Generations questions and observations

[Plomeek Broth]

Do you think Soran seeking out the Nexus is necessarily an evil thing or is it only for the way he goes about it and lives he costs?

Loved the Kirk/ Alan Ruck opening scene on the Enterprise D.

Loved the holodeck program on the Master and Commander style ship.

Data was annoying when he was laughing so goofy after obtaining the emotion chip. Bad acting?

Loved Picard and Kirk's convo over the cooking of eggs and toast

This movie was fairly good, just not as good as FC

 

[Falcor5]

Do you think Soran seeking out the Nexus is necessarily an evil thing or is it only for the way he goes about it and lives he costs?

No I don't think its evil at all. If he was able to just fly into it with a shuttle craft and cause no harm to others it would have been perfectly ok in my opinion.

 

[Plomeek Broth]

True, but he would have been cheating life's journey of struggle and triumph and possibly redemption. It's an interesting quandary.

 

[Augustus]

I agree with the OP that Generations is a good movie, though 3 things always make me struggle to truly love it. 1) that this punk Soran and the Klingon sisters somehow outsmart everyone this time. 2) The way the Enterprise D is lost and 3) That Kirk dies in a poor way as well.

As for your commentary. The movie has some great dialogue but Data's emotion chip storyline was not handled well and like you said, at time annoying...

Despite all that, I am going to watch it again soon.

 

[JNG]

True, but he would have been cheating life's journey of struggle and triumph and possibly redemption. It's an interesting quandary.

Yeah, the film hits the note pretty hard that the Nexus is not real and somehow empty. I don't think we really ought to believe that Soran would have found happiness there.

 

[Plomeek Broth]

The crash of the Enterprise D was a very cool scene and beyond elaborate.

I had trouble with Dr. Soran as a villian even though Malcolm McDowell is a good actor because he wasn't fleshed out well at all IMO.

I kept rooting for LaForge to remove the emotion chip once Brent Spiner hammed it up steroid-style.

 

[Siwilliams]

Do you think Soran seeking out the Nexus is necessarily an evil thing or is it only for the way he goes about it and lives he costs?

Killing off other planets/stars and ships in the waves path, that's evil

 

[Timo]

Destroying the first star would probably have posed no major ethical problems: the only thing worth attention there was the observatory - and since Soran was apparently working undercover there and would have had to evacuate, odds are that he would have tipped off his colleagues and prompted them to evacuate as well. Nothing much lost, and people might never have figured out the reasons for the star's explosion were not 100% natural.

Destroying the second star was an obvious crime against humanity. Or some sort of humanoidity at any rate.

Dealing with renegade Klingons and stealing from Romulans are things that Starfleet might give medals for, in the right circumstances.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[T'Cal]

The crash of the Enterprise D was a very cool scene and beyond elaborate.

I had trouble with Dr. Soran as a villian even though Malcolm McDowell is a good actor because he wasn't fleshed out well at all IMO...

In the novel, you are better able to understand the depth of Soran's obsession. You learn that in that moment when he (Guinan and the other refugees) phase in and out of the nexus, Soran is reunited with his wife and children that he had lost just recently to the Borg. His deep depression is replaced suddenly by extreme joy. Then, just as quickly, he is ripped from their presence and back to reality. He knows where there are and gives everything up to be with them.

The nexus idea is just so full of holes that I have real trouble getting past it as an integral part of the plot. Why are Picard and crew so ignorant to a phenomenom that takes place with such regularity so close to earth, one that was responsible for the loss of Starfleet's legend, James Kirk? Why didn't Kirk know about it? Cripes! Even Archer should've known about it back in the day! He went deep into space while previous exploration, manned and otherwise, would've covered much of our solar system. Why did Picard chose to go back with Kirk to the point just before Soran launches the rocket? Why not prevent him from blowing up other stars and saving millions/billions of other lives?

 

[KevasTrader]

Re. Brent Spiner.

Actors largely have to play extremes of emotion. In Spiner's case, he was playing a character who, at best, had only ever imitated human behaviour without understanding them or feeling them. With the introduction of the emotion chip he was suddenly overwhelmed by actually feeling everything all in one go.

Ask yourself this... how would you react?

What if you were blind and could suddenly see? Or vice versa?

 

[Plomeek Broth]

Re. Brent Spiner.

Actors largely have to play extremes of emotion. In Spiner's case, he was playing a character who, at best, had only ever imitated human behaviour without understanding them or feeling them. With the introduction of the emotion chip he was suddenly overwhelmed by actually feeling everything all in one go.

Ask yourself this... how would you react?

What if you were blind and could suddenly see? Or vice versa?

I agree one would act in an extreme manner, but it still doesn't change the fact that Spiner's performance when he was giggling came across as complete camp to me.

