Star Trek Movies Tier List: All 13 Films Ranked (2026)

The film that saved the franchise and the one every other entry is measured against. Nicholas Meyer shot it as a naval submarine picture, gave Kirk an age and a son and a consequence, and let Ricardo Montalban play revenge as grief. The Kobayashi Maru frames the whole thing, the Mutara Nebula is still the best space battle in the series, and the ending earns a death that the sequel then walked back. Forty years of Star Trek films have not gotten near it.

The Next Generation crew got exactly one great movie and this is it. Jonathan Frakes directs the Borg as a horror antagonist rather than a puzzle, Patrick Stewart plays Picard as a man with unfinished trauma instead of a diplomat, and the Ahab reading of the character is the best writing the films ever gave him. Zefram Cochrane and the Phoenix keep the optimism intact underneath it, which is why it feels like Star Trek and not just a good sci-fi thriller.

The one with the whales, the one your parents liked, and the highest grossing Star Trek film until 2009. Leonard Nimoy directs a time travel comedy with no villain and almost no phaser fire, drops the crew into 1986 San Francisco and simply watches them be strange in it. Its trick is that the jokes never come at the crew's expense. It is the most purely likeable entry in the run and the easiest one to hand somebody who has never watched any of it.

Nicholas Meyer comes back to write the original cast out, and gives them a cold war thaw to be wrong about first. Kirk's bigotry toward the Klingons is treated as a real flaw rather than a beat, Christopher Plummer chews the part of Chang with total commitment, and the courtroom and the assassination plot give the film an actual shape. A send off that argues with its own heroes is a much better goodbye than a victory lap.

J.J. Abrams reboots it with a time travel device that lets the old continuity stay standing, and casts it almost perfectly: Chris Pine finds a Kirk who is not an impression, Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban are uncanny. It is faster and shinier than Star Trek had ever been and it works as a summer movie, which is what it was for. The cost is that the plot is thin and Nero is a placeholder, and both are the reason it sits below the top two rather than in them.

Slow, cold, and much better than its reputation once you accept it is not an adventure film. Robert Wise made a 2001-shaped picture about a machine that has outgrown its makers, Jerry Goldsmith wrote the theme the entire franchise still uses, and the V'Ger reveal is a genuinely big idea. The 2001 Director's Edition trims the endless drydock gawking and is the version to watch. The nickname was The Motionless Picture and that is only half unfair.

The middle chapter of the trilogy, and the one that has to spend its runtime undoing the best ending in the series. It is uneven and Christopher Lloyd's Kruge is a strange choice for a Klingon, but it contains two of the biggest things the crew ever does: they steal the Enterprise, and then they lose it. "The needs of the one" landing as an answer to the last film is the reason this one is affectionately kept rather than skipped.

Justin Lin and a Simon Pegg script quietly deliver the most Star Trek shaped of the three Kelvin films: the ship is destroyed in the first act, the crew is split into pairs, and the movie is about what they are like as colleagues. Jaylah is the best new character the reboot made. Idris Elba is buried under prosthetics playing an idea the film explains too late, and the Beastie Boys ending is either the highlight or the low point depending entirely on you.

The handover film, and it is built around a device (the Nexus) that exists to get two captains into one scene. The Enterprise-D saucer crash is a real set piece and the Kirk and Picard team up is a nice idea on paper, but Kirk dies twice, the second time under a bridge, and there is no version of that which is a fitting end for the character the last six films were about. Malcolm McDowell is doing good work in a plot nobody can summarise.

Well made, well acted, and hollow at the middle. Benedict Cumberbatch is genuinely excellent right up to the moment the film says the name Khan and turns into a lesser remix of a better movie, complete with the Wrath of Khan death scene reversed and drained of its weight. The year of insisting he was not Khan is its own small piece of franchise history. Two thirds of a strong thriller attached to a fan service ending it did not earn.

A perfectly pleasant two part episode of The Next Generation with a film budget attached. The stakes are 600 villagers, the villains are undone by their own skin condition, and the biggest moment is Data and Picard singing Gilbert and Sullivan. Nothing in it is offensive and nothing in it needed a cinema. Coming directly after First Contact is what makes it feel like a bigger fall than it is.

The film that ended the Next Generation run and put the whole franchise on ice for seven years. A Picard clone, a Data twin, a dune buggy chase, and a death scene that copies the Wrath of Khan sacrifice without any of the setup that made it mean something. Tom Hardy is fine and completely miscast. Stuart Baird did not watch the series and it shows in every scene where the crew talk to each other.

William Shatner directs, and goes looking for God at the centre of the galaxy on a budget that could not afford the trip. The rock men were cut, the effects were done by the wrong house, and the Enterprise flies to the middle of the universe in an afternoon. The consensus bottom of the run, with one real defence: the campfire scenes between Kirk, Spock and McCoy are the warmest the three of them ever got to be.