Generations had a bigger budget than ST6, so why...

...did they need to reuse the Bird of Prey explosion from the previous film? Always bugged the hell out of me.

I get that some money had to be spent on redesigning some of the Ent-D sets and refurbishing the shooting model for movie lighting and picture resolution. But was all the extra money really spent on that?

 

The scene on the holodeck Black Pearl looks like it was expensive.

Worf got wet, everyone laughed
Beverly got wet, nobody laughed

Future humor

 

• How much does a shot like that costs?
• How much was the overall FX budget?
• If the FX budget was maxed out (as it should have been, why leave money on the table?) what should they have spent less money on for a new explosion? Make something else cheaper? Cut something else entirely?
• How different would a new explosion (taking up how many seconds of screen time?) have looked?

"Extra?" I think the money was spent on: All of the shots of two Enterprises, a space ribbon, a space station, NEW shots of a Bird of Prey, crashing the largest model of the Enterprise ever built, planetary effects, stellar cartography (cut that, that'll give you your explosion), and and and and.

Generations might not have had the budget of Terminator 2 but it wasn't a low budget movie and it doesn't look like one. They figured out a place to stretch the budget where 90% of the audience would never notice. Good for them.

 

The problem is that the movie was a cash-grab, that was rushed to Theatres just after TNG went off the air. I was lucky enough to hear Brannon Braga and Moore talk about the movie in person. They stated that originally Kirk, Spock and McCoy were there on the Enterprise B, but there was no time to re-script the lines for Chekov and Scotty - they literally just lifted the dialog and gave it to them. So we have the weird bit where Chekov (McCoy) says "you and you, you've just become nurses, lets go". It makes sense for McCoy to say that, but not Chekov.

They tried and failed to get Nimoy to direct and then Meyer. Both refused. Berman informed Nimoy that there was no time to rewrite the script, that they were already in production, so Nimoy walked away.

Moore even stated that Nimoy's complaints were valid. It all feels made for TV, you've got a workman like director in David Carson, who has not directed a big budget movie since. You've got (actually kind of lovely) TV music that totally fails to score, especially in the action scenes. They'd wanted Goldsmith of course - but he wasn't available. Braga said they realised about the plot hole of leaving the Nexus (any time) but didn't have the time to solve it. Instead they hoped the charisma of Stewart and Shatner would paper over the cracks. You've also got TV quality actors with the Klingon sisters and their inclusion is just off. It's a side track that goes no where. Flab like this makes the film harder for the non-fan to appreciate the movie.

Some of the VFX in Generations is great - the energy ribbon, that shot with Soran on the mountain. But time pressures meant that even footage filmed for Encounter at Farpoint is re-used. Even the saucer crash didn't work properly, they were able to cobble something together that kind of works, but the leading edge of the saucer kept lifting up.

For me - and this might be unpopular, the biggest weakness is Shatner. The man is an acting powerhouse, he was the leading man in six pretty great movies. But in this one, Shatner plays Shatner, not Kirk. Shatner loves horses and Dobermans, does Kirk? Was this really Kirks fantasy? Where was Miramanee or Edith Keeler? The problem for me is always that Kirk isn't in the film except for right at the beginning.

Over the years, I've mellowed on the movie, I like the bright colorful approach and the attempt at a complex story - rather than revenge plots filmed in dim lighting. The first half of the film really works, but it's all dragged down once they enter the nexus.

 

If I remember correctly, a lot of money was spent designing and making new uniforms that didn't end up getting used. Plus some scenes, like the orbital skydiving, were shot but not used.

Stellar Cartography was an expensive set to make. Plus, as mentioned above, Worf's promotion scene was expensive.

The money was spent... it just didn't all make it to what we saw.

 

Indeed. Location shooting is always expensive. They also had to rent the ship.

And, the desert scenes were expensive, and then they had to reshoot some of them.

 

It's beyond me why they didn't at least flip the shot to make it less recognizable.

 

It would have made no sense for McCoy to say that, it would have been an offensive line if a doctor disrespects nurses and their profession so much that he appoints some random people as "nurses" which he wouldn't even have the authority to do. Chekov who isn't a doctor calling other people who aren't medical professionals either nurses is fine because they are equally untrained for what they're doing.

 

There was also the time factor. The movie was under an extremely tight deadline to get in theatres November of 94. Filming began at the same time AGT began filming, granted that was just the 23rd century stuff on the Enterprise B. Even so, the 24th century portion of the movie began filming something like a week after AGT finished filming. And with the extensive time filming the saucer's crash sequence took, they simply didn't have enough time to film a new exploding BoP so they just used the stock shot from TUC instead.

