Star Trek 7: Generations

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Star Trek 7: Generations - what the fuck is it about?

So this is the film in which Kirk and Picard manage to team up after Kirk is struck by what I'll call some 'contrivance-lightning' that conveniently sends him into the future. Although if you've been watching these movies chronologically, you can see that age alone has already been sending Shatner into the future pretty fucking quickly. Moments before this happens, a retired Kirk was doing a tour of the Enterprise when things went a little titties up. They attempt to save some other ships from a weird space-cloud by arriving with only seconds to spare and getting themselves instantly stuck in it too. That's not the mistake, though. I mean.. that's just stupidity. I guess you can't expect these people to be.. you know.. rocket scientists. The mistake is that, of the few people they manage to rescue, one of them is Malcolm McDowell. Because he's never played a crazy before, has he? Well except in every other fucking film he's ever appeared in. McDowell plays a creature here that's able to live an extraordinarily long life and so is able to survive travelling into the future to piss about with Picard. I mean, McDowell's rotting haggardy face certainly screams “man who refuses to die”. And to think, all it took to look the part was a decade-long smack habit.

So was it shit or not then?

Well I was excited to see this movie because I really wanted to see Shatner act alongside Patrick Stewart. I mean, I'm fans of them both however in terms of their style, I imagined it'd be as weird as a comedy double-act featuring Doug Stanhope alongside Barry Chuckle. And I was right. Stewart is doing his usual thing of drawing on his Shakespearean background whereas Shatner is fighting against the giant throbbing cock of self-parody. I was right; it was weird. The problem is that, as combinations go, it wasn't the good kind of weird, like sticking pineapple on a pizza, but rather the bad kind like you know.. sticking a good actor alongside William Shatner.

It doesn't help either that the film takes fucking yonks to build up to this moment, and then when it happens it's a bizarre mix of strange and boring. Because rather than being sent directly to the future, Kirk is living in a dimension in which he's living out an idealised version of his own life and that the future simply has access to. When we meet him, he seems excited because in this existence his dead dog is alive again. And it seems to be alive simply because he loved it so much. That's nice. I mean it's a shame that he seems to have forgotten about his dead son, but oh well.

And then we get to the death of Kirk, which is one of the least dignified conclusions since I was in school and I noticed that one of the other kids had finished a run after soiling himself. Kirk has to be one of the most iconic pop-culture characters of all time, and he dies simply because a crappy metal bridge collapses with him on it. I mean, I know he's put weight on over the last few films, but still. I'd say the character deserved more than that, especially seems as he adds pretty much nothing else to the plot at all. It's as though the movie only exists to have the two captains together and give one a good send off, and yet where these two's goals are concerned, the film is sadly like my school chum's post-run arse-hole, because it completely failed.

The rest of the film is also pretty forgettable with the exception of a sub-plot involving Data. He's a robot that accidentally fucks up an upgrade that was meant to have him feel emotions. The result is that, like this film as a whole, his mood is all over the place. I did find the way in which he'll go from laughter to the verge of tears in the space of a second pretty funny though. Although that could simply be because it reminded me of my Mum after a drink.