I thought First Contact's Earth scenes felt claustrophobic. The movie told us we were in our future (and Picard's past), but it never showed us any location that differentiated the Earth of 2063 from the Earth of 1996 -- a missile silo, a dive bar (complete with 1960s tunes), a moutain side field, a forest. That's what I meant by the "random studio backlot" comment. I didn't need location filming, I needed something that felt like I was not in 1996.
City on the Edge of Forever needed more scenes in Germany.
CotEoF wasn't showing us the future.
"City on the Edge," which was shot on a studio backlit, was more convincing of its 1930s setting than First Contact was of its 2060s setting. First Contact is telly, not showy, to its detriment, imho. It's not a question of being willing or unwilling to suspect disbelief. It's a question of telling us that this is the setting, then doing absolutely nothing to establish that setting beyond Lily's one context-free line about "the Eastern Coalition."
My notes on the script would have been to drop the comedy elements from the 2063 scenes and have the Eastern Coalition forces advancing on Cochrane's compound which forces Riker and the Enterprise personnel into fighting a battle on the ground while Picard and the crew are fighting a similar battle on the ship, with the fate of the future being at stake in both. As it stands, the 2063 scenes are devoid of conflict and drama. The 2063 setting could have been made more "real" if it actually mattered to the story.
Two things scream "2063" to me in the movie. The postatomic setting where refugees are camped in the woods of Montana next to an old Titan ICBM silo, and the octagonal or hexagonal music CD (and a very small one at that) containing Cochrane's launch music. The rest could easily be in 1996 or 2024, and the only ground vehicles we see in the entire movie are parked trucks with wheels.
I was about to bring up the hexagonal CD! LOL
See, there was just enough there for me as an audience member to believe that yes, this is in the future a bit. I don't know how else you would be able to portray the post atomic horror, it was convincing enough to me.
Hey, all - it's been a short while.
I don't recall mentioning this, but I caught one audio gaffe in this film many years ago, and I'm surprised Paramount never fixed it. Guinan and Soran are both El-Aurians, but when Dr. Crusher looks up Soran's file, she says "he's an En-Laurian". It was done from off-camera, so they easily could've had Gates re-dub it, but they left it in for some reason. I wonder if anyone has ever brought that up with her at a convention, or spken to director David Carson...
I don't recall mentioning this, but I caught one audio gaffe in this film many years ago, and I'm surprised Paramount never fixed it. Guinan and Soran are both El-Aurians, but when Dr. Crusher looks up Soran's file, she says "he's an En-Laurian". It was done from off-camera, so they easily could've had Gates re-dub it, but they left it in for some reason. I wonder if anyone has ever brought that up with her at a convention, or spken to director David Carson...
It's a slip of the tongue or a typo in the script. What's to comment on? Probably no one making the film noticed or cared.
I just tried sitting through STFC... on top of your points, so much is wrong with it and if this is the best of the TNG movies, then Trek was in a really sad state at the time.
"Generations" is a more creative and risk-taking movie, especially when it had to be rushed through, yet FC had far longer to be developed and refined and what everyone got was inconsistent shlock with crowd-pleasing moments that don't stand up at all.
The contemporary Earth songs were hokum.
The Borg battle early on was tokenism at best. I'd say it otherwise had a meaning except so many scenes throughout the movie don't add up or make sense (too many to count and repeat, but the Borg with their time travel technology could have bypassed a big battle from the outset and spare Picard from gone deaf by listening to Bizer or Berlioz or even Bananarama for all the script could care as Troi getting drunk seemed to have more effort and agency put into that scene, but with all the contemporary 1996isms, that's an easy scene to perfect.
Never mind sending only one Borg cube (again, so much for adapting), a quick write-off of low-priority system (again), and why not relieve Picard and bring in Captain McDingdong to take over from him and almost destroy the Big-E with instead of sidelining what seems to be the only ship with quantum torpedoes... where they can beam death-wish Worf and friends over with shields up, never mind no INTRUDER ALERT klaxon (let me guess, that doesn't come in until Tuesday too??
