Star Trek: Generations.

• EARL: Overall, I liked it. I had originally feared that too much of the Trek formula was going to be changed, but as it turned out, most of the changes were for the better, because the film needed to be something bigger than Next Generation was on TV, and so they had to do these things. There were some changes I did not like, but many of these were primarily technical and can be ignored by more reasonable and sane individuals. Overall, I thought it was an excellent movie - guess I've gotta eat my words from several months back, when I was pondering this movie's fate as one of the odd-numbered Trek films!
• ROBERT: Yes, I remember that. I tried to avoid any foreknowledge of the movie. I wasn't completely successful, ultimately. I really didn't want to know that Kirk died; however, that realization didn't ruin the actual theater experience. I thought the movie was quite good - much better on a second viewing.
• EARL: Though it wasn't as important as the movie itself, you do have a point - that it was impossible not to know certain things about what was going to happen in the movie. It seems like the script leaked out suspiciously early, and Paramount's efforts to milk any surprise out of this thing were very lax.
• ROBERT: I really did try to avoid as much as I could, but by a week before the movie came out, well...you have all the Star Trek magazines, and so many of them were intent on revealing as much of the story as they could. Really, I knew a lot about the movie, but going into the theater and seeing it, the foreknowledge didn't destroy it for me. I thought it was a good movie. I thought it tailored to Trekkers and non-Trekkers alike, but I did have some peeves with the movie - as I'm sure you did.
• EARL: Well, let us progress to the peeves! Peeve number one, please.
• ROBERT: I'm about to peeve. One peeve I had with the movie was - maybe I'm being too picky - the ILM effects were great when it came to the energy ribbon and so forth, that was fantastic. But the space battles with the Klingon ship were kind of awkward...is that just me?
• EARL: Some of that may have been budgetary. They were treating the Enterprise as a stationary platform that could only turn but couldn't actually move. They implied with such things as the pilot episode of Deep Space Nine that these rather large Starfleet ships can turn and bank and rival the Star Wars variety of action, but here they had the Enterprise lumbering.
• ROBERT: You coudl also tell that they swiped some scenes from previous movies, like the Klingon ship blowing up that was obviously taken from Star Trek VI.
• EARL: I hope they leave it blown up this time because I'm bloody sick of the Klingon bird of prey! They took the trouble of making a new Klingon ship for the TV series, and if they decide to keep up this strange pattern of having the Klingons be the enemy in every movie, which has been the case since Star Trek III in which the bird of prey first appeared, at least give the Klingons some new wheels to get around in.
• ROBERT: It helped the storyline in this case. You could see Lursa and B'etor using whatever they could get their hands on to achieve their goal, and it helped that we needed to destroy this ship, and what better to do it than find some fatal flaw in an older ship that Worf could know about? That aside, I thought the special effects were good, but they could've played it up and made it a bit more fluid and more exciting. They were exciting, but not exciting enough.
• EARL: The special effects on the outside I'm willing to let fly. On some of the interiors, though, it gnawed away at me that every time there was an explosion on the Enterprise bridge and something blew ip and some poor extra in his yellow uniform went sailing over the railing, everything suddenly went to slow motion. They're great explosions and great stunts, but they did the slow motion gag way too much - they blew up the Klingon ship in the same way, and they throw Worf and Crusher into the water that way...I suppose it looks more dramatic, but it struck me as really looking hokey. If they had kept the scenes going fast and furious and still included those scenes at a normal speed, I think it would've had, at the very least, the same impact. To slow it down like that was almost putting a neon sign on the scene saying, "This is a miraculous stunt you will enjoy!" But on the other hand, it's also for the general audience.
