Captain's Blog pt. 34: Generations

When I walked out of the theater after first seeing Generations, I was convinced what I'd just seen was a movie about drugs. "I get it," I told my brother on the way home, "the Nexus was drugs. Soran was the strung-out junkie, Guinan was the ex-user, and Data was the drug freak-out character. It all makes sense." 

 

 

"Picard's family has been destroyed, and he has to figure out why. He has to descend into the madness to make sense of it."

My brother didn't buy it, pointing out (quite rightly) that Picard's family wasn't killed by the Nexus, something my metaphor would need in order to be consistent. But I kept going. "What else could it be but a drug metaphor? Wouldn't make sense otherwise. Even the sets: I mean, it's supposed to be the same ship, but everyone's quarters are different, everything's lit differently, darker, mood mood-lighting-ish, and even Guinan's quarters resemble an opium den."

I was only 20, so it just had never occurred to me (despite my love of the original cast films) that a show leaping from the small-to-big-screen would naturally re-do its visual design, costumes, sets, etc.

In retrospect, had they been trying to make the film I thought I was seeing, they might have been more successful. Generations does indeed resemble the before, middle, and after of a drug binge. And what do you have to show for it in the light of day? Your ship's destroyed, your family's gone, and Captain Kirk lies dead at your feet.

Yep... Time to sober up.

I was onto something, here, just not what I thought. The film was about the dangers of simulated reality/ fake-euphoria vs. hard-won reality; it's just not an especially convincing delivery mechanism for that theme.

Despite everything I'm going to get to, it's still an entertaining enough film, and the TNG-style fx look undeniably cool on the big screen. The spaceship battle and ship destruction - while not particularly logical - and Stellar Cartography scene, and even the big set piece on the Age of Sail boat, everything looks great. 

Let's start at the beginning.

Generations began its journey to the screen when Paramount informed Rick Berman that he'd been greenlit for two films. He asked Moore and Braga (then still writing partners,) Maurice Hurley, and Michael Piller to each come up with some ideas, of which he'd pick the best one. (Piller, still wrapped up in DS9 and not liking the idea of having to compete for the job, declined to submit an idea) Hurley's idea was about having Captain Picard conjure up Captain Kirk in the holodeck, to help him and the Enterprise-D through some kind of crisis, but Berman rejected the idea in favor of Moore's and Braga's. Says Ronald D. Moore:

"It was a movie about mortality. It was a movie about Picard reaching a certain age and realizing there are more days behind him than were in front of him. His brother had died, the Enterprise herself died, and this mythic hero would ultimately have a mortal ending as well. Despite realizing we are mortal, you still move on and you still live your life and you still try and the make the most of it. (Pause) Well, that is what the movie was trying to be about."

I think between the two interpretations offered here, I'll take my own. At least "we were trying to make a drug freakout movie" has a wtf factor that, like it or loathe it, you have to admire.

He continues: "I think-Brannon and I were not ready to write that movie at that point in our careers. Our reach exceeded our grasp. We didn't have the maturity and the seasoning as writers, and probably as human beings, to tackle something that grand and marry it to an action-adventure Star Trek film."

I think it's commendable that both Moore and Braga (who had a funny exchange with Shatner and Damon Lindeloff about Generations on Twitter) recognize the shortcomings of Generations. But beyond the muddled themes of the film and the bad cinematic-realization of the script, as with The Undiscovered Country, the fundamental Trek-ness of the film (ship functionality, internal consistency, character arcs and subplot that support a theme, etc.) is just... off. It's a collection of niggling mistakes from start to finish that undermine the whole. It baffles me to this day that Moore, Braga, and Berman, whose Trek acumen was collectively so spot-on for so many years, threw out so much of what worked over seven seasons and seemingly started from scratch.

Thankfully, there are enough reviews/ sites out there that make a comprehensive list of the film's failings, so I don't have to. Perhaps the most amusing is Red Letter Media's, which makes its usual snarky-but-airtight case against the many "Uhhhhh..." moments from the film. (It's a 30-minute video but totally worth watching if you're so inclined.)

I'll only focus on a few of the more egregious gaffes here and try to cut the film some slack for things that aren't quite gaffes, just very odd choices, such as when Geordi celebrates Worf's promotion by breaking into the high-pitched "hul-li-li-le-lee-li-li..." cheer typically associated with Muslim women (and only Muslim women) saluting their men going off into battle. (At least according to the movie Three Kings.)

