Why was it so vital that "Generations" be a "bridge" movie.

[enterprisecvn65]

... it was absolutely VITAL that the film be some kind of "bridge" between TOS and TNG, with Kirk and Picard meeting being the most desired scenario of course.

Because otherwise they'd have to find a new title.

Kind of wishing Generations was a bridge movie, because I liked what they did with that set...

What, dropped it off a cliff with Kirk still on it?

Hindsight has never been 50/50. It however has been known to be 20/20 on occasion.

Don't feel bad, enterprisecvn65. You're fine as long as you don't get to the state of some people I've heard about. They hire a taxi to cruise the perimeter of the mall looking for their car....

Good lord. If I reach that point I'm just going to call it a life, go home, put aluminum foil over all my windows and just order chinese delivery every day and watch all my favorite movies and shows until the end.

 

[Christopher]

I understand the thinking that TNG was a not a network show so there might have been a sizeable base that wasn't familiar with it, hence the need to connect it with TOS to make it more recognizable to some.

But really, despite the fact is was syndicated only I really think there was a big enough base to make it successful and if the first priority had been to make the best TNG film possible, then word of mouth might have spread to people to the non TNG folks and they would have gone to see it.

Well, as I said, TNG's syndication was only part of it. People go to movies for lots of different reasons. A movie based on a show is bound to have a fair number of ticket-buyers who don't watch the show or don't even know about the show. Whenever something moves to a new medium, it's going to get audience members who've never heard of it in its old medium. (When Smallville was around, there were genuinely fans of the show who had no idea that it was a Superman prequel, who didn't recognize the name Clark Kent as being associated with Superman. They just watched it because it was Dawson's Creek with superpowers.)

Indeed, that's part of the reason for doing adaptations in the first place: To expose a property to an audience that wasn't already following it and thereby to enlarge its total audience base. Attracting new fans is pretty much the point.

I never really thought about it this way, but 'Generations' would have been an incomprehensible mess to someone who was not a already familiar with the show.
They just assumed that everyone in the audience knew these characters and if you go by first impressions none of the cast displayed anything which made them look good. Having an intro scene like TMP would have helped a lot....

That's a good point. It's kind of contradictory the way they went about it -- they included the TOS characters because they thought they needed a bridge for the sake of non-TNG-savvy audiences, but then they approached the TNG elements with the assumption that they needed no introduction.

Again, I think it's because they rushed into this right after ending the series, so they just went on momentum and treated it as another 2-hour episode with a bigger budget than usual. Maybe it would've worked better if they'd waited longer, cleared their minds and then started over from scratch. Or if they'd brought in someone new to write and direct the movie, someone who could come at it from a fresh perspective.

 

[enterprisecvn65]

I don't know that GEN needed to be a "bridge" movie.
That is, the film needed a "baton passing" or that TNG couldn't stand on it's own or the public needed some contrived franchise continuity help.

The first TNG movie would want a big story, a big star, something extraordinary and special for the big screen.
Bringing Kirk and Picard together seemed to fit the bill.
It's a suitable big historic event worthy of a movie.
A better bet for their first time out than, say, an INS Alien of the Week idea.

And I suppose the precedent had already been set by Spock's appearance during the series. But bringing Kirk back and teaming up with Picard was a good big idea for a TNG movie (not because it was "needed" in any kind of creative or financial way).

Well I could be wrong and I am looking at this through the fog of 20 years.

It just seems to me that, once it was announced that TNG was going to the big screen, it was almost immediately expected that Kirk was going to be in it before any kind of thought was put into it so the starting point of making the film was "How do we get Kirk into it?" And it may have forced the creators into limiting their options and using contrived plot devices like the Nexus.

It didn't help that the final meeting of Kirk and Picard was also pretty lame.

I don't pretend to know Rick Berman...Sure I've met him a couple of times and we made out once....but I have no real proof that he or any other big shot at Paramount made the edict that "Thy first TNG film shall includeth the almighty Captain Kirk."

I just have a gut feeling, that's grown over time, that once the TNG films were announced the top priority was getting Kirk in and not how do we kick the film franchise off in the best way we can and set it up for a good run.

But again it made money so I guess it achieved it's goal. Unfortunately for many ST fans it was a case of short term gain in exchange for long term pain and I think all but the most die hard "Generations" fans would be able to call the long awaited meeting of the two captains as "Epic"...which is what is should have been.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I don't pretend to know Rick Berman...Sure I've met him a couple of times and we made out once....but I have no real proof that he or any other big shot at Paramount made the edict that "Thy first TNG film shall includeth the almighty Captain Kirk."

