Fix Star Trek Generations

[Sonic Glitch]

Other then not making it?

Then I guess we would have a parallel movie, a little bit like "All Good Things...", where you follow the parallel investigations of Soran's Nexus machinations in both times, TOS and TNG.
In TOS, this happens right after TUS, so the E-A doesn't have time to go back for decomissioning, and needs to jump into action immediately while still damaged.

Both sides' attempts to disrupt the Nexus at first fail because both teams are actually unknowingly working against one-another, i.e. each of their solutions actually cancels the other one, until they find a way to communicate together, and we see them attempt to solve this problem together.
Both ships could be attacked and outnumbered by Klingons from their own time periods (the TOS ones because the resentful ones for TUS plotted with Soran from that time to destroy Kirk and the TNG ones as we saw, featuring the Duras sisters with a few ships) while implementing their respective solutions, during battle you suck both ships in the Nexus, and we see them fighting side by side, the E-A acting as a Firgate to the E-D's Battleship...
We then see them kill the Klingons, but the E-D gets heavily damaged after kicking so many Klingons asses, and barely has enough power left to implement its part of the solution, and then we see both ships get kicked out of the Nexus where the E-D's Battle section needs to be evacuated, and the Saucer barely makes it before the explosion.
The E-A, while also heavily damaged, limps back to Starfleet headquarters for final decomission...

But I like my first option better...

Hm. You're idea reminds me of something. Perhaps drop the Nexus plot entirely and make a film adaptation of Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens novel "Federation" (assuming it had been written at the time?)

[Mikey]

#2 can be done by still writing a very Picard-esque amazing role. Patrick Steward was simply great in the X-Men movies, yet he wasn't the main character. What undermined his importance in the movies was simply because Xavier's power were so powerful he couldn't be part of the climax without having an auto-win character, so he had to be disable/killed before the showdown. But in a Trek movie, you can still have Picard calling the shots for the protagonist, offering support, stalling the bad guy, etc... while being played brillantly.

You're missing the point. It's not to make sure Stewart gets a nice chunk of dialogue; rather, Stewart almost has to be the one in the spotlight because he's such a superior actor... and the role that matches that actor happens to be Picard. In other words, the idea with this particular bullet point isn't about the captain necessarily being th foucs, so much as Stewart being the focus and the happenstance of him playing the captain. Marsden, Janssen, Jackman, and especially McKellan (not to mention Vinnie "Nut-grabber" Jones in the third one) were strong enough performers that the presence of Stewart in the film didn't insist upon itself, so the X-Men analogy doesn't quite fit; further, GEN was set up by the entire run of TNG, which had already set Picard up in quite a central role. To backtrack on that stance for the movie would seem both awkward and self-serving.

#1 kinda mix with my points for #2. You don't need the captain to be the center of the movie. I can remember more than a dozen of episodes where a single crewman was the center of the storyline, but still have the captain in the background calling the shots. Why can't you apply this formula to a movie? Picard was just the greatest character to be the aloof/authoritarian captain, wise man, uptight and diplomat. In the movies, we got to see him up-close and personnal. It just.. wasn't right.

TNG showed plenty of more intimate exploration of Picard, which made the sacrifices he made to maintain his aloof, upright character all the more poignant. Be that as it may, there have been eps which featured other characters as the focus - but they were inevitably eps geared specifically toward the exploration of that character. That wasn't the direction of the movie, nor would it have worked if it were.

[Atekimogus]

Well to fix the movie you would need to rewrite huge portions of the plot. Therefore only smallchanges with things which didn't sit well with me in roughly chronological order:

#1 Soran shouldn't be an El'Aurian. Having three refugee ships full of them and noone at starfleet asks them from whom they are fleeing? The supposed death of Kirk is important enough without Soran providing an arc between TOS and TNG era. That would also later eliminate a problem with Guinan....

2# Next, Worfs promotion is ok, if it costs so much money that they had to reuse footage to cheapen the climatic space battle it is NOT ok. A cheaper holographic setting would have sufficed.

