Similarly to The Original Series, there are also some TNG films. I watched them all, and they are much more of a mixed bag than the first six movies.
Star Trek Generations: Star Trek Generations feels like it could have been the perfect epilogue to The Next Generation. It brings back a bunch of old plot threads (Picard's family, Data's emotion chip, the Duras sisters, Guinan's species), it destroys the Enterprise-D, and biggest of all, it lets Picard and Kirk meet. However, there's just something about Star Trek Generations that felt kinda underwhelming to me, and I think that's because it felt more like an episode than a movie.
Star Trek Generations has a lot going on, so I'm going to go over each storyline on its own. The main plot is that an evil El-Aurien intends to destroy a planet so he can go to an idealized realm called the Nexus. It definitely feels like a bit of an excuse plot, but it works well enough and does a solid job of allowing Kirk and Picard to meet. Soren isn't super fleshed-out, but I like his brutality and just how close he was to winning. It also allows for some pretty great action sequences, especially that fantastic and brutal sequence where the Enterprise-D is destroyed. My biggest gripe here is how this storyline could've been used to finally explore Guinan's species and origins, but it's only touched upon in a single scene. Similarly, the Duras sisters (who are legitimately great villains) also only appear for a few scenes despite being allied with Soren. But worst of all, Kirk only appears at the very start and end of the film, with most of Generations focusing exclusively on the TNG cast. For a film about the two shows crossing over, there's really not much of TOS here. The scenes he does have are pretty cool and bring me back to the original films, and seeing Shatner and Stewart together is great, but there just isn't enough of them. Not to mention Kirk's infamous death where he gets a bridge dropped on him, which yeah, isn't very well-done. Star Trek Generations does have a lot of interesting ideas and fantastic scenes, but it tries to do so much that it can rarely support all of its plot points, and I didn't even bring up the subplots.
Picard has a subplot about his family dying in a fire which just seems random. It leads to a great scene with Troi and Picard, but aside from its minor connection to its theme of "passing a torch" (a theme executed far better by Wrath Of Khan), it just feels unnecessary. Data's subplot about trying out his emotion chip, on the other hand, is great and one of the few fully-realized parts in the film. It's exactly what I wanted to see from Descent, Data struggling to navigate his new emotions, both positive and negative, and Brent Spiner does a fantastic job with the material. At the start of the review, I said Generations feels like a TV episode rather than a movie, and I think that's because of just how many plot threads there are. It feels like the writers were just checking off boxes when writing the screenplay. It doesn't help that the production is incredibly shoddy and uneven. There are aspects of Star Trek Generations that look fantastic, particularly the CGI and explosions. However, you can tell the film is trying to make itself seem more like a movie than it actually is, utilizing dark lighting, overly dramatic camerawork, and a booming yet unremarkable score. It doesn't quite work, and Generations struggles to hide its stock footage, TV sets, and cheesy-looking exterior scenes. It's as if the fact that Generations tries to hard to prove to you that it's a movie makes it feel less like one.
Overall, Star Trek Generations feels like an incredibly mixed bag. On one hand, it ties up a lot of loose ends from TNG, has some great action and character interactions, and contains a ton of fantastic scenes like the opening, Picard meeting Kick, the crash of the Enterprise-D, the ready room chat, and Data discovering his emotions. However, it suffers from far too many plot points that don't get enough attention, Kirk getting little screentime and an underwhelming death, and a shaky production that struggles to convince the viewer that this isn't just an extended episode, or even more, a commerical. Generations is an enjoyable time, but definitely one of the weaker Trek films.
3/5 Stars
Star Trek: First Contact: This was a fantastic movie to watch on Halloween, it's basically Star Trek's attempt at a zombie flick, and it's really good! It's tense, fast-paced, and focused, but most importantly, it actually feels like a movie this time.
In First Contact, the Borg travel back in time to 2063 to conquer Earth, so the Enterprise crew follows them. There are really two storylines here, with half of the crew having to fend off the Borg when they take over the Enterprise, and the other half of the crew having to make sure Earth achieves first contact with aliens when they're supposed to. Personally, I think the Borg storyline was the more compelling of the two. As mentioned above, it kinda felt like a zombie movie in how more and more of the ship was starting to get assimilated. Picard dealing with his trauma from the Borg and slowly breaking down throughout the film was engaging, as was Data's interesting discussions on humanity with the Borg Queen. I'm not quite sure how I feel about the fact that the Borg has a queen, given that they're kinda supposed to be a collective, but her appearance didn't make them any less terrifying or brutal, and Alice Krige gave a great performance as her. The first contact part of the film wasn't as tense, but it allowed for some great and funny character interactions with Riker, Troi, and Geordi, getting to see a fictional time period for once was cool, and the development of Cochrane (the warp drive originator) was pretty good. The scene near the end of the film where Riker, Geordi, and Cochrene test out the warp drive served as such an optimistic contrast from the darker Borg subplot. Both storylines get a good amount of focus and it feels like the cast is overall better utilized than in Generations.
