14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek Generations
Is anything in this movie dumber than dropping a bridge on Captain Kirk? You bet your Nexus!
Let's face it, Star Trek: Generations is a jumble of disconnected elements that aren't particularly interesting on their own and fail to come together as a coherent or compelling story. The writers, Ronald D. Moore and Brandon Braga, have acknowledged that they were handed a checklist of must-haves for the film, which hindered the resulting screenplay. The pair wrote the feature simultaneously with the series finale “All Good Things...”, which made it difficult to give the film the attention it required. Compounding this, neither of them had prior experience writing a feature film, which is a different beast compared to a TV episode, so they were out of their element.
For all that, the fundamental issue with the movie lies in the contrived mechanism they devised to bring Kirk and Picard together: the Nexus. It’s an Anything Muppet that does whatever the story requires at a given moment, no matter how unbelievable, nonsensical, or just plain dumb. It’s so dumb I could write 14 items about it alone.
But hey, there's plenty of other dumb aspects to this film, so let's make sure we have some space to discuss those too!
14. The H.M.S. Holodeck
Between 1979's Star Trek—The Motion Picture and the 2009 reboot, the various and sundry Star Trek movies were always middlingly budgeted affairs, as Paramount knew they typically pulled in a bit north of $80 million US, and a movie’s box office has to at least double the film’s budget just to break even.
But movies aren’t TV episodes, so it was necessary to spend some of the film’s budget to open things up beyond TV scope. So we got the introductory sequence featuring The Next Generation crew on an actual sailing ship merely on the weak pretext of dropping Worf and Crusher in the drink and to establish Picard’s romanticism of the past. As such, it ends up a pointless, gratuitous sequence that isn’t half as charming as it thinks it is.
Worse, it exemplifies a problem that permeates every TNG cast movie: that it caters to fans at the expense of a broader audience. Does Worf’s promotion matter to the story? No. Does the holodeck? Nein. Do the Duras sisters? Nyet. All appear only for dedicated fans and mean nothing to the casual viewer. And the more they did this, movie after movie, the fewer causal viewers they were going to get.
Dumb.