Star Trek: Generations

Star Trek - Generations

Release date: 8 May 2009

Director: JJ Abrams

Screenwriters: Brannon Braga & Ronald D Moore

US box office takings: $75,671,125

Is Star Trek: Generations an honorary even-numbered Star Trek movie? Despite its real number (seven, although that was kept off the official title caption and posters for the first time ever), it doesn’t deserve to be rubbing up against the wretched Final Frontier or the dreary Insurrection in the shamed odd numbers camp. But stand it next to the more obvious muscularity of The Undiscovered Country and First Contact, and Generations *can* look a bit weedy, a little bit TV. Maybe if Generations had been a double-part Next Generation telly episode, it might possibly be worshipped as much as The Best of Both Worlds or Yesterday’s Enterprise.

Was it the fact that Trekkers were being asked to pay for their Trek only six months after The Next Generation had breathed its last TV breath that Generations received such a tepid reaction? But look at what it does right - it finally unites the two Enterprise captains, it boasts a fantastically sneery baddie in Malcolm McDowell’s Dr Soran, it smashes up the Enterprise D in spectacular, bruising fashion and it has the brazen audacity to kill off Captain James Tiberius Kirk.

Those first brainstorming ideas for Generations though were very different to the finished film. Writers Brannon Braga and Ronald D Moore initially spitballed a concept that would pit both Enterprise crews against each other. Just imagine the poster. But however sweaty they got trying, they couldn’t cook up a scenario that made both sides look good. “No matter how much we played around with this thing, *somebody* was gonna come off looking like the bad guy,” opined Moore.

It was originally intended to include all of the central seven Classic Series crewmembers in the film’s 23rd Century opening sequence. But Moore and Braga were soon overwhelmed by the pressure of giving an ensemble that size enough things to do in such a short space of time. Wisely, the seven were pruned down to the Big Three - Captain Kirk, Mr Spock and Dr McCoy. Except DeForest Kelley and Leonard Nimoy both said no (Nimoy was also considered as director, but insisted on too many script changes). Their roles were swiftly (and somewhat awkwardly) replaced by Chekov and Scotty.

Putting Scotty in the mix however, and and having him witness Kirk’s supposed death, created a continuity problem with the Next Generation episode Relics, in which Scotty, beamed into the 24th Century en route to his retirement, remarks that he bet James Kirk got the Enterprise out of mothballs just to head the rescue mission himself. The official line, in case you’re concerned, is that the poor engineer was disorientated after having been stuck inside a transporter system for nearly a century.

Before the recent 1080p repolishing of The Next Generation, Generations was the first time we’d got to see the Enterprise D in so much luscious detail. Production designer Herman Zimmerman had tweaked some of the sets, but what really makes Generations stand apart from the TV show is its imaginative, atmospheric lighting and cinematography from John A Alonzo (whose stellar camerawork had helped elevate Polanski’s Chinatown).

The decision to kill off Kirk was made early in the process. The studio - to Moore and Braga’s surprise - backed the idea. And what’s more, so did William Shatner. “It was starting to become a cheat to ignore the question of ‘Whatever happened to Kirk?’” said Moore. “I’d heard Gene say a couple of times that he thought Kirk would most likely be dead by the 24th Century, so we felt that our idea was sort of in that spirit.”

Malcolm McDowell claimed at the time he was honoured to be the man chosen to finally rub out James T Kirk, though his nephew - and Deep Space Nine regular - Alexander Siddig revealed later his uncle thought the script was “shit”. But while Generations deserves some kudos for having the chutzpah for closing the book on Kirk, it loses some brownie points on the way they did it.

To have such an icon of American popular culture slain by a falling bridge upset many (Shatner’s improvised line of “Bridge was on the captain” was mercifully cut). Shatner though is fantastic, sneaking in a trademark Kirk grin even when seconds from death. Kirk’s last ever words would be the enigmatic, “Oh my...” and then it was all over. Kirk was gone, the Enterprise D was gone and Star Trek had finally passed the baton from one generation to the next.

TRIVIA

Tim Russ, later Tuvok in Star Trek: Voyager, can be glimpsed in a small role as human member of the crew of the Enterprise B.

“I went home that night with a great sense of satisfaction,” Shatner later wrote about his death scene. “I didn't feel it was the end of an era, just the end of a character. And then I sat down and wrote a 40-page treatment for a story in which Kirk comes back from the dead.”

The horse that Shatner rides in the Nexus is his own horse.