First Contact feels a lot different from the other Trek films in a lot of ways. I've noticed these Trek films tend to have a bit of a slow start (most notably TVH taking over half an hour until the crew goes back in time), but First Contact gets right into the action with no time to spare. Speaking of which, I think this is the first Trek film I can call an "action movie". Not to say that Trek films don't have action, even TVH had a big climactic finale, but First Contact is stuffed to the brim with it. Thankfully, most of these setpieces are pretty great, especially that fight on the ship's hull. First Contact also feels like a darker Trek film than most, with some genuinely terrifying scenes involving the Borg. Despite these differences, I think First Contact works because it achieves what it's trying to do. It's not overstuffed like Generations, all of its characters and plot points get time to develop, and the tense and scary stuff is genuinely effective and balanced with some great levity and moments of hope and optimistic. Even more, First Contact looks fantastic. It's stunning how this film was made in 1996, the effects hold up shockingly well (then again, they did have ILM work on it). The Borg cube, the exterior shots, that stunningly subtle shot of the queen being assembled, the action scenes, it all looks so fantastic. The movie using entirely new sets over the preexisting TV ones definitely helped as well, as they suit the dynamic lighting and movie cameras a lot better. We also got another score by Jerry Goldsmith! It's a lot more muted and sinister than some of his previous scores, but when it kicks in, it's so damn good, especially during that Vulcan scene.
Overall, First Contact was a fantastic movie, definitely one of the best Star Trek films of them all. It's taut and tense, with a nice balance of character, comedy, drama, action, and Borg-related nightmare fuel. The cast is well-utilized, the visuals and effects are outstanding, and unlike Generations, it felt like a story that deserved to be told on the big screen.
5/5 Stars
Star Trek Insurrection: By the end of watching Insurrection, I feel like I just lost two hours of my life. It's not as horribly incoherent and "off-feeling" like TFF was, but it was just so dull. It's an average episode of the TNG stretched out to movie-length, and it shows.
Star Trek Insurrection is a movie about the Enterprise crew navigating a moral conflict between two species. On one side, there's the Ba'ku, a species of only 600 people hogging a planet with rejuvenating effects and medicinal value so they can remain peaceful and immortal. On the other side, there's the Son'a, a disfigured group of ex-Ba'ku who want to take the planet back no matter what, who are allied with a Federation officer who wants to use the planet's medicinal values to help the galaxy as a whole. Take a wild guess who the antagonists are? Believe it or not, it's the Son'a! That's the biggest problem with Insurrection, the Ba-ku are completely unsympathetic and just come off as selfish, and the Enterprise crew only ally with them because "the Prime Directive says they must". I haven't expressed my grievances with the Prime Directive much before, but it really started to get on my nerves in later seasons of TNG as it causes the crew to make some really immoral decisions. Aside from the conceived conflict, though, the main storyline of this movie just isn't interesting. It's a glorified "Fountain Of Youth" tale with not much more. The main crew doesn't get much focus, with a subplot about Riker piloting the Enterprise not amounting for much, and the character interactions devolve into some really bad comedy bits that didn't land for me. Picard has a romantic subplot where he has zero chemistry with his love interest, Data has an intriguing mystery about a malfunction that goes nowhere, and most unforgivably of all, Riker shaves his beard. There was one good character-focused scene in the movie involving Geordi seeing the sun again, but otherwise, hardly any of the writing worked for me.
Star Trek Insurrection feels like the polar opposite of First Contact in many ways. First Contact has a high stakes story that pits the main cast against impossible odds, pushes Picard to the brink, and shows the Borg at their most horrifying and desperate. Insurrection is a boring and badly written moral conflict that feels like it could have been any other episode. First Contact uses its action to show how the characters survive against the Borg, there's only an action scene when the two sides come into conflict. Insurrection, on the other hand, tries to shove in an action scene every 10 minutes for no apparent reason, not to dissimilar from Generations in its attempts to try and prove that it works as a standalone film (it doesn't). Insurrection is stuffed with random shootouts that don't actually progress the plot or any of the character arcs, and it doesn't help that the effects-heavy setpieces ended up looking awful. Similarly to TFF, Industrial Light & Magic left and it shows. The CGI for the spaceships are really rough, the blatantly unfinished final battle uses an unmodified bluescreen on a backdrop, and plenty of effects just look plain bad. First Contact was probably one of the best looking films of the 90s and aged nearly perfectly visually. Insurrection came out 2 years later and yet it looks at least four times as bad, almost Babylon 5 levels of poorly-aged (actually no, that would be doing B5 a serious disservice). Jerry Goldsmith made the score again, poor sap, but even that couldn't save the pretty shoddy production.
