Reason it's so dark in "Generations" Maybe it was Halloween or "The Purge."I

[Christopher]

As for the bridge upgrades, the main reason we got those side panels in the first place was so that they didn't have to have stations that would have to be manned every week, or in every shot - they put all the secondary stations at the back literally so that they would be paying less money for extras from the per-episode budget.

Well, also the original idea of Roddenberry and TNG's developers was that technology had advanced to the point that the ship was mostly automated and intelligent enough to run itself, and thus the crew didn't need a lot of controls -- which was why the bridge was designed to be more like a conference lounge with a few minimal consoles than a high-tech flight-control center. (And why there was no communications officer, only one flight controller instead of helm and navigation, and no regular chief engineer.) Heck, one of Andrew Probert's early design proposals would've had a conference table right in the middle, but they eventually decided to make that a separate set for variety. The movie added completely unnecessary new consoles because the director wanted the bridge to look more "busy" and visually interesting. (A design philosophy taken to its extreme by the Kelvin Timeline movies, wherein the bridge has maybe twice as many consoles as the original and it's unclear what most of them are for.)

 

[Jayson1]

What I find intresting is nobody ever talks about how similar the Enterprise looks compared to how it looked in "Yesterday's Enterprise" which was also directed by David Carson. Even those side monitors on the bridge were oviously the same ones they used in "Yesterday's Enterprise." I never heard anyone ever talk about how they hated how the ship looked in "Yesterday's Enterprise" so I wonder why people give that a pass but not the movie?

Jason

 

[Christopher]

I never heard anyone ever talk about how they hated how the ship looked in "Yesterday's Enterprise" so I wonder why people give that a pass but not the movie?

Maybe because the YE version was supposed to feel wrong and uncomfortable, so any dislike of its appearance served the story's purpose?

 

[Jayson1]

Maybe because the YE version was supposed to feel wrong and uncomfortable, so any dislike of its appearance served the story's purpose?

I agree that it was supose to feel wrong but I think for a lot of people it ended up being something that actually preffered. Seems like it made sense that you could basically take the look and just adapt it to other stories instead of just doing a war story. "Generations" seems to be that seperation people thought would have looked great back during the time "yesterday's Enterprise."

Jason

 

[Christopher]

I agree that it was supose to feel wrong but I think for a lot of people it ended up being something that actually preffered. Seems like it made sense that you could basically take the look and just adapt it to other stories instead of just doing a war story. "Generations" seems to be that seperation people thought would have looked great back during the time "yesterday's Enterprise."

As my father liked to say, "Context is everything."

Or maybe I should be quoting Spock: "Having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting."

 

[Lance]

My biggest problem with the visuals of Generations is that it never gave us an introductory beauty shot of the Enterprise-D. They forgot that this was a movie instead of an episode and failed to adequately introduce the E-D to new viewers. The first shot of the ship was after the holodeck sequence and it was just a brief partial shot of the saucer from the rear, a standard angle from the series that failed to give a clear sense of what the ship looked like. Then there was a long stretch of interior scenes, then a brief, distant shot of the full ship by the observatory when the star imploded, then a quick shot of it warping away. We didn't get an exterior flyby of reasonable length until maybe halfway through the film, and it was just a pretty standard flyby angle from the show, with an almost stationary camera pointing at the ship from behind as it went by. Then another quick warp-entry shot at the end of the following Stellar Cartography sequence, then a few shots of its arrival at Veridian and faceoff with the Klingons. But we didn't get any extensive coverage of the ship exterior until the battle and crash sequences.

They should've introduced the ship after the holodeck sequence with a big, impressive beauty shot showing it off -- nothing as lengthy as the TMP flyaround, but at least something like our introduction to the Enterprise in the 2009 movie, something to make the ship an impressive presence from the get-go rather than an afterthought. Maybe, after Picard leaves the holodeck, do an interior montage with the crew bustling about their business on various sets, treating it as a pullout that eventually takes the camera out through a window or shuttle-bay hatch and pulls out until the whole immense ship comes into view, giving a sense of its vast scale that we rarely got on a TV budget -- like a reverse of the zoom-in on Picard in the observation lounge windows at the start of "Encounter at Farpoint." And there should've been more establishing beauty shots of the ship in the first half when they cut to shipboard scenes from somewhere else. Not only would that have given new viewers a stronger sense of place in the first half of the film, but it would've let them identify more with the ship and raise the stakes for its eventual destruction.

