Population Numbers...

Exactly. It was entertaining. If it's entertaining we as fans very forgiving, and we can even fall in love with all the flaws in some cases no matter how stupid and obvious they are.

I'm not saying that because I'm guessing: I'm saying that because I've counted.

People forget that the distance problems with Vulcan and the Ice planet are mirrored perfectly in the distance problems in WoK between Genesis and the Mutara Nebula. The Genesis torpedo is much more magical than Red Matter. How did the Reliant not notice how many planets Ceti Alpha had? How did the Reliant scan the planet looking for even tiny traces of microbial life and miss finding several dozen people, plus a planet full of killer worms. Also, metal structures?

Although Abrams Trek did have the ridiculous plot point of having academy students crew star fleet vessels on an actual mission. Oh, wait. But Abrams used the ludicrous plot coincidence of finding Scotty on the planet Kirk happens to land on. Its not like the Regula space station was manned by a someone with an incredible coincidental relationship to Kirk. But at least WoK didn't invent an entire relationship out of whole cloth like Abrams did with Spock and Uhura. Like a previously unmentioned wife and son.

I loved WoK: I still think its one of the best Trek movies, if not the best. But the slam on Abrams that it has plot and science holes is I think disingenuous given the rose-colored glasses that are used to view the other movies. I think it was different in tone and visual style, and not everyone appreciated the change, and they are looking for specific reasons to explain their disagreement over the overall movie.

What about the time cops? How many episodes have we seen people from the future coming back in time to maintain the timeline? I guess what happened in JJtrek didn't affect the future.

The time cops themselves were an incredibly bad creation. One could very well ask why they weren't around for every other time travel incident prior to Voyager's escapades in the Delta Quadrant.

I always thought most of the ST time travel episodes were poorly written with a built in "Oops never happened" that always irritated me.

Its time travel: how do you know the time cops aren't going to fix this, but we're still seeing the universe as it was before it was changed. That often happens in time travel stories: in Yesterday's Enterprise we see what the results of the time loop were, even though technically speaking due to the Enterprise-C going back to the same moment in the past none of that actually happened in the "official" timeline.

Or perhaps some time alterations are not subject to the time cops. Like anything that happens with the Guardian of Forever, say. Or for that matter if the Enterprise sends Tasha Yar into the past and creates a powerful Romulan enemy by accident. Apparently they will even let aliens go back to Earth's past and eat people. And you wonder what the time guardians had to say about either the quantum discontinuity that Worf experienced, the fact that the current Miles O'Brien is actually a future O'Brien, or whether they tried to take any steps to prevent the disaster initiated by Q in All Good Things...

The one thing that's impossible to do is accuse the Abrams Trek of being inconsistent with Trek's handling of time travel. They've done closed time loops, inconsistent loops, permanently changed history, demonstrated multiple simultaneous timelines, showed time being managed, manipulated, monitored, altered, preserved, corrected, and just plain shattered. There's very little consistency to obey in the first place.


WoK played loose with the science fiction and even some of the continuity of Trek to focus on the character melodrama between Kirk and Khan, and it worked: the action served the story. Abrams played loose with the science fiction and continuity of Trek to make a more general action adventure movie set in Trek. I think both succeeded for what it tried to do.

Some became romulans, and just because they were exploring doesn't mean they were spreading out. In the series Enterprise, T'pol goes home a few times and they are shown to be fairly reclusive in general in a lot of ways.

I think the major assumption here that is flawed is that because Vulcans are out there and exploring, they must be setting up colonies every where. Vulcans aren't like that, they don't want colonies everywhere, they just do there thing for knowledge and logic, they aren't empire building and never really were..

It's not the inconsistencies that bother me so much as the glaring omissions. Things that should've been explained in the movie were left to web comics, which is, IMO, just bad story telling.

And then there's the stupidity of the Romulans in general and Nero in particular. Seriously, the best the Romulans can do is send a whiny miner to avenge Romulus' destruction? Yeah, the planet blew up, but they still have a freaking military with warships commanded by people who actually have an understanding of tactics and strategy. But rather then send any of those people, they send an emotionally compromised miner whose idea of tactics is to just shoot things until they blow up and throw tantrums every time his dead family comes up in conversation.