Berman has said on a number of occasions that Paramount gave him no such directive. Including Kirk -- and killing him -- was his choice, not the studio's.

I just have a gut feeling, that's grown over time, that once the TNG films were announced the top priority was getting Kirk in and not how do we kick the film franchise off in the best way we can and set it up for a good run.

I think that's basically correct. Berman couldn't have afforded Shatner on a weekly television budget, but on a film budget he could. Generations let him get a guest star that the television series couldn't have afforded.

 

[Dukhat]

In fact, that's one thing I think Generations didn't do right -- they didn't introduce the Enterprise-D well at all. We didn't get a full exterior look at the ship until it fled from the supernova midway through. And the initial scenes starting on the holodeck and then going out into the corridors of the ship would've been confusing for people who didn't watch TNG. The producers made the mistake of rushing into production on the movie immediately after finishing the series, and they were too much in the habit of making the series with the assumption that the audience was coming back week after week and knew what they were seeing.

I never really thought about it this way, but 'Generations' would have been an incomprehensible mess to someone who was not a already familiar with the show. They just assumed that everyone in the audience knew these characters and if you go by first impressions none of the cast displayed anything which made them look good. Having an intro scene like TMP would have helped a lot....

Case in point: I went to to see Generations on opening night with my girlfriend at the time, who was not a Star Trek fan and didn't watch TNG. While she wasn't an idiot or anything, I wasn't expecting her to catch a lot of the TNG references. After the movie she made a comment something to the effect of "I understand that the passage of time made the captain older and bald, but why did his accent change from American to British?"

After explaining to her that Harriman and Picard were two different characters, and that the Enterprise-B and the Enterprise-D were two different ships (she didn't notice this either), I realized the fundamental flaw of this film: It was just a big fanwank production for people who ONLY watched TNG. The casual moviegoing audience, like my gf, would have walked out of that theater never wanting to see another ST film again.

Now again I'll point out that my gf wasn't an idiot. Look at it through her eyes: The way the film was produced, you have old Kirk aboard a brand-new Enterprise (which got quite a stunning reveal at the start of the movie), and being introduced to a brand-new, young, wet-behind-the-ears captain of said new ship. Then all of a sudden there's this jarring 78 year passage of time cut, and those TMP-era characters are just gone. Now we have a completely different ship and a completely different crew. But to the casual viewer there's no indication that this ship isn't the same as the one we were just introduced to, and since (as Christopher points out) we don't see its exterior very well, a casual viewer might mistake it for the same ship as the Ent-B. So logically, one would think that the ship's captain was supposed to be the same young guy we were introduced to at the start of the movie, only now older, balder, and for some incongruous reason, a Brit.

Really, the introduction of the Enterprise-B was a bad idea. Rather, it should have been the decommissioning ceremony for the Enterprise-A. No new young captain or new TMP crew to confuse the audience. When the Nexus comes, Kirk should have piloted the old ship into the Nexus, seemingly destroying it while saving the El-Aurian transports from destruction.

It also didn't help the confusion that three characters who were present at the start of the film did not appear to age at all in that intervening time: Kirk, Guinan, and Soran. For the latter two, we TNG fans already knew that El-Aurians are a long-lived race. But for the casual audience, they'd be confused as hell (and I don't believe there was any point in the film where their lifespans were mentioned). As for Kirk, he's the same age as when he entered the Nexus, why again? According to his perspective, he just got here? Come again? Why was that?

 

[Lance]

As I alluded to earlier, one version of the story did begin the TNG segment aboard the Armagosa observatory, under apparent attack from Romulan Warbirds, when the Enterprise arrives and chases away the Romulan attackers.

In my perception, this would've been a much better introduction of the TNG characters to an audience not familiar with them. The cinema going audience's "first" view of the TNG cast would be of a competent group of professionals working tightly as a unit, not to mention beginning the TNG segment with a bad-ass battle sequence, which would have been a terrific introduction of NCC-1701-D herself.

The problem with the 'wacky hi-jinks on the holodeck!' opening that we got instead is that, as I stated earlier, there's this oddball assumption from the film-makers that the audience are already familiar with Picard and his crew. Which is a very strange way to do business when the apparent aim of the movie is to ease audiences who may be less familiar with TNG into accepting the passing of the torch... as it is, for all extents and purposes, the HMS Enterprise scenes are cute, and would be a great fit for an ongoing TV series, but it isn't that great an introduction to these characters, for anyone who doesn't already know them. Not to mention the visual dissonance of going from a spaceship to a sailing ship, with no apparant explanation of what the holodeck is or how it functions. So casual audiences may have been completely baffled by all of this.