In the pre-TNG sequence - where Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov are VIPs aboard the launch of the Enterprise-B - the new crew is rather unbelievably incompetent. They're untested rookies and all/ everyone had a bad day, fine whatever; would Starfleet really staff its flagship vessel with such folks, though? And here is where the problems start: What are we to make of when the Captain (Alan Ruck) tells the press (who seem more 20th century than 23rd) that they're taking the ship on a quick "run around the block," i.e. to Pluto and back, yet, seconds later, when the Nexus appears, they're the only ship in the vicinity? 

Even if you're being pretty forgiving, this one is hard to square.

Next we have the killing off of Picard's family. It's a pretty lazy way of motivating Picard to think about mortality, though the strong presence of Robert and the gang from "Family" certainly lends the scene some power. They're not nameless off-screeners, but folks we got to know a little. And I admire the fact that they wanted to introduce Picard in the movies in an anti-traditional-action-lead way, i.e. showing vulnerability and sobbing grief. Which Patrick Stewart pulls off, no problem. (And I guess Trek has done this sort of thing before, so I can hardly single out Generations. Still.)

Does the film lack a strong director? David Carson directed some of the best episodes of the series, but it's no insult to look at his imdb and see him as a (perfectly competent) director-for-hire. Which is bully for him, career-wise, but would the film have been better-served with someone else? Back to Ronald Moore: (from here)

 
"Leonard Nimoy turned down (directing) the film, and I knew he didn't like the script. It is hard to say at this point he was wrong. I didn't meet with him, but I remember after he met with Rick, Rick conveyed to us his reservations and why he didn't like it. He put his finger on the right problems. The Nexus was a problem. The Nexus was a difficult concept that we were never able to crack and Kirk's death didn't pay off the themes in the way we wanted it to pay off."

Let's talk about The Nexus for a second.

I like the idea of a mysterious energy-ribbon that appears like Halley's Comet every so often and wreaks havoc. But as the bridge between the two eras, it has major problems, not the least of which is what we learn about it from Guinan. i.e. Once you've been in it, you remain as an echo/ ghost, and you can leave whenever you want. 

Wouldn't Soran still be in it, then? (And how does Guinan's ghost even know this? Granted, she has extra-sensory perception, but both the Nexus and Guinan's presence within it to talk to Picard come off a little maguffin-y.) As for the leaving whenever you want aspect, this has been criticized elsewhere and often, but good God, man, why go back to seconds before the sun blows up, then? And why does Picard even need Kirk? To help punch the bad guy? And how is it so easy for Picard and Kirk to break out when everyone else has to be torn kicking-and-screaming from it? (For my drug metaphor, I rationalized this as the way different people are hard-wired for drugs. Soran would be the guy chemically wired to become a full-blown addict after one shot of vodka, while Kirk/ Picard aren't, or something.) 

I'll get back to the Next Gen cast momentarily, but let's talk Kirk/ Shatner.

 

They originally had trouble getting Shatner to come back for his Trek farewell, as Shatner relays in Movie Memories. (Says Moore) "Brannon was explaining why he thought Kirk was integral to the story, and Bill suddenly bursts out, sounding exactly like Kirk, "Well... in fact... he's NOT... in-te-gral... to the story!" Brannon's head snapped back, I flinched, and Rick (Berman) looked startled. But I thought (seeing Shatner channel Kirk spontaneously) was really, really cool."

As undeniably cool as an in-person Shatner Kirk-ism must be, practically nothing in the film, Kirk's arc or otherwise, is integral to the story, because there's really just not much of a story. Sometimes, Trek can pull this off, but does it here? Given Kirk's stature, it is for me the weightiest problem sitting on (and crushing) this script's chest. Whether it's the death of Picard's family, Data's emotional chip, Kirk's death itself, the destruction of the Enterprise, or the Klingons, all of these things seemingly exist only to prop up the conceit of getting the Captains together.

I can understand that's it's cheaper just to introduce someone new, but did anyone else find it weird that there'd be this random love of Kirk's life, "Antoniya?" (Which Shatner's accent distorts into "Antonio" in a couple of scenes.) I'm not saying it's a mistake or a bridge too far, just kind of random. Personally, I'd have chosen to make it Edith Keeler and just never name her; I mean, we only hear her offscreen/ see her in this long shot; wouldn't that have been much, much better?

