Star Trek: Generations (1994)
Directed by David Carson

Film Review

With the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation proving to be a worldwide hit, it was inevitable that Jean-Luc Picard and his loyal crew would make it to the big screen, although they had to wait until their series had been cancelled before the opportunity arose.  Star Trek: Generations is so sympathetic to the popular series that it could easily be mistaken for a double-length episode, and therein lies its principal failing.  Despite some extraordinary effects work, the vision and story are so small-screen, so pedestrian, that the film doesn't quite make the grade as the sci-fi feature epic it so desperately wants to be.  The binary curse appears to be inescapable - the seventh Star Trek movie cannot avoid being dragged into the mire of mediocrity, like all the other odd-numbered entries in the series.

The film's shameless ploy of resurrecting Captain Kirk so that he can work alongside Jean-Luc Picard and then get himself killed off looks like what it is - a treat/shock for the fans which seems to have been crow-barred into the narrative at the last possible minute.  Whilst William Shatner's presence does inject some badly needed vitality into the film at just the right moment, it looks painfully like an afterthought and the decision to kill off Kirk in such a casual and unconvincing manner smacks of bad judgement.  However, without this controversial plot point the film would probably have been forgotten within months of its release - there is nothing else remotely memorable about it.  With the exception of Picard and Data, none of the crew of the Enterprise gets much to do, and most might as well be equipped with Klingon cloaking devices for all the impact they have.   A suitably nasty Malcolm McDowell makes a worthy opponent for the eternally unflappable Picard, but some totally risible dialogue reduces him to the level of a lame pantomime villain in several scenes.  Star Trek: Generations has some fleeting moments of brilliance, but these are few and far between, and so overall the film is pretty well forgettable.

Film Synopsis

In the 23rd century, Captain James T. Kirk is invited aboard the starship Enterprise-B to attend its maiden voyage.  The ship is about to return home when it picks up a distress call, from two refugee ships which are threatened by a mysterious energy ribbon.  Ill-equipped for a rescue mission, the Enterprise attempts to save the passengers on board the stricken ships but is itself hit by the energy ribbon.  As Kirk attempts to save the Enterprise, the hull of the section of the ship he is in is ripped open and he is sucked into space.  It is assumed he is dead.  Eighty years later, the crew of the Enterprise-D responds to a distress call from a solar observatory.  When they beam into the observatory, crewmembers Data and Georgi La Forge find it has been virtually destroyed by the Romulans.  The one survivor is Dr Soran, who fires a trilithium missile at a nearby star, causing it to go supernova.  Just before the observatory is destroyed, Soron beams himself aboard a Klingon ship piloted by the Duras sisters.  From the bartender Guinan, Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the Enterprise, discovers that Soran intends to return to the Nexus, the energy ribbon which the Enterprise-B encountered many years ago.  To do this, he must destroy the star of the heavily populated planet Veridian III.  Just before the Enterprise comes under attack from the Duras sisters, Picard beams onto the planet, determined to thwart Soran's deadly plan.  He arrives too late.  Once the sun has been destroyed, Picard finds himself in the Nexus, a place where dreams become reality.  It is here that he has an unlikely encounter, with Captain James T. Kirk...