I'd have replaced the Klingons with the Romulans. Soran could easily have been making trilithium doomsday torpedoes for them in exchange for the versions he needed, and we'd have probably got both Tomalak featuring and a fight between the Enterprise-D and a D'deridex-class warbird too. Also, I wouldn't have destroyed the Enterprise-D, I'd still have had her become badly damaged in the fight at the end, where she'd "limp" home segueing into the next film. One thing I liked about many of the TOS films is that they take place either right after the previous one, or are relatively close to one another. So it would have been the badly damaged Enterprise-D that faces the Borg, and eventually succumbs to her "wounds" towards the end of the second film.
I'd do some of the following: 1. Not have TOS mentioned at all like in the rest of TNG. They didn't need a handover for goodness sake. TNG had been doing fine on its own for years. If you had to do a 'handover' I would just do some mystery that the TOS crew had left behind and perhaps Kirk giving a message to the future captain in 80 years time. I did like the opening sequence but agree with the people who think Chekov and Scott were the wrong characters given the wrong lines. 2. Lesson the power of the Nexus to have it do time travel, endless life, 3-dimensional travel, fulfill your geatest fantasy, compel you to come back. Its too much, too incredible. Use good writing to get over script problems, don't apply more magic. 3. If you have to have Kirk have a fantasy life, have it with someone we know about with Edith or Miramanee having his brother alive so we can see that it is hurting him to go with Picard. 4. Show the natives Picard wants to save so we could care about them
TNG was on air for seven seasons, amassed a big fanbase of its own and was about to go into feature films, surely the series had enough weight behind it to do its first film without a crossover. By the time Generations came out the torch was well and truly passed I'd say. They should've had the TNG crew standing on their own, without the need for Kirk. I liked the scenes on the E-B, but they could have related more to the story/mystery that the E-D crew would then come to face. (Which could then have been a nice little lead into a new series based on the E-B .)
That idea of a long lived bad guy who first deals with the TOS crew, and then later on with the TNG crew, would have been far better. Kirk and Picard wouldn't meet in person, but that wouldn't have been necessary at all. You could mirror Kirk's struggle against the bad guy with Picard's struggle against the bad guy, with a different outcome because Picard studied Kirk's reports on the bad guy. Similar to how they mirrored Luke's fight against Vader and the Emperor with Anakin's fight against Saruman and Palpatine. And don't get me that "But the audience would have been confused" bullshit. They wouldn't have been. And you could still have Picard and Spock meet in person. And they could have intertwined both stories using flashbacks. But that kind of storytelling wasn't really prominent in the 90s. Heck, have the final fight in some sort of time displacement thing, where Picard and Kirk actually do meet and team up in their fight against the bad guy and create a predestination paradox. So eventually Kirk and Spock always knew that they would win with the help of some Captain from the future, but he also knew that it would take a lot of time.
Amidst all the other stuff mentioned, I think a big problem is the film is trying so hard in places not to do the obvious the ideas it comes up with instead wind up being not-obvious because they're terrible. The opening Enterprise D scene is a case in point. After all, the intent here is to introduce the Next Gen crew to the wider casual audience who go see the new film every couple of years but don't pay much attention to the various TV versions. As an introduction... it's bloody awful. You do get a rough idea of some of their characters, but there's no real clue as to what they do on the ship or what their roles in the rest of the movie will be beyond Picard's in charge. It also makes it look as if Worf is going to be a major character, before he proceeds to do nothing for the rest of the film (despite the fact his personal nemeses are the secondary baddies. Considering Worf was arguably the third most popular/recognisable character it's amazing how three of the TNG films basically waste him. It can't even be because of doing double duty on DS9 as First Contact managed to give him a decent role right in the middle of his time on that show). The rejected original idea for the D opening of an action scene defending the observatory might have been more obvious, but you'd have quickly established what everyone on the ship does, their working relationships and had time for a bit of character establishing banter. It would also have had the advantage of being more tied to the main plot that Worf's promotion. Also, Carson talks on the Blu Ray commentary about how expensive the sailing ship sequence was and that it ate up a surprisingly large amount of the production schedule (I think he says three out of 12 weeks, but that sounds so large he may well be misremembering, but either way it's still a lot for a five minute nothing scene). He talks with pride about how he fought to keep the sequence in the film, but frankly in this case I think the money men were right. That time and cash could have been put to much better use later in the film. More time could have smoothed out some of the rougher direction (big honking zooms on the face of every villain as they die?) and saved money could have been better used in the final battle. No reused Bird of Prey explosion from the last film, maybe even giving the D a chance to fight a little better in her swansong. At the very least put the number of torpedoes Riker actually asks for into the stock footage... On a more general note, I'd also have the Picard/Kirk relationship be more equal. It's odd really, TV Picard is more than capable of holding his own with Kirk and their contrasting personalities should play off each other well with each bringing something different to the partnership. Instead (and I don't know if this is the result of Moore being too a big TOS fan or Shatner having some influence on the script) everything seems to conspire to make Kirk look awesome and Picard look completely useless and fawning. His grief over his family's death doesn't help Picard as he's very much on the backfoot from the off, but the fact he needs to get a dead old man to come help him punch another old man in the face (with Kirk being his second choice to do this after Guinan...) just makes Picard look useless. The scale just isn't there to justify the team up of these two icons.