#3 Picards Family should not have died in a fire. I have nothing against heavy emotions etc. but Picard is understandibly beside himself the whole movie and altough it was realisticly done, having a depressed main character for most of the movie is not something I like to watch when expecting a star trek movie. They should have used the time he wastes crying to figure out the nexus on their own (instead of asking the bartender) and include the Romulan attack on the station with the Enterprise to the rescue and FINALLY showing us the E-D kicking Warbird ass after 7 years of TV-teasing.

#4 Get rid of the scene with Guinan. I like her. The scenes with her a cringeworthy nonetheless. See point 1

#5 Picard should not beam to the surface to stop Soran. He should have sent Ryker, that is his job. I am not sure why there was the NEED for the two Captains to meet but I think Ryker would have done a better job on the surface than he did in space and he could have provided a viewpoint on the differences of the two.

#6 Shorten the nexus scene. Since we now have Ryker on the planet he experiences a live with Troi he never had but wished for which provides the arc to the next movies and their relationsship but keep it short.

#7 The final space battle. Oh boy. There are a ton of possibilities how they could have resolved it, the took the worst. They absolutely wanted to have the saucer crash scene so here is what I would have done:
First, the Duras have a Vorcha with two BoP escort.
Second, they seperated the saucer prior to the battle to better being able to intercept Sorans probe if need be.
Third, epic battle between basically five ships, Geordie figures out that he transmits shield frequencies and finds a workaround (not looking at the damn screen for instance and letting an underling deal with it) and they win by a margin, yet the saucer is without maneuverabilty and crashes on the planet.
Forth and most importantly, they are able to salvage the damn thing and the E-D doesn NOT die. I don't care how cool the E-E is, it is NOT the Enterprise of the Generation crew. Love her, hate her it is the ship of 7 years of TNG, the one you most associate with the TNG era.

#8 Kirks death. Well dead is dead, could have been more heroic but to be honest it didn't bother me much. What did bother me is that he got no proper funeral. Hell, being shot out the torpedo tube is preferable.

[BigJKU316]

I agree with a lot of that but can't get behind keeping the Enterprise D around.

Yes, it was their ship...but the problem with it is you can't have a grand space adventure in something that is a flying hotel and has a bridge that looks fit for driving around a bunch of drunken cruise passengers. The thing just was not going to work from a movie perspective I don't think. Though I will admit I hated almost everything about the Enterprise D from the outset. Its bridge layout is awful. The concept with all the families is equally as silly.

It only made sense on a deep exploration mission where you never put into a station. However the Ent-D was at stations all the time and was constantly sent into high threat situations with children, civilians, dolphins and other assorted nonsense on board.

Since we know they don't have the stones to show little Sally getting sucked through a hole in the hull the size of a coke can and spit out into space you have to get them off the ship if you want to do more action. The only way to do that is to put them in something different than a GCS.

[Tyyr]

I don't have quite the loathing of the Galaxy class Big does but I do agree that it just didn't work for the movies. Can you imagine First Contact with a Galaxy? The Borg in among all the families? How about ramming Shinzon in Nemesis? You've got a lot of stuff that just wouldn't fly with a Galaxy.

[Atekimogus]

Think E-D from Yesterdays Enterprise and I dont to see why it shouldn't have worked. Getting rid of the civilians is a no-brainer because of the dominion war so you have that.

All the problems you have stem from their modus operandi, not with the ship itself and since most of the movies are roughly during the dominion war one would assume they run the ship exactly as they did the E-E.

To emphasize, it would have served continuity also very well, by showing us that - altough it is the same ship - it is run differently because of circumstances. It would have helped the movies to not feel so completley being out of touch with the rest of the timeline imho. (I could not say if during First Contact and Insurrection if there is still the D-War going on and how much time has passed since generations)

So...yes I can imagine an E-D in First Contact fighting the Borg....she did so several times in TV. I also can imagine ramming shinzons ship, which really isn't that different from the saucer crash sequence, the only difference being that Shinzon would have been properly f''''''ed if a ship the size of the galaxy would ram him.


Changing the ship after 7 years like a pair of shoes in a most shamefull way doesn't sit right with me.