Much has been made of Kirk's rather-offhanded death, which unravels the "Kirk dies alone" thing from Star Trek V. (Not that anyone really minds. I mean, you could say he died alone on the Enterprise-B, but even that seems not what was meant by this bit in STV.) I was amused by Frank Miller's reaction to this, though: "That's not how James Kirk dies! He dies leading the fragmented remains of Star Fleet into one last battle against the entire Klingon armada. And winning." The original version had Soran shooting Kirk in the back, but the test audience/ Sherry Lansing at Paramount insisted on a re-shoot. So, they had it more of an action/ heroic sacrifice thing. Not the most original/ epic. I mind this the least, though, as I don't even buy that this guy is Kirk. I think it's a transporter double. Unless it's a prequel to the Shatnerverse. In which case, well played.

I have my problems with the whole set-up on Veridian III, but the scenes between Shatner and Stewart are fun. At the time, much was made of the friendship they'd formed on-set, and I thought that was just a bit of marketing. But the years since have demonstrated that the two did indeed become friends, and despite some of the unflattering reviews at the time of the movie's release, I quite enjoy seeing the two actors play off another.

Shatner's ad-libbing and line reading of "Oh My..." is actually pretty cool, and fitting. I approve.

I am baffled why Picard covers the bodies with rocks and leaves it there, though... uhhh... it's not like a shuttlecraft isn't on the way; can't they just bring the body back/ give it a decent burial? I suppose it was a "buried at sea," thing. Like Bin Laden. (Hi, NSA!)

Malcolm McDowell, in Shatner's Movie Memories and almost everywhere else on the web that his involvement in this movie is mentioned, was downright gleeful about his being the guy to kill Kirk. He brags about it. I've never understood his excitement. The only thing memorable about his character is that he gets to kill Kirk, in a very un-Khan like fashion, and with no purpose. This is a guy who wants to slaughter billions so he can get back to his drug zone? Let's not even get into the absurd mechanics of how people enter the Nexus... as with how people exit it, it just falls apart immediately under questioning.

McDowell slags off not just the film but his co-stars, these days, as evidenced here, though I'm not sure how seriously we should take him.

He gets a couple of good lines, but his character is poorly motivated and just not very interesting. For Kirk's death to have the kind of impact it deserves, it needs to be in service of a strong plot and a strong villain. Otherwise, it's a whole different type of film. Take The Wire: Omar getting iced by that mouthy kid from the corner works because of the whole five seasons of context. Soran's entire scheme rests on some nonsensical motivation and wonky science (his rocket takes 8 seconds to reach the sun? a 50 gigawatt force field? The Rube Goldberg-like contraption to re-enter the Nexus?) and it cheapens what should be among the most powerful farewells of the whole Trekverse.

So, okay, Trilithium/ Nexus = Red Matter/ Genesis Device. Big deal. I can hang with some magical technobabble with a passing nod to science. Is that it? Unfortunately, no.

Let's talk about Data.

Data's emotion chip deserves a special mention. Normally, a subplot serves some kind of purpose to the support structure of a film. Does Data's? I realize there is an attempt made in this direction during the admittedly beautiful-looking scenes in Stellar Cartography:

 

But is it enough? I honestly don't think so. Worse, it sets the stage for a retread of Spock's own emotional journey in the films, settled in TMP but resonating through at least TVH. Spiner is not very well-served in Generations. He gets some funny lines (I do quite enjoy his "No problem!" response to Riker's suggestion about the phase coils (rather than just modulating the f**king shields, like they did every other f**king episode of TNG... But I digress.) but both the direction and performance and purpose of his emotional freakouts, here, is just damn odd. (Unless, of course, it was meant to convey the "bad trip / drug freakout"ness. But let's face it, 20-year-old Bryan, it wasn't.) Data seems to just decide to pop in his emotional chip, as if this was an episode in need of a b-story. But big-screen fare doesn't support that kind of stuff; it needs to better serve the a-story.

Some Odds and Ends

Christopher Miller plays Rene Picard in the Nexus sequence, but months earlier, he'd played Shatner's son in the SeaQuest DSV episode "Hide and Seek."

