Was moving 'The Next Generation' over to movies a bad decision?

I agree the TNG movies came too soon. Generations should never have been made. The production team should have focused on making FC an epic classic/ writing a solid plot. Losing the Ent-D to the Borg would have made more sense for Picard becoming Ahab. As it stands now,his tirade to Lily about not losing another Enterprise doesn't relate to the Borg. He lost his state of the art and fully manned ship facing an obsolete Klingon Bird of Prey. Another issue with FC was how it's battle with the Borg and near destruction of the Defiant were not mentioned on DS9. It was also a lousy way to get Worf back on the Enterprise.

 

I agree with you on "Nemesis".

I disagree with you that TNG is "more soap opera than an action series". It's most definitely not soap opera. It may be "more suited" to the TV screen, but that's not the same thing.

On the latter point: That's a "fault" with DS9 (Behr was unhappy at how the Defiant was treated in FC, hence the refusal to acknowledge the damage); as for a 'lousy way' to bring Worf back... really? I thought it was rather good, and certainly better than "Insurrection" which just couldn't be bothered to explain it at all!

As for your first point: Not sure of your age, or how long you've been into Trek, but back in 1994 there was a massive demand for more TNG, and the hype for "Generations" was...well, I personally think the period '94-'96 is when Trek was at its pop culture/mainstream zenith. There's no way a film wasn't going to be made, or do well.

It's easy with hindsight now to plot a different course (and I agree ideally there should've been a longer wait to build up even more anticipation), but at the time, "Generations" was absolutely the right move.

 

Actually, the original intention was to destroy the Defiant in FC. Behr was upset about the Defiant's destruction, and suggested he'd ignore it on DS9 and co ntinue using it anyway. Hence the scene was rewritten with the "tough little ship" being "damaged but salvagable."

 

They wanted to destroy it ? That's... idiotic. It was one of the things people loved about DS9.

 

yeah, Kirk's nexus fantasy didn't make sense as wish fulfillment, but it could as a "road not taken" fantasy, much like Picard's. And of course they both ultimately reject it anyway.

I'm aware of Moore and Braga's criticisms of it, but I think a lot of that is a reaction to fan reception.

 

I recently watched the TNG films again, and I can say that Generations is probably "the best". Which isn't saying much because all four have severe problems. But this one at least feels like an event picture.

Both FC and INS are simply too small. Yes, FC too. As I've said often, it's essentially a bottle show and a missed opportunity to make the return of the Borg something epic (I do hope that the next Bad Robot film will use the Borg and make them interesting again). There's also narrative smallness in the character of the Borg Queen, who reduces the Borg to a bunch of zombie henchmen to an EEEEVIL seductress who cannot express herself except in double entendre and confusing hogwash disguised as mind-bending philosophy. Nah.

Compared to that, NEM actually holds up pretty well. It's a copy-and-paste job of previous films, yes, and the villain doesn't make much sense, but then again, neither did some that came before him. The cast interactions, on the other hand, are really good in this one and, in contrast to its two immediate predecessors, at least an attempt was made to make the film cinematic.

So was TNG on the silver screen a mistake? Well, no. It was the logical thing to do once the original cast had retired. No other big-screen Trek could've been made at the time. And seeing how the TV shows fizzled out a few years later, that might've been the absolute end for ST altogether. The films, mixed bag that they were in the TNG era, at least kept the general public aware that there was a thing called Star Trek - which could then be revived to great effect in 2009. But it would've been nicer if the TNG films had kept the high quality of the series.

I blame committee writing for this. Too many cooks, too many opinions on what kind of narrative and what kind of scope a ST film should have. Plus: Rick Berman, who I dare say was in over his head with movie-producing.

 

All TNG movies feel like blown-up episodes. Seems they just wanted to move to the big screen because... well, because.

 

The movie wasn't about DS9, and eventual DS9 producers destroyed it themselves.

(spoiler alert)

 

Yeah, but as a plot point.


If you're going to make a connection to DS9, why make such a stupid move ?

 

no, they wanted to go to the big screen because the show was clearly running out of gas and the cast was getting too expensive to keep on TV anyway. Movies made more sense than doing TNG until season fourteen.

 

Except that doing bigger episodes for the big screen doesn't work very well.

TNG's seasons were done. Didn't they plan for 7 ?

 

Funny, I thought Nemesis was the least cinematic of the TNG films. It feels like a stage play with a couple of space shots. Heck, you can see that it is a WALLPAPER behind them during the wedding thing at the beginning.

 

It feels like a 2-part episode that got souped-up for the big screen. That's also the way Insurrection feels (in a good way, for me), but the only TNG movie that feels like a movie is Generations, and it's my least favourite Trek picture. Great idea, crappy execution.

 

I said an attempt was made, not that it was entirely successful. Besides, being cinematic or not requires more than location shoots or sets that make you believe they are not "wallpapers". (For instance, watch The Empire Strikes Back on BD: You can clearly see where the matte paintings are - yet that doesn't make the film one iota less cinematic.)

It's rather about the scope of the narrative, as well as the consequences of same: Have the characters grown and changed? One can reasonably argue that in these terms one can skip both FC and INS and not have missed anything in the development of either the characters or the universe they inhabit. Most of the TOS films, plus GEN and, yes, NEM cannot be accused of maintaining the status quo.

 

I'm still not sure why blowing up the Defiant while helping save Earth is a big deal? They've killed TOS characters in TNG and yet the franchise survived.

 

I just find it odd that they would do it in a movie of a different series, where a lot of people watching wouldn't get the reference, and the DS9 fans would be told back in the series "oh, the Defiant was destroyed".

 

And they'd have gotten a new one the next week and the series wouldn't miss a beat.

 

This! I think the first half of FC is suspenseful, entertaining stuff, and Picard's meltdown, even if out of character, is undeniably riveting acting. But when he goes down to Engineering, and we realize the Queen's big gambit is pretty much just to whine about how hard it is for a high-powered career girl to find a decent boyfriend, the whole thing deflates like a balloon making love to a porcupine.

Soran's plan is absurd and devoid of any shred of believability (much like the Genesis Device, amirite?!), but come on, he aims to blow up a friggin' solar system for an addiction fix. That's some serious s***, there.

 

I still feel that FC was the best film the TNG cast made (many issues aside). The only TNG character in FC who was true to character was Worf. Having Picard feel the Borg is not explainable since his implants were removed. Picard also dealt with his Borg trauma before the series ended so there would not have been a justification for his having gone Ahab. Now if the Ent-D had been destroyed by the Borg and some crew members assimilated (Beverly, Riker, or Troi), that would have been different. I also could have seen Picard try to shut down the hive and liberate the Borg.
Generations needed a major rewrite and movie grade production quality (shifting uniforms a big no-no). The only part that felt like a film was the first section with Ent-B. Having the Ent-D destroyed by a bird of prey (and using the footage from ST VI) was a let down. The biggest problem was that it was a rush job that came too soon after the series ended.

 

re: GEN: That's true. Like I said, they managed to fuck the films up in a different way each time.

But somehow, Trekkie that I am, I love them all anyway, warts and all.