Items13The creator’s order
  1. 1Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) 7.7/10 on IMDbReleased Jun 4, 1982The best place to start, and it barely needs the show. Ricardo Montalbán's Khan comes from a single episode of the original series, but the film tells you all you need in a few lines: Kirk marooned him on a dying planet 15 years earlier, and he wants revenge. What follows is a cat-and-mouse duel…0
  2. 2Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) 7.3/10 on IMDbReleased Nov 26, 1986The funniest Star Trek film and the friendliest to newcomers. To save Earth from an alien probe, the crew travels back to 1986 San Francisco to fetch two whales, which turns the story into a fish-out-of-water comedy about future people out of step with 1980s life, down to a run-in with a punk…0
  3. 3Star Trek: First Contact (1996)Star Trek: First Contact (1996) 7.6/10 on IMDbReleased Nov 22, 1996The strongest film with the Next Generation crew, and the one that works best cold. Captain Picard's Enterprise chases the Borg, a cyborg collective that absorbs whole species, back in time to 2063, where they mean to stop Zefram Cochrane (James Cromwell) from making the warp flight that leads to…0
  4. 4Star Trek (2009)Star Trek (2009) 7.9/10 on IMDbReleased May 6, 2009Built for people who have never seen Star Trek. J.J. Abrams restarts the story with a young Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) in an alternate timeline, so nothing you missed on TV counts against you, and it plays as a fast, funny origin story about two rivals learning to be a…0
  5. 5Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) 7.3/10 on IMDbReleased Dec 6, 1991The original crew's farewell is a political thriller. A Klingon moon explodes, leaving the Empire suddenly ready to make peace, and Kirk, who still blames the Klingons for his son's death, is sent to escort their chancellor to the talks. A conspiracy follows, with a murder mystery and a Klingon…0
  6. 6Star Trek Beyond (2016)Star Trek Beyond (2016) 7.0/10 on IMDbReleased Jul 7, 2016The rebooted crew at its warmest. Director Justin Lin, best known for the Fast & Furious series, has the Enterprise ambushed far from home and torn apart, leaving the crew stranded on an alien planet and scattered into small groups, which gives the supporting characters real scenes. Simon Pegg, who…0
  7. 7Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) 6.4/10 on IMDbReleased Dec 7, 1979The most like serious science fiction, and the slowest. Robert Wise, an Oscar winner brought in to give the first film weight, made it as a stately space epic: a vast, unknown force destroys three Klingon cruisers and heads for Earth, and Kirk returns to a newly refitted Enterprise to meet it.…0
  8. 8Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) 6.7/10 on IMDbReleased Jun 1, 1984Watch this one only after The Wrath of Khan: it picks up shortly after that film and depends on how it ends. Leonard Nimoy's first film as director is a smaller, more personal story about how much the crew will risk for a friend, defying Starfleet's orders to do it. Christopher Lloyd plays Kruge,…0
  9. 9Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) 7.7/10 on IMDbReleased May 5, 2013Fast and handsome, but the reboot film that leans hardest on what came before. Benedict Cumberbatch plays a terrorist whose true identity is one of the film's big reveals, and several of its biggest moments deliberately play on The Wrath of Khan, so they land very differently depending on which you…0
  10. 10Star Trek: Generations (1994)Star Trek: Generations (1994) 6.6/10 on IMDbReleased Nov 18, 1994The handover film, and the one that most assumes you know both crews. The original series' Kirk (William Shatner) and the Next Generation's Picard (Patrick Stewart) meet in the Nexus, a strange realm outside time, and join forces to stop Malcolm McDowell's scientist from destroying a…0