The ideal situation should always be to assume that each new Star Trek movie is someone's *first* Star Trek movie, and re-explain the fundamentals for the benefit of that audience (I may have paraphrased Stan Lee there ). Generations simply doesn't do that in regards to the TNG segments. Compare it to First Contact, which is a direct sequel to events from the television series, but explains everything completely from scratch, and it doesn't assume that members of the audience will know anything about "The Best of Both Worlds". It's a much stronger introduction to TNG as a result of that.

It also didn't help the confusion that three characters who were present at the start of the film did not appear to age at all in that intervening time: Kirk, Guinan, and Soran. For the latter two, we TNG fans already knew that El-Aurians are a long-lived race. But for the casual audience, they'd be confused as hell (and I don't believe there was any point in the film where their lifespans were mentioned).

Another excellent point. We see Guinan and Soren haven't aged in the interim, and as viewers of TNG *we* understand why. But there's nothing in the movie which explains this to a casual audience. They're just left to figure this stuff out on their own.

 

[JeffinOakland]

From nearly the beginning, there seems to have been this internal mythology that what the fans love about ST is Kirk. Allegedly, the fans can't get enough of him. Next Generations was intended, I think, to be an "opportunity" to the fans to say goodbye to their beloved. I think Shatner and TPTB over-estimated how attached to Kirk the fanbase really was. Story has it that the TNG actors besides Stewart were furious that, after they finally got their movie, it was just a Kirk/Picard bromance.

 

[enterprisecvn65]

I don't pretend to know Rick Berman...Sure I've met him a couple of times and we made out once....but I have no real proof that he or any other big shot at Paramount made the edict that "Thy first TNG film shall includeth the almighty Captain Kirk."

Berman has said on a number of occasions that Paramount gave him no such directive. Including Kirk -- and killing him -- was his choice, not the studio's.

I just have a gut feeling, that's grown over time, that once the TNG films were announced the top priority was getting Kirk in and not how do we kick the film franchise off in the best way we can and set it up for a good run.

I think that's basically correct. Berman couldn't have afforded Shatner on a weekly television budget, but on a film budget he could. Generations let him get a guest star that the television series couldn't have afforded.

I don't pretend to know Rick Berman...Sure I've met him a couple of times and we made out once....but I have no real proof that he or any other big shot at Paramount made the edict that "Thy first TNG film shall includeth the almighty Captain Kirk."

Berman has said on a number of occasions that Paramount gave him no such directive. Including Kirk -- and killing him -- was his choice, not the studio's.

I just have a gut feeling, that's grown over time, that once the TNG films were announced the top priority was getting Kirk in and not how do we kick the film franchise off in the best way we can and set it up for a good run.

I think that's basically correct. Berman couldn't have afforded Shatner on a weekly television budget, but on a film budget he could. Generations let him get a guest star that the television series couldn't have afforded.

Thanks for the Berman info, I had a feeling his fine hand played a big part in this.

If he wanted to include Kirk in the first film then fine. It may not have been the best way to go for the first TNG film, but I guess that's neither here nor there.

But the way he included him.......GAWD!!!! The opening with the Enterprise-B was decent. You could see Kirk really didn't want to be there and it was amusing to see him look so uncomfortable. But then when things went down and the Herriman asked for help it was cool to see Kirk leap into action.

But the ending.....jeez. I mean really. Picard has to basically beg and guilt Kirk into helping him and then Kirk doesn't really in a meaningful self sacrificing way. Sure the bridge was wobbly but Kirk probably thought "It'll hold, I've gotten out of worse situations." Then he gets the remote and BAM the bridge falls and noone sees it and it's all over, except for the dying words, in a few seconds.

Compare that to Spock's silent moment of decision when Genesis was activated. Leaving the bridge and going into the radation filled room on his own accord, knowing he would die, struggling to fix the mains while in great pain and his friends screaming desperately for him to get out of there. Not to mention his last words shared with someone he was actually close to.

All I can say if this was strictly Berman's call then he needed to go back and watch TWOK about 50 more times to learn how to write a meaningful and moving sequence leading up to a main character's death. It would have been pretty pathetic if Kirk had to beg Spock to go down to engineering to see if he could help.

