A Look Back At: Star Trek Generations (1994)

WARNING: This review discusses key plot points throughout the movie. If you want to go into the experience spoiler-free, come back and join the discussion after you’ve watched it yourself.

Background

Star Trek Generations came at a crucial time for the Star Trek franchise. After six feature films, Paramount was ready to move on from the original series cast. On television, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” was wrapping up its seven season run.

When Paramount executives approached longtime franchise producer Rick Berman about making the seventh Star Trek film a TNG vehicle, the decision was made to use the film to pass the baton from the Kirk era to the Picard era.

To facilitate this, writers Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore came up with a story centered around the El-Aurians. They are a remarkably human-like species of “listeners” who have extraordinary longevity. Whoopi Goldberg’s recurring character Guinan, a centuries-old bartender aboard the USS Enterprise-D, was the perfect means to bridge the gap between the two generations of Enterprise crews.

And using a recurring astronomical event to link the two time periods really works on a conceptual level. But somehow the execution just isn’t quite as satisfying as it should be.

The Story

The movie opens with the christening of the USS Enterprise-B, under the command of Captain John Harriman. It is very similar to the USS Excelsior that made its debut in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. But the lower hull of the third USS Enterprise flares out in a way that both anticipates the shape of the Enterprise-D and feels reminiscent of the World War II flying boats.

A full contingent of Federation journalists along for the ship’s high-profile maiden voyage. A few of the old guard — Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov — are in attendance as special guests. It would have been great to have the entire main cast from the original series back, but there wouldn’t have been enough for them to do.

Soon enough, the Enterprise-B finds itself in called into action, without much of the technology needed to mount an adequate response. Kirk saves the day one last time, but seemingly dies heroically in the process after saving 47 refugees, including Guinan.

The movie jumps ahead nearly eight decades. Worf, the first Klingon Starfleet officer, is finally being promoted to Lt. Commander in an elaborate ceremony on the holodeck. Everything is jovial until Picard gets a shocking bit of news: There has been a fire at the family vineyard, and his brother and nephew perished in the blaze. Suddenly the man who has never had time for a family is the last of the Picard bloodline.

Before Picard has a chance to process his loss, the Enterprise-D responds to a seemingly unprovoked attack on a Federation observatory orbiting a star that has suffered a brutal Romulan attack. There are only five survivors — including Dr. Tolian Soran, one of the El-Aurian refugees rescued by the Enterprise-B.

Soon, they find themselves in the middle of a dangerous situation involving threats both old and familiar. Will they be able to figure out what’s going on in time to stop it?

The Good

This feels cinematic in a way that many of the movies with the original series cast did not. There’s something just really special about movies made in the mid-nineties. It was the apex of celluloid filmmaking, before digital took over. Movies looked even better than movies shot on film today, because there were so many more options for film stocks and there were so many more labs with deep benches of expertise. The exteriors in this movie, in particular, are gorgeous with natural colors and beautiful contrast and saturation.

Certain corners had to be cut to get this movie into production and then out to theaters so soon after the end of TNG on television. The movie reuses the Enterprise-D sets from the TV series. It also utilizes a hodge podge of the uniforms from the later seasons of TNG and the uniforms from the early seasons of “Deep Space 9”. The messiness of all of that is one of the things I like about the movie. It bugs me when something makes the jump from TV to the silver screen and they redesign everything for the scope and scale of the movies. It interferes with my suspension of disbelief.

There are some tweaks to some of the sets, like the Enteprise-D bridge. But this movie still feels like it exists in the same world as TNG. And it makes sense that when an interstellar organization with thousands of ships across half a galaxy switches to new uniforms, there would be a bit of a prolonged transition period. We never got to see that before, and this movie captures that moment.

The key selling point of this movie is getting to see Kirk and Picard share the screen together. Patrick Stewart and William Shatner are both consistently great in this movie. In fact, they’re often better than the material they’ve been given to work with. Shatner’s performance as Kirk has been parodied by Kevin Pollak and others so often over the years that it’s easy to lose sight of what Shatner actually brings to the role. He’s wonderful here, and understands his role as a supporting actor.

The Bad

If you’re going to kill off an icon like Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise, you’d better give him a worthy death. And that just doesn’t happen here. They knew from the test screenings that the ending didn’t work, and Paramount gave them millions to reshoot it. But the new ending still need to take place at the same location and center around the same basic conflict. So there were limits to how much the reshoots could solve the problem. Kirk was felled by a damaged gang plank. He should have died in the captain’s chair aboard the Enterprise.

A lot of the humor just doesn’t land, especially with regard to Data and his emotion chip. Too often it’s grating instead of amusing.

The audience doesn’t really feel the stakes either, because we never see the millions of people that are in danger, or even the planet they’re on. The convoluted plot with Saron and the Duras sisters doesn’t feel epic enough in scope.

And it’s kind of a downer to end on the destruction of the Enterprise-D.

The Ugly

TNG was famously lit so brightly and so fully that nary a shadow can be seen aboard the Enterprise. While much of this film is beautiful to look at, many of the scenes aboard the Enterprise-D go too far to the opposite extreme. There are a number of scenes that are so dark that it’s hard to believe that the characters can see what they’re doing. This is especially true in HDR on the recent 4K Ultra HD release of the movie, with the rich deep blacks.