Posted by Shawn M. on Nov 23rd, 2007
Better late than never, right? Today, I’ll be taking a look at Captain Picard’s first big screen adventure, Star Trek: Generations.
Star Trek: Generations
Released November 18th, 1994
Directed by David Carson
It’s an historic day for the United Federation of Planets. The U.S.S. Enterprise-B has just been christened, and is ready for a quick spin around the solar system before heading out for active duty. The press is out in full force to cover the launch, and the man they want to talk to most is the legendary Captain Kirk. While not in command this time, he’s off to see the next version of the Federation flagship off (along with Scotty and Chekov). Soon after departing, the Enterprise-B runs across two transport ships that are caught in a strange energy field, and it’s ripping them apart. Being the only ship in range, the understocked ship has to help them. Scotty, operating the transporters, only manages to save a handful of the El-Aurian refugees from both ships, chief among them Guinan (who Next Generation viewers should know quite well) and a man named Dr. Tolian Soran. Dr. Soran demands to be beamed back into space, but is sedated by medical staff.
The energy ribbon heavily damages the Enterprise-B, and Captain Kirk volunteers to go below decks to perform a vital repair operation. He succeeds in his task, but there’s a hull breach. He’s ripped away from the ship, never to be seen again. Scotty and Chekov rush to his last know location, only to find emergency force fields over the rather large hole in the ship.
Seventy years later, aboard the Enterprise-D, the senior staff is in the Holodeck. The theme is the open seas, and Lieutenant Worf has just been promoted to Lt. Commander. Everybody is happy and joyous, save for Lt. Commander Data — everybody’s favorite emotionless android. He makes a failed attempt at humor, and Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge admonishes him. Meanwhile, Captain Jean-Luc Picard receives a message from Earth — his brother and nephew have been killed in a fire. Shocked, he leaves the Holosuite, and retreats to his ready room.
Shortly after, a distress call is received from a solar observatory. The away team, lead by Commander William Riker (and his beard) searches the station, deduces that the Romulans attacked, and find a single survivor — Dr. Tolian Soran, the very same from the Enterprise-B.
On the Enterprise, Data asks Geordi to install the emotion chip that he salvaged from his also-android brother, Lore, from events in The Next Generation series. Geordi agrees, but warns Data that it’s a risky endeavor. Capable of feeling emotions, Data heads to Ten-Forward and orders a drink from Enterprise bartender Guinan. Much to his delight, he finds the drink disgusting, and orders more. As she readies his next drink, Guinan looks over to catch a glimpse of Dr. Soran in the crowd.
Dr. Soran returns to the station to continue his experiment — a rocket that, when fired into the Amargosa star, will make it go supernova. Geordi and Data are also on the station for a follow-up investigation, and stumble upon Dr. Soran’s plans. Soran subdues Geordi, and Data, with a newfound sense of fear, is unable to save him and stop the rocket from launching. Soran beams away, with Geordi as his prisoner, and is picked up by a cloaked Klingon ship. Data returns to the Enterprise, and both ships flee the scene as the Amargosa star is destroyed.
Guinan tells Picard all about Soran, that he’s not interested in destruction or constructing weapons — he simply wants to return to The Nexus. The energy ribbon that destroyed the two transport ships from Kirk’s time is actually a gateway to a idyllic paradise, that’s different for every person. It’s a place where people’s fondest desires come true. In short, paradise.
Picard and Data discover that Soran destroyed the star to change gravity, effecting The Nexus’ trajectory through the universe. They devise where he’ll strike next, and rush to his location, the Viridian star system. They make contact with Soran and his Klingon buddies (the Duras Sisters from TNG), and Picard offers a trade - himself for Geordi. Soran agrees, but not before implanting a recording device in Geordi’s visor. Geordi is beamed back to the Enterprise, and Picard is beamed to the planet’s surface to talk to Soran.
When Geordi returns to engineering, the Duras Sisters are able to learn the Enterprise’s shield frequency. This allows them to send photon torpedoes straight through the Enterprise shields, severely damaging the ship. However, Data is able to come up with a way to “hijack” the Klingon’s shields. The Bird of Prey is destroyed, but the damage is done to the Enterprise. The warp core is about to blow, and there’s only moments to evacuate to the saucer section. Once separated, the saucer retreats, but the warp core breach’s explosion knocks it into a planet’s gravity, and it crashes.
Meanwhile, Picard is unsuccessful in his attempt to stop Soran from launching a missile that will destroy that system’s sun, thereby killing 230 million people on one of the planets. There is a side effect, though — Picard finds himself in The Nexus. In a lovely home, surrounded by his children, his nephew, and a wife. It’s Christmas, and everything is perfect. But Picard can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t right. Suddenly, Guinan appears, explaining her presence as an “echo” of the brief time she was in The Nexus. She explains the situation to Picard, telling him that he can go back to any point in time. Before Picard goes, though, he decides he needs some help.