Sheesh, TFF has a run for its money with the comedy in FC... On the plus side, Alfre Woodard and Alice Krige steal the show, but Ruby at least had thought put into her character (making her character genuinely engaging), all while Borg Queen cites drivel about limited three-dimensional concepts (yet she's dumber than one-dimensional stump for not thinking of time travel to eliminate the Federation completely (kay, with more than nine billion humans live in the 24th century and with the greater technology, though given how advanced the Borg already were why would they still care, apart from adding more drones and that's the only reason left as the Borg were defeated before. Unless they wanted to take over the Romulans and Klingons and by then the alliances were toastier than breakfast cereal, and scribbling all that into a script just doesn't sound as cool to the Trek fans than the 3D line, though are the Trek movies made for Trek fans or general audiences who'd rather sit in the back seats to shag? There were several million Trek fans in the 1990s and how does STFC appeal to non-Trek fans? If they did become fans and then revisit this flick, will they be turned off by the laxity of it all?)
The scene with the deflector dish still boggles the mind, starting with how the main big shuttle bay is well above deck 11, but Picard warns not to shoot near it because it's charged with antiprotons and zapping it could destroy half the ship... then after a brief cutaway scene concluding the earlier pee joke and how Roddenb-- I mean Cochrane returns and doesn't want to be a commemorated statue, Worf aims and fires at the dish. I think it was about this point when I'd walked out of the theater in the second viewing. Heck, flawed or not, NEM and especially INS at least try not to coast too much on "fan favorites" so they get brownie points off the bat. But I digress, and with the glass tubes broken to release the flesh-dissolving plot device that also cooled the main
I could go on forever, but for another quick trip to the plus side, the reason Picard yells in the air about civilian clothing is because transporter rooms (since they're still needed rather than site-to-site that's increasingly the norm) have replicator terminals to put the needed clothing; Picard states "transporter room 3"...
I thought the exact same thing when I just saw it. Then realising the thread was posted a year ago is a massive extra sting.
Generations probably remains my favourite movie. That was my peak fanboy phase of Trek so seeing my show on the big screen was just something else. I guess it's that sort of holy experience that Star Wars fans seem to have.
I remember the sound effects even down to simple on board ship sounds being amazing. When I got it on VHS I had a really old single speaker that I found if I plugged it into the headphone jack of my TV I could get the sound to come out of the TV and speaker at the same time. So it was my attempt to desperately recreate some of the surround sound effect of the cinema. I'm so lucky to have a good setup at home now and it on 4K to feel that magic again.
I thought and still think the saucer crash is epic.
Over time the themes of the movie have really resonated me, having lost my parents and I'm not having any children.. things that went over my head at the innocent age of 16 but I totally get now. I think it's also why I react very negatively to Picard the TV show because other than it being rather shit it tries to erase the plot lines and emotional impact of Generations.
The deflector dish and the warp plasma coolant are only needed when they are traveling at warp speed. They weren't traveling at warp when they went through the temporal vortex at either the beginning or end of the film. They were just moving at impulse. And when they traveled back to the 24th century, they would be right at Earth where they could get repairs without having to warp anywhere.
If it's that easy for the Enterprise crew to recreate the Borg time travel distortion (which is why they don't need warp drive, so that's good...), why not use it more often? That assumes they had the technology. If they didn't, they learned it really quickly while juggling everything else in the movie. But there's the "temporal prime directive" so that solves the time travel interference issue altogether, they can't and won't meddle...
But why does Picard bring up the dish the movie as a big scary drama plot point with emphasis as if it's a matter of fact, only to shoot at it seconds later with no explanation? Scene cut? (the deck count is another issue too if I recall... the movie was catering to a wide range of fans as well as bringing in newcomers, should there be enough exposition in the movie to whittle down the number of plot holes and loopholes?) Other sources claim the deflector dish is also powered on and in use when not at warp, to prevent smaller asteroids, space dust (even microscopic), radiation, or other particles from penetrating the hull.
The plasma coolant seemed to be full of plasmic matter, and a different one when the Borg come in because of iconography (color hue) if nothing else. The fact the warp engine was still pulsating* also begs questions. Now bring in Torres saying how Q was about to destroy the warp engine by doing his light show in "Q2", and while I don't recall if the episode was starting with the ship in warp or not, Torres seemed to be understandably upset (so how different is VOY's design vs the big E's?)
(Forget the late-60s, the early-00s were even groovier!)
* Do it and the nacelles glow 27/4 as opposed to the TMP-era where they glowed only when in use are significant? Well, arguably yes if the same engine is the primary source of power for all of the ship's systems, albeit at low power but you still need to keep it cool to extend its lifespan. May as well use a liquid cooler on you PC but forget to plug in the motor's power. Might run cool for a little while before it heats up... same principle but on a smaller scale, and without the coolant running through it's going to overheat
First Contact does a fine job of walking the line as far as how much historical backstory to spend screen time on.
