A Brief Guide to Star Trek (25 page)

A movie version of
The Next Generation
had been gestating since 1993, when Paramount had suggested the idea to Rick Berman, who’d been responsible for the show from the second season following the enforced retirement of Gene Roddenberry due to the latter’s ill health. As happened with the original pilot episodes of
Star Trek
, Berman was asked to develop two pos -sible movie stories for
The Next Generation
with two different writing teams. The writers going head to head in this friendly competition were all
Star Trek
TV veterans: Maurice Hurley, who’d done so much to shape
The Next Generation
in the early days, and the team of Brannon Braga and Ron Moore. The only rule laid down by the studio was that each story should feature the appearance of a character (there was no specification as to who) from the original
Star Trek
series. Given that Spock, McCoy and Scotty had all appeared in cameos in
The Next Generation
, the obvious choice was Captain James T. Kirk. Sulu would feature in an episode of
Voyager
two years later.

Braga and Moore won the internal screenwriting ‘contest’. They’d prepared by watching the preceding six
Star Trek
movies, some of them more than once. ‘We watched
IV
(
The Voyage Home
) closely’, said Moore, ‘[and] we watched
The Wrath of Khan
several times, because it’s my favourite and I think the best as far as story and execution. We wanted to get a feel for how
Star Trek
translated to the big screen.’

The writers were used to working within the limitations of television, where a space battle requiring special effects shots would be strictly limited to a couple of exterior shots, occasional phaser strikes and a lot of camera shake to simulate action. The same restriction would not apply to a big-budget movie with a different approach to special effects. Riffing on the title of one of the best-remembered
The Next Generation
episodes, the writing team of Braga and Moore set out to capture ‘the best of both worlds’ in fusing the humour of
The Voyage Home
with the high
drama and charismatic villain of
The Wrath of Khan
in their
The Next Generation
movie.

They were also aware that popular though
The Next Generation
was on television, the
Star Trek
movies had to appeal beyond those core viewers to an even wider potential audience, who might not be as familiar with the set-up and characters of
The Next Generation
as they were with the ori -ginal
Star Trek
series. The movie had to be more of a stand-alone action-adventure story featuring
The Next Generation
characters than a tale caught up in seven years’ worth of serialised back-story and mythology.

‘We knew Kirk was going to be in it’, said Braga of the film that eventually became
Star Trek Generations
. ‘We knew what we wanted to do with Data. Coming up with the space-time Nexus and what the villain was up to was not a struggle. Because it is a movie you can take bigger risks with characters, because you are not obligated to do another episode the next week. We ended up with a lot of humour, but a dark film as well. The theme does deal with death: Picard suffers a terrible tragedy, while Kirk is facing profound regret. There are some sombre moments.’

Bringing the two generations of
Star Trek
crews together was always going to be a narrative challenge. Their first instinct was to put the two crews in conflict, inspired by a draft movie poster concept of two
Enterprise
s engaged in combat. Common sense rapidly prevailed, however, when the writers discovered that coming up with a plausible reason for such a situation was more difficult than they’d imagined. They also ruled out a time travel story (something they’d done several times on
The Next Generation
, and a Brannon Braga speciality), and they didn’t want
The Original Series
characters to appear in the twenty-fourth century as ancient versions of themselves, like McCoy had in ‘Encounter at Farpoint’. It was Rick Berman who suggested a story spanning both time zones, beginning in the twenty-third century of Captain Kirk and then continuing seventy-eight years later in the world of
The Next Generation
.

The one thing everyone agreed had to happen was a meeting
between the two iconic
Star Trek
captains, Kirk and Picard. The desire for that meeting to take place on neutral ground led to the development of the Nexus, a kind of ‘nowhere’ place outside regular time and space within which both captains would find themselves trapped.

Unlike the choice of an experienced Hollywood director in Robert Wise to helm
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
, the first film for
The Next Generation
crew would be directed by a name familiar from the TV series. David Carson was a veteran of many TV pilots, including the $12-million opening episode of
Deep Space Nine
. His selection came only after Rick Berman had approached Leonard Nimoy. ‘We had a difference of opinion about the script’, noted Nimoy, who was also offered a cameo role in the movie. ‘It didn’t work for me.’ The benefits Carson brought to the project were many – he was very familiar with the
Star Trek
universe, cast and crew; he was equally at home directing the actors as well as handling the special effects requirements; and he had huge directorial experience across a range of different television shows. The step up from the
Deep Space Nine
pilot to a $26-million feature film was not that huge, and Berman regarded Carson as a known quantity, one that would avoid all the problems Roddenberry had faced working with Wise back in 1979.

Many of the behind the scenes crew from seven years of
The Next Generation
moved smoothly onto working on
Generations
as the series segued directly into the movie. Although the requirements of a feature film versus a TV episode were often somewhat different, Berman was glad that most of his experienced team were able to step up their game for the big screen
Enterprise
.

Initially, the plan was to feature the entire original series crew in the opening sequence of
Generations
, but several of the actors felt they had said a more than suitable farewell to their
Star Trek
characters in the more meaningful conclusion of
The Undiscovered Country
. Missing from the film therefore were Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, George Takei and Nichelle
Nichols. They realised that the story was built around the meeting between Captain Kirk and Captain Picard, making their roles largely superfluous. In the end, joining William Shatner in the film were James Doohan as Scotty and Walter Koenig as Chekov.

With only two hours to tell a movie story, rather than the twenty-six hours of the average season of
The Next Generation
on TV, Rick Berman was clear that story choices had to be made. The film would be primarily about Picard, Kirk and Data, relegating everyone else from both
Star Trek
crews to secondary status. Unexpectedly finding themselves sidelined by this focus were some of the cast of
The Next Generation
, including Marina Sirtis (Troi) and Michael Dorn (Worf ). Even Jonathan Frakes, as Picard’s right-hand man Will Riker, suffered. ‘It’s like a big Picard episode, with those on the Away Team being the B-story’, said Frakes. ‘Maybe I’ll have more to do in the next movie?’

