Star Trek: Generations at 30
- Thread starter Tallguy
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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.
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