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Star Trek GenerationsRating:
Release Date: 13 May, 2003 Retail Price: $19.99 OUR Price: $17.99 You SAVE: $2.00! Cast: Complete Cast (20 total) |
Star Trek Generations Reviews
Mr. Tricorder
The 7th movie of the Star Trek films is perhaps the worst movie of all. Now, some people might say that Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is the worst movie of the Trek movies. But, they're wrong.
The Enterprise-B is carrying three members of the aging "classic Trek" characters; Capt. Kirk, Scotty and Chekov. The Enterprise-B does a rescue on ships trapped in The Nexus. The Enterprise-B is badly damaged, and Kirk is presumed dead. But, Kirk is just living happily back at his house on Earth within the Nexus.
The story is the worst of the movies. The only thing that saved the moive--for me--is the subplot about Data's emotion chip.
Poor movie, but excellent DVD edition
One of the things that I find mystifying and annoying is the degree to which DVD commentary tracks can completely fail to reflect reality. Listen to the commentary track on a movie like Aliens vs. Predator (a truly awful film) and you would think that they were discussing a classic, like 2001. What is on the screen is crud, but what you hear is self-delusion.
That is why the commentary track on this Star Trek movie is so refreshing. The two writers, Ron Moore (now the executive producer on Battlestar Galactica) and Brannon Braga, talk about this movie and are surprisingly self-critical. So much of the movie simply does not work, and they admit it. And they blame themselves (although they probably resisted blaming others as well).
In particular, they are critical of several key aspects of the movie. They think that the entire Nexus plotline did not work very well and had way too many internal contradictions ("You can't think about it too much," one of them says at one point, "or it falls apart."). They really disliked the sequence where Picard goes into the Nexus and experiences a Victorian Christmas scene that is so treacly and mawkish that you want to gag (at one point one of them says something like "Whenever you have five little kids all showing 'yea!' at the same time you know you're in trouble."). (An aside: I was surprised that nobody considered using Picard's "family" from the outstanding Next Generation episode "The Inner Light" for his Nexus sequence. That would have added a powerful emotional depth to the story.) And they thought that they made a mistake by not having Picard and Kirk clash with each other. (According to Moore and Braga, both men got along extremely well on set, however.)
They also completely disliked the ending, where Captain Kirk dies. This ending was re-filmed because the original had Kirk getting shot in the back and dying unceremoniously. But the final version that they ended up with is similarly unsatisfying. A friend of mine, who ended up working on Star Trek Enterprise, once said to me that he too thought it was lame: "Kirk dies reaching for the remote," he said. Moore and Braga said that they wanted an ending that was not cliched, that did not have what everybody expected, which was Kirk dying on the bridge of a starship. But watching the movie again, they realized that that is EXACTLY what they should have done--they should have gone for the heroic ending of a hero. Instead, we're all left unfulfilled. If they had used "The Inner Light" for Picard's Nexus sequence, and had a more heroic death for Captain Kirk, this would have been a much better film. Otherwise, it is largely forgettable.
One surprise for me was their casual way of destroying the Enterprise. They resurrected this idea from a rejected TV episode after getting the idea out of a Trek technical manual. They just thought that it would be "neat." The fact that it served no real purpose in the story, and had no emotional resonance, is a major disappointment. It proves that Moore and Braga lacked the reverence for the Trek universe that was needed.
Both men note--and they are exactly right--that William Shatner nearly stole every scene he shared with Patrick Stewart. He demonstrated an enthusiasm for the role that really shone through. It proves that for all the criticism of his abilities, Shatner can certainly act.
The overall technical quality of this 2-disk set is excellent. The extras are also pretty good. The deleted scenes are fascinating for the simple fact that they are all so bad. Groan-inducingly bad. I've already mentioned the original ending (brave Captain Kirk gets shot in the back). But the original opening, with Kirk skydiving from orbit, was also badly fimed, edited, acted and written, and we are lucky it did not make it into the movie.
The tribute to Matt Jeffries, who designed the original series ship and sets, was nice, but is the kind of thing that belongs on a different DVD (such as the TV series collections). The graphic designers who worked on the later shows comment about Jeffries' work and some of them explain why it was so good--Jeffries strove for a bold, distinctive look using relatively simple lines. As one person notes, Jeffries knew that the ship had to be recognizeable as it zoomed across the screen, so he gave it large, distinctive elements.
The short on filming the special effects was also interesting, although it left me wanting more. One surprising revelation was that the cameras often damage the models during close passes, requiring constant touch-up. Unfortunately, nobody mentioned that the visual designers felt that the TV series ship was the wrong shape for the more rectangular movie screen, and whether or not this influenced the writers' decision to destroy the ship. (It does explain the fact that the later Enterprise is much longer than the TV series version--so it fills up more of the movie screen.) I wished there had been more footage of the modified Enterprise 1701-B and the spacedock.
Star Trek Generations was not a good movie, but this is a pretty good DVD collection that can be enjoyed for what it is.
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