I am not a fan of the whole blowing up the Enterprise-D business in general, (though I am greatly amused by it happening almost immediately after Troi takes the helm) but specifically:

 

Shameless.

I can understand re-using expensive footage, but the explosion of the Klingon ship is the same shot from the end of The Undiscovered Country.

Beverly is fairly ill-served in each of the NextGen movies, unfortunately.

 

 
Says McFadden: “Making Generations was fun, even though I wasn’t very involved. Everyone got on well and was energized by the experience, and I think we all look forward to the next one (...) Speaking for myself, I would like there to be more Crusher in the next film, and I’m hopeful that will be the case.”

Hopes denied.

Though her character gets a pretty sound farewell in "All Good Things," so at least there's that. (And the totally bizarre genre deconstruction madness of "Sub Rosa.")

I don't want to go on too much about this one, but in terms of what it set out to do (be a tale of Picard wrestling with mortality, illuminating the dangers of simulated-reality vs. reality, and send Kirk off as the pantheon deity he is) it fails. 

CODA

"Time is not a predator but a companion on our journey. What we leave behind is not as important as what we live." This isn't a bad line, but it's kind of an anvil dropped on the film. I don't buy this as a reasonable wrap-up for Picard's experience in the story we just saw.

It is a nice wrap-up, though, for some other sentiments, and I'll close this blog with these remarks from the end of Shatner's Movie Memories:

"For years now, Leonard has been telling me about how difficult it was for him to film the death of Spock, and I have to admit, I never really understood what the hell he was talking about. I mean, he'd sit there telling me about how he spent the entire preproduction period on TWOK as well as our early days of production in total denial, blocking the character's death from his mind. Only later, he said, as the actual shooting day approached, did the full depth and consequences of his actions begin to set in. That's when he began having second thoughts, which continued to plague him right up until the cameras were ready to roll, at which point he began looking for any excuse to storm off the set and avoid playing the scene at all." 

"I too spent many months blissfully denying to myself that this simple death scene merited any serious thought, any analysis, any grief, only to later find myself swept under a flood of last-minute anxiety and soul searching in regard to Kirk, Shatner, and both our lives.

"The Kirk I knew is not the standard issue amalgam of fiction, imagination and hype. Instead, the actor's Kirk grew out of memorizing ten pages of dialogue every day and studying scripts in advance, always struggling to come up with the creative ideas that might eventually allow the actor's performance to complement and enhance what already existed on paper. In short, the character was first and foremost a combination of writer's concept and actor's experience.

"The Kirk I knew was bonded to cast and crew by hours of tedium and occasional moments of creative glow.

"What laughs and sorrows had gone into the totality of this fictional character! (...) He's changed my entire life, and he's fulfilled a lot of my boyhood dreams along the way. I owe him a tremendous debt. (...) Every once in awhile, that kind of awareness will sneak up on you and clobber you over the head. For me, filming Kirk's death marked one of those occasions. 

"It was clear now that, for me anyway, Star Trek was coming to an end."

R.I.P. James T. Kirk. Until we meet again.

"Live life like you're gonna die... because you are." 

Captain's Blog pt. 30: The Undiscovered Country

Nick Meyer's original choice of title for Star Trek II was The Undiscovered Country. Given that film's themes of friendship, age, and death, the reference to Hamlet makes perfect sense. As Hamlet questions whether or not life is worthwhile given its hardships, coming to the conclusion that people endure only out of a fear of death, (that undiscovered country whence no traveler has ever returned * ) its parallels to Captain Kirk's character arc are perfectly clear.

* Well, except Spock.

 
I can understand the studio's insisting it be changed: The Wrath of Khan has more immediate impact. Meyer acquiesced, but unhappily, so when he was approached by Nimoy to do a story about "the Berlin Wall coming down in space," he said Sounds great; I have the perfect title.

Except that's the first (though not the foremost) problem with TUC; the title makes only the vaguest sense when transposed on the story we actually get. Suddenly, Hamlet's soliloquy is interpreted as "the uncertain future?" i.e. the future of Klingons and the Federation / Trek itself is "the undiscovered country?" I mean, first of all, it was actually fairly well-discovered territory in 1991; we were all watching it every Saturday or Sunday on The Next Generation. I know Kirk and the gang don't know that in the timeline of the movie, but it still repeats the mistake of STV: The Final Frontier, i.e. only by the loosest stretch of the definition did the story involve an actual "final frontier." (It made sense for the original script but not so much for the film it ended up as.) Part VI could just as well be called Star Trek: It's Like About 1991 America and Stuff.

