The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock felt like series arcs of the TV show, with bigger budgets and production value.
Those are the only movies with TOS cast that I enjoyed. I grew up with TNG and DS9, and a bit of Voyager (which I couldn't get into), so the TNG cast movies were alright, but nothing stellar.
Calling the rest of it bad fan fiction is a bit disingenuous, because some good stuff has come out in each series since their original runs ended.
This video is very educational, in terms of the current Star Trek cinematic universe:
https://youtu.be/kOys0IusW2U
It appears that they want to scale back to doing these films on a glorified TV budget, like they did in the post-TMP era.
Remember the “army” of only a dozen borg suits seen in “First Contact”...?
...Remember the recycled TV sets from TNG being used as sets for the Enterprise in Trek V and Trek VI?
Ah, the glory days...
Well the TMP sets were all taken over by TNG, leaving Trek V with no options.
Not to sidetrack too much, but B5's CGI looks awful today largely because nobody ever bothered to preserve the underlying elements separate from the old low definition material. Theres literally no way to upscale it now. There isn't enough information in the frames, and because they mixed live action shots with CGI and only kept the final low definition composite, there's no way to separate the elements, upcode them and recombine them.
They looked awesome...for a 90s show with a fairly low budget.
The thing is, the core story, although presented in a very "90s" style, is still pretty amazing and -- in my opinion-- timeless. And it has some truly amazing performances that only really reveal themselves over time.
I haven't watched DS9 beyond some of the first season, so it may pick up, but other Trek shows' strength is in its individual interesting episodes and the ideas they explore. Larger narratives aren't really part of the show, but that's fine. Both franchises have good stories. They're just told differently.
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Just spent the morning watching ST 2, 3, and 4 on STARZ. My God, why can't they just make Star Trek movies like this now? Three almost perfect Trek movies in a row. Was it just something about the 80s that made producing a good Trek movie possible?
IV for me was a big WTF in my circle.
Changing gears into an environmental comedy with Spock yucking it up was stripping the gears, not fun at all for me.
Especially after III which I felt was epic, we got Spock back and I was ready for boldly going again into the final frontier with the old school
and got a sit-com instead.
OK for a TV series to have comedy episodes now and then but for movies I just was not wanting that at all. Some of it was very painful
to watch, all that double dumb ass stuff and "wessels", Scotty talking to the mouse. Very popular stuff I guess but for me... Ugh.
And people still are shocked... wahhhhh? you didn't like IV????? LOL
Perhaps I take Trek too seriously.
IV was my gateway into Trek around the time it came to TV.