[SolkaTruesilver]

You could have simply pulled a Star Trek TMP on Generation and simply claimed the Enterprise D went trough a "refit".

[BigJKU316]

I thought the Enterprise-A and Nill made sense for Kirk, with the arc in which they took the movies where much of it was about Kirks desire to be in command of the Enterprise rather than do anything else. In that context it made a lot of sense. But I never got the sense of Picard being all that attached to the particular ship that you got from Kirk.

More than that the Galaxy Class just looked tired. Given the standards of modern special effects against which the movies had to compete I don't think the GCS would have held up very well. The compromises made to make it a TV friendly design (limited bridge crew, all flat control panels, very smooth outer surface) don't translate well into special effects heavy era of film.

I also don't think a simple refit would get the job done. The exterior was the biggest part of the problem they would have on screen. You could pull it with the bridge, but you can't make the thing look very exciting on the outside, without changing it so much you might as well not be constrained by the original design.

When you are being measured against Star Wars and other such films I don't think you can trot out something that looks old and boring like the Ent-D did by then. The original cast movies did not have nearly as heavy of competition to deal with as any new trek movie was going to have. I think the change had to be made.

[Mikey]

You could have simply pulled a Star Trek TMP on Generation and simply claimed the Enterprise D went trough a "refit".

Indeed, it would have been easy to do so given the "war-refit" GCS seen in DS9.

Further, the destruction of the E-D meant the replacement of the GCS as the Enterprise with the Sovereign class. Yet in AGT, we've already seen (by the time of GEN) that the GCS was kept around, even favored by Admiral Riker. Yes, I know it was a constructed timeframe, but it stands to reason that Q created it based on the actual thought processes of the characters.

[Sonic Glitch]

You could have simply pulled a Star Trek TMP on Generation and simply claimed the Enterprise D went trough a "refit".

Indeed, it would have been easy to do so given the "war-refit" GCS seen in DS9.

Further, the destruction of the E-D meant the replacement of the GCS as the Enterprise with the Sovereign class. Yet in AGT, we've already seen (by the time of GEN) that the GCS was kept around, even favored by Admiral Riker. Yes, I know it was a constructed timeframe, but it stands to reason that Q created it based on the actual thought processes of the characters.

Well, perhaps at the time of AGT it was the thought process of the characters to keep the GCS around .. and then they realized the Ent-D was destroyed by a 20year old klingon BOP (or Kia as sfdebris would say). Even without shields the E-D should've lasted longer. I'd say that combined with the loss of the Yamato, and the Odyssey and whichever other ships they lost would prompt a reconsideration.

Also, perhaps Q's timeline was an "alternate timeline" somewhat similar to the episode where we see all the different "quantum realities" (with Worf shifting from one to the other to the other).

[Captain Seafort]

But I never got the sense of Picard being all that attached to the particular ship that you got from Kirk.

There wasn't a need to push that angle, because Picard stayed a Captain. The only reason the TOS films needed to push Kirk's attachment to the big chair was because of his rank - Admirals are meant to command fleets, not individual ships.

More than that the Galaxy Class just looked tired. Given the standards of modern special effects against which the movies had to compete I don't think the GCS would have held up very well. The compromises made to make it a TV friendly design (limited bridge crew, all flat control panels, very smooth outer surface) don't translate well into special effects heavy era of film.

Why not? While the design is far from the best (either IU or OOU) you could just as easily ascribe each of those "problems" to the refit Connie.

I also don't think a simple refit would get the job done. The exterior was the biggest part of the problem they would have on screen.

They did all right in Generations with the refurbished 6-foot model, albeit at considerable cost.

When you are being measured against Star Wars...The original cast movies did not have nearly as heavy of competition to deal with as any new trek movie was going to have.

Star Wars: 1977, 1980, 1983
TOS fims: 1979, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1989, 1991

Don't talk nonsense.

[BigJKU316]

The special effects in the original cuts of Star Wars were hardly way ahead of some of the stuff in say the Wrath of Kahn in my view. They were different, and in some ways better than the Trek stuff but not generations different when watched together.