• ROBERT: It is a convention in a lot of action movies to have the slo-mo sequences. They do it in big action pictures where they have trucks exploding and so forth, because in actuality the explosions aren't as interesting in real time as they are in slow motion. Now I thought it was very clever at the beginning to have the bottle swinging through space and then crashing into the ship. It's very hard for movie directors to keep the audience's attention in the opening credits. If you look at a movie, say, Speed, they have to take the audience by the hand and show them who's in this movie, who directed it, who produced it, wrote it and what have you, and at the same time show something visually interesting to keep people watching. I thought they did a good job here - at the beginning, you don't really see the bottle or understand what it is until it suddenly hits you that they're christening a new ship and doing it in a novel way, and I thought that was very clever.
• EARL: And in space, that bottle crashing into the ship makes a lot of noise out there in that vacuum! That's really a minor technical point that is ridiculous to bring up, but I thought it was kind of amusing that this bottle finally crashes into something and there's a deafening explosion!
• ROBERT: Well now, if they didn't do it, everyone in the theater would be wondering, "Where are the sound effects?" This wasn't 2001 or anything like that. You have to suspend your disbelief!
• EARL: Moving on to my biggest peeve about the movie was the fact that they rescued Beverly Crusher after she went overboard! No, just kidding. Actually, my biggest complaint had to be with some of the lighting. It's elementary that they were trying to imply, in the Enterprise scenes just before they blew up the first of several stars in the course of the movie, that the blinding yellow light streaming through the windows was coming from the nearby sun. That's fine, but it seemed a little too harsh, particularly in the scene where Troi is counseling Picard in his quarters. There were times when Patrick Stewart was doing this smash-up job of conveying the emotions of loss and grief ...and he steps into shadow and you can't see his face!
• ROBERT: Perhaps that was some sort of mood technique. But director of photography John Alonzo is supposed to be a Hollywood heavyweight in his field, and he did a very good job in concert with Carson, but I don't see how anything would've been changed if they'd used another director of photography. In my opinion, what they were aiming for was just to be obviously different-looking from the TV series. Most people were comfortable with the way the Enterprise looked in the series, why change it?
• EARL: I didn't mind the Enterprise bridge being much darked than it appeared in the series - I actually liked that aspect of it. And I did like the new, wide-screen bridge. I didn't mind that so much as the brief time when they had this blazing sunlight. In some places it helped, but in others it wasn't necessary. It was almost like someone in engineering said "Hey, there's this blazing sunlight bathing the port side of the ship, so I'm turning off all their lights - click!"
• ROBERT: Why don't we turn to something like...the story?
• EARL: The story! Imagine that! Easily the most controversial thing they did with the movie was the death of Captain Kirk. There have been people complaining and decrying this scene of the movie and my one gripe with the death of Kirk was how well-publicized it was before the movie opened. We all know it was going to happen!
• ROBERT: But think about this for a second. If Kirk's death hadn't been so well publicized, had been kept under wraps until the movie came out, I have a very strong feeling that people would've had strong negative reactions to it. It would've been such a shocker that people might have left the theater depressed, thinking "That movie sucked!" Knowing of it beforehand let us ease into the idea a little more.
• EARL: I hadn't thought of it like that, preparing the audiences and cushioning the blow, as it were.
• ROBERT: Exactly. It might have been better that way, but I don't know if the publicity was intentional. Really, Kirk's death affected me in a way I didn't expect. I'm certainly more of a fan of Picard than I am of Kirk because I was watching Next Generation before I began to appreciate the old series and its characters. But watching Kirk die, I realized we had an American figure here who has a special place in everyone's heart, and he's dead and the torch has been passed. So it did affect me, but those who were very upset by it need to realize that people are mortal, and things do have to go on. It's kind of a wake-up call.
• EARL: Yes, Kirk was finally done in for being on the bridge - well, a little mezzanine metal bridge! "Oh my." I thought that was absolutely perfect - how else for someone whose career consists entirely of cheating death to react to it finally catching up with him?
