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.
© James Travers 2012
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.