But it was not the huge difference it was when Generation/First Contact was going up against the re-released and re-mastered Star Wars stuff, with the next three movies on the way and well known to be on the way by then and other contemporary movies that were making heavy use of digital effects such as Jurrasic Park which had come out the year before.

Visually the GCS is pretty boring to look at. There are not a lot of features that stand-out on the thing. Its very flat on its surfaces and visually does not have a lot to draw you in. I just don't think it would have held up well at all as a main ship in feature length films. It does not look like an adventerous ship at all.

As for the refit Connie I don't think she looked old compared to the other stuff that was out there at the time. Due to special effects restrictions even X-Wings looked slow in the first Star Wars movie diving in on the Death Star. They were fighters and that was cool in and of itself but I never felt watching the Trek movies for the first time that the Connie was boring or anything. It was just different.

By the mid-90's I think peoples way of looking at things was altering a bit. Hence all the streamlined ships of "new trek" starting with First Contact and Voyager. I won't pretend to no the reason for it but it seemed to have an impact a lot of places. Cars went from boxes on wheels to having a more streamlined feel. As did a lot of other household appliance type things. I don't think they did the Enterprise-E for no reason at all (I mean why take on the expense for nothing). I think they recognized that on the big screen, given the design trends of the 90's that it just would not hold up for audiences as a ship you go adventuring in. I don't think the Connie suffered that problem nearly as much.

[Captain Seafort]

But it was not the huge difference it was when Generation/First Contact was going up against the re-released and re-mastered Star Wars stuff

They weren't. Generations was years before the SE films, let alone the prequel trilogy.

contemporary movies that were making heavy use of digital effects such as Jurrasic Park which had come out the year before.

So what? Yes, the effects have to be good, but that doesn't mean you have to ditch the E-D.

There are not a lot of features that stand-out on the thing. Its very flat on its surfaces and visually does not have a lot to draw you in.

Neither does the refit Connie, or the E-E for that matter.

I don't think they did the Enterprise-E for no reason at all (I mean why take on the expense for nothing). I think they recognized that on the big screen, given the design trends of the 90's that it just would not hold up for audiences as a ship you go adventuring in.

I don't think they gave it anything like that much thought - they simply wanted something different.

[Atekimogus]

More than that the Galaxy Class just looked tired. Given the standards of modern special effects against which the movies had to compete I don't think the GCS would have held up very well. The compromises made to make it a TV friendly design (limited bridge crew, all flat control panels, very smooth outer surface) don't translate well into special effects heavy era of film.

And where exactly is the E-E different in this regard than the E-D? Limited bridge crew was changed for the movies, flat control panels are still there, very smooth outer surface is a feature of starfleet ships since the TOS Enterprise and Jeffries even designed that very much on purpose. Cudos for being practical, I prefer this approach to the star wars one. (Hey, we need to go EVA again to repair the toilet drain since all our installations are on the outside...damn)

The exterior was the biggest part of the problem they would have on screen.

Just fyi the 6 footer model of the E-D was quite probably the best and most detailed physical model every made for star trek (at least the touched up version for generation) Considering all the models we have they are pretty much of the same quality, be it E-A, E-D or E-E it all comes down to personal preference to which I can only say this:

The Serenity is one ugly butt of a ship, she is not streamlined, looks roughly like a cross between a firefly a duck and a truck and parts are constantly falling off of her. Yet I would have hated to see her replaced by a more state of the art ship for the movie, there are things you just don't do, call it fanservice.
Likewise the E-D, you may think she is ugly, weak and impractical (which incedently she is not but you can not argue about personal taste) but after 7 years of tV she earned the right to serve her crew during the movies and not meet this disgraceful end. Call me crazy but the lame E-D destruction bothered me way more than the death of Kirk.

They did not only loose the E-D that day, they also lost the whole TNG feeling, the atmosphere and the setting. This was okay for one action flick (First Contact) but subsequent movies suffered greatly from this lack of familiar atmosphere imho.

[SolkaTruesilver]

The best ship internal design I've seen was in the new BSG. At last, I'd see a starship not designed with the command center completely exposed to ennemy fire