Well, see the Romulans didn't send anyone. Nero left on his own to seek revenge upon Spock for failing to save Romulus. This is explained in STO of all places. Just because the movie doesn't explain it doesn't make it an omission. They don't go on explaining warp theory or matter teleportation either, yet we easily accept those as fact. Books, comics, web comics and games are a perfectly acceptable way to expand upon a 90min movie intended to entertain for 90min, not educate viewers in the minute details of its universe.

Coming up next: Star Trek: The Next Generation: Technical Manual: The Movie Quintology! (STTNGTMTMQ for short)

Ceti Alpha Five was where Ceti Alpha Six was supposed to be and it matched 6's description. Hence the confusion.

Contrary to pictures in textbooks and posters on walls, planets are not all neatly lined up on one side of their sun. Sure, they could've done a full survey of the Ceti Alpha system, but they were bored stiff and 5 resembled 6 and was in the right place as 6, so they assumed it was 6. Character laziness isn't a plot hole.

No records of Khan and crew were in the general databases because the Space Seed incident was labeled Top Secret. It had been long enough that it had slipped Chekov's mind. It's not like he didn't face even greater dangers and have more impressive adventures in the time since he was an off-screen ensign during Khan's first appearance.

They weren't necessarily scanning for metal, so half-buried metal structures could've been disguised as ore deposits given the planet's weather conditions.

Overlooking Khan & Co. *is* a problem for me, however, and a plot hole. But because of the awesomeness of the rest of the film, I will squint askance at it and say that the weather conditions were messing with their scanner readings. There's precedent for that in ToS, so it works for me. The movie does so many other things right that minor slights like this can be forgiven. Abrams' flick doesn't earn a similar pass.

The distance between the Regula One space station and the Mutara Nebula isn't a thing as far as I can recall. Maybe you can be more specific as to what you're referring to. Since they're both fictional, they can be anywhere in relation to each other.

The Genesis Device and Red Matter cancel each other out, but the first is absolutely integral to the plot while the latter is merely a Plot Contrivance Switch. It's just a bad example of Treknobabble designed to blow things up and isn't used again to any great effect.

While neither Carol Marcus nor the Spock/Uhura relationship are plot holes, I will opine on them:

Carol Marcus wasn't Kirk's wife, just another girlfriend. And as a lover of numbers, I'm sure you can appreciate that with all the play Kirk got, David's existence was statistically guaranteed. Kirk is always shown being attracted to strong women, either highly intelligent or strong leaders or both. Carol Marcus is that. However, the important point is this: neither of them feel "wrong" given the character, not the way the relationship between Abrams' Spock and Uhura does. Spock is pretty much asexual and Uhura is a consummate professional. I just don't buy them doing rishathra.

Marcus calling Kirk directly isn't a coincidence, either: he's part of the Admiralty now and as such approves and oversees projects like Genesis. She's simply trading on her past relationship with Admiral Kirk in order to get some answers while bypassing the usual channels. However, Abrams piles coincidence on top of coincidence, such as Kirk being marooned on the ice moon where Old Spock happens to also be marooned where Scotty also happens to be hanging out, and that particular coincidence is again predicated on Spock acting completely out of character: emotional *and* ignoring Star Fleet regulations.

While this is often the case and it's certainly at work here, WoK is the superior effort. In fact, WoK starts off with a terrific scene that plays with our sensibilities and expectations and then three-quarters of the way through the movie has what is undisputedly THE crowning Moment of Awesome in the Star Trek universe ("hours would seem like days"), and one of the all-time contenders for that title in cinema. So much so that it's referenced in other movies and TV shows as well as in other Trek TV series, and JJ Abrams put an amazingly lame version of the Kobayashi Maru test in his flick. In WoK, however, it's integral to the both the plot and the character, which is one of the reasons why it's so revered all these decades later.

It's also important to recall that WoK had three other important Moments of Awesome, too -- Khan's initial attack on Enterprise and Kirk's response to it ("Here it comes.") and then later the Bullit-like moment after Spock mentions that Khan is brilliant but inexperienced, forgetting the 3rd axis. Then, of course, Spock's death is the third one. Four really cool scenes, one of which being an all-time great.

How many of those moments can you recall from Star Trek? There you go.

Some perhaps, but a lot is debatable as to whether it should have been self-contained. WoK doesn't really explain who Khan is or why he's on Ceti Alpha Five. It doesn't explain the connection of his wife to Kirk, or how a 20th century person is running around in the twenty third century. We're assumed to know.