I've said this before, but the worst thing a movie can be in my opinion is boring. Star Trek Insurrection isn't awful by any means, but it is painfully boring and mediocre. The effects are shoddy, the action is dull, the main conflict is poorly-done, the comedy is awful, and completely unlike First Contact, there's no reason for it to exist. It doesn't contribute anything of value, it's like staring at a blank screen for two hours.
1/5 Stars
Star Trek Nemesis: I went into Star Trek Nemesis having already known about the film's incredibly troubled production. A director that never saw an episode of Star Trek and didn't care to, a script with no rewrites that ended up getting leaked, a release date aligning with some of the biggest movies of 2002, no wonder it flopped! However, and this might be because I just saw Insurrection, it's not that bad. Nemesis is a mixed bag with some high highs and incredibly low lows, but at least it's not boring.
First, let me talk about the things this movie does well. For starters, it actually feels like a movie, and even with its flaws, it attempts to wrap up The Next Generation's story once and for all. Riker and Troi get married, Data dies, the Romulans reappear, it's not nearly as perfect of an ending as TUC was but it works well enough. The main plot about Picard's clone has flaws that I'll point out later, but it also feels like a story that warrants a feature film, and Tom Hardy (in his first major role, no less) gives a really solid performance as Shinzon. I'd also say the Enterprise crew are far more sympathetic than they were in Insurrection, and the interactions they have with each other during the wedding at the start are really sweet. As a whole, I think this film executes its comedy much better than Insurrection did as well. But I think the best thing about Nemesis is the production. Compared to Insurrection, the effects are mostly really good (still not First Contact caliber though). The green hues give such an early 2000s vibe that has always been appealing to me. The action scenes definitely seem like they have had a lot more work put into them than pretty much any other Trek film, especially the big space battle near the end of the film, which I think might just be the finest action setpiece in all of Trek from what I've seen so far. I will admit not all the action fits all that well (looking at you, dune buggy sequence), but they're all still fun and well-done sequences on its own merits. And of course, Goldsmith is back for the music, and he's great as always.
However, that's where the compliments end, because Nemesis is also an incredibly flawed film. I'm sure you've noticed that I compared it to Insurrection a lot, and that's because if it weren't for that film, I'd probably be a lot less favorable to it. I have a lot of issues with Nemesis, so I'll just list them all out. Picard and Data get an overwhelming focus again, to the point where it feels like the rest of the crew might not exist. Shinzon is an incredibly baffling character who constantly changes motivations, and his similarities to Picard are paper-thin at best. The mind rape scene with Troi was awful and felt like it was just there to make Shinzon feel more evil. The overall storyline borrows a lot from Wrath Of Khan, and Data's death isn't as impactful as it should be because it just feels like a worse version of Spock's death (not unlike Into Darkness). B4's existence felt odd given that he was never mentioned prior to this movie, and it invalidated a large chunk of Data's development. But I think the worst thing of Nemesis is how just much wasn't included. Apparently, there were a lot of character moments and scenes of development that got cut by the director Baird to focus on the action. To put it simply, this film was cut to bits, and it pains me knowing that it could have been much more coherent and fleshed-out than it actually was.
Overall, Star Trek Nemesis is such an odd film because its quality seems to fluctuate at such a rapid pace. The wedding scene, the space battle, the final few scenes, there's some solid stuff in Nemesis, and the effects, acting, and action are generally pretty great. However, it suffers from a plot with so many issues that just layer on top of each other, from its unoriginal ending to the side cast getting shafted to the confounded villain to some really important bits of character development getting completely cut from the film. Nemesis was a fun time, definitely more entertaining than Insurrection, but wow, is it so bad at times.
2/5 Stars
When I watched the Original Series films, I found myself loving almost all of them, and I think I still hold them up as the peak of Star Trek so far. With these Next Generation films, I only really found myself liking one of them. Generations and Nemesis do have their good moments, but First Contact was the only film of the bunch that felt truly well-crafted. I think the biggest problem with these TNG films is that they mostly felt like TV movies. The first six films carved out their own timeline and place in the Star Trek universe, and interconnected incredibly well. TNG's movies didn't feel as well-plotted, especially considering the fact that other Trek series were airing at the time. First Contact was fantastic, easily one of my favorite Trek films that gets better the more I think about it. The rest ranged from flawed to the worst in the franchise.
Overall, my ranking is:
First Contact > Generations > Nemesis > Insurrection
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