Postmortem: Star Trek Generations

They say hindsight is twenty-twenty, and it's true; without proper historical context any evaluation of any subject is bound to be warped. In that spirit, a review based on something that was released years ago.

Star Trek Generations is the seventh feature film in the Star Trek franchise, and was released in 1994. It was the first film in the series to feature the cast of the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, which had run since 1987 and become a critical and commercial success. The producers, then, decided to end the show with its seventh season and begin a series of feature films. The previous six movies had featured the cast of the original Star Trek series, ending with their swan song in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country in 1991, but executive producer Rick Berman saw the movie as a way to "pass the baton" from the old generation to the new.

The film is split into two major segments. The prologue takes place in the 23rd century, with former Enterprise captain James Kirk overseeing the launch of the new Enterprise-B. The ship is undermanned and untested, and when the Enterprise is put into danger saving a ship of refugees from an energy ribbon, Kirk reroutes power to free the Enterprise. Just as the ship clears the ribbon, an energy tendril destroys a swath of the Enterprise, leaving the crew to believe Kirk dead.

In the 24th century, the Enterprise-D discovers that a scientist rescued by the Enterprise-B, Soran, is developing a powerful device to collapse stars, moving the course of the energy ribbon to intersect with a planet. Soran is willing to kill millions of people in inhabited star systems his device will destroy in order to return to the Nexus, a sort of paradise where time has no meaning; the only way to return to the Nexus is through the energy ribbon. Aided by scheming Klingons, Soran manages to launch the device into the nearby star. The Enterprise's captain, Jean-Luc Picard, is sucked into the Nexus with Soran; the Enterprise is forced to crash-land on the planet after sustaining critical battle damage, and is destroyed by the collapsing sun's shockwave.

Inside the Nexus, Picard finds his version of paradise; a warm home surrounded by the family he has never had time to have. Realizing that the happiness is an illusion, Picard enlists the help of Kirk, who had been drawn into the Nexus as well, and the two go back in time to foil Soran's plot.

Overall, the main issue with Generations is the persistent feeling that it's an over-long episode of the television series, rather than a movie in its own right. The film actually began production before the series ended, so it's not surprising. Pacing is erratic, sometimes with the sprightliness of a television episode ("Captain's Logs" used to narrate events rather than actually show them on screen) and other times lingering on sequences which could be expedited. There's also an issue with basic construction; the Enterprise's battle and crash takes place about an hour into the movie, almost two-thirds through the film, but before a real climax. The action is interpersed with rather dull shots without music or any lively pacing of Picard and Soran struggling on the planet below. While the destruction of the Enterprise and the "back in time" trick isn't bad per se, when it comes to the final showdown between Soran, Picard, and Kirk, it's underwhelming. The climax simply lacks punch; it's one guy with a weapon against two major characters. In addition the shifting action results in disjointed and compartmented action which lessens its sense of being a real story rather than a contrivance. The Enterprise disables a Klingon ship, cut to surface. Cut back, where there is suddenly a warp core breach; everybody evacuate. It's at times like these the story feels like it's being jerked along on a leash, and worst of all it's fairly evident this is so.

The ending features Kirk's death from plummeting into a chasm to stop Soran's device. In context with the battle mentioned above, it's underwhelming, but at least it's better than the original ending, featuring Soran shooting Kirk in the back. Negative audience reaction to the ending led to a $5 million resumption in production so that the new ending could be hammered out. It's better than the original and Kirk's final moments are actually decent, but still lacks tension; a cat-and-mouse game with more players would have been better at building to the climax, and Kirk could have gone out in a more heroic manner (say, sacrificing himself to disable the sun collapser-thingy by throwing himself at the launch pad.) Admittedly, the lack of budget and being forced to reuse the same barren landscape for the film contributed to a dampened ending, but the best Star Trek film (1982's The Wrath of Khan) was put together on a shoestring budget and succeeded because its story was strong from the getgo-a larger budget wouldn't have saved Generations from its fundamental story arc flaws.

Finally, the characters weren't the strongest, and the film's message was lost in the muck. What distinguishes good Star Trek from, say good Star Wars is that at the best of Trek lies themes more nuanced and interesting than good versus evil. Soran is an unconventional villain in that he's a shattered man who has lost his family and is only pursuing destructive acts in order to find his own peace, but he's rather minimized in the movie. Instead, Picard family angst and the android Data's flirtations with emotions take a larger role than required for advancing the story or adding nuance to the characters. The tie that binds all these characters together is a short of fondness for what may have been, but it's a rather poor tether and leaves the film without much in the way of a cohesive message. Data's emerging humanity is used more as fodder for jokes which occasionally feel tired and interrupt flow.

Overall, Generations is a good film, but not a great one or one that can be compared to the best films of the series. If it shows one thing, it's that trying to unify characters separated by 80 years of fictional history might not result in the best narrative, or the best movie.