We have people protesting the LHC because they think it might create a black hole that eats the Earth. On the other hand, the Federation looked the other way when a science team decided to make a small device that can destroy a planet and turn it into Disneyland. And its not like they didn't know about it: Carol Marcus sent them a proposal and a video of them destroying a planet with it. And they let this team continue working on it, in a tiny space station in the middle of nowhere, without oversight or protection. Or at all.

Khan, the super-genius, read everything about how to operate a starship except the part where it has an override code that can be used to take over the entire ship. Is that not in the manuals? Is it classified information? Less classified than how to operate the deflector shields or weapons? In TOS he learned enough from reading manuals to override the bridge controls and take over the ship from engineering: Khan doesn't seem to be the sort of person that just skims the manuals looking at the pictures.

And while we're at it, Khan the superior intellect rejects Kirks offer to beam aboard the Reliant unless Kirk transmits to him all of his Genesis files. Except Kirk almost certainly downloaded those. Once Khan had Kirk he could have forced him to download anything he wanted on Reliant. Why have Kirk get the data on Enterprise and transmit it to Reliant *and then* beam aboard? That actually makes no tactical sense whatsoever.

And one last bit of tactical brain freeze. Kirk correctly surmises that if Khan is thinking two-dimensionally, he can gain the tactical advantage by removing himself from Khan's plane of travel. But then he pops back up again giving himself a 50/50 chance of popping up right in front of Khan. How about turning 90 degrees "upward" and just waiting for Khan to cross your line of fire? (I know why: dramatic license: it looks better on film the way it was shot. But its still stupid.)

It's possible that feature was added to starships after -- or even *because of* -- his encounter with Enterprise. Regardless of whether he knew about it: he recognized what was happening instantly and immediately shouted, "The override! Where's the override?!"

If he did know about it beforehand, he was smug in his domination of Kirk and his anger and arrogance led him to make that mistake. Kirk capitalized on an error his enemy made. And you have to give Khan credit: he and his gang were able to run a Federation starship pretty soon after taking it over and gave an experienced crew the what-for.

Dramatic license that we can handwave away: Enterprise's engines are damaged. Maybe like Zoolander they can't turn left.

I'm not talking about small things like why Kirk was such a ****** or why Scotty was stationed at the a** end of nowhere (both of which were actually explained in the movie). I'm talking about stuff like why Nero's mining ship was as big as a space station and had more firepower than an entire fleet, or what was he doing between his encounter with the Kelvin and the emergence of Spock, or what the explanation for the changes to Federation technology was (in universe, I mean, I'm perfectly aware of the real life reasons). Those things should've been explained in the movie, but they weren't.

The Kirk-Khan history isn't fully explained, but there was still a (very) brief summary of what happened between them. You don't get that in JJTrek. There's not even an acknowledgment that Nero and Spock have a relationship beyond Nero's "You didn't do enough to save my planet," tantrums, even though a deeper relationship is supposed to exist.

Sorry, that doesn't fly. Its been established that sensors can tell how many planets a system has as a starship approaches it: which side of the sun they are or what their relative positions are is irrelevant given the distances we're talking about. They could have thought Ceti Alpha Five was Ceti Alpha Six due to a confusion about distance. They could not have failed to notice that Ceti Alpha had one less planet than it was supposed to, or that there was a giant debris field that used to be Ceti Alpha Six.



I don't consider Chekov not remembering the significance of Ceti Alpha a plot hole. I do consider it a huge plot hole that a starship supposedly scanning a planet to make sure it was safe to destroy with the Genesis torpedo fails to discover what is essentially the remains of a ship on the planet that is obviously inhabited.


That's an interesting way to look at it. Lets flip it: in terms of consistency and scientific reasonableness, what does WoK do *right*?

And keep in mind I was talking strictly about the notion of plot holes and scientific inconsistencies, not which movie was subjectively better executed. I never specifically asserted that Abrams Trek was better executed than WoK. I questioned blaming plot holes and inconsistencies for not liking Abrams Trek. I believe noticing those is an effect of not liking Abrams Trek, not the cause, for many if not most people.


No, they cannot. In general planets don't just wander around near weird nebulas. But lets say this is an anomaly and it is in fact wandering around somewhere around the Mutara nebula. At what distance? It can't be *any* distance because Enterprise can see the extent of the Mutara nebula from Regula. That means it has to be quite far away from the nebula. The nebula can't be small, because at warp one it takes Enterprise several seconds to cross it at least, and it has to have enough mass for the genesis device to make at least one planet and one star.

