STAR TREK: GENERATIONS

STAR TREK: GENERATIONS (Directed by David Carson. Starring Patrick Stewart, William Shatner, Malcom McDowell, Whoopi Goldberg)

The original Star Trek mission was only supposed to last five years, but the series’ astonishing popularity has kept it boldly going till the crew was going bald. And I have loved every interstellar minute of it: the loopy sci-fi plots with their tidy moralistic conclusions; the interplay between the three main characters (passionate, daring Captain Kirk; cool, dry Mr. Spock; grouchy, concerned Doc McCoy); the self-perpetuating cliches (they’ve had so much trouble over the years with their dilithium crystals you would have thought they would have had them replaced by now); the peculiarly pitched combination of light, self-mocking humour and overblown, almost pompous seriousness. The crew of the Enterprise got their hooks into me when I was too young to know any better and now I’m just a sucker for all those plastic rocks, Scotty’s complaints (I just can’t do it cap’n, I doann’t have the powerrrrr), the way the space ship pitches from side to side when they’re having a battle . . . I even love that wee-oo noise the doors make when they open. Frankly I’m with Eddie Murphy on this one: Captain Kirk was the coolest white man in the known universe.

It had to end sometime, of course. I mean, Scotty had got so large they were either going to have to widen all the doors on the Enterprise or start beaming him from room to room. Having brought an end to hostilities with the Klingons and left the crew of the Enterprise sailing off into the sunset, or starburst, or whatever it is you sail into in deep space, Star Trek VI was supposed to really be the final frontier (How many ears does Mr Spock have? Three. A right ear, a left ear and a final front ear). Kirk and co. had boldly gone and it was time for us all to find someone else to save our universe. Yet here’s Kirk once again, his disembodied head floating on a new set of Star Trek posters, with twenty years miraculously airbrushed away by a graphic artist. He seems at first to be rising, like the new born baby of 2001, above a smooth grey planet, until you realise that perfectly round surface is actually the head of his successor, Captain Jean Luc Picard, baldly going over the same old territory.

The New Generation has its (many) fans, and doubtless they will be pleased with Paramount’s decision to take the follow up series off the small screen and launch it on the big, but to me the whole thing reeks of cash cows in space. They just don’t know when to stop. So once again, William Shatner is taken out of mothballs, squeezed into a truss and wig, and paraded around in a spurious plot designed to link the past Captain with the new. Those old hacks Scotty (James Doohan) and Chekov (Walter Koenig) take some time out from Trekkie conventions to wave off their boss as he is sucked into a space time continuum (or something like that, it is always called something like that) while saving the Enterprise one more time (for old space-time’s sake). Spock and McCoy are nowhere to be seen however, which is probably a good thing, since their perfectly weighted relationship and old pro’s timing would simply serve to show up what the new crew lack: character.

Once Kirk has been disposed of, the film skips forward four generations to the Picard era. The triumvirate of Kirk, Spock and McCoy was one of those accidents of casting and writing that cannot be replicated, and the quadrangle that the New Generation has concentrated on certainly doesn’t come close. Some attempt was obviously made to construct a reversal of the Captain Kirk/First Officer Spock emotional/logical relationship, but while the stern and repressed Picard (Patrick Stewart) makes a decent if unremarkable stand in for Spock, his bearded first officer Riker (Jonathan Frakes) crucially lacks any of Shatner’s charisma, coming over as smug rather than dashing. The android Data (Brent Spiner) and his blind friend Geordi (Levar Burton) serve as a duo with Spockian alien characteristics and a dash of McCoy-style comic relief. Equal opportunities does not seem to have made much progress over the intervening 100 years or so. Sure the girls don’t have to squeeze into those Uhuru style space age mini skirts but neither do they get any real prominence amongst the crew. Whoopi Goldberg, by virtue of her star status, gets the principal female cameo, while the rest of the women from the TV series get sidelined. And, for once, not even Kirk gets a snog. What kind of future is this?

While the key to the success of the original Trek was the human (and Vulcan) element, much of the appeal of the New Generation has been the special effects, spectacular by television standards. Yet since it already had a big screen sheen about it, actually putting it in a cinema hardly seems to add anything. Generations comes over as a longer, somewhat sprawling and rather unwieldy episode of the TV series. Its chief interest lies in the combination of the two captains, but Kirk’s role is small, the final cinematic appearance of this much loved figure being squandered on a guest star trek.

I took a friend who is a fan of the New Generation, and he was thrilled at the sight of Picard showing his soft centre, Data getting emotional and Riker just looking happy to finally get a big screen break. Most members of generation Trek will probably share his joy, but it reminded me most of the captain’s log: the kind Kirk might find floating at the bottom of his toilet.