Star Trek Sundays: I Hate "Generations," and you should too
The absolute worst Star Trek movie, kicking off a terrible streak
It’s Sunday, and we’re going through all 13 theatrical STAR TREK films, a series that includes a number of pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). We continue today with the first Next Generation film, STAR TREK: GENERATIONS. Enjoy…
Star Trek: Generations
1994, Dir. David Carson
Originally published in 200 Reviews, based on notes from 2022
F*** this movie.
Few films flush their good ideas so aggressively down the toilet as Star Trek: Generations, a movie that arrives awash in potential and realizes absolutely none of it. For a story that at least wants to be about the weight of missed opportunities, the sad magnetic pull of the road not travelled and the perils of retreating into nostalgia, there is something almost poetic about how completely the film succumbs to the very things it asks its heroes to overcome.
The disappointment sets in right from the beginning, where the prologue sequence aboard the Enterprise B is clearly supposed to feature Kirk, Spock, and McCoy – and maybe could have been a fun passing of the torch if they had, indeed, secured the original trio – but the film was unable to secure Leonard Nimoy or DeForest Kelley, so we wind up following Chekov and Scotty alongside a very miserable-looking William Shatner. The scene was not meaningfully rewritten to adjust for the particular strengths of these characters or their particular chemistry, and it is all just as random and awkward as it sounds, with Chekhov doing the medical stuff and Scotty taking over the science officer duties, despite neither of those being their areas of expertise. It’s bad, and it gets worse, as the film transitions from Kirk (seemingly) sacrificing his life aboard the Enterprise B to the Next Generation crew fucking around on the holodeck in historical cosplay, the ship’s entire senior leadership team having a laugh in their play room while on active duty (without Picard seeming to have left anyone of substance in charge on the bridge), which is, at least, a fairly honest representation of the move from The Original Series to The Next Generation. Alan Ruck, recently resurgent due to his role as Connor Roy in HBO’s Succession, appears in the opening as the Captain of the doomed Enterprise B, and his presence makes me think of the most enduring line from that show’s final season: “I love you, but you are not serious people.”
The Next Generation cast aren’t always insufferable layabouts, of course – the films provide very little evidence of it, but these characters are beloved for a reason – and the single biggest problem with Generations is how little interest it has in any members of its main cast, save Picard and Data (and then only to let Brent Spiner be a ham, as part of the woefully misconceived ‘emotion chip’ subplot, which is one of the dumbest ideas in the history of Star Trek). Nobody else registers at all, the rest of the cast left to fulfill dry, technical purposes, with no joy or enthusiasm for these characters on display. Compare what Generations does with its cast to what a good groove the earlier films got into with giving everyone in the Original Series crew at least one big moment, or building in scenes for the characters to bounce off one another, and it’s night and day. This doesn’t feel like a film made out of any real affection for the Next Generation cast, but because the old guard stepped down, somebody at Paramount had another Star Trek film penciled in on the calendar anyway, and the train was already leaving the station.
As a result, Generations also makes precious little effort to actually look or feel like a movie, a problem most of the Next Generation films would struggle with as well. David Carson was and is today a TV director, and there is absolutely no shame in that – his Next Generation credits include the all-time great classic “Yesterday’s Enterprise” from Season 3 – but Generations does not look, move, or feel like a theatrical feature film, nor does the script, by TV writers Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore, pace itself like anything other than an episode of television, to the point where one can directly identify where the act breaks for commercials would go. Compare this to the grandiosity and energy of The Motion Picture or The Wrath of Khan or The Voyage Home, and it’s kind of startling how small and languid this film is, an episode of TV stretched uncomfortably to feature length, without the production bona fides to draw the viewer in. The one time the film attempts to build up a cinematic head-of-steam is the disaster movie action sequence that climaxes with the crash landing of the Enterprise’s saucer, and the only thing that’s interesting about it is how monstrously, devastatingly boring it is, numbingly bad from start to finish. Of all the times the Enterprise has been destroyed, this has to be the worst and most desperate.
It has always struck me as unnecessarily cruel to kill Picard’s entire surviving family off screen at the beginning of this film. These weren’t nameless, unseen characters – we met them, in one of the most memorable and beloved episodes of The Next Generation (Season 4’s “Family,” the direct follow-up to series high-point “The Best of Both Worlds”). And yet, here we learn they burned to death, off screen, due to a freak accident, and while it gives Patrick Stewart a moment to perform his heart out, the film in no way follows through on that trauma in a way that makes the enormity of it feel earned. The narrative economy of the scene is to establish Picard’s regrets around family for when he enters the Nexus in the third act, and sees himself living a life of happy domestic bliss, but it is insanity to think you have to kill his remaining family members to set up that idea. It is perfectly reasonable for Picard to be a little wistful about his lack of family ties, and for that to be the fantasy the Nexus offers him, without burning his brother and nephew to death in a house fire. Jesus.
The Nexus in general is just horribly executed from start to finish. It is not a bad concept – on the contrary, ‘magical wish-granting space field’ is sci-fi 101, so much so that the first episode of Star Trek ever produced, “The Cage,” plays on this same idea – but how they deploy it here is disastrous. First, because Soren is so thinly-written as a character – we never actually learn what about his life in the Nexus was so meaningful to him that he would destroy whole solar systems to return – that even the great Malcolm McDowell can’t make much out of him; Second, because it is a wildly convoluted way to reach the end goal of having Kirk and Picard interact, especially for a series that has never been shy about busting out time travel when necessary; and third, because once Kirk and Picard do meet up, the film reveals how little interest it ever had in actually doing anything with its central concepts, or making use of the amazing characters it has been handed.
Everything about the final act and how this film handles Kirk in particular is infuriating, but the idea that Kirk would have the exact same fantasy of domestic bliss as Picard is objectively insane. Star Trek: Generations is the seventh film in its series, and every single one of the preceding six movies is at least in part predicated on the struggle Kirk has accepting his age and letting go of the Captain’s chair – so why wouldn’t his fantasy be getting to stay eternally young as the swashbuckling Captain of the Enterprise, surrounded by the crew he vocally considered family? It is such a profound mis-read of the character, and Shatner is stranded with such extremely out-of-character material, that it feels as though nobody involved with this movie knew who Captain Kirk was before the cameras rolled. And insult is added to injury when we reach the end of Kirk and Picard’s fight with Soren – one of the saddest, cheapest, limpest action sequences ever committed to film – climaxes with Kirk dying after falling a few feet off a small bridge, which is definitely in the running for the title of ‘worst death for a beloved fictional character.’
To quote Roger Ebert from his iconic review of Rob Reiner’s North:
“I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.”
On film, at least, Generations is Star Trek’s most dire hour, an utterly botched passing of the baton that reveals how unprepared all involved were to carry the torch.
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