Enterprise gets from Regula to the nebula in a few minutes with impulse engines. They have to be moving relatively slowly at impulse, and yet they get from a planet with a vantage point to see an entire nebula to the nebula itself in minutes. The distances don't work out there unless you assume impulse engines go way faster than its normally implied they can go.

But here's one that doesn't require any astronomical knowledge at all. Enterprise is heading for Regula at warp five. Thats a bit more than a hundred times the speed of light. At some point it is intercepted by Reliant and drops out of warp (presumably). A fight ensues, and Enterprise is crippled. It then proceeds to Reluga one at impulse. Lets assume it takes eight *hours* to get there, and that the impulse engines can travel at least half the speed of light. That means that at the time they dropped out of warp Enterprise was only about two and a half minutes from Regula at warp five. If Kirk took longer to walk to the bridge they would have made it to Regula.

And this one is compounded by another one. Reliant left Regula to intercept Enterprise. We've established that the intercept point has to be within about two and a half minutes of Regula at warp five. So when Khan gives the order to intercept Enterprise and Joachim says "may I speak" Khan should have said "make it fast, buddy, Enterprise is like just a couple minutes from driving right over us."

And one more on this subject: Khan says "prepare to alter course." Alter? He was at Regula. Kirk is heading for Regula. If he is altering course, that means he first left Regula, headed in a random direction, and then decided to intercept Enterprise after moving a significant amount of tangential distance. That also makes no sense. He should never have been anywhere but basically in a line between Enterprise and Regula, with no real need to "alter" course to intercept Enterprise. Enterprise is heading right for them.


That's called "cheating." Moreover, I consider plot holes that are integral to a story to be worse than ones that are tangential to the story, because the intergral ones cannot be ignored or dismissed.


Carol *calling* Kirk isn't a coincidence due to their prior relationship, although I do not think Carol is calling Kirk because she thinks Kirk is actually in charge of Genesis normally. In fact, I think she was surprised to learn that Chekov said Kirk assumed authority for Genesis. She seemed incredulous.

But Carol Marcus just happening to be the project leader for Genesis is no bigger of a coincidence than Scotty just happening to be on the planet Kirk and Spock are left on. And once again in Star Trek, Enterprise is the only starship anywhere in the region, by coincidence. And Enterprise is near Earth at the time, by the way. It was at impulse power after leaving space dock: it can't be far from the Solar System. Coincidentally, a ship near Earth is the only ship anywhere near Regula.

Coincidentally, the planet Reliant finds and beams down to happens to be the planet that Khan is on. Coincidentally the planet Kirk leaves Khan on happens to be near a planet that explodes, even though planets don't explode. Coincidentally of the two people who find Khan, one of the two is part of the Enterprise crew that originally found him.


I'll concede the Kobayashi Maru: that was utterly wasted in Abrams Trek. But as to the moments people are likely to remember from Abrams Trek to a similar degree, its hard to say: its been too soon to judge. Testing my personal memory is not representative: I remember the entire movie more or less accurately. But as to wow-moments in Abrams Trek that have been repeated to me by others, Kirk's father crashing the Kelvin into the Narata to open the movie is one, Spock's beam down to Vulcan (which was in the trailer) bookended with his beam back to Enterprise while Amanda falls to her death is the other. Will they or other scenes become "classics" in the same way some scenes from WoK have become? Probably not: WoK isn't just remembered because it was good, it is remembered because in many ways it was the first Trek movie to really grab people in a way the Motion Picture didn't. Its hard to become iconic, and it takes as much luck as skill to make it.


On my list of Trek movies, WoK is still probably comfortably in first place. But I'm juggling 4 and Abrams for the second spot, and interestingly I think Abrams Trek has a lot in common with 4. Both are radical departures, certainly, but they work. Both were designed to bring in a wider audience than the hard core Trek fans, and both succeeded. Both were met with grumblings about how they were "not Trek" and an insult to the fans when first released. I think most of the complaints about Abrams Trek will fade like those for TVH did, and it'll be appreciated for what it was. In terms of being good general entertainment, both succeed in my opinion. And I think in terms of being movies first and Star Trek movies second, both are superior efforts to most of the other trek movies. I think Undiscovered Country is a good movie, but WoK is the far superior work of similar tone. I think 3 and 5 are not as bad as people say, but not Trek's best work definitely. And I think none of the TNG movies including Generations is really anywhere near WoK, UC, TVH, or Abrams except maybe First Contact, and its still a movie that trails them.

