Starring 7th Trek

It's the trade off movie where they hand over the movie series now that the second tv series has ended.

Some pointless astronomical plot is going on that leads to the destruction of a stellar system. To stop this, two captains of the Enterprise team up and... end up with a rather useless death scene, which is then taken over and dealt with far better in the books. In fact, go read the books, because they are the only good thing relating to the story in this movie.

There is fine acting here, especially from Patrick Stewart. Brett Spiner is also good, but LeVar Burton is hampered by his token minoritism (ie having the play the blind guy as well as being the black guy). Malcom McDowell... is in this movie.

But the problem with the movie is that... well... the script sucks. Despite being about emotion and humanity and time creeping up on you, there is no emotion in this movie. This feels like a small movie, with basically the TNG cast wandering around, and a couple of cameos from other actors. Yes, stars are exploding, and a planet gets blown up... but we don't have any connection to the people who suffered. and... it's nothing.

And many things still bug me. The model shot of the saucer landing feels like a model shot. The amount of time that Kirk and Picard spend dealing with Soran is about ten times the amount of time Picard and Soren spent when Soren didn't even need to do anything. And the damn orange light in the earlier shots just look terrible, however evocative of hell / sunsets ending time it was supposed to be (although wasn't).

This was a movie was more about passing the baton rather than telling a story worth in an of itself. Let's just move on to proper TNG stories.

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