and the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise suggested a grim future for the series. However, Paramount Pictures decided to hire Lost innovator J.J. Abrams to retool the series and effectively reboot it. 2009’s Star Trek managed to introduce the franchise to a new generation , earning an impressive global box office total of over $386 million .

While the insertion of more action certainly didn’t hurt, the Star Trek reboot succeeded because of the appeal of its new cast . Chris Pine ’s brilliant reinvention of Captain Kirk managed to endear itself to a younger generation of viewers in the same way that Shatner’s work had for previous generations. It provided a comeback for the series and was a critical hit, earning the franchise its first Academy Award for Best Makeup.

1 ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ (2013)

Worldwide gross: $467,381,584.

While the way in which it retooled elements of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan remains divisive among fans of the series, Star Trek Into Darkness was an unprecedented box office juggernaut that easily became the biggest film in the entire series. While the franchise has certainly produced some commercial hits, Star Trek Into Darkness ’ amazing global box office gross of over $467 million placed it as one of the highest grossing films of 2013.

It’s difficult to imagine the Star Trek franchise ever reaching the financial heights of Star Trek Into Darkness ever again, as the saga has stuck to its television roots in recent years. While the announcement of the Michelle Yeoh -led film Star Trek: Section 31 certainly has potential, it will take a significant marketing push to earn the same enthusiasm that Star Trek Into Darkness generated over a decade ago.

Star Trek Into Darkness

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Star Trek Movies Ranked Best to Worst

Live long and prosper!

• Movies or TV
• IMDb Rating
• In Theaters
• Release Year

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

PG | 113 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

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.

Director: Nicholas Meyer | Stars: William Shatner , Leonard Nimoy , DeForest Kelley , James Doohan

Votes: 129,243 | Gross: $78.91M

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

PG | 119 min | Action, Adventure, Comedy

To save Earth from an alien probe, Admiral James T. Kirk and his fugitive crew go back in time to San Francisco in 1986 to retrieve the only beings who can communicate with it: humpback whales.

Director: Leonard Nimoy | Stars: William Shatner , Leonard Nimoy , DeForest Kelley , James Doohan

Votes: 91,500 | Gross: $109.71M

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

PG | 110 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

On the eve of retirement, Kirk and McCoy are charged with assassinating the Klingon High Chancellor and imprisoned. The Enterprise crew must help them escape to thwart a conspiracy aimed at sabotaging the last best hope for peace.

Votes: 80,910 | Gross: $74.89M

4. Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

PG-13 | 111 min | Action, Adventure, Drama

The Borg travel back in time intent on preventing Earth's first contact with an alien species. Captain Picard and his crew pursue them to ensure that Zefram Cochrane makes his maiden flight reaching warp speed.

Director: Jonathan Frakes | Stars: Patrick Stewart , Jonathan Frakes , Brent Spiner , LeVar Burton

Votes: 132,086 | Gross: $92.00M

5. Star Trek (2009)

PG-13 | 127 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

The brash James T. Kirk tries to live up to his father's legacy with Mr. Spock keeping him in check as a vengeful Romulan from the future creates black holes to destroy the Federation one planet at a time.

Director: J.J. Abrams | Stars: Chris Pine , Zachary Quinto , Simon Pegg , Leonard Nimoy

Votes: 620,354 | Gross: $257.73M

6. Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

PG-13 | 116 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

The Enterprise is diverted to the Romulan homeworld Romulus, supposedly because they want to negotiate a peace treaty. Captain Picard and his crew discover a serious threat to the Federation once Praetor Shinzon plans to attack Earth.

Director: Stuart Baird | Stars: Patrick Stewart , Jonathan Frakes , Brent Spiner , LeVar Burton

Votes: 83,941 | Gross: $43.25M

7. Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

PG-13 | 132 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

After the crew of the Enterprise find an unstoppable force of terror from within their own organization, Captain Kirk leads a manhunt to a war-zone world to capture a one-man weapon of mass destruction.

Director: J.J. Abrams | Stars: Chris Pine , Zachary Quinto , Zoe Saldana , Benedict Cumberbatch

Votes: 497,126 | Gross: $228.78M

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

PG | 105 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

Admiral Kirk and his bridge crew risk their careers stealing the decommissioned U.S.S. Enterprise to return to the restricted Genesis Planet to recover Spock's body.

Votes: 86,185 | Gross: $76.47M

9. Star Trek: Generations (1994)

PG | 118 min | Action, Adventure, Mystery

With the help of long presumed dead Captain Kirk, Captain Picard must stop a deranged scientist willing to murder on a planetary scale in order to enter a space matrix.

Director: David Carson | Stars: Patrick Stewart , William Shatner , Malcolm McDowell , Jonathan Frakes

Votes: 87,064 | Gross: $75.67M

10. Star Trek Beyond (2016)

PG-13 | 122 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

The crew of the USS Enterprise explores the furthest reaches of uncharted space, where they encounter a new ruthless enemy, who puts them, and everything the Federation stands for, to the test.

Director: Justin Lin | Stars: Chris Pine , Zachary Quinto , Karl Urban , Zoe Saldana

Votes: 258,546 | Gross: $158.85M

11. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

G | 143 min | Adventure, Mystery, Sci-Fi

When an alien spacecraft of enormous power is spotted approaching Earth, Admiral James T. Kirk resumes command of the overhauled USS Enterprise in order to intercept it.

Director: Robert Wise | Stars: William Shatner , Leonard Nimoy , DeForest Kelley , James Doohan

Votes: 96,635 | Gross: $82.26M

12. Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

PG | 103 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

When the crew of the Enterprise learn of a Federation conspiracy against the inhabitants of a unique planet, Captain Picard begins an open rebellion.