I always thought they should have "stolen" an idea from Forbidden Planet; have Veridian 3 be the site of an ancient and powerful machine that can make the users greatest fantasy become reality, essentially a reality warping device of sorts. It needs an exotic energy source, such as the Nexus ribbon to power it, which the original inhabitants did use but the disaster which ended their civilisation knocked it out of reach of the planet. Hence Soran needing to change its course back with the destruction of various stars. In addition to him getting his family back, Soran would tempt Picard with the prospect of creating a world in which the Borg ceased to exist, in which Picard had never been assimilated and used to destroy 39 Federation starships and the loss of around 11,000 lives. At the end of the film Picard would alter the control mechanism so as to use the ribbon to completely destroy the device. A decision that would have repercussions leading into the next film.
There wouldn't have been much of a chance to create a brand new species, and get to know them shoehorned into limited time span of a movie, however having instead of Veridian Three it be a planet that TNG had priviously visited might have been better. In order to work, the movie had to bring in a non-TNG audience. James T. Kirk is Star Trek.
I suppose the thinking by the studio suits was that movies and television are two distinct beasts with two potentially distinct demographics, and that while TNG had undoubtedly proven itself to be a major success as part of the Star Trek phenomenon (the fact that they even green-lighted TNG's move to the big screen in the first place was proof enough of that), there were still those at Paramount who felt they were somehow 'unproven' as a big box office draw. Hence having a crossover with the previous movies was deemed essential as a way of hedging their bets.
At least a Trek film wouldn't degrade itself by flashing a woman in her underwear in the middle of a trailer just to show that it's "sexy and/or edgy" in order to get bums on seats...hang on....
Late TNG had phenomenally high ratings and STFC was a big hit without the TOS crew, so I don't see how you can make that argument. By the time of Generations, Next Gen was a success on its own.
Because FC was a vastly superior film. It didn't need Kirk. I'm agreeing with both of you, in different ways. Generations was a good film but not as good as FC. This had nothing to do with Kirk, rather it rests on credible storytelling.
I'll echo what others have said: wanting to have Kirk meet Picard was the main flaw of the premise of "Generations" from which everything else more or less descends. The contrivances and twists that are performed to execute this create many of the problems with the film. Add to this the underwhelming threat of the Nexus and Soran (Malcolm McDowell was almost wasted here) and the underused Duras sisters (who I agree would have been better had they been working with/for Tomalak and the Romulans, if they really must be used at all) and you end up with a film that is underwhelming and on a certain level just does not make sense. As Tomalak said earlier, if you wanted the two crews to meet, "Yesterday's Enterprise" was the story to do it with. Seeing that it had already been done, I think including Kirk and company was simply a poor choice. If you wanted to tie the film to TOS somehow and keep the "Generations" title, then come up with a villain who logically was created by the actions of the TOS crew, or the aftermath thereof. The things that are good about the film, for me at least, primarily stem from outgrowths of what had already been established on TNG. I guess the best direction for Star Trek VII, for me at least, would have been having it not be "Generations" at all.
I propose a very simple solution that would easily fix Generations and save it from being my least favorite TNG movie, without changing a single line of dialogue. It's simple: Picard and Kirk need to fight eachother in the nexus. If you're going to have a movie with both captains atleast have fun with it. A additional 5-10 minute long choreographed fight scene between the two should do it. And since the nexus isn't reality, there's no limit to what they could do. You could even have them flying around crouching tiger style. Just imagine Picard dropping a line of Shakespeare on Kirk after karate chopping him. Alright maybe that's extreme, but I wouldn't mind it if they took a swing or two at eachother.
Wasn't one of the original ideas for GEN was to have the TOS crew vs TNG crew. I for one love seeing old people fight.
I would love seeing Berman, Moore and Brage pull a Pegg & Orci saying "What, you didn't like our film? Fuck off!"