Entertainment Weekly Reviews The Star Trek Movies

[wayoung]

It's #2 for me, behind Khan. It has its flaws like the prison sequence, the "Cinderella" scene, the Klingon language skit, and the final saving of the president being a few.

But the reviewer is spot on with how the beginning of the movie to the prison sentence is great, especially the briefing and the dinner scene. "Earth, Hitler, 1938" always gets me. Shatner and Plummer playing off each other is great. The end where photon torpedoes are devastating weapons again is also good, although Spock and McCoy turning the torpedo into a yeat seeking device is dumb. Seems like that would already be a part of a ships weaponry....

And the very ending... second star to the right... yes, it is too winky winky but I love it anyway.

 

[Shalashaska]

Generations review is up.

http://www.ew.com/article/2016/06/10/star-trek-generations-end-cinema

I wish he talked more about the film and its problems, and less about All Good Things.

 

[Vger23]

I have to admit, the review for TUC was so good, and pointed out a lot of interesting things, that I am excited to go back and look at the movie again with new eyes.

 

[Smellmet]

Generations review is up.

http://www.ew.com/article/2016/06/10/star-trek-generations-end-cinema

I wish he talked more about the film and its problems, and less about All Good Things.

This is the exact same problem I had with the TSFS review. He spent way too much waffling on about the books shatner and nimoy had out prior to the film. There was little to get your teeth into in this review too. Some of the others have been great though.

 

[Shalashaska]

This is the exact same problem I had with the TSFS review. He spent way too much waffling on about the books shatner and nimoy had out prior to the film. There was little to get your teeth into in this review too. Some of the others have been great though.

That was only a small part of the whole picture though. The whole second part of the review was devoted to the film. This was a short review and also had little to say about Generations unlike TSfS.

 

[drt]

Generations review is up.

http://www.ew.com/article/2016/06/10/star-trek-generations-end-cinema

I wish he talked more about the film and its problems, and less about All Good Things.

The AGT discussion was relevant to the point the reviewer made in previous reviews and reiterates here. That for some reason, the bigger the spectacle Trek productions try and throw on screen, the less it seems to work overall. So it's worth pointing out that AGT's story really works and feels more "cinematic" than their big budget effort.

 

[BillJ]

The AGT discussion was relevant to the point the reviewer made in previous reviews and reiterates here. That for some reason, the bigger the spectacle Trek productions try and throw on screen, the less it seems to work overall. So it's worth pointing out that AGT's story really works and feels more "cinematic" than their big budget effort.

I think that certain failures of the movie franchise have more to do with TV people making major motion pictures than the budgets involved.

 

[RAMA]

As I've pointed out before, no ST movie will ever be worse than STV..it simple isn't possible to go lower than that. However, Generations is the closest to it. It looks better, sounds better, is acted better, but both stories are muddled. Generations stands as the ST movie with the biggest plot holes and the most meandering storyline. It's baffling that it took a whole year to write this story when AGT is so fantastic. How apt it is to bring it up, because i consider it the real first STNG movie!

RAMA

 

[BillJ]

As I've pointed out before, no ST movie will ever be worse than STV..

I'd prefer to watch The Final Frontier over every one of the TNG theatrical outings. It is simply more fun to watch.

 

[Khan 2.0]

First Contact is up
http://www.ew.com/article/2016/06/17/star-trek-first-contact-transgressive-retrograde

 

[BillJ]

First Contact is up
http://www.ew.com/article/2016/06/17/star-trek-first-contact-transgressive-retrograde

He types a lot, but I'm not sure he's saying much.

 

[Seven of Five]

I still love First Contact after all these years. I always find something new in it each time I watch.

Whilst the Borg Queen did no favours for VOY, she was a wonderful presence here, being so seductive and scary at the same time. I also think this was the last time Data's humanity arc was effective.

It was the best use of the ensemble for me as well. Generations was pretty good in that regard too, but not as well executed as this film.

One of my big issues with the TNG films is the lack of consistency with film-Picard vs. TV- Picard. Whilst First Contact furthers his Borg arc from the show to a conclusion, his action scenes were always distracting.

 

[wayoung]

Have you read Michael Pillers unpublished book about writing for Star Trek, in particular Insurrection? It was posted on these forums a few years ago. He has a lot to say about Patrick Stewart with regards to Picards portrayal, to the point that Stewart flat out told Pillar that he was a new writer who had no idea how to write for Picard, not realizing Pillar had been on the TNG staff for years, and was the head writer for awhile. While Pillar didn't write FC I wouldn't be surprised if similar conversations occurred for it, with Stewart wanting more of a traditional movie hero role.