That help comes in the person of one Captain James Tiberius Kirk, who has been in The Nexus all this time (though, from his point of view, he’d only just arrived). Picard convinces him that even though it’s everything he wants, The Nexus is fiction. Kirk agrees to accompany Picard back to the point where he tried to stop Soran. With Kirk’s help, Picard is able to stop the missile’s launch by locking it into place. Clamped in tight on the launch pad, it blows up, taking Soran with it.
Kirk, though, was mortally wounded in the fight. After saying goodbye to Picard, and that “it was… fun”, he finally makes that journey into the great unknown. Meanwhile, the crew of the Enterprise-D pick themselves up after their crash landing. Picard is rescued shortly thereafter, and everybody goes home for some well-deserved rest.
The Good: Obviously, The Next Generation casts’ opportunity to make the jump to the big screen is a very good thing, as at the time of its last episode, the shows’ following was very significant.
- At the time, the special effects were very good, save for a bit of reused footage to cut costs (the Klingon ship exploding is the exact same shot used in Trek IV).
- The Holodeck scene in the beginning, which is a location shot aboard a full-sail ship complete with crew.
- Data’s newfound emotions really add depth to the character. Some people like this change, others hate it. Despite how you feel, you can’t deny that Brent Spiner, the actor that portrays Data, really handled the sudden change in character and made the performance very memorable.
- The Enterprise’s crash scene is very intense. Growing up with TNG, it was very jarring to see the iconic ship take such abuse. Aside from story purposes, the Enterprise was destroyed so that a film-screen friendlier version could be brought in for the sequels, as the Enterprise-D was built for the 4:3 aspect ratio of television.
- It’s always good to see Shatner hamming it up, and his marked indifference towards Picard when they first meet is classic. That part of the movie really illustrated the difference between the two captains. While Picard is by-the-book, very efficient and commanding captain, Kirk really humanizes the role. I just couldn’t imagine Picard chopping wood or frying eggs the way Kirk did.
The Bad: This irked me from the very moment in the theater, and I’m sure a lot of people have wondered about it as well. It’s the point where Picard, when in the Nexus, decides he needs to go back to the moment just before Soran sends the rocket into the star, thereby killing so many people (including the Enterprise-D crew). WHY that moment? Knowing the things he did, Picard could have went back to a point earlier in the movie, arrested Soran, and have been done with it. I’m sure Geordi, who was heavily tortured (a scene cut from the movie but referred to by Doc Crusher) by Soran, would have appreciated it. Heck, he could’ve went back even farther to prevent the death of his brother and nephew. Captain Picard is a very smart man, so this line of thinking just baffles me. I know, it wouldn’t have made for a satisfying ending, but this is just too hard to buy.
- Kirk’s death seems kind of “meh”. But then again, how do you kill such an iconic character? An earlier script had Kirk taking control of the Enterprise-D’s battle bridge and dying there, which would have been more fitting. But falling down from some rocks while hanging onto a walkway? LAME.
- Dr. Soran, played by Malcom McDowell, seems far too generically sinister. Soran is always sneering or scheming and just has that “don’t turn your back on me” air to him. Maybe it’s just McDowell, who seems to have that same quality in real life, though. Maybe casting an actor who didn’t look so naturally evil would’ve worked better.
- In TNG’s episode “Relics”, Scotty is discovered on a planet, trapped in a transporter loop in a crashed ship. Scotty says in this episode that Kirk was still alive before he became trapped in the loop. Hmm… doesn’t that contradict the whole opening of the movie?
- The absence of Spock and Bones. They, along with Kirk, have always been the heart and soul of the previous six movies, and some of Kirk’s best scenes have been with them. Having Kirk without his two best friends just doesn’t feel right. Leonard Nimoy (Spock) decided to pass on the film (and was even offered the chance to direct) when there wasn’t enough time to fix the parts he felt needed it. As for DeForest Kelley (Bones), he was in bad health, and couldn’t obtain the neccessary insurance to appear on-set. Their lines were given to Scotty and Chekov, leading to the earlier point’s continuity error.
- While The Next Generation’s cast does well on the big screen, it’s pretty clear that in terms of personality, they don’t hold up to TOS’s crew (except for Picard and Data, who will go on to pretty much be the main characters in the next few films).
Final Rating: B-.  This movie had two things working against it — trying to bring the Next Gen cast to the big screen, and the death of Captain Kirk. The transition from television to screen was mostly successful, even though most of the crew factored very little into the overall story. As for Kirk, I personally felt it was unnecessary to even include him. We Trek fans didn’t need to see how he died — it was always open to interpretation.