"Show, don't tell," is not a storytelling principle that's useful in a vacuum. At every point in a story, the writer has to decide what to show, what to tell, and what to just leave out altogether.
Too many skiffy writers don't know how to do enough of that last one.
The intent of these movies was never just to satisfy Trek fans, but to raise the IP's profile and enlarge the overall theatrical audience.
Some Trek fans may be interested in the niceties(!) of WWIII/The Eugenics War/The Second American Civil War,* but they don't matter to the movie narrative at all. Liily's fear and familiarity with foreign missile attacks pretty much points the Apocalypse away from having been a plague or zombie uprising, and that's all moviegoers needed to know - because there was no point in the film where any additional backstory had a direct impact on events unfolding in the Now.
*Now established in canon as the same events.
"Show, don't tell," is not a storytelling principle that's useful in a vacuum. At every point in a story, the writer has to decide what to show, what to tell, and what to just leave out altogether.
Too many skiffy writers don't know how to do enough of that last one.
The intent of these movies was never just to satisfy Trek fans, but to raise the IP's profile and enlarge the overall theatrical audience.
Some Trek fans may be interested in the niceties(!) of WWIII/The Eugenics War/The Second American Civil War,* but they don't matter to the movie narrative at all. Liily's fear and familiarity with foreign missile attacks pretty much points the Apocalypse away from having been a plague or zombie uprising, and that's all moviegoers needed to know - because there was no point in the film where any additional backstory had a direct impact on events unfolding in the Now.
*Now established in canon as the same events.
One part that I really like about this movie is the opening scenes with Kirk on the E-B. That encapsulates the typical Kirk actions - The Kobayashi Maru scenario really well. And you can tell from the Scotty and Chekov dialogue where Spock and McCoy could have been.
One part that I absolutely hates is the fight between E-D and BOP. The E-D crew looks nothing like the one that faced the Borg before and I was thinking like what were they doing? Even the crew of the Odyssey from DS9 looked more valiant than this E-D crew. I can’t stand that fight.
I also felt Kirk was out of character when meeting Picard in the cabin. This one and Insurrection is a toss up. Nemesis is definitely at the bottom and FC is on top.
One part that I absolutely hates is the fight between E-D and BOP. The E-D crew looks nothing like the one that faced the Borg before and I was thinking like what were they doing? Even the crew of the Odyssey from DS9 looked more valiant than this E-D crew. I can’t stand that fight.
I also felt Kirk was out of character when meeting Picard in the cabin. This one and Insurrection is a toss up. Nemesis is definitely at the bottom and FC is on top.
Kirk is pretty okay in that particular scene, though I thought that by the time of Generations, Shatner had long ago stopped playing Kirk and was just playing William Shatner. Scotty and Chekov seem very off, and it would have still seemed off if it had been Spock and McCoy reading the dialogue. The technobabble they gave Scotty, for example, didn't fit him nor would it have fit Spock.
I just feel like Moore and Braga -- even though Moore was a big TOS fan -- didn't know how to write TOS characters. I don't care for "Relics" either, and that was Moore's work as well. The two times in TNG when TOS characters actually felt right were McCoy's cameo in "Encounter at Farpoint," which was written by someone who had actually written TOS; and Spock in "Unification," where all of Spock's appearance (save for one line in part one) was written by Michael Piller.
Absoluitely agree. The Enterprise-D and her crew looked absolutely pathetic in that fight. Yes, the Duras sisters were supposed to have an edge because the shileds were down, but the D should still have had enough weaponry to blow an outdated Bird of Prey to bits. And they fire one phaser shot for the entirety of the battle. Ridiculous.
Even Moore and Braga make fun of that scene between Kirk and Picard. All the buildup for the two legendary captains meeting and it turns out to be... them cooking breakfast?
I do appreciate Kirk dressing down Picard over the whole duty and obligation thing. Only James T. Kirk could put Picard in his place and render the latter speechless.
Yeah, but wouldn't it have been better if Kirk had turned to him and said, "sheer fucking hubris"?
Kirk's Ghost: "So, Picard, did you follow my advice and not let them promote or transfer you?"
Picard: "Funny story...."
Kirk's Ghost: [*Pinches bridge of nose and sighs loudly*]
Picard: "Funny story...."
Kirk's Ghost: [*Pinches bridge of nose and sighs loudly*]
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