This title mismatch is emblematic of all that is wrong with TUC: this is a movie that overflows with incongruent details not fatal in and of themselves, but a nick here and a nick there and pretty soon you're bleeding to death. Or, as the Klingons put it before they switched to all-Shakespeare, a thousand throats can be cut by one running man.

For years I've been hearing from people who love this movie and have no time for any of the following. To each his or her own, of course, but keeping this sum-is-greater-than-its-parts/ cumulative-effect in mind, let's look at just a few of the many changed premises Meyer and co. bring to the table.

Since when do phasers leave exit wounds? Cool effect, bro and everything, but it is at odds with everything we've ever seen. While I'm here, is it at all believable this Klingon crew could be so confused and helpless in a failure-of-gravity situation? They act not only like this has never happened before but like they've never even considered it happening before.

 

 

 

Text by Michael Okuda. (His text-commentaries on the Trek films/ some episodes are always entertaining)

The entire sequence from the fake photon blast through the Daft Punk robots (thanks to Jeff B, for that) through McCoy's conveniently-botched examination through the trial (where people use 1940s-style transistor-translators and Chang channels Adlai Stevenson, for some reason) just rings false.

Then again, speaking only in other people's catchphrases seems to be all that Chang does. He's the Klingon equivalent of the alien from Explorers, apparently.

The Klingons were of course meant to represent the crumbling Soviet Empire, but the metaphor wags the tail a bit too much to be at all believable. TUC seems more dated than TOS, in so many ways.

The Federation comes across even less convincingly. I'll get to the film's biggest problem (i.e. our heroes and Starfleet are both inexplicably and incredibly racist) more in a little bit, but beyond that:

Apparently, it was meant for the Federation President to be blind, (which actually is a wink-wink detail I enjoy) hence this scene where he pointedly puts on his purple-tinted shades. They probably should have mentioned that in the dialogue itself. Or, better yet, cut it out altogether.

Or have him not be obviously sighted in every other scene. (Incidentally, this whole break to the Federation's p.o.v. is such a tonal break in the film)

Also, are we really to believe that Starfleet conducts its business in a 18th century French drawing room?

Or uses 1960s classroom fold-over maps to pitch a military operation? ("Operation: Retrieve," no less.)

I don’t want to make Nick Meyer the bad guy here. Really, he did everyone a favor by coming on board and steering the production to something resembling a credible destination. As Nimoy said of The Final Frontier, "(Bill) was just riding a bad script." So, too, was Nick, here, except he was riding five or six bad scripts all at once, cobbled together with little sense. (That story's too involved to reproduce here, but suffice it to say, script negotiations started in good faith and ended in chaos and arbitration. Nimoy, Meyer, and Shatner all discuss it at great length in their respective memoirs.)

But it's difficult not to see Nick Meyer as the "running man" from the Klingon proverb above in his determination to turn the film into a relentless hodge-podge of anachronistic cultural allusions completely at odds with all previously-established Trekverse rules. Whereas his Hornblower allusions were kept in check in TWOK, here he gives them not just free reign (At one point, Kirk tells the helm "Right Full Rudder." Are you serious?) but diplomatic immunity.

Not to mention his penchant for all-things-Holmes. I like Holmes (and Hornblower) as much as the next guy, and for the record, I'm fine with Spock mentioning an ancestor of his originated the famous Sherlock Holmes quote "If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." (Meyer maintains it was meant to indicate Spock's relation to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through his mother. Fine, whatever.) But I can think of few scenarios less applicable to that quote than the "mystery" sequence in the middle of the film, which is at odds with everything we ever learned about a starship, or tricorders or internal sensors for that matter, and where characters enter and exit like dinner theater, and bad dinner theater at that:

 

 

 

 

By the by, Meyer and JJ Abrams' Dad are friends, and Meyer gave a young JJ an annotated copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes at JJ's bar mitzvah.

