Two Captains. One Destiny.

Story: Star Trek Generations
Written By: Ronald D. Moore & Brannon Braga
Series: The TNG Cast Films
Year: 1994

Star Trek: Generations is an okay film. It is enjoyable if your not thinking too hard, but once you start to question anything, it all falls apart. Soran is an average villain, nothing special, but he is sort of besides the point since the whole film is about getting Kirk and Picard together. I would have preferred a straight Duras sisters story instead of some weird tale where they kinda work with/for him and just die in an anti-climax explosion from the last film’s climax.
I feel this way about the whole movie. Things just happen. Nothing too interesting does, but things DO happen. A lot of it doesn’t make sense, and it is very disjointed. Data’s emotion chip storyline is mostly god-awful. Picard’s family storyline doesn’t really pay off in anyway (and it pointlessly kills off his family off screen in some fire because apparently we lost the fire dept. in the 24th century). And the Nexus is kind of a boring sci-fi cliché.

The whole sell of the movie hinges on Kirk and Picard getting to meet. Unfortunately, when your entire film is based on the idea that two people separated by 80 years meet, then you need some bad sci-fi cliché to make it happen. And it isn’t all that satisfying to have them meet. I do think Shatner and Stewart make the best of what they can with this script.

I like the sequence where Kirk dies to save the Enterprise-B, even if it doesn’t make a lot of sense. But I think the film would have benefited if he ACTUALLY died there, not in some old men fighting on a rickety bridge ending.
I can watch Generations, and if I don’t think about it I can enjoy it, but it just is not up to the level of quality that TNG usually maintained. Mostly I enjoy watching it for the nostalgic feeling I get remembering the excitement I had as a kid seeing these two titans of my childhood meeting. In that sense I like the movie, but when you think of the other Star Trek story written at the same time by the same writers you begin to realize that“All Good Things…” was far better...and it might have been even better if their attention was totally focused on it.

NEXT TIME: Battle with Borg and Time