The biggest knock on this movie, though, is the story problem with the Nexus and why Picard didn’t think about where he wanted to travel back to. He wanted to go back and re-do his fist fight, instead of going back later and taking care of things in the typical Picard style of diplomacy and words?
The production values were great, and the direction by David Carson was crisp, despite this being his first feature film (he did direct several Trek episodes, though). But despite the technical polish, the story really drags this film down into mediocrity. Not the best way to introduce the Next Gen cast to theaters, but at least it looked pretty. Thankfully, the next film in the series would fix a lot of problems of Generations.
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Devin de Gruyl
November 23, 2007 at 7:15 pm
I have some things to say about this movie myself. Now, I must here admit that I’ve never had the sense of connection, of “family” if you will, to the TNG cast the way I did the TOS crew, so my perspective will be a bit different from yours. I don’t actively dislike any of them - with one rather notable exception, which I’ll discuss later - but for some reason they just never “clicked” with me. (Or maybe it’s because I never really forgave them for killing off Tasha Yar, my favorite first-season character, in the sort of “chump” way so many redshirts bought it over the years.)
And speaking of “chump” deaths… As limp as Kirk’s death comes off as in the finished product, it’s still better than the originally-filmed ending, in which Kirk was simply shot to death after very stupidly turning his back on Soran. So yeah, James Tiberius Kirk, the John Wayne of the 23rd century, who’s survived Klingons, Romulans, Gorn, planet-killers, and oh my God the “Spock’s Brain” episode, gets his ticket punched by a minor villain who couldn’t carry Kahn’s allegedly-artificial pecs… sorry, not buying it. The falling-bridge ending isn’t much of an improvement, but at least Kirk doesn’t check out looking like a total moron in this one.
I understand the story necessity of Picard choosing to exit the Nexus at the point he did; it had to be a point after 1701-D piled in, because they really wanted to destroy the ship and move on to a more movie-friendly design, but if Picard had gone back any earlier than he did, the ship would’ve been all right. And personally, I shed no tears for 1701-D’s demise; I have always felt the Galaxy-class design was one of the ugliest Starfleet ships ever (yes, even worse than the “Grissom” model from ST3), all curves with no style (and horrid-looking windows in the saucer). The Soverign-class 1701-E, introduced in First Contact, is (IMO) so much better-looking it’s not even funny.
(BTW, small correction: The reused Bird of Prey explosion comes from VI, not IV.)
Data… what can I say. Brent Spiner plays it just about perfectly (the only time I cringe is the “tiny little life-forms” sing-song on the bridge), and hey - he’s got the line of the movie! (I won’t repeat it here, but I’m sure you know the one I mean…) But it established a pattern of making the later movies “The Picard and Data Show,” often to the detriment of other characters (I have no doubt that Gates McFadden legitimately loved Trek, for instance, because I’ve no doubt in my mind just about any other actress would have walked away from the movies given how shabbily her character was generally treated in them).
Oh, BTW, the character I actively hate? Riker. I just cannot stand the man. Even friggin’ WESLEY gets more respect from me than this smarmy, borderline Marty Stu-ish James T. Kirk wannabe. Johnathan Frakes has my respect as a director and possibly actor, but his most famous character invariably makes me long for a brick to throw through the screen. The scary part is, he’s at his LEAST offensive in Generations… by the time Insurrection came along I was ferverently hoping Riker would get impaled on one of those girders they insisted on ripping through the Enterprise bridge in that movie.
Unlike you, I do feel the death of Kirk was something that should have been explicitly shown. At least from a marketability standpoint; if nothing else, it would gaurantee Generations an iconic place in the Trek firmament no matter what, and it’d certainly be a major “hook” for even casual fans (or those who wouldn’t normally see a Trek film) to check it out at least once. It would be the equivalent of Spock’s death in II, or the original Enterprise’s destruction in III. Unfortunately, the way it was done came off very flat (even though it was still an improvement over what almost was), and since it happened in a movie featuring a veritable Pandora’s Box of a plot device (the Nexus), no doubt left many wondering when Kirk would eventually come back.
I did like Generations when I saw it the first time in theaters, but (with the exception of the saucer-crash sequence, which is still awe-inspiring 13 years later) I don’t think it’s aged well at all. Of the four movies to feature the TNG cast, however, it’s #2 behind First Contact, and light-years ahead of those twin disasters Insurrection and Nemesis. Still, in no way does Generations come close to that “Best of Both Worlds” vibe despite the watershed events it depicts (the death of Kirk, the end of the Enterprise-D). It’s a must-see for any Trek fan, but doesn’t really stand alone as a great film in and of itself…
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