Which reminds me: iconic moments are a metric, but not the best or only metric to judge a movie. Generations probably has a better one than any moment in The Voyage Home with Kirk's "it was... fun" scene. People remember that one. But TVH is a much better movie than Generations, even without a scene that trumps that one (for fans, TVH has lots of quotable moments, but that's not the same thing as having a generally iconic scene).

Doesn't matter. Starships have changed a lot since then. Khan certainly reread the manuals to take control of the Reliant.


If he knew what was happening he should have shouted what I would have: "fire."

It's more memorable, but I suspect it has to do with Trekkies being disappointed by how Kirk died rather than how poignant the scene was.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock spent a lot of time with the enemy commander. Which was part of why it sucked so badly, as Christopher Lloyd made a terrible, campy Klingon.

Star Trek in general has always done better when it created a genuinely interesting threat or enemy for the main characters to confront. In fact we tend to remember the challenge as much or more than what the characters did to overcome it: Khan, the Doomsday Machine, the Borg (the original scary Borg, not the Hugh/Seven of Nine version). I don't think WoK works with any other villain but Khan and any other actor besides Ricardo Montalban dueling Shatner-speak with whatever it is that Ricardo Montalban is doing in WoK. WoK needed a villain you honestly believe is the equal of Kirk and friends, something that Nero, Soren, Shinzon, Ruafo, and even the Borg Queen just never seemed to measure up to.

There's no question that Nero is not the equal of Khan. But I think a Khan would have blown Kirk and Spock off the screen: we don't know these new actors and reimagined characters well enough yet for them to stand up to a Khan, and there wasn't enough time to simultaneously develop Kirk and Spock *and* Nero at the same time. Nero was about as much villain as the first movie could handle. Think V'Ger.

I think the second movie will define whether the Abrams Trek respects the need for the cast to have a strong villain or threat to counter or not, much as WoK couldn't have been the first Star Trek movie after all those years and needed to follow TMP.

No offense to either actor, both of whom I respect, but when your Klingon captain is Emmet Brown, and his lieutenant is Dan Fielding, the wheels have come off of central casting.

The point I was making about Trek's general treatment of villains was how much is Soren, V'ger, etc., except for Khan, developed in their own movies? In half of these movies, there was an inanimate or wholely unhuman threat that you can't really color any more than "challenge." Khan is the epitome of Star Trek villains. Which also makes him the exception. You can have a massive challenge that the crew of the Enterprise overcomes, against all odds, without giving more than lipservice to the villain. Which is pretty much a "Monster of the Week" in movie-form. Which is okay, because not every villain needs to have depth. It is unfair to compare Nero to Khan, like you said. Who comes close to Khan anyways in the Trek movies?

And I wholeheartedly agree with the statement that the second movie will paint a clearer picture of where Abrams will take Trek. Think about the first movie, The Motion Picture, and Generations. They aren't viewed with the rosiest of glasses. They are usually damned with faint praise. Why? Because, as you said, they are placesetters. It is the first time with a new cast. First time an attempt to make a Trek movie with certain conditions. And so on. You can't swing for the fences on your first attempt, because if you whiff, that's it, it is over.

I don't buy into this, because that would mean you're excusing this film when you would never excuse a movie with an original story. And that's what I find a lot with Abrams' Trek: people keep saying, "Oh, it's the first one, give him time to sort it out," No. Abrams is a seasoned professional and the very weaknesses we see in his Star Trek are the exact same ones we see in his other works: he doesn't do characters, he does character sketches. He'd be great at making commercials, because he communicates a stereotype very quickly. But when it comes time to fully delineate a multi-layered character he invariably falls down.

I mean, no one watched the first Back to the Future and said, "Well, let's wait till the second one to see if Biff becomes a credible threat and Marty can think on his feet." Everything you needed to know was in that movie. Same goes for Raiders of the Lost Ark or Die Hard or Iron Man or the best Star Trek movie that's not a Star Trek movie, Galaxy Quest. You get the story, the heroes, the villains, everything, all completely set up.