I do actually agree with this, and it's a general problem throughout the movie: the lack of shots of the Enterprise in space. In fact, when I was trying to do a 'TV edit' of the movie a while back for fun, re-editing the movie into the format of two standard length episodes, one of the biggest stumbling blocks I found was the lack of shots of the Enterprise in the movie. The TV show always relied on establishing shots of the ship at the end of ad breaks or to help suggest the "passing of time" between individual scenes, subtle touches, but the editing in the movie is much more fluid in cutting from scene to scene to scene without going back to the outside of the ship. After that Armagosa establishing shot, the next time we even see the Enterprise is when the star explodes. So when I was doing my project, I ended up having to raid the TV show for any establishing shots I thought were suitable for placing between scenes and give it the flow of a "TV episode", they do feel notable by their absence in the movie.

I actually think the battle scene with the Klingons suffers from the same problem: what we do get looks absolutely beautiful, but there just isn't enough of it. By the way we see the interior sets shaking it seems like the Enterprise is really being hammered by the smaller ship, but we only see one or two actual shots of that in space. The movie needed maybe a few more sequences of the Klingons doing strafing runs while the lumbering Enterprise struggles to respond, just to help hammer home the damage that's being inflicted, but the movie gives us almost nothing.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

I actually think the battle scene with the Klingons suffers from the same problem: what we do get looks absolutely beautiful, but there just isn't enough of it. By the way we see the interior sets shaking it seems like the Enterprise is really being hammered by the smaller ship, but we only see one or two actual shots of that in space. The movie needed maybe a few more sequences of the Klingons doing strafing runs while the lumbering Enterprise struggles to respond, just to help hammer home the damage that's being inflicted, but the movie gives us almost nothing.

Using a new shot for the Bird of Prey explosion would've helped a lot, too. I noticed that it was recycled from the climax of TUC on my very first viewing of GEN. It bugged me then, and it bugs me to this day. They could have at least flipped the shot so it wasn't as recognizable.

 

[Lance]

There were times when the sets were actually lit similarly on TV, it just wasn't their default lighting scheme on the show.

I was trying to remember a specific instance of this, and today I found one. This from TNG 3.6, "Booby Trap", although it's specifically because the ship is suffering from problems, but the bridge is lit in a way that evokes the later lighting scheme used in Generations:

And for comparisons sake, the bridge in the movie:

The similarity is even more acute on the HD versions of "Booby Trap".

 

[Qonundrum]

There's a practical reason for that. TV shows are generally watched on moderate-sized screens (much smaller on average when TNG was on) in relatively well-lit rooms, but movies are made to be watched on gigantic screens in darkened theaters. So TV-style lighting would look too bright on a movie screen. But when you're watching both the episodes and the movie on the same living-room TV or computer screen, that distinction is lost, so the change seems arbitrary.

Wasn't there someone who also said the TNG sets were dinged up over the years, for which a big screen would reveal every last little issue if lit as brightly as the TV show? (Even in season 3 on blu-ray, some minor things can be seen... on a 60' screen, everyone would point and probably laugh as well.)

I rather adored seeing the bridge and other sets in semi-darkness with shadows. Looked more authentic and atmospheric. The 1701-D looked magnificent on the big screen after the 6' model was refurbished as well.

What I find intresting is nobody ever talks about how similar the Enterprise looks compared to how it looked in "Yesterday's Enterprise" which was also directed by David Carson. Even those side monitors on the bridge were oviously the same ones they used in "Yesterday's Enterprise." I never heard anyone ever talk about how they hated how the ship looked in "Yesterday's Enterprise" so I wonder why people give that a pass but not the movie?

Jason

It bugged me more that entire warp core breach scenes from Yesterday's Enterprise were re-done in Generations (to save time? The writers were working on Generations at the same time as they were for All Good Things). The appearance with more busy stations certainly looked cool, in both TV episode and movie...

Loved Carson's style in TNG, very cinematic but on the small screen. His work on Generations was pretty good too IMHO.