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September 26, 2004  This post is about Star Trek. Specifically, it's about something I never thought I'd see: the legendary deleted scenes from Generations that have now been exhumed by Paramount for the Special Edition DVD. When the movie came out in 1994, there was a great deal of anticipation in the fan base for the historic pairing of Kirk and Picard. I remember getting fairly worked up about it myself, waiting in line at the Eric Pacific 4 in Lancaster, Pa., for about 4 hours to see this thing. Of course, the movie was a fairly big letdown. Visually, The Next Generation didn't translate very well to the big screen, and the creative powers behind it were compeltely unaware of how to make a full-length feature of any sort of scope. What we got were some marauding Klingons, some bad jokes, and a plot that has a lot of incoherent elements that seem fairly underwhelming in retrospect. Sadly, we also have Shatner, James Doohan, and Walter Koenig from the original show in an embarrassing prologue that's bad enough in the finished film. The message I have after watching the deleted scenes is that it could have been far worse. The movie was originally supposed to begin with an "orbital skydiving" sequence...  Doohan and Koenig are waiting around in a field somewhere--it looks like Palmdale to me--when Shatner's stunt double lands on the ground and scampers around, rather hilariously. Koenig and Doohan are in hot pursuit. Cut to Shatner pulling off his helmet and delivering some horribly written dialogue about how much he loves to skydive from satellites. This sequence was shot and cut, but, as Rick Berman helpfully explains on the DVD, "it didn't work for any of us." Also known as, "We're incomptent and the scene sucked in every possible way."  (As an interesting side note: The existence of this sequence was denied by Paramount right before the movie came out. It was in a leaked copy of the script that was all over the BBS and nascent Internet scene; there was lots of talk about it. Paramount eventually admitted that it did exist when someone pointed out that they themselves had released a promo photo of it several months before.)  It's embarrassing and terrible to think that Star Trek came to this (or this), which is far worse than anything in the much-maligned Trek V. The DVD also brings us the original ending to Generations, which featured Captain Kirk turning his back on Malcolm McDowell and getting shot. Not only was it ill-conceived, the performance from Shatner is ridiculous; did they look at the expression on his face on the set?  It looks more like a bad hangover than the death of one of the most famous characters in pop culture.  The ending was re-shot at great expense, as Berman explains, to give it "more punch." Also because test audiences ran gagging from the theater. I have to give it to them that the re-shot ending is probably a 3/10, whereas the original one is maybe a 2/10. Of course, the death of Trek is now history. I'd give Generations a lot of credit in knocking the franchise down several notches, as it confirmed everyone's worst fears; that the new people in charge didn't really know what they were doing. Of course, with the debut of Voyager about 11 months away, we were about to find out exactly how bad it could get. |