The destruction of the Enterprise in TSFS had more purpose and more emotion than Berman's goosecrap.....and the Enterprise wasn't even a living being to begin with.

Ultimately it comes down to this. When you make a science fiction film where one of the main plot devices shares its name with a line of shampoo and hair care products.........chances are you're in trouble.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Hindsight has never been 50/50. It however has been known to be 20/20 on occasion.

Whoops.

Well I'm talking about hindsight on Krypton. They have much stronger hindsight there.

Krypton...that's more like 50,000,000/20.

 

[Dukhat]

The problem with the 'wacky hi-jinks on the holodeck!' opening that we got instead is that, as I stated earlier, there's this oddball assumption from the film-makers that the audience are already familiar with Picard and his crew. Which is a very strange way to do business when the apparent aim of the movie is to ease audiences who may be less familiar with TNG into accepting the passing of the torch... as it is, for all extents and purposes, the HMS Enterprise scenes are cute, and would be a great fit for an ongoing TV series, but it isn't that great an introduction to these characters, for anyone who doesn't already know them. Not to mention the visual dissonance of going from a spaceship to a sailing ship, with no apparant explanation of what the holodeck is or how it functions. So casual audiences may have been completely baffled by all of this.

Another problem is that the holodeck scene simply wasn't necessary. Worf's promotion had nothing whatsoever to do with the plot of the movie; it was just more pointless fanwank. Most of the film's budget was spent on this scene, and for what? Yeah, the sailing ship Enterprise was a cute moment I guess, but I would rather have seen the budget spent on new filming models of the Enterprise-B or the Klingon ship, or newer, better uniforms for the crew instead of the 18th century sailing outfits seen for a total of 15 minutes.

 

[Lance]

It's like I say, the weirdest thing is the visual shift. Imagine being a casual viewer. You'd probably spend the whole of that sailing ship scene wondering why we're suddenly on the high seas, and then still being puzzled even when we see Picard exit to the Enterprise corridor. At no point in the scene is any concession ever made for an audience member who doesn't know what a holodeck is.

(It's comparible to something I've seen people say about the 1996 Doctor Who TV Movie, which introduces us to The Doctor and the TARDIS without making it clear that the vast interior is inside the tiny exterior... the assumption was made that people already knew what a TARDIS is, so they introduced us to the inside of the ship first. This is a fatal choice, decisions like these are the kinds of simple errors that will lose a first-time audience member.)

 

[Khan 2.0]

As I alluded to earlier, one version of the story did begin the TNG segment aboard the Armagosa observatory, under apparent attack from Romulan Warbirds, when the Enterprise arrives and chases away the Romulan attackers.

In my perception, this would've been a much better introduction of the TNG characters to an audience not familiar with them. The cinema going audience's "first" view of the TNG cast would be of a competent group of professionals working tightly as a unit, not to mention beginning the TNG segment with a bad-ass battle sequence, which would have been a terrific introduction of NCC-1701-D herself

I remember reading somewhere the writers, Berman whoever it was figured that another intense action scene coming immediately after the Ent B opener would've felt too much for the audience so they went with the sailboat.

I guess the TNG team figured that the TV show had been so successful and ingrained in the pop culture that everyone would already know about holodecks, the TNG crew, A list mega star Whoopi Goldberg not aging etc. Its a wonder they bothered to put in "78 years later"

Really, the introduction of the Enterprise-B was a bad idea. Rather, it should have been the decommissioning ceremony for the Enterprise-A. No new young captain or new TMP crew to confuse the audience. When the Nexus comes, Kirk should have piloted the old ship into the Nexus, seemingly destroying it while saving the El-Aurian transports from destruction.

that would've been a great opening. So obvious but I wonder if it was even considered?

 

[Christopher]

(It's comparible to something I've seen people say about the 1996 Doctor Who TV Movie, which introduces us to The Doctor and the TARDIS without making it clear that the vast interior is inside the tiny exterior... the assumption was made that people already knew what a TARDIS is, so they introduced us to the inside of the ship first. This is a fatal choice, decisions like these are the kinds of simple errors that will lose a first-time audience member.)

Well, they did show the police box whirling through the time vortex accompanied by the sound of the music the Doctor was playing in the interior scenes, which is a common cinematic technique to establish that the exterior and the interior are linked; but I agree it wasn't entirely clear to the uninitiated.

