Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

"I never took the Kobayashi Maru test until now. What do you think of my solution?"

It is 1980. Disappointed with the performance of the decidedly un-STAR WARS-like results of STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, Paramount executives approach television producer Harve Bennett about taking over the next outing of the Starship Enterprise...but for a far lower budget than the prior film and its special effects extravaganza.

To familiarize himself with the series, Bennett watched all 79 episodes of the original series, with one story – season one's "Space Seed" – igniting his imagination. The tale of an antiheroic superhuman named Khan who attempts to take over the Enterprise and who is left with his followers on an Earth-like planet to create their own utopia... well, it begged for a follow-up. Alongside co-writer Jack B. Sowards and young director Nicholas Meyer, Bennett created that follow-up, and set the stage for two more films that, though planned one-by-one, work as a perfect trilogy.

An epic revenge tale that also manages to pack in meditations on aging, regret, and how we deal with death, it’s the finest moment in the entire original series canon, and (arguably) one of the greatest science-fiction films ever made.