2 out of 5

Director: David Carson

It’s really not anyone’s fault that Generations made for a so-so introduction to Next Generation – there were timing issues corresponding with the series that prevented it from having the build-up of Motion Picture, plus, we can recall the stumble that first film had.  There’s the requisite passing of the torch, which was handled well even though it required humbling the flick a bit, and then there was the question of how much set-up to do – do we need to explain these characters to people?  And so it results in a movie that works but can’t get much steam behind it, the actors carrying over their television personas, not quite filling up the big screen yet, and on open plot that sort of runs into V’s territory of not having an incredibly threatening villain and an end-all event that’s sort of generally termed ‘bad’ without much explanation and seems rather easily conquerable.  We start 70+ years before Next Gen’s ‘present day,’ with a new Enterprise being sent off by the retired Captain Kirk.  Along way they run afoul of an energy surge… the catastrophe leaves some survivors, including Dr. Tolian Soran – McDowell – but results in the death of Kirk.  Now flash forward, and our current Enterprise runs into the same energy wave (the nexus) and the same Dr. Soran, who’s on a destructive bent to access the wave since it’s a passage to a paradise land… McDowell gets very little screen-time to establish himself as creepy, and that it happens during a pretty besides-the-point Klingon segue doesn’t help.  Most of the plotting feels besides-the-point, actually, which results in the questioning of when the REAL threat is going to be revealed… but alas, it already has been.  Episode director David Carson and episode composer Dennis McCarthy both do fine jobs of upscaling – the effects look great and, frankly, the crash is a pretty thrilling moment.  But there was just this required fitting o’ the britches for the new league before they could settle into to a proper film momentum.