• ROBERT: The relationship between Picard and Kirk worked better than I thought it would. I got the feling that Kirk had the greater stature - in some of these scenes, Picard was almost reduced to a kind of fumbling idiot, trying to take a swing at Soran and falling off the bridge, and only Kirk can show this guy up. The scene was played for Kirk so he could be heroic one more time, and it worked. I understand they reshot the ending.
• EARL: Originally, Picard and Kirk were more equal partners in the battle with Soran, and in the course of the fight Soran shot Kirk in the back, end of story, he's dead. Apparently the test audience threatened to spontaneously combust at this, so they spent the money on reshooting it and giving Kirk's death more weight. And how about that Malcolm McDowell? I thought he did an excellent job.
• ROBERT: There's one area where I have to slightly disagree with you. When I first watched it, I was expecting more of a Ricardo Montalban sinister kind of villain; instead we get somebody who was single-minded, who's got only one thing on his agenda, to get back into the Nexus. I didn't see a lot of personality in him that I saw in Khan, and I hate to keep comparing the two... he was important to the story, but he wasn't fully developed.
• EARL: But thankfully they finally got away from this clichè of having the bad guy of the piece be this very literate, Shakespeare-spouting, moustache-twirling type. One problem I had with Star Trek VI was where we had Christopher Plummer doing the same character Ricardo Montalban had done nine years earlier, hunting Kirk and spewing classic literature. Not that Soran wasn't an intelligent character, but it was good to get away from someone who had a political agenda revenge motive.
• ROBERT: I guess my expectations were that the villain was going to be very manipulative and more intelligent, but instead he wasn't. One of the reasons for this may have been that the movie was a jumble of subplpots - a Data subplot, the Kirk subplot, a subplot for Picard, and they had to service all those well. They did a good job of it, but whenever you have that kind of situation, the movie's elements all have to remain kind of thing but at the same time entertaining.
• EARL: Now on to the subject of humor.
• ROBERT: I thought it really scored well in that department.
• EARL: There were places where it was kind of cheesy, and admittedly some of Data's bad jokes, such as making a puppet out of his tricorder, were old the first time, but it needed to be - here you've got a guy discovering humor for the first time, and what is there to start with but the basics? As the rest of the humor goes, I liked the sarcastic byplay between Picard and Riker on the boat.
• ROBERT: That first scene was crucial to establishing these characters for the people who weren't familiar with them, and they established a rapport between Riker and Picard, but that's all of it they addressed. That was one of the unfortunate things about the movie, that they established a neat little element about each character such as Riker's sense of humor, but you don't see much of that in the rest of the movie because we have to deal with Picard, deal with Kirk, and all of the other characters got shortchanged. I think they could've foind the humor in a lot of the other characters like Geordi and Beverly, things that they explored well in the series, but the only one they got to here was Data, and it really worked well. I was afraid that getting his emotions would be the death of the character, and it had the potential to be... well, very stupid! What better way to spice up a move by giving Data emotions and letting him act stupid? But they didn't do that, and Spiner had some really good scenes and did a good job with them.
• ROBERT: Let's talk about the subject of music here. Two of the main reasons I wanted to see this movie was to see how David Carson, who's directed quite a few episodes of Next Generation and DS9 would handle having such free reign to do things in a larger scope, and to see how loud and crazy Dennis McCarthy would get with the music. Of course, we're also dealing with Rick Berman, and although he probably wasn't as influential with the movie as the studio executives were, he did have a big hand in it. I thought Dennis was given a good chance to do things he didn't have the opportunity to do on TV.
• EARL: After years and years of the press and media hammering away at the house style of Star Trek's music scoring, a good balance was finally achieved.
• ROBERT: It wasn't even really melodic, not in the sense of Cliff Eidelman's really catchy melodies and so forth, but this movie didn't until you watched the end credits where there was a new theme.
