Squid Flicks: Star Trek VII: Generations

Title: Star Trek Generations

Director: David Carson

Original Release: November 18, 1994

My Overall Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Kirk or Picard?  For the die-hards, it's the starting point question, the answer placing you in one camp or the other.  Which Enterprise captain is your guy?

What if you didn't have to choose?

For one and only one story in the canon, we get both of them.  

via Memory Alpha

Star Trek Generations begins in Kirk's era.  Kirk, Scotty and Chekov are the guests of honor for the christening of the Enterprise-B.  After the ship is launched out of dry dock, ceremony is usurped by duty when a distress call comes through.  Our man Jim takes over command when the "real" captain loses his nerve.  But then Kirk runs off to deflector control to make adjustments where he gets killed.  Or so it would appear...

Fast forward 78 years.  Picard & Company respond to their own emergency.  The Amargosa Observatory is under attack and the Enterprise-D runs to the rescue.  There, our friends encounter Soran, an El-Aurian scientist who seems harmless enough at first.  But he's in cahoots with the Duras sisters and that's not even the worst of it.  He's trying to direct the path of a mysterious, space-rending energy ribbon so he can get back to the utopian plane the ribbon contains, the very same ribbon that caused all the trouble in Kirk's story.

Generations was the first Star Trek movie I saw in the theater.  I went with my brother-in-law in Minnesota during Thanksgiving break my senior year of college.  I have to admit that before my recent re-watch, I remembered virtually nothing of the story outlined above.  I remembered Kirk's "death."  That's really it.  Nor did I remember Data's adventures with his recently installed emotion chip.  All I remembered clearly is the next bit.

Picard enters the Nexus, the world of the ribbon.  There, he meets Kirk, who apparently didn't die at all.  He just got trapped in the Nexus.  Picard tries to convince the older captain to come back with him to defeat Soran but it's no easy sell.  In the Nexus, all your dreams come true.  Picard experiences having a family: wife, children, the whole deal.  Kirk gets to hang out chopping wood and burning breakfast at his home on earth with the woman he didn't but maybe should have married.  And then suddenly he's at his uncle's horse ranch in Idaho.  The world seemingly becomes whatever you want it to, like a beautiful dream.  But none of it's real.

That bit I remember and it comes in much later in the story than I realized.  I'd forgotten the most important bit, too...

SPOILER!!!

Kirk dies.  For real this time.  Picard succeeds in bringing Kirk back with him and, indeed, they defeat Soran together.  But victory comes at a cost.  Soran kills Kirk.

It's been nearly 30 years.  I've forgotten many of the details from my life 30 years ago.  But in my experience, emotional impressions tend to last and I think it says something that the event which was clearly meant to leave such an impression didn't.  

Some critics complained - and not for the last time - that the film feels too much like a long television episode.  That, in itself, doesn't bother me so much.  Obviously, I like Star Trek episodes.  And I think the Kirk-Picard partnership, gimmicky though it feels in the end, does bring that certain something special that a movie should have.  The real problem for me is that apart from the gimmick, the plot itself was not especially memorable.  

As is true of many great stories, TNG's series ending felt like a new beginning for the characters (see here).  Picard's relationship with his crew had clearly changed.  Perhaps the first movie could have worked better if it did more to build on that new beginning.  I understand wanting to make a film bigger than the show had been in terms of scope.  But don't lose sight of why we've grown to care about these characters.

So where does Generations stack up against the previous films?

1. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
2. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
3. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
4. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
5. Star Trek VII: Generations
6. Star Trek: The Motion Picture
7. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

For the first six movies, my rankings mirrored the Rotten Tomatoes ratings exactly.  Here, I break.  RT has The Motion Picture slightly above Generations.  In truth, both movies feel disappointing - acceptable but so much less than they could have been.  Fortunately, in both cases, the subsequent film was a considerable improvement.