I am fine with adding a galley and laundromat to the Enterprise; maybe they went retro at the last refit. I'm fine with adding some new Starfleet rule regarding the discharge of a phaser aboard a starship; it makes no sense/ is contradicted in dozens of previous episodes and movies, but hey, bureaucrats. I'm fine with a one-time "we've got to turn out every locker and mattress as if we were on a submarine" sequence; it makes no sense to go about things this way but hey, okay. (Likewise, I'm fine with the old "Uhh, listen up, everyone, would the killers, like, report to Sick Bay?" trick.) I'm fine with Chekov being made to look like a buffoon just to have a "if the shoe fits..." joke; maybe he's having a mental health day.

Ditto for Scotty, who once again is played mainly for comic relief.

But put all these things together? No. That's several bridges too far. That's an archipelago of bad and lazy writing.

Incidentally, despite the way it's pronounced, the word "inalienable" means in-a-lien-able. Which makes the whole business of "if you could only hear how bigoted you sound," not to mention some of the discussion around the topic, somewhat confused. It might have worked as a moment of translation/ communication difficulty had I gotten the impression the screenwriters understood the word's actual meaning.

And ditto for this "Let's pull out old 19th-century-looking Klingon translation dictionaries" sequence.  Nichelle Nichols objected to this scene, stating (quite correctly) that Uhura would have at least a passing familiarity with Klingon, but Meyer (rather bluntly, according to Nichols) overruled her. (Chekov can he heard saying something about how a universal translator would be recognized, but the whole thing rests on the strange premise that these ships cannot scan one another. Before we even get to the wtf-ness of this "quick! Pretend we're Klingons!" sentry-password stuff, there's that.)

Nichelle Nichols does a good job with the humor of this scene, but the idea of making all of the senior officers look like grandparents trying to "figure out this Tumblr thing" is at best a bad idea and at worst needlessly - and illogically - cutesy.

Maybe spell-check your character names, too? It's Uhura, not Uhuru. Then again, Kirk got it wrong a few times in TOS, as well:

"What's happening to Lieutenant Yoo-hoo-roo!?"

I'm usually pretty forgiving of this we're-really-commenting-on-ourselves aspect of Trek. As a rule, I shrug off a lot of stuff; if we could perfectly detail life in the twenty-third century and beyond, we'd be living in the twenty-third century and beyond. I get it - everything we write is, ultimately, the eye describing only itself. No problem. But The Undiscovered Country is a good exception to this rule: I'm perfectly happy to be forgiving of these things if the story in question doesn't hold the metaphor in such contempt. This couldn't be anything else but 20th (and in some cases, 18th and 19th) century baby boomers winking at themselves and masquerading as Trek. (If I had the time, I'd do a video mash-up of TUC to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" to really drive this point home.)

The "Only Nixon could go to China" line would actually be pretty good if everything else in the movie wasn't there. I like that Spock is trying to make a joke - and a pretty good one. Unfortunately, it's so tonally at odds with the scene that surrounds it (and everything else that happens) that it falls flat.

There are many more examples; to list them all would be overkill. Any one of them can be explained away with a little thought, but the cumulative effect is insurmountable for me. There's a difference between nitpicking and accounting, for Crissakes. One last one: the final starship battle rests on "this ship has got to have a tailpipe," a strange reference for someone of Uhura's era to make, and modifying an actual torpedo, not a photon torpedo, as it is called again and again. It might as well be a "magic cannonball."

Granted, this torpedo business is confused in many iterations of Trek, not just TUC.

Let's turn our attention to the bigotry and false-flag-ness of the whole Starfleet plot. Suddenly, Starfleet is racist and ignorant, displaying an understanding of the Klingons out of the 1930s.

Shatner (quite rightly) considered his "let them die" comment to be very un-Kirk-like. Meyer insisted. As a compromise, he did the scene in one take and added a dismissive wave after his comment which was subsequently edited out of the final movie despite Meyer's promise to leave it in. Considering Shatner only said the line contingent on the gesture/ shrug to explain it, this is pretty inconsiderate on Meyer's part.

Nichelle Nichols flat-out refused to say the racist lines attributed to Uhura (the lines were redistributed to the two jock-bigot transporter room folks we see after the Klingons beam in.) Koenig tried the same, but he finally relented, delivering the somewhat-humorous-if-odd-for-Chekov-to-reference "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" line.

Brock Peters' scene in the council chamber had to be shot in numerous takes, as he was very uncomfortable with the racial undertones in his lines that the Federation take the opportunity to "bring them to their knees" which was itself a reference to another film in which that line was said about African Americans. (i.e. The Birth of a Nation.)