• EARL: The one thing that did impress me was that they finally retired the previous Goldsmith and Courage themes. Not that there's anything wrong with those pieces, but they've been used ad nauseum unnecessarily - the audience ought to know by the time of the opening titles that they're watching a Star Trek movie. If they can't figure it out until they hear Alexander Courage's fanfare several minutes into the proceedings...! I thought it was good that it was an extension of McCarthy's musical style on Next Generation.
• ROBERT: I liked the fact that it was in the same style, but louder and more percussive. There were several very good sequences, especially the Kirk part at the beginning, and the horse ride near the end where he really let loose. But other than that, if you listen to the extended sequences, you can hear McCarthy's mellow approach to it, which irritated me a little bit, but it did suit the movie.
• EARL: I was just glad that the old themes were shelved, though it's kind of ironic that I target Jerry Goldsmith's theme like that for criticism, because the first Trek movie score had - as did this one - only one statement of the Alexander Courage theme, and back then that was my favorite Trek film score until perhaps the sixth movie came out. It's ironic that Goldsmith broke the mold there in 1979 - and since then, he's become the mold - interpret that as you see fit! It's about time the patterns were changed again.
• ROBERT: I have to agree with a critic in Entertainment Weekly who said that overall, the movie was loud but didn't resonate. It was philosophical, but not in the typical Trek-ian way. I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that the movie was trying to be intellectual, but not to the point where they would lose some people.
• EARL: That's a good point, but at the same time there are some hours of Star Trek which are intellectual and philosophical such as, say, the Emissary pilot of DS9, where you have this whole thing about time and existence. That was sort of tailored for the Trek audience, because you already had the backstory of the Federation and the Bajorans and what not. But with this movie, you couldn't predict a locked-in audience in which, "Ah! Our entire audience will consist of loyal Next Generation fans," you realize you're also going to have quite a few other people. I don't think they dumbed it down. I enjoyed it being different in its philosophical tone.
• ROBERT: I guess part of the problem is that, being Trek fans, some of us can't go into the movie and watch it objectively. The whole scene in which Picard discusses his nephew, it seemed like you kept thinking back to Family and noticing the differences and how they tried to gloss over this scene. I guess we go into it expecting it to be really Trek-ian, really philosophical, but it really isn't - it's a movie that has to appeal to a great number of people who perhaps had never paid attention to Star Trek before, and I'm sure that was a problem the writers had to deal with, to make it appeal to a broader audience.
• EARL: You do bring up a good point here. I think it was a very good idea to aim it at a more general audience, perhaps not even a Star Trek audience, because as you said, there's no pleasing some of these people! There are some people who claim to be fans who have absolutely slashed and panned everything Trek has done in the past several years, to the point of annoyance. I decided, when I sat down in the theater, "I'm not going to sit here and pick this apart just for any inconsistencies." It's insane to try to think of any other film in those terms, and just because it's Trek doesn't mean it'll stand up to that kind of attack any better than any other two hours of celluloid. Some of the computer netters have picked at so many of the movie's loose threads that it falls apart under their examination.
• ROBERT: I wonder why people need to pick it apart like that? Though we're actually kind of doing that here!
• EARL: With the hardcore Trek audience, they've had a lot of this technical documentation, the tech manuals and all, setting down how everything looks and behaves. It doesn't need to stand up to this material of the resulting inconsistency allows them to tell a better story.
• ROBERT: But we're talking about entertainment here, too. Really, there is a huge difference in terms of making a television show and making a movie. Producers have more control over a TV series than directors, whereas in a movie the director has more control. The studio also has a great deal more influence on how a movie is made, and what they're looking for is money, and it barrels down to entertainment value. The movie's got to be loud, have a lot of special effects, it's got to have great music - it has to do a lot of things. The technical aspects of it shouldn't be stressed so much because most people are willing to look past that; I think the only people who are going to have a big problem with it are your hardcore Trekkers.

Robert Heyman and Earl Green

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This article originally appeared in the December 1994
issue of LogBook: The Zine
© 1994, 2001