This was to be a problem for all
The Next Generation
films going forward: how to translate the ensemble nature of the TV series to the big screen, with only one two-hour story every few years, but a large group of characters to feature. The additional decision to feature Whoopi Goldberg’s Guinan character heavily (after all, she was a more experienced movie star than someone like Sirtis), and the villain Soran (Malcolm McDowell), further limited the screen time of the more incidental regular
The Next Generation
characters.

In the opening of the film, Kirk is teamed up with Scotty and Chekov, rather than Spock and McCoy as had originally been planned. ‘It was very odd’, said Shatner. ‘I felt very lonely without my two buddies.’ The three veterans of Starfleet are in attendance at the launch of the
Enterprise-B
when a distress call is received from a vessel transporting El-Aurian refugees to Earth. Proceeding to the rescue, the new
Enterprise
crew witnesses an energy distortion – the Nexus – that seemingly claims the life of Kirk as he saves the ship. Long-lived El-Aurian refugee survivors of the distortion include Guinan and Dr
Soran, who encounter the
Enterprise-D
seventy-eight years later. Soran plans to enter the temporal Nexus, at the cost of many innocent lives, so he can recreate his lost family. In an attempt to stop Soran, Picard is drawn into the Nexus where he discovers Captain Kirk, whom he recruits to help defeat Soran. The pair is able to leave the Nexus at a time before they entered, thus stopping Soran, but Kirk’s life is the price.

The death of Kirk was to be a central part of
Generations
from the beginning, following the same treatment of Spock in
The Wrath of Khan
. Paramount insisted the writers consult with Shatner before taking such a dramatic step, and they were surprised when he agreed quite readily to the development (although Shatner would later resurrect Kirk in novel form in a series of co-written stories). Other characters were further developed too, with Picard suffering a family tragedy and Data exploring his capacity for emotions, giving both actors dramatic challenges and new ways to look at their very familiar TV characters.

Hoping for a Khan-like villain in McDowell’s Soran, the writers of
Generations
further raided the
Star Trek
movie back-catalogue by lifting the destruction of the
Enterprise
from
The Search for Spock
. This time it was
The Next Generation
’s sleek
Enterprise-D
that would be wrecked – allowing for the long-planned saucer separation sequence that had been little seen on TV (most notably way back in ‘Encounter at Farpoint’). ‘It was something we always wanted to do [more] on the series, but didn’t’, admitted Braga. ‘Saucer separation was expensive and elaborate.’ The resulting sequence, in which the saucer section of the
Enterprise
crashes to the planet Veridian III, was achieved using somewhat old-fashioned physical model techniques at a time when many movies were exploring the possibilities of computer-generated imagery (CGI), ironically something
Star Trek
had pioneered in the second and fourth original cast movies.

‘We wanted to explore mortality’, said Braga of
Generations
, ‘[but not] in the religious way that
Star Trek V
[did]. The film is
about time – Picard is obsessed with what his future holds, and his impending death [while] Kirk is a man looking at what he did or didn’t accomplish in life. The Nexus in space-time gives both men a chance to cheat death, until they realize it’s part of life. It’s really about how these different characters come to terms with their personal dilemmas.’

Released in November 1994, just six months after the final episode of
The Next Generation
aired on TV (compared to the decade it took
The Motion Picture
to reach the screen),
Star Trek Generations
opened to a mixed reception from fans, critics and the wider public alike. The film had racked up a production cost of $35 million – having started off with a budget of $26 million: controversial reshoots of the climactic battle to the death between Kirk and Soran and enhanced special effects shots added $4 million, following a failed test screening in September. However, the movie grossed $75 million in the US and $118 million worldwide, following a $23-million US opening weekend. The
New York Times
’ Janet Maslin complained that ‘
Generations
is predictably flabby and impenetrable in places, but it has enough pomp, spectacle and high-tech small talk to keep the franchise afloat’, indicating that the makers had failed in their objective of making a film that would appeal to a non-
Star Trek
audience in the style of
The Voyage Home
. Roger Ebert, writing in the
Chicago Sun-Times
, thought
Generations
was ‘undone by its narcissism. [It is] a movie so concerned with Trekkers that it can barely tear itself away long enough to tell a story. I was almost amused by the shabby storytelling’.

Lessons would be learned from the critical failure of
Generations
. With the obligation felt by
The Next Generation
creators to the crew of the original
Enterprise
discharged by this movie, the next film would be entirely theirs and it would involve no ‘shabby storytelling’.

One of the problems with
Star Trek Generations
may have been its very proximity to the TV series that spawned it.
Star Trek
fans were desperate for a new movie in 1979, as it had been a
decade since the
Enterprise
crew had been seen on the big screen, apart from in a two-dimensional animated form. The struggle to revive
Star Trek
throughout the 1970s had been followed closely by fans who witnessed the project mutate from a movie to a new TV series and back to a movie again. When
Generations
was released in 1994, it came mere months after the conclusion of seven years of TV adventures, while
Star Trek
on television was an ongoing concern in the shape of
Deep Space Nine
and the upcoming
Voyager
. While Paramount had been keen to trade on
The Next Generation
momentum with a new movie following 1991’s
The Undiscovered Country
, fans were not nearly as starved of
Star Trek
material in 1994 as their 1979 counterparts had been. This potential ‘franchise fatigue’ (the fear that there was just too much
Star Trek
available) would become a serious problem for later
Star Trek
TV shows and movies.