July 02, 2022
I'm a pretty big Star Trek fan. I've seen every movie (many of them several times) and almost every episode (I skipped some from Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: Voyager that looked uninteresting or received bad reviews, and I'm still watching Star Trek: The Animated Series). And whenever I'm watching, I repeatedly pause to reference Memory: Alpha (the online Star Trek wiki/encyclopedia) for details on characters, locations, and other important information.
I thought it would be fun to rank the Star Trek movies. This is my end product. (It was indeed a fun process!). Rankings are roughly in terms of my enjoyment and my interest in re-watching, though I'm sure there are other factors I can't enumerate at the moment. There isn't really a common "logical" theme to all of these rankings, but I don't really care.
(My homemade blog engine takes my plaintext and renders it into HTML, and I was too lazy to go through and add <i> tags to the movie titles. Oh well.)
Interestingly, the first five odds fill the final five spots. I've heard before about the curse of odd-numbered Star Trek movies, and my views incidentally seem to fall in line. With that said, I think The Motion Picture lies on the fence between liked and disliked, and I'd rather group The Final Frontier with the eight above it than with the four below it.
Just for further amusement, and to validate my results, I made 78 pairwise comparisons of the thirteen movies and calculated the scores, and the output was almost identical (Insurrection came right after Nemesis) and otherwise entirely transitive (if I ranked A > B and B > C then I also ranked A > C).
I predict these rankings will be controversial. That's part of the fun, too!