(Not including the reboot trilogy as that’s a different altogether topic)

I was recently in a mood to binge the first ten Star Trek films as I hadn’t seen any of them in several years, and I notice that the TOS films are better than the TNG films. Which is weird because when it comes to the tv series, I far prefer TNG and its spin-offs over TOS but when it came to the films, it’s the opposite. I love First Contact, and like Generations but Insurrection and Nemesis are pretty bad IMO, whereas the only TOS film I truly dislike is V. (My favorites are IV and VI) Was wondering what others here thought, I think this may be the standard opinion in fact.

As for why they’re better, I think for whatever reason the TOS movies feel more cinematic, whereas the TNG films were mostly trying to capture the TNG feeling and not as much be cinematic?

  • theinspectorst@kbin.social
    71·
    1 year ago

    Small sample sizes and idiosyncratic factors.

    I agree that the 6 TOS movies on average are better than the 4 TNG movies on average. But if you remove Insurrection (which was fine) and Nemesis (which had a lot of flaws) from the mix, then that is no longer the case - so the question really becomes a narrower ‘why is Instruction only okay and what went wrong with Nemesis?’, rather than the broader ‘TOS vs TNG’ way you put it. If they stopped after First Contact, people would rave about the quality of the TNG movies.

    Another way of looking at it is that if you alternatively removed TWOK (written and directed by Nicholas Meyer), TVH (written by Nicholas Meyer) and TUC (written and directed by Nicholas Meyer) from the TOS list then the comparison would also no longer be clear cut. In which case you could also phrase your question as ‘why was Nicholas Meyer so good at making Star Trek movies?’