Retro movie review – Star Trek: Generations

Haven’t done this in a while, so let’s have a go shall we?

Man, it is really hard to believe it’s been almost 14 years since this, the first film to feature the Next Generation crew, was released. Lot‘s happened since then, both in the world and in my own personal life. When this came out, I was in the middle of courting my soon-to-be wife, and the notion that she would be a stay-at-home mom with three sons to take care of wasn’t even a vague notion.

Technology has advanced quite a bit as well. I remember being impressed by the wall-sized view screen on the 1701-D bridge, and would have killed for a similar setup. After all this time, how did I revisit this film? On my wall-sized (projected) screen, which cost less than some Star Trek collectibles I have seen for sale on ebay.

 

And all that 24^th Century tech gear they used? Heck, my iphone looks cooler than any tricorder from the show (though nothing beats the classic style of the original series’ props).

So, 14 years later, how did the movie stand up? Not very well, I’m afraid. Course, I did not like it that much when it was initially released, either”¦

The film marks the meeting of the original captain of the Enterprise James T. Kirk with the next generation’s Jean-Luc Picard. This was a BIG DEAL for Trek fans, and there was a lot of anticipation for the film. How would the meet? What would they do? What epic struggle would they have to join forces to defeat?

They finally meet, dramatically”¦ actually, no they didn’t. They debated each other about obligations and duty as one of them fixed breakfast.

Sigh.

 

How’d they get to that point (and how did WE get to that point as an audience)? The plot is a contrivance, really, to create an adversary to defeat and get the two captains (Kirk and Picard) together. The bad guy, played by Malcolm McDowell, is a one-note character though McDowell does a great job with what he is given (he, Shatner and Stewart are all good here, and the acting is one of the few highlights). The effects are solid, the supporting cast all have great moments, but”¦

It just doesn’t work. The quest of the bad guy (to get back to The Nexus, where “death has no teeth”) involves collapsing stars and killing millions of people and, well”¦ the stakes just seem artificial. The way the crew stumbles into the bad guy’s plot is just”¦ well, they stumble into it. Whoopi Goldberg’s powers are, like in other episodes of TNG, mainly the alien power of exposition, allowing Picard to get the information he needs to advance the plot forward. None of it is organic, it’s all forced.

The nice thing about rewatching it was I was able to watch it twice ““ once with my oldest son (who thought it was “˜OK’) and once with the Ron Moore and Bannon Braga audio commentary track on. Braga and Moore wrote some of the best episodes of TNG and Moore is a fantastically talented writer (see the new Battelstar Galactica) and so their comments are particularly enlightening.

They don’t like it either.

Well, let me clarify that: they don’t out and out say “man, we screwed up” but they say enough things to make you realize that, if this was not a commentary track for a DVD, they would probably be a lot more critical and forthcoming about their opinions (though they do admit that the final two-hour episode of TNG was better and THAT should have been the movie). Moore, especially, appears to have a lot of regret about how it turned out. He’s not the only one.

A couple of final thoughts: They had to reshoot the ending which, like the final version of the movie (SPOILER ALERT) had Captain Kirk die. Watching the original ending, I shudder to think of how that would have been received (it may have killed Trek at the cinema much sooner than Nemesis finally did). It was pretty bad, and the final ending was better by comparison but”¦

I’m not one to say “Captain Kirk should not have died” or “how dare they kill Kirk!” but I will say that the whole narrative structure failed the audience and reduced the meaning of Kirk’s death to a footnote. Allow me to explain this opinion. Basically, whenever anyone sees a film, reads a novel or watches a TV show a natural suspension of disbelief occurs, and how far the audience will “go along” with the writer or director depends on how “grounded” the story is by the rest of the work.

Ian Fleming wrote some CRAZY stuff in his James Bond novels, but he “grounded” the story elements with so much real world detail that the reader got past any doubt and got swept up in the story. Richard Donner and Mario Puzo’s Superman: the Movie has at it’s heart a near-ludicrous premise (most super-hero stories do) but they do a very smart thing: they make the world Superman lives in as real as they can and the authenticity of his surroundings helps the audience believe what they are seeing. I could list other examples but let’s return to Generations“¦

Two-thirds the way through the movie, Picard enters the Nexus (where Kirk has been since the first part of the picture), where everything is a fantasy and NOTHING IS REAL. See what I’m getting at? To viewers, who have bought into the story by that point, you have now reset their expectations and shown them a completely “real-looking” environment that does not really EXIST. Then you take them out of the “fake world” and put them back in the “real world” and”¦ you’ve lost them. Now, it’s just a movie, there is no emotional investment, and they have no “skin” in the game.

The Matrix had a similar problem with their narrative, but they fixed it by making the audience care about the characters and curious about the “secret” of the Matrix and THEN it was revealed, the twist being that the “real world” they had come to believe was NOT real. That worked (at least for the first film). This”¦ didn’t.

Kirk died, and it FELT like it did not matter (even though in the story he saved millions of lives). And that is hard to accept as a classic Trek fan.

So, all in all, was I glad I revisited Generations? Yes, because it is still not a “bad” movie in the context of something that MST3K would make fun of”¦ but I doubt it’s a DVD I’ll revisit anytime soon.

Maybe in another 14 years.