It would've been a better film if it had started in San Francisco with the human characters and gradually revealed the Doctor and the TARDIS to the audience as the characters learned about them -- in other words, done the same thing "Rose" did a few years later (and that "An Unearthly Child" did decades earlier). True, that would've meant losing a fair amount of Sylvester McCoy's scenes, but they could've been shown in flashback later on; or they could've written the movie so that he survived a bit longer in San Francisco before regenerating.

 

[DWF]

(It's comparible to something I've seen people say about the 1996 Doctor Who TV Movie, which introduces us to The Doctor and the TARDIS without making it clear that the vast interior is inside the tiny exterior... the assumption was made that people already knew what a TARDIS is, so they introduced us to the inside of the ship first. This is a fatal choice, decisions like these are the kinds of simple errors that will lose a first-time audience member.)

Well, they did show the police box whirling through the time vortex accompanied by the sound of the music the Doctor was playing in the interior scenes, which is a common cinematic technique to establish that the exterior and the interior are linked; but I agree it wasn't entirely clear to the uninitiated.

It would've been a better film if it had started in San Francisco with the human characters and gradually revealed the Doctor and the TARDIS to the audience as the characters learned about them -- in other words, done the same thing "Rose" did a few years later (and that "An Unearthly Child" did decades earlier). True, that would've meant losing a fair amount of Sylvester McCoy's scenes, but they could've been shown in flashback later on; or they could've written the movie so that he survived a bit longer in San Francisco before regenerating.

Unlike several Doctor Who stories the movie started with the Doctor and the Master, Rose and and An Unearthly Child had a stopry running and the Doctor was introduced later on. With Generations you also had a storyline started and the next gen crew were added to the story later on. And strangely enough with the exception of the start of Star Trel III and the Genesis tape the Star Trek really hasn't had any flashback scenes, but then I think that could be a throwback to how movies were generally made in '80s.

 

[Lance]

I think the official Doctor Who Magazine conducted an experiment at the time, showing the TV Movie to a class of Year 7's who were completely unfamiliar with Doctor Who, and they did have trouble grasping the notion that the vast labyrinthine interior was supposed to be inside the police box exterior early in the movie. It didn't click for them until halfway through the movie when Chang Lee walks into the TARDIS for the first time.

On some level I can't fathom the same being true of Star Trek, but on the other hand I can definitely imagine an audience who lack familiarity with something like the holodeck being completely puzzled by the sailing ship scene... because we never actually *see* the simulation get switched off, we only see people entering and exiting it, so to a layman audience member it could be like, "So why has this Enterprise got a sailing ship inside of it?"

To you and me the answer is obvious, but the movie makes no concessions to those kinds of questions whatsoever.
The basic point is essentially what I said earlier when I paraphrased Stan Lee: "Every Star Trek movie is somebody's first Star Trek movie, so it's very important to always remind people of the fundamentals as if you're pitching it to a new audience." That's doubly true for a movie designed to promote a different crew to the big screen... simply giving us "another standard episode" as if it's business as usual just doesn't cut it.

 

[Christopher]

It's interesting... in all these years, I never really realized those things about Generations. I did recognize that they didn't do a good job establishing the exterior of the ship, but I didn't realize just how lost a novice viewer would be. This has been an enlightening discussion.

 

[Dukhat]

It would've been a better film if it had started in San Francisco with the human characters and gradually revealed the Doctor and the TARDIS to the audience as the characters learned about them -- in other words, done the same thing "Rose" did a few years later (and that "An Unearthly Child" did decades earlier). True, that would've meant losing a fair amount of Sylvester McCoy's scenes, but they could've been shown in flashback later on; or they could've written the movie so that he survived a bit longer in San Francisco before regenerating.

Actually, I read somewhere that McCoy stated that the worst thing the producers of the '96 movie did was have him in it, for precisely the reason that any new viewers to Doctor Who would have no idea what was going on.

 

[Christopher]

^Yeah, I thought about the possibility of leaving McGann out altogether; but while being accessible to new viewers is important, I always appreciated how much the movie tried to be a continuation rather than the reboot I was expecting. And having a newly regenerated Doctor was helpful for new audiences in a way, because the Doctor's rediscovery of his own identity and past served to provide exposition.

 

[Dukhat]

But the '96 movie was supposed to be a pilot for a new TV series, yes? If that had happened, then perhaps McCoy could have had a guest role in a flashback once the series progressed to the point where the audience understood the concept of regeneration if they didn't before.

 

[Christopher]

It's not a perfect movie, but I still think it holds up pretty well. A re-edit that starts in San Francisco and then fills in some of the McCoy-in-the-TARDIS scenes in flashback later on could've worked well enough.