There's Only One Way to Watch Star Trek Movie to Make It Less Boring
Star Trek movies have a pretty spotty history.
The general wisdom often goes that even-numbered Star Trek movie installments are good, while odd-numbered ones are bad.
Well, that rule only held true until Nemesis (the tenth feature-length Star Trek movie, which was a flop). But we can say with certainty that out of the six original generation Star Trek movies, II, IV and VI were beloved, and others… not so much.
In particular, the very first Star Trek: The Motion Picture, though a modest box office success, was and is generally seen as simply boring. It was a fairly expensive – by the standards of its time – blockbuster without all the things that people expect from a sci-fi blockbuster, such as space battles and compelling antagonists.
Its core was a bridge drama, good enough for a TV series episode, but insufficient to carry a whole movie. Sure, there was a message, with the movie making a serious shot at contemplating vastness and ineffability of the universe and man's place in it, but people complained that the movie was just slow.
Perhaps that reaction was inevitable. The real mistake that Star Trek I made, if any, was aiming above all the existing core audience of dedicated TV series fans.
It both assumes that the audience is familiar with the TV series and its characters, and strives to present the fans with a decently-budgeted image of their beloved fantastic word (that's why, for example, the movie dedicates a whole long sequence to overview shots of the starship Enterprise, which only appeared on the screen as a shoddy model before).
It also can be argued, that the movie directly borrowed elements from certain Star Trek TV episodes because its creators wanted to show the fans, how Star Trek could have looked, if they had budget and special effects advancements, necessary to realize their ambitions.
Similarly, while the original Star Trek series was not devoid of action sequences, it generally tried to be at least somewhat serious science fiction, trying to both contemplate what mankind may encounter in outer space and to reflect problems of the present through the fantastic lenses, to the best of the scriptwriters' ability.
And creators of Star Trek I tried to retain these ambitions, before going to more typical blockbuster fare with thwarting of a villainous plot in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.