Votes: 79,481 | Gross: $70.12M

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

PG | 107 min | Action, Adventure, Fantasy

Captain Kirk and his crew must deal with Mr. Spock's long-lost half-brother who hijacks the Enterprise for an obsessive search for God at the center of the galaxy.

Director: William Shatner | Stars: William Shatner , Leonard Nimoy , DeForest Kelley , James Doohan

Votes: 64,215 | Gross: $52.21M

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7 best Star Trek villains, ranked

Thanks to its more than 50 years of continued existence, Star Trek   has produced just a lot of stuff. That stuff includes several great TV shows, more than a few outstanding movies, and perhaps most importantly of all, some genuinely great villains.

4. The Klingons

3. the borg queen, 2. gul dhukat.

Because Trek has always concerned itself with the politics of the stories it tells, the series has also introduced some genuinely nuanced bad guys. There are plenty of great villains of the week, to be sure, but there are also legendary villains who have made their way onto this list. These are the seven best Star Trek villains, ranked.

Say what you will about  Star Trek Into Darkness , but J.J. Abrams’ first Star Trek effort was a rousing success. Among its many feats was its introduction of a totally new villain in the form of Nero, a vengeful Romulan who blames Spock for not preventing the death of his family.

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Eric Bana’s performance in the role is transformative, but what really sells the whole endeavor is the sense of grandeur and scale that’s on display. Nero is filled with rage, and it’s that rage that has driven him to where he is now.

We’ve had plenty of great villains from across the many Trek shows, but Deep Space Nine ’s Weyoun was among the most beloved, in part because he was an ideal foil to the show’s cast. As the mouthpiece for the Dominion and a Vorta himself, Weyoun always delivered his message with a smile, but that rarely meant that he actually had the best of intentions.

In fact, Weyoun was in many ways your typical slimey politician, and that was undoubtedly a huge part of what made him so appealing to fans of  Deep Space Nine every time he was killed off and then inevitably returned to the show.

An omnipotent being that is a reminder of how far  Star Trek  characters can come, Q was first introduced as an ominous presence but became something much sillier as he became more familiar to Star Trek fans.

It was Q’s actions that ultimately resulted in the introduction of the Borgs to the universe, and he was also the one who charged Picard with the crimes of humanity. In spite of his power, Q is ultimately not the worst perpetrator of evil in the world of Star Trek, even though he certainly could have been.

In many ways the primordial Star Trek villain, the Klingons have shown up in a number of different villainous guises over the course of the franchise’s long and storied history. In the show’s original configuration, they existed as a foil to the Federation — the USSR to the Federation’s America.

Of course, Trek never expressed any idea quite that simply, and the Klingons were always humanized, even as they often opposed what the Federation was doing. You understood that they had their reasons, even if you weren’t always supposed to be sympathetic to them.

The Borg, in general, is a major menace to the crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation . Operating as a hive mind with the goal of assimilating all other living things into them, part of the point of the Borg was that they were everywhere and nowhere.

That’s why many were so worried by the introduction of the Borg Queen, but they didn’t have any reason for concern. The Borg Queen totally works, in large part thanks to Alice Krige’s memorable, sensual performance in the central role.

Gul Dukat was the best version of the authoritarian mode of Star Trekvillain. A character so villainous and tyrannical that you wanted nothing more than his ultimate defeat, even if you also found him compelling.

A Cardassian war criminal who ruled over Bajor as a complete totalitarian, what made Dukat so remarkable was that you could understand that his actions were heinous, even as you found yourself drawn into his world. Many argue that Gul Dhukat is the finest villain Star Trek has ever produced, and we think that’s pretty close to being on the money.

A name memorably screamed not once but twice in Star Trek movies , Khan is most remembered today for killing Spock in  The Wrath of Khan , widely regarded as the best of the  Trek  movies for a reason.

Although Khan was just a villain-of-the-week in the original series, in Wrath of Khan , he is elevated to a devious mastermind, capable of taking down and outsmarting even Kirk, Spock, and their crew. Ricardo Montalbán’s performance made the role one of the most important in the history of the franchise. As for Benedict Cumberbatch’s reprisal of the character? Well, the less said about that, the better.

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From mind-bending depictions of the cosmos as seen in Interstellar to chilling examinations of AI like Ex Machina, the top sci-fi movies from the 2010s are often counted among the greatest from the genre overall. With stunning visuals, compelling performances, and an array of thought-provoking stories that reflect the best aspects of science fiction today, these films will undoubtedly continue to enjoy their enduring legacies as contemporary masterpieces. 10. Gravity (2013)

The sci-fi genre owes much of its evolution to a myriad of television series that have shaped and redefined it over the years. These influential shows underscore the power of the small screen to captivate audiences, particularly through sci-fi's distinct combination of innovative storytelling and ambitious visuals. Whether viewers are fans of futuristic technology, extraterrestrial encounters, or dystopian futures, there's something for every kind of sci-fi lover among the genre's best entries.

From the groundbreaking brilliance of Star Trek to the modern masterpiece Black Mirror, the greatest sci-fi TV shows of all time have expanded the genre's horizons and left an indelible mark on pop culture in the process. They promise worlds beyond anyone's wildest imagination, with the mind-bending journeys they depict ending up being some of the most unforgettable adventures ever seen on television. 10. Black Mirror (2011-present)

The video game adaptation trend continues with Amazon Prime Video's Fallout, and Walton Goggins was among the hit streaming show's standout performers. His casting as the former Hollywood actor and mutated ghoul was pitch-perfect for the dystopic world's atmosphere and sardonic humor.

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