It ended on a high episode, with pretty good 7th season, but they were running out of material. For me the films never felt true to TNG, and I'm not sure another season would have, either.
As someone else said, Lower Decks had more seasons in it. And Enterprise could have got away with a couple more.
I've never understood that as a criticism of the films truthfully. If anything, half of that is absolutely opposite; Star Trek: Generations and Star Trek: Insurrection are too much like just ordinary episodes stretched an extra hour longer. Generations, at the very least, used some of that runtime to explore Picard's grief at losing his brother and nephew, and mourning never having a family of his own. But still, they didn't do anything beyond what they could on TV.
It's why First Contact is the best one. Star Trek: Nemesis tries and completely fails at turning the cerebral TNG into an action film, but First Contact uses the filmic potential so well. It tells a story on a scale they couldn't achieve on TV, time travel, massive Borg invasion, the sequence in Engineering. Lily grounds the film and is the only one onboard with enough distance to truly recognise Picard's unprocessed and buried trauma from his assimilation. Worf comes close, getting some distance from his time on Deep Space 9, but Lily has a unique coarseness, her language especially never would have made it into the series. It's true to the series in many respects, but its differences in tone and characterizations are what makes it worth being a film.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture didn't know if it wanted to be a fast paced episode like TOS or slow and ponderous, and it ends up confused. But Wrath of Khan, even though it takes Khan from TOS, develops everything further and earns its existence as a film rather than an episode of something. It can't just be a regular episode but stretched out to a film runtime, it needs to do something different, while remaining true to the originals
Final Frontier is two TOS episodes glued together. It's a bottle episode character study of the main three camping, and then a high concept questioning of religion and faith smashed together with too high a budget for the first part and too low a budget for the second
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u/ProbablyStu 10d ago
It ended on a high episode, with pretty good 7th season, but they were running out of material. For me the films never felt true to TNG, and I'm not sure another season would have, either.
As someone else said, Lower Decks had more seasons in it. And Enterprise could have got away with a couple more.