Star Trek: Generations (Short Version)

Star Trek: Generations
Captain Picard: Patrick Stewart
Captain Kirk: William Shatner

My long, geeky review will be after this one, so I will keep this short for those who have no interest whatsoever in that type of thing. For those who read the next one, if any do (I have my doubts about this), I still recommend reading this. It is a good counterpoint for the things I complain about in the next one.

This was the first Star Trek film to feature the crew from the second series. It was actually being written in the final season of the show. A show that I really liked (though not so much anymore). Sadly, I think this movie is flawed. It is the only Star Trek DVD I had that was still unopened, including all 7 seasons of Deep Space 9 and the 3 seasons of the original series. It just doesn’t excite me. Despite all this, I think it is a decent popcorn movie. A lot of the film is fun, there are a few very good moments, and the first 15 minutes are fantastic.

The primary flaw, around which everything else rotates, is that the film is mediocre. The characterizations of everyone who is not in the first 15 minutes feel incomplete. Unfortunately, “everyone” includes the entire crew of the second series. Much of the movie is less like a film than a television episode. The direction is static, and the editing often makes the acting look worse than it likely was. The writers never found a good way to bridge the new crew to the silver screen, and it damages the movie severely. In short, much of the movie wanders from scene to scene, very few reaching anything other than functional.

A major problem is that, unlike the original Star Trek movies, the cast of this one is huge, resulting in several being used as little more than set pieces. The characters with dialogue in the first 15 minutes are given more meaningful things to do than some of the characters from the Enterprise D, who were supposed to be the focus of this film. None of the movies with the original crew featured more than 9 or 10 characters. This one tries to fit 14. As much as it pains me to admit, three or four of the characters probably should have just been dropped from the film. Keeping them dragged the entire film down.

The key reason to see this film is for the first 15 minutes. Kirk, Scotty and Chekov are a lot of fun to watch. Indeed everything about the beginning of the movie is fun to watch. It manages in that short amount of time to effectively (being the key word) put more humor, action, drama (not melodrama), and pathos than the rest of the film does in more than 90 minutes. What’s more, the writers were able to pack a more dramatic punch with these actors than they were able to do with all the others combined. They are easy to identify with, even the new ones, so you feel their worries and fear quite strongly. It is a shame that these characters, and not just the three from the original series, could not have been the entire cast. The writers clearly had a better grasp of how to write for them than anyone in the rest of the film. This is ironic because the two writers had written for Star Trek: The Next Generation for about four years by then; they should have been experts with the new crew. Alas, it was not to be.