 

This may be true, but Generations isn't any more (or less) of a cashgrab than any other film in the series. TMP and TWOK were both sold to theater owners before a script was even finished, the former only made it by throwing money at it, and the latter was saved by Nicholas Meyer volunteering to rewrite the script on a frenzied caffeine (cocaine?) binge. The entire franchise is a cashgrab.

Again, there's truth to this, but also a bit of an exaggeration. The lines work fine enough for Chekov and Scotty - they're confident and experienced men willing to help when no one else is available - and there is indeed some customization for them: at one point Chekov speaks Russian and Scotty teases Kirk about retirement in a way that sounds right for him and not at all for Spock.

I'm thinking Nimoy wanted Spock to be more directly important to the plot; I could see them try giving him a line to Kirk that would later be echoed by Picard and having it be instrumental in Kirk deciding to help save the universe one more time, but who knows if that would've appeased him.

In any case, the suits cared enough about the quality of the production they ponied up the cash to send Stewart, Shatner, and McDowell right back to the desert to reshoot the ending, so whatever else you can say about the production, I don't think anybody involved just thought "who gives a f--k?"

 

I think the movie's release date is likely the biggest culprit in its shortcomings. The production wanted to get it out for the holiday season of the same year TNG went off the air, which was probably too soon to really do a great job within the allocated budget and rectify mistakes that caused delays.

That old expression of "you can have it fast, good or cheap, pick any two" definitely applied. If they had waited until the 1995 holiday season, they could have cleaned up a lot of the messiness with script revisions, production assets & people availability, etc., (there would also have been more time for the audience to miss the TNG crew and be up for seeing a new adventure), but I think there was a desire to use the movie's release to promote UPN's launch in January 1995.

 

The test screenings were so poor they were forced to reshoot the end. Even with the revised ending, audience reviews were lukewarm.

According to the Wikipedia article on the movie, it was shot in just 56 days! Production was so rushed, Frakes and Burton wore Avery Brooks and Colm Meaneys costumes from DS9. Apparently, filming on Generations was happening concurrent with filming on All Good Things.

Ron Moore: I think that is probably a valid point. If you listen to the commentary track on the Generations DVD, Brannon [Braga] and I talk pretty openly about our dissatisfaction with Generations and the reasons why it went south and the reasons we are not happy with it. I kind of feel it was a missed opportunity and a movie that just didn’t come together.

I really think that with more development time, this movie could have been great.

 

Technically, it was the Interceptor.

I was shocked when I read an earlier draft of the script from before they cut it down (it actually had the whole TOS crew in it, though only Spock and Bones got more than a line or two) and saw that "Keep things together until I get back"/"I always do" was written for Kirk and Spock. It doesn't even make sense that way. Kirk and Spock always went down to the planet together, Scotty is the one who had to stay on the ship and make sure it didn't fall out of orbit or whatever long enough for the big three to solve the episode.

 

It wasn't supposed to be a BoP at all, there was supposed to be a new and powerful Klingon ship, a fair match for the Galaxy Class. They cut building a new ship model for cost reasons and rewrote the script to use the existing BoP explosion footage.

 

Sounds like it’s time for writing a strongly-worded letter.

 

Well, that and they wanted to get the Trek movies back on a two-year plan like they were in the 80s with the specific intention of having a new movie out in 96 to celebrate the 30th anniversary. And they wanted the 30th anniversary to bring in a brand new Enterprise, which is why the D had to be destroyed in Generations.

 

Could we not baselessly speculate on Trek creatives doing cocaine without having any evidence for it? Meyer by all accounts has always been a fast writer. Writing a script quickly is not proof of a cocaine habit.

 

You got me searching the web to see if there's any evidence that Meyer took Cocaine. There isn't.

But:

"Sherlock’s canonical cocaine addiction is eradicated by Meyer too, after Holmes is treated by Freud in the same book."

https://www.tor.com/2019/10/29/nich...s-in-the-adventure-of-the-peculiar-protocols/

 

Just to clarify, the book that sentence is referring to is The Seven Per-Cent Solution, Meyer's first Sherlock Holmes book, where Holmes' cocaine addiction reaches greater heights than Conan Doyle ever depicted.

 

Good book. West End Horror is good too. Those are the only two that I ever read.

If you get him talking about Sherlock Holmes he sounds like a FAN.