The whole idea of turning Brock Peters and top Starfleet brass into bigots and false-flag-operatives is yet another shortcut-to-plotting/ lazy writing, to begin with. Compare how this comes across vs. the considerably better-handled false flags/ crew-stands-up-to-conspiracies of Into Darkness or Insurrection.

Would Starfleet seek to exploit another culture's tragedy and conspire to commit murder and blame it on others to further its own military ends and use racism/ xenophobia as cover for it? Not the Starfleet I know, but these are certainly questions worth considering and I'm glad Trek is asking them. They would be much more relevant, though, if the script didn't undermine and contradict itself (and all previous Trek) as it poses them. When Gorkon's daughter tells Kirk "You've restored my father's faith," and Kirk answers with "You've restored my son's," it's especially grating, given the backflips Kirk's characterization had to do to get to this "breakthrough" moment. Granted, these Klingon bastards killed his son, and granted Kirk's principles are somewhat "flexible" in TOS. But still:

“All things being equal, but things are not equal.”

Not just the actual conspiracy plot, but Worf's grandfather's speech in the Klingon kangaroo court in particular.

Meyer, to his credit, regrets having Spock torture Valeris to get the info, nowadays. One can argue that it's logical for Spock to do so, and I can see that, somewhat. But given the abundance of mixed messages surrounding it, it seems as odd a bit of characterization as everything else in the film.

 

It's supposed to end on a hopeful note, but the whole thing is a war of attrition to get there.

All of these problems notwithstanding, TUC remains a curiously well-regarded Trek film. There are certainly things I like about it, but they're so minor and few and far between:

 

The 2nd unit stuff sounds like it was especially difficult to film, but the visuals are undoubtedly cool.

Sulu is handled well.

His long overdue Captaincy of the Excelsior is good to see, as well as his unhesitant going off-grid when he realizes something rotten is going on.

Valeris is more or less fine. I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense for her to be in on the conspiracy; maybe if they'd intended her to be the fall guy? (Fall girl, I guess.) It's better than the original idea of having Saavik turn traitor. (They only changed Saavik to Valeris when Kim Cattrall balked at being the third actress to play the role; sadly, Robin Curtis wasn't even asked.)

The scenes in the prison camp are all kind of fun.

Although this "Kissing yourself must have been your lifelong ambition" thing makes little sense as a line spoken between Kirk and the shapeshifter. Like the Nixon and China thing, had the rest of the script not existed, it'd be fine, but taken as part of the tsunami of wink-wink and anachronistic lines and moments, just... ugh. To paraphrase Joss Whedon re: Waterworld, "The problem with the third act is the first two acts."

 

 

Is this the stuff of David Bowie's nightmares? Or perhaps his fondest dreams?

I've detailed here and there how Roddenberry's declining health and presence of mind dovetailed with the last few Trek films and the beginning of TNG. After a particularly intense stroke, he was confined to a wheelchair and unable to say much beyond yes or no. Susan Sackett relays in her memoir how he was wheeled into a screening of this film. While the assembled suits (for whom the screening had primarily been arranged) talked to themselves about how great everything looked, Roddenberry, limited in speech but having one of his more lucid days, could only whisper "No... no... no..." over and over again.

I'm sorry, but a) that is so incredibly sad, and b) could this possibly bring Captain Pike from "The Menagerie" to mind any more?

 
Once he recovered his energy and vocabulary, Gene instructed his lawyer to do everything possible to shut the movie down, as it had taken the "Starfleet is military" trope to new and dangerously offensive heights. He died shortly after, and the lawsuit fizzled out. TUC raked in just under $75 million at the box office, and the original cast never appeared together again on the silver screen.

Given how they are handled here, that is probably a good thing. I personally prefer to think of The Voyage Home as the original cast's collective swan song. I've never read a satisfactory explanation as to why Meyer went about things the way he did with this movie; he seems to shrug off all criticism of it in his memoir (though less so in interviews on YouTube.)

For me, and with apologies to those who champion it, it's the first thing I think of whenever I hear or read people say "(fill in the blank) doesn't get Star Trek." Take the worst episodes of every Trek series, and they all seem more Trek-like than what we get here. It's hardly the worst thing in the world, but it's definitely my least favorite of the bigscreen Treks.