Right? The Motion Picture is the only one of all the films that feels totally epic in scope and grandeur. There isn't even a real villain; it's all about the characters dealing with this super-entity that just wants to find its own personal God that created it. Which leads me to another point: why does every ST film have to have a villain now? It used to be about big ideas and good, hard sci-fi.
Now it's about lasers and scenery-chewing arch nemeses.
I dislike the TNG films, because they lost what makes TNG special. TNG basically worked best as a television show; it didn't have the outlandishness and old-fashioned heroism of the original series that is mostly required to be cinematic. If they were going to do a TNG film, they should have kept the strengths of TNG: modern, interesting characters, with cerebral plots about ideas, ethics, and questions of morality. Instead, they put Picard in a dune buggy and gave him cool sunglasses and a gun. Bald, aging action hero time! Even Generations, which was the closest to having some really powerful character scenes (like when Picard breaks down after hearing his family were killed), had some really nonsensical and stupid things piled into it for ->-bleeped-<-s and giggles (and mainstream appeal), like Data's emotion chip, which was abysmally handled, or the ridiculous amounts of explosions (it appears that the entire bridge is lined with high-energy explosives, so when the ship gets into a phaser fight, people can fly across the room comically). Bottom line: the TNG movies took the show and flushed it down the toilet, in my humble opinion, but there are a few good things here and there.