Instead of raiding Star Trek: Nemesis and Star Trek: First Contact for his villain and his plot, he should've done what Bennett did and take a good long look at Trek's universe and come up with something interesting to hang his reboot on.

Not true. The Star Trek movie is obviously an attempt to set up a bigger story in a larger universe, and it has the burden an original movie doesn't have of having to mesh with prior expectations. That means its requirements are different from an original story that has no prior baggage.

Lets take a look at another recent example, albeit in a different setting. The reimagined Battlestar Galactica has a similar set of problems the Abrams Trek has. It had a set of preconceived notions it had to address, and it had to set its own course and tone. It had to do all of this and set up its future storylines all in one short three hour pilot. In my opinion, it did a pretty good job of it but I'm similarly "excusing" a lot that I wouldn't if I was judging this as a stand alone three hour movie. It isn't the miniseries that sets the tone of the show, its the first few episodes, and specifically the first one: 33. All the pilot did was make me interested enough to tune in to the first episode. 33 hooked me into the show. The pilot is mostly staging. 33 is a dramatic masterpiece.

Another relevant example: Casino Royale. Another reboot of a classic series, this time a movie series. Casino Royale is a great movie, but it does have the only little problem of being about someone I've never seen before, ever: James Bond, before he became James Bond. The one thing I have no idea about at all is just exactly where is this going with the character. Quantum of Solace tells me: Casino Royale isn't the new James Bond: its the fresh out of the wrapper James Bond that we're seeing once, and never again.

It also ends on an obvious set of hanging threads designed to be hanging in a way I would also rarely "excuse" in another movie, but I was willing to give Bond the benefit of the doubt. I was rewarded for that benefit of the doubt.

Probably the most relevant example though is X-Men. I made the same "excuses" in that movie. Unlike Abrams, you can't hang the bad character director label on Singer, but the first X-Men was a bit more plodding and superficial than is his norm. Partially because of the material, but also partially because those are the constraints he was working through. He had to start from scratch and invent an entire world for the X-Men to inhabit, and also invent his version of the X-Men. It was X2 where he was able to launch into the story at full speed without all that set up and showed much more clearly what sort of director he was. And I think that is fair.

He's not the strongest character director. But I think that's not a fair assessment of his work on Trek. Of course that is somewhat subjective, but I think his treatment particularly of Spock is not a caricature: its very well fleshed out. Its a little more superficial in the case of Kirk, but then again Kirk was pretty superficial in most of TOS as well. He was more of an archetype than a three-dimensional character except for a few very noteworthy episodes.


Bad examples. In those cases those movies were not intended to be setups for future stories, and did not have very much in the way of established baggage to cut through, except for Iron Man. And in the case of Iron Man, they had several advantages. Robert Downey Junior for one, and a less nit-picky fanbase for another. Iron Man is not an ensemble piece like Trek is. Its focused on one character. Everyone else is just along for the ride. Trek has to focus on Kirk and Spock, work in McCoy, Uhura and Scotty (and to a lesser extent Chekov and Sulu), and Sarek.

But more importantly, everything *I* needed to know I saw in Trek, just like in Raiders and Back to the Future. There were *tons* of unanswered questions in both those movies, but I didn't *need* them answered to enjoy them. I didn't need them answered to enjoy Trek either. Those who did decided they did but only as a matter of personal preference. There's no objective reason why they would be needed.

And if we fall back to the issue of movies being subjective, and if its not enjoyable then objective criteria is meaningless, which often happens in discussions like this, then the bottom line is more people seemed to pay for and enjoy Abrams Trek than did all the TNG movies combined.

Whatever else is subjective, this much is objective. Abrams reversed decades of other people slowly destroying credibility and interest in Star Trek. Before the Abrams reboot, Trek had one foot in the grave. People are interested in Trek again, and the franchise has a future again. This was not an obviously easy thing to accomplish, and I doubt one person in a million could have succeeded better on that score. The bottom line is Abrams left Trek better off than worse off or at best neutral. I cannot say that about Enterprise or Voyager or even Deep Space Nine. I can't say it about any TNG movie. I can't really say it about Star Trek III or V or even Undiscovered Country (which was not a bad movie). Excluding TOS itself, I can only say that about Star Trek the Next Generation, Star Trek the Motion Picture, Star Trek the Wrath of Khan, Star Trek the Voyage Home, and Abrams Star Trek.

And then he gets to Chekov and Scotty...