By Steve Krutzler / 03:48, 27 August 2004 / Reviews - Products

Two captains, one destiny.

Well, not quite. STAR TREK: GENERATIONS seems born of several destinies, beginning with two competing scripts, including two popular casts, and layering together a broad range of thematic elements. The seventh STAR TREK feature has long been at the center of the disdain many have for the hit and miss ST:TNG films, but of the four, GENERATIONS is surprisingly the most watchable.

The new Collector's Edition DVD, hitting U.S. shelves on the eve of STAR TREK's 38th Anniversary, provides plenty of opportunity to examine why. It's a film rife with problems, from incoherent plot devices to bad lines and recycled pryotechnics. There are more gimmicks thrown into the film's near-two hours than even a Ferengi can keep up with. Klingons and sailors and Christmas trees, oh my, the script is a mishmash of creative energies. There are also blatant plot problems, like the concept of the Nexus, which invites more plot holes than you can imagine, contrived as a way to avoid using time travel to bring Kirk and Picard together. How exactly does one "think" their way out of the Nexus, anyway? You're better off not to ask such questions, but despite this caveat, GENERATIONS is still a lot of fun to watch.

One reason is the late John Alonzo's spectacular photography. It may be strange that the vacuum of space bathes the interior of the Enterprise-D in golden light, but it's sure pretty to look at. It also helps hide the lack of detail in the surfaces of the television sets, all except engineering looking better than they ever have. The warp core's flat, featureless face definitely needed a facelift for the big screen, but overall the Enterprise we came to know and love for seven years received a beautiful treatment in this film. The look of the film is also helped by a lot of color, perhaps lacking in the rest of the TNG films, in part due to the black and gray uniforms that FIRST CONTACT ushered in. At first it strikes of laziness for the crew to be interchanging between the TNG and DS9 costumes rather than having unique and consistent new threads, but the bold colors really make the frames of this picture a feast for the eye, and the familiarity of the style contributes to the happy feeling you get while watching, even if the script starts to drown about midway through.

The other big factor for me has always been Dennis McCarthy's original score. Second to my personal favorite, STAR TREK VI, McCarthy's score makes GENERATIONS the only TNG movie that I'll regularly watch through to the very last credit. Completely original and lacking the rehash that plagues FIRST CONTACT through NEMESIS, McCarthy's sweeping cues elevate the picture in many instances and never make the mistake of becoming mere wallpaper to the striking visuals. Highlights include the eerie Soran/intro pieces, the space battle, and the grandiose main theme that'll ring in your head for days. The only real let down is the Nexus music, disappointing mostly because the sequence as a whole just drags the film to a halt.

Despite warp-speed traveling rockets, confusing plot developments (such as Picard's volunteering to become a prisoner but then being immediately beamed down to the planet's surface), and a heavily contrived method of uniting Picard and Kirk, GENERATIONS still succeeds with some key elements. Namely, the scenes with William Shatner and the other representatives of the original crew, and Shatner's interactions with Patrick Stewart. The fact is that GENERATIONS goes into the hearts of both our captains and while the sentimental approach may not have been the best strategy for huge success at the box office, it's a really enjoyable ride for STAR TREK fans. We see a whole new side of Kirk and the look at his life that could've been is entirely appropriate for what would become the character's ultimate swan song, and a movie that tries desperately to deal with the issue of mortality. Having the swashbuckling heroes reexamine their choices as mortality creeps in is a poignant subtext to the "passing of the baton" credo permeating of the pic.

Data's comic subplot delights with groans and all. From the bad jokes to the "oh, shit," Spiner imbues all his scenes with successful humor and his journey across the gamut of human emotions provides an interesting subplot. Data and Geordi's relationship from the television series gets the most screen time in this movie (nearly forgotten in the others) and his emotional scene with Picard in stellar cartography - another example of rich, bright, pleasing color - is in the finest tradition of what STAR TREK was always about: the continuing exploration of the human condition. Add to that a marquee action sequence in the saucer crash landing (aka the scene so nice they used it twice), and you've got plenty of set pieces to keep the piece afloat.

The Commentaries

Co-writers Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore provide the play-by-play this time around, in a satisfyingly candid audio commentary track. Their discussion ranges from the early stages of development to little things like costuming, to outright criticism of their own work. Moore states that their inexperience as writers at the time contributed, and they both agree that meeting the demands the studio had for the script and pleasing everyone else along the way just made for a difficult writing process.

Braga and Moore explain the difficulties in working each character into the picture, such as finding a good way to utilize Troi and the mistake of having Picard become too emotional in his big screen debut. As the film progresses, both writers point out several blatant errors in the script and things they wished they could've worked out better. Braga points out something I've never managed to notice, which is the fact that Picard tells Worf "that's a pretty big margin of error" after Worf explains the odds of shooting down Soran's probe; obviously this should be "a pretty small" margin, not a large one.

Once the film gets into the Nexus, the commentary becomes pretty candid, from admitting that the idea of the Nexus itself wasn't very well-defined and invited numerous plot holes, to displeasure with the having introduced Captain Kirk doing, of all things, chopping wood and scrambling eggs. They admit that the inclusion of horseback riding was intentionally to attract Shatner and offer funny anecdotes like the fact that Shatner let the production use his horses for the sequence, but charged the studio for it! We also learn that much of Shatner's dialogue while walking his horse around Stewart was rewritten and replaced after the shoot.

By the end of the commentary, both Moore and Braga conclude that the performances of Stewart, Shatner, Spiner, McDowell, and the rest of the cast elevated the material beyond the page and that several of the film's misfires were the result of directly trying to avoid cliché and do things different. It seems that the proximity of the writing and production process to the seven year TNG series - both made for all intents and purposes, concurrently - actually made it difficult identify the types of elements that might've played better in a feature film.

Mike and Denise Okuda's text commentary comes in big STAR TREK-styled pop-ups, bringing you a mix of mundane, obvious, and mildly informative for the non-initiated observations or trivia facts about the picture. The main difference from previous Collector's Edition products is that they pop up on top of the film image, making it less attractive to run the commentary at all because you can't see the picture half the time and what's in the pop-up box isn't particularly compelling. Paramount would be wise to put these pop-ups in the black space below the letterbox from now on.

Continued...

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