I’ve always been partial to The Motion Picture, and The Wrath of Khan is good too!

I tend to agree with your comments on the movies though. I’ve run into the same thing with all of the Star Trek movies over the years. I’ve never had any of them that really got me excited like the shows have.

My feeling has always been that Trek works best as a TV series. Movies (and by extension heavily serialized shows) often feel to me like just a buildup to an action sequence at the end, and one of the things I like about Trek is the number of times they find an alternative solution to the problem, with that being a last resort. But since action often gets more people in theatres, we don’t get that kind of story!