Review of Star Trek: Generations (1994) by Liam C — 18 Jun 2014

Ah! The odd movie curse strikes again. I'm not really sure how to feel with this movie and this is all due to the inclusion of Kirk, Chekov and Scotty. Not to just jump straight into this and sound like a raging fanboy but you either include them a lot, or not at all.

While Kirk does serve a major purpose, Chekov and Scotty just seem to be forgotten about after the first 10 minutes. I think the opening for the next generation of movies could have been improved a little, while the first movie effort of the original series is hardly a great work of cinema it did have a grand feel to it and distinguished itself apart from the TV series and actually feel like a film.

While this movie is hardly bad it just sort of felt 'okay'. Not to say my opinion on it was that it was a mediocre film but in comparison to 'The Motion Picture' is just an 'okay', on the contrary, I did infact like it but there are a few problems here.

The emotional side-plot with Data really didn't go anywhere, besides one scene in the middle where Picard and Data actually talk about how to control emotions and learn to live with them, everything else seems to be a lame excuse to get us to laugh at what he is doing and his constant laughter began to annoy after awhile besides getting us to laugh at him the whole point of that subplot seems to be that we don't want him to have emotions because of how annoying he is being- yes, it is given a concluding scene but it didn't feel like it was natural it just felt like it was included in the script because 'that storyline had to wrap up because its the end of the movie now'.

Even with that, all around, the acting was good with Malcolm McDowell doing a fine job as the antagonist and he is given a great line that I shall not forget 'Time is the fire in which we burn'.

The movie does manage to have good themes in it that are explored and one of them that plays into every scene of the movie is that things have life and death and time can be looked at as a predator or a companion and I thought this was handled well.

Considering how urgent the story is, I find it a little strange how some of the movie feels a bit padded, I feel that some of the scenes in the Nexus could have been trimmed as well as some of the action sequences, considering we have to see some of them twice, I don't think its an outlandish request.

Speaking of action sequences though, the movie is definitely a visual treat as some of the crash sequences look really great and the explosions look good also. Given the fact that this movie does have some time traveling, of sorts, it does raise some good questions that I forgot to put in my Star Trek IV review.

Surely if someone had the power to go back in time, surely any time something goes wrong they would just go back in time and fix it, right? Sure, you could argue that it would cause paradoxes but since when did that ever have any affect on anything in Star Trek and Star Trek IV seemed to get around that loophole in a fine way.

I am also a little saddened at Kirks departure from the movie series, its not in vain and it didn't feel like they ran out of ideas or anything but perhaps its just seeing a legendary icon gone for good- which I would have been fine with anyway because I assumed he left in VI never to be seen again, so I should be grateful I got to see at least 3 of the original cast again.

Given all of this though, I still liked the movie, it just had more problems than I would have liked.