Joss Whedon wrote once about how actors start off subservient to the writers but the longer a show/franchise goes on the actor, being the face project, gets more power and thus the character adjusts to be more of the actors idealized selves (Mary Sueing the real actor into the fictional character) then the writers original interpretation. He used Alyson Hannigan as a positive example of this, how Willow became a better character because she started to take on Alyson's real life qualities, but it's not hard to see how it could easily go the other way.


I like First Contact fine but the Earth sections really hinder it. It's like two entirely different movies. They could have been cut out entirely and the movie would have been stronger for it. You can also see that this wasn't a big budget picture. $45 Mil in 1998 isn't a lot - you'd have to double that to really call it a big budget production. The three minutes of space combat, where you spend most of the time on the Enterprise or Defiant bridge was disappointing. Another few million spent there would have been worth it.

Surprisingly, Frakes direction wasn't half bad. He had some really nice shots.

Although, the novel Federation was vastly superior

 

[DonIago]

I would tend to think for some people the Earth portions of the film were a welcome bit of levity away from the grim intensity of the scenes set aboard the E.

That said, I found it frustrating that the first time we see the E on screen we get maybe 15 minutes to get to know it before it's essentially more of a set piece than a starship.

 

[wayoung]

Maybe some people did, I can't speak for others experience watching a film. Frommy own perspective the earth sections came off as unnecessary and negatively affected the quality of the film.

I do know I enjoyed it more as a kid than as an adult.

 

[Maurice]

The writer has some interesting things to say, but needs a more brutal editor to tighten him up. I think he's on point about a number of things about this movie, especially this dead-on comment:

Too much dialogue in First Contact — in a lot of Star Trek, past a certain point — has that same precise tone, the sound of someone reciting a fake periodic table from memory.
​

 

[RAMA]

I'd prefer to watch The Final Frontier over every one of the TNG theatrical outings. It is simply more fun to watch.

I've tried watching STV twice in the last 5 years(the last time was when I got the new Bluray set and vowed to somehow get through all 6 movies). I couldn't make it through and had to fast-forward to get through even parts of it. It's the ONLY Star Trek movie that hasn't improved visually with better formats. At least with Generations I can get through the whole film. On a technical level, there isn't any single part of Generations that isn't better than STV.

 

[BillJ]

On a technical level, there isn't any single part of Generations that isn't better than STV.

I guess when there's nothing else to hang one's hat on (emotional connection, entertainment value), there's always "technical level".

 

[RAMA]

First Contact is up
http://www.ew.com/article/2016/06/17/star-trek-first-contact-transgressive-retrograde

Out of the Borg stories, this is maybe 6th or 7th best story, but out of the films, it's still the second best of the pre-JJ movies.

Could it have been more focused? Sure.

Should we have seen the Queen? Well, it was almost inevitable that viewers needed an incarnation of the Borg to deal with, and it couldn't have been Locutus again.

Were the scenes on Earth all that great? It probably had the effect of STIV in making it a $150 million grossing movie. It also got us into some trek history I didn't mind seeing, though I still prefer the history from the 1980 Spaceflight Chronology better.

Overall, it's a very good, entertaining film but not a great one.

The reviewer made some interesting points which I won't get into in depth right now, but one of them leads me to a story I would have wanted to see..the story of a "benevolent" Borg race that helped the Federation against the invincible Borg, because like STTMP's Singularity melding/man-machine interface, a hive mind could also be an expanding experience for humanity. I picture a less obvious violation of the flesh...a silvery futuristic incarnation of cyborgs to evoke that feeling.

A "Queen" that might look close to this:

Interestingly, the news headlines recently have even had the otherwise brilliant Elon Musk--who has unfortunately made knee-jerk warnings about an AI takeover--expanding AI research, not slowing it down. http://www.wired.com/2016/04/openai-elon-musk-sam-altman-plan-to-set-artificial-intelligence-free/

The eventual effect? Transhumanist inspired cyborgs!
http://www.sciencealert.com/elon-musk-says-we-re-going-to-need-brain-implants-to-compete-with-ai

Something I've pointed out as an inevitability for years here if we are going to keep up with machine-derived AI as opposed to human-derived AI.

RAMA

 

[RAMA]

I guess when there's nothing else to hang one's hat on (emotional connection, entertainment value), there's always "technical level".

Like anything else that's a group effort, a movie is in amalgam of the different facets that are put into it, and I like to judge movies or TV based on different facets. Sometimes if enough of those are good it can override other issues, sometimes not.

In this case, STV is garbage in every respect..Generations has some saving graces, though neither is good. Still, Generations was never nominated for worst film or worst film of the decade:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10th_Golden_Raspberry_Awards

So yes, Generations is far superior amongst the awful.

RAMA