I was never a huge fan of Star Trek TNG, so its probably no surprise that I'm not a giant fan of this one and only crossover film between the old and new casts, 1994's STAR TREK GENERATIONS.
Checkov, Scotty and Kirk (William Shatner) are honorary guests aboard the new Enterprise-B (how many times did that thing blow up, anyway?) but are strictly there for history's sake.
When the ship's routine first voyage is interrupted by a distress signal, Captain Kirk is lost in an interesting encounter with a massive energy source.
The film then flashes forward nearly 100 years, with Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) and his crew aboard the Enterprise-D.
They encounter a crazed scientist names Toran (well played by Malcolm McDowell of "Cat People" and "Time After Time" fame) who is hell bent on destroying worlds in a rather lame rehash of the "genesis experiment" planet redo from earlier films.
Part of Soran's plan includes the massive energy source that only appears every 100 years or so. Of course, this massive bend in time and space allows Picard to encounter Kirk, lost in the space-time continuum that's often mentioned but rarely explained.
Stewart and Shatner are good, but the final action scenes have been reduced from operatic space battles between massive ships to a couple of guys fighting on a rickety bridge, so pardon me if my excitement levels have been reduced to match.
It's all competently presented from a filmmaking level, the effects are fine but not new and Data's entire plot line about his new "emotion" chip wears thin in minutes, let alone hours. Stewart is forced to play massive amounts of grief, which isn't exactly the way to establish the new Captain's power and hubris. Stewart deserves a LOT better than this screenplay.
Snooze.
The only generation gap in play here is the skill of the storytelling versus previous films. It feels more like a two hour TV movie than a feature film and like that series, gets a resounding "meh...." and a C-.
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