 

[arch101]

I think they should have written Soran as more desperate than evil, it would have been more dramatic. McDowell is a good enough actor to have played it that way. By making him more grouchy and evil, they made him more 2-dimensional and run-of-the-mill villain.
They didn't have to make Harriman a doofus. In fact, by making him more heroic like a young Kirk, it would have been a more 'passing-the-torch' scene. Kirk could have still been the big hero in the end.
The use of slow-motion should have been identified as laughably ineffective in test screenings.
It WAS nice of them to throw the Duras Sisters in there as antagonists. Their search for trilithium even ties loosely to the last time we saw them in Season 7 of the TV show.
I really wish Shatner cared enough to slim down for the film. It's extremely unfortunate that our last memory of Kirk was of a bloated Kirk sweating and gasping as he fights Soran in that vest-girdle thingy he was practically bursting out of. I think even he now regrets leaving character that way.

 

[Timo]

Why are Picard and crew so ignorant to a phenomenom that takes place with such regularity so close to earth

Why would it pass close to Earth every time? It's quite likely that, since it moves in a really wide circuit (going out of the galaxy and all), it also wiggles around quite a bit, hitting different locations at different times. Heck, perhaps the path even stays "immobile" while the galaxy turns, creating a multi-lightyear shift on the points of intercept during each 40-year lap.

The Nexus was obviously more complex than what was explicitly shown in the movie. I rather dig the concept, and I like to think of the strange phenomenon as something "unnatural". Perhaps a derelict starship of an alien sort, its alien control systems stuck on beaming up people and pampering them with alien holodeck-equivalents?

It WAS nice of them to throw the Duras Sisters in there as antagonists. Their search for trilithium even ties loosely to the last time we saw them in Season 7 of the TV show.

Or their appearance in the first season of DS9. Still dealing in illegal explosives for their noble cause of undermining the Empire, only this time buying rather than selling.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[T'Cal]

DATA: According to our information, the ribbon is a conflux of temporal energy, which travels through our galaxy every 39.1 years.

Yes, he says galaxy. It apparently passes through the Federation with regularity otherwise we wouldn't know its frequency. Yet, even Data didn't know about it until he looked it up. This is the thing that killed James T. Kirk!! On the launch of an Enterprise!! With media representatives recording the event!! Pitiful writing.

Also, it must move incredibly fast to travel through our galaxy that often. It appears in the film to travel through the horizontal plane of the Milky Way but even if it is at an angle, it has to move at speeds that would make it a blurr, not quite the slow moving ribbon we saw on screen. This whole concept was not thought out well at all. The writers inserted magic in a sci-fi film. Magic belongs in sci-fantasy films.

I want to like this film because it does have its moments. But the more I watch it the less I like it.

 

[Timo]

The argument still stands: the thing could take a somewhat different route every 40 years. And the Trek galaxy is full of such phenomena, too many for even Data to keep track.

As for the irregular pace at which the Nexus moves, I'd interpret that as the very reason why Soran can affect it by the truly minuscule changes in gravity that a star's explosion will produce. The thing is simply extremely sensitive to gravity, and tends to slow down to a crawl near planets and stars...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Argus Skyhawk]

The thing is simply extremely sensitive to gravity, and tends to slow down to a crawl near planets and stars...
Timo Saloniemi

But then it speeds up when it leaves a solar system? Not if it is moving only on its own momentum, but perhaps if another force is pulling it. Of course, this thing has to be moving one heck of a lot faster than light to pass through the galaxy once every 39 years, so it is clearly being governed by laws of physics different from those we know about.

One could also wonder why the Borg were not more widely known before "Q Who". To paraphrase the Nit-Pickers Guide for Next Generation Trekkers 2, the Listeners must have been a tight-lipped bunch. My fan theory is that the El Aurians DID tell people about the Borg, but the Federation had already learned from Kirk that the galaxy contained planet-eating Doomsday Machines and Trelane characters who could make planets disappear with a wink, so the Borg were just lumped in with the other scary threats from the far reaches of space, and generally overlooked until they were almost forgotten.

Anyway, despite the common complaints about the logic problems in the plot, I still love Generations and consider it vastly underrated.

 

[T'Cal]

The argument still stands: the thing could take a somewhat different route every 40 years. And the Trek galaxy is full of such phenomena, too many for even Data to keep track.

As for the irregular pace at which the Nexus moves, I'd interpret that as the very reason why Soran can affect it by the truly minuscule changes in gravity that a star's explosion will produce. The thing is simply extremely sensitive to gravity, and tends to slow down to a crawl near planets and stars...

Timo Saloniemi

Are ye daft, man!?! Ye cannot change the laws of physics!!