With Star Trek: Generations, which was released six months after the airing of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s final episode, the series blossomed out into its own big screen incarnation. However, Star Trek: Generations is a decidedly mixed affair. It feels like a routine episode of the tv series that has accidentally attained a multi-million dollar budget. Certainly, the planetary destruction sequences and the show-stopping crashlanding of The Enterprise are awesome. There is one fabulous shot that pans down a starship’s exterior to a breach in the hull to show tiny figures standing inside, utterly dwarfed by the scale of the ship. On the other hand, the rest of the film seems caught back down in the limited budgetary horizons of a TV episode. Case in point being the climactic shootout, which seems only like one of the series’ cut-price desert locations with a bridge plonked in its midst. Star Trek: Generations even seems to have been photographed for the small screen – look at the way Brent Spiner’s makeup job shows its cracks under the widescreen camera’s unflattering eye.

Star Trek: Generations also shares many of the failings of the Classic Star Trek films with a story that characteristically reaches for grandiose concepts – godlike alien beings and vessels, return from the dead – but falls woefully short of any satisfying treatment of them. For such a grandly scaled concept as The Nexus – a Virtual dreamworld that contains the fulfillment of one’s greatest desire – the film needs a titanic struggle to match it. There should have been a monumental choice between the fulfillment of what Captain Kirk most dearly wanted in his life and the necessity to abandon that to save the rest of the universe. Only this isn’t the case – Kirk sees through the illusion and dismisses it with an astonishingly casual shrug of the shoulders.

The series’ regular characters seem unsure of themselves. It is a virtual sleepwalk through for some of the characters like Worf, Beverly and Geordi who hardly even appear. One of the problems of having an ensemble cast that was well developed throughout the course of the series is that in moving to feature-film format and in effect limited to producing only one film (the equivalent of one-and-a-half tv episodes) every two years, the characters get minimal screen time and take much longer to develop whereas the series could easily devote a whole weekly story to each character. In the most radical piece of development, Data gets his emotion chip (which one was under the impression had been irreparably damaged at the end of the episode Descent, Part II [1993]) working and the opportunity to experience the human emotions he always wanted to throughout the series. Brent Spiner is a superb mimic – he was the one genuine find among the cast of unknowns that Star Trek: The Next Generation brought to the screen – and certainly makes the comic most of Data’s emotional scenes here. However, one is unsure how the apparent permanence of the chip is going to impact on future story development. One has the suspicion that it may humanise the character too much as ironically Data’s appeal on the small screen was his very lack of humanity, his oddball curiosity and blank-eyed innocent view of the world.

The one person who makes the best of things is that renowned limelight grabber William Shatner. Star Trek: Generations’s big drawcard was the little kept secret of William Shatner’s guest appearance and Captain Kirk’s death. William Shatner rises to the occasion, mugging and smirking his way through a grand old airing of the Captain Kirk role, in fact out-acting all others in the show, including the much more subdued Patrick Stewart. It was a good career move for Shatner killing his bread-and-butter role off, especially considering how the public has started to turn off him with the publication of various of the original casts’ autobiographies – indeed even Shatner’s own – which portrayed him in a decidedly unappealing light. Malcolm McDowell also lets all his patent stops loose in a grand scenery-chewing performance that vies with William Shatner’s for screen size.

The subsequent Star Trek: The Next Generation films were Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002). The Classic Star Trek films are: Star Trek – The Motion Picture (1979), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), The Voyage Home: Star Trek IV (1986), Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). Star Trek (2009) was a reboot of the classic series, recasting it with younger faces and telling an origin story. The Star Trek tv series are:– Star Trek (1966-9), Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1992-9), Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001) and Enterprise (2001-5).

(Nominee for Best Special Effects at this site’s Best of 1994 Awards).