Star Trek: Generations

Branson Reese

Not even the noble Star Trek is immune to giving its loudest fans exactly what they want: a mostly bad movie. You want a TNG movie and you want it right now? Okay but it will feel like a long, uneven episode of the show instead of a triumphant return. You want Picard and Kirk to finally meet each other? Okay but it'll settle nothing and mostly be two actors of wildly different styles having a conversation at each other where one of them tries to convince the other not to become an LL Bean guy. You want Data to finally become a real boy? Okay but that real boy's standing in line for a show at UCB and riffing loudly to anybody who will listen. Would be interesting if there was some sort of meta-commentary with the Nexus going on here, about not getting what you want all the time because it's ultimately unnatural and unsatisfying. But you and I both know that's not what's going on. At the end of the day I think if they were going to listen to fans they should've listened to me, 28 years later: this should've just been a straight up TNG movie, and the last two TNG movies should've been one DS9 movie and one Voyager movie. And the Abrams movies should've been scrapped altogether, their budgets used to help build public housing.

Will Menaker2.0

The one where Kirk and Picard join forces to save Data's catWhatever bants get delivered when these two legendary captains of the Enterprise team up are undercut by the perfunctory nature of the premise that puts them together in the first place--an energy "ribbon" that is a portal to "The Nexus" which is essentially heaven--and a climax that is just three old men running around scaffolding. Feels like this one could have been a pretty good finale to TNG but underwhelms as a movie. There's also not much for any of the rest of the crew to do outside a corny subplot about Data implanting his "emotions" chip and acting like a complete dickhead. Antagonists include Malcolm McDowell as an evil scientist who keeps blowing up stars to get back into heaven, and the Duras sisters, among the lamest heels in TNG, who get taken out in exactly the same way Gen. Chang does in VI. Eagle eyes will of course spot Tim Russ, aka Tuvok, who shows up as a human officer on the bridge of the Alan Ruck-captained, Enterprise C.UPDATE - Trek never falters harder than when the writers attempt to show their characters interests and inner-lives outside of being in Starfleet, which almost always involve a hobby or affectation that the writers think signals "cool guy" or "sophisticated man of learning and culture", no matter what they choose it's always cringe and at least five centuries out of place for the person they're trying to portray. This is illustrated nicely here when we see Picard's version of being in heaven is a very British Christmas where he's surrounded by blonde children who call him "Pa-pa."

👽 Zara 👽4.0

look man i literally know nothing about this star trek or enterprises or whatever but after watching this, i know i would die for data and that's the tea