I'm going to offer the controversial opinion here, and that is Star Trek II should not have been made the way it was. Nick Meyer departed Gene Roddenberry's vision by militarizing things far more and turning them into more of an action element and less about exploration. Roddenberry was not happy with the direction Meyer took things, but was powerless to stop it.
Its success now means that Star Trek almost always requires a "villain" character. This moves it into the comic book realm, when it used to be a peer of films like 2001.
As time has gone on, I’ve become more focused on art and artists, rather than mindlessly consuming unending franchises. That being said, I can enjoy subsequent extrapolations of original works. I think it depends on how respectful they are of the original iteration, and what they bring to the table.
I recently rewatched THE TERMINATOR/T2, PREDATOR, and ALIEN/ALIENS. I contend that the first film in each series is still the best.
THE TERMINATOR is a lean and mean masterpiece. T2 is excellent, too—one of the best sequels ever made, and incredibly well-made. But, at the end of the day, it’s a big-budget remake of the first film, with some clever plot inversions. It hinges upon a key loophole: Reese didn’t know that a second Terminator was sent back to 1995, and that Skynet was fighting its temporal war on
two fronts.
At the end of the day, it’s not essential to the story. The first film is a perfectly closed circle. T2 brings some interesting twists to the table, but it’s become lesser for me, over the years.
Same with ALIENS. ALIEN is a masterpiece. ALIENS is essentially a remake of ALIEN, with more action and some STARSHIP TROOPERS (the book) thrown in. The plot beats are fundamentally the same. It’s still a great film, but is it essential to the ALIEN story?
On the flipside, every subsequent TERMINATOR and ALIEN film after their first sequel has either knocked over the applecart (ALIEN 3), or tried to rehash and recapture past glory (TERMINATOR 3, GENISYS). And they’re all varying degrees of terrible.
And then there’s STAR TREK. I enjoy all six TOS films to varying degrees. TMP has grown and grown on me, over the years. It’s arguably among the purest representations of Roddenberry’s vision—a serious, smart, philosophical sci-fi procedural. TWOK was
absolutely a correction for TPM’s mixed reception—more action, more character, more humor. Both films are excellent representations of different facets of the TV series, and scratch different itches. And I love them both. The TV show covered a wide spectrum of subjects and tones, and the movies are no different.
TMP is the first pilot—cerebral, gray, and little action. TWOK is the second pilot—action, color, character. TSFS and TVH are good second season episodes. TFF is a third season episode. And TUC wraps everything up in a respectful way.
Interestingly, the movies confronted the problem that many long-term franchises inevitably deal with: Do you have growth and change, or the mere
illusion of change? TSFS began the process of backpeddling and restoring the status quo, and I can’t bring myself to say that it wasn’t the wrong choice. Yeah, it would have been more mature to evolve the franchise, by losing old characters and bringing in new ones. But I think sometimes we need to keep our iconic heroes alive and together in out hearts forever, to heck with “realism”. Was Kirk’s lame deathin GENERATIONS really a step up from simply leaving his final fate unknown, as it had been during TNG?
Which brings us to perhaps the biggest IP failure ever, Disney’s STAR WARS. I’m not some whiny Gen-Xer a la RedLetterMedia, who thinks that the prequels “ruined” the franchise simply because the films weren’t what they’d been expecting for 16 years. Like it or not, there are
six STAR WARS films, and they represent the overall vision of their creator, as seen over a 28-year span.
As far as I’m concerned, STAR WARS comes in three flavors: The original, standalone, 1977 film, the Original Trilogy, and the six-film Saga. And all three have entertainment and artistic value.
Ironically, the Disney Trilogy actually DID ruin the franchise, but not merely because the films weren’t what fans had been expecting. Rather, it was the well-documented lack of a plan, the sociopolitical agenda seeping into everything, and the complete lack of logical and consistent characterization/organic storytelling based on the established lore. The Disney Trilogy utterly destroyed the character, themes, and plot points of the six Lucas films. Nothing makes sense. Nothing matters. For all the claims of TLJ being “bold” and “different”, all three films badly rehash the tropes and plot points of the original trilogy. They ruined what came before in order to badly copy them. It’s proven to be a horrific, franchise-killing disaster. This is what can happen when a beloved IP is handed over to people who don’t understand it, merely try to copy its surface traits, and/or use it as a “platform”.
At least we still have BACK TO THE FUTURE, because pretty much everything else has been sullied by awful reboots/remakes/sequels/prequels, many of which were made decades too late, and by people who don’t understand or respect the source material.