Tripwire Reviews Star Trek: The Next Generation Movies Collection

Spirit Of Enterprise?

Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows just reviewed Paramount’s Star Trek: The Next Generation Movies Collection out now on Ultra HD 4K…

Star Trek: The Next Generation 4 Movie Collection

Star Trek: Generations (1994)
Director: David Carson
Stars: Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, Michael Dorn, Marina Sirtis, LeVar Burton, Gates McFadden, Malcolm McDowell, William Shatner

Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
Director: Jonathan Frakes
Stars: Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, Michael Dorn, Marina Sirtis, LeVar Burton, Gates McFadden, Alfre Woodard, Alice Krige, James Cromwell

Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)
Director: Jonathan Frakes
Stars: Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, Michael Dorn, Marina Sirtis, LeVar Burton, Gates McFadden, Anthony Zerbe, F Murray Abraham, Donna Murphy

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)
Director: Stuart Baird
Stars: Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, Michael Dorn, Marina Sirtis, LeVar Burton, Gates McFadden, Tom Hardy, Ron Perlman

This boxed set has been released because of the current attention around Star Trek: Picard and its third and final season which is running on Amazon Prime. It reunites the original Star Trek: Next Generation cast so it makes commercial sense. 

The original Star Trek films with the Original Series cast ended with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a genuinely entertaining last adventure with the 1960s cast. Generations, which kicks off this boxed set, sees Shatner return one more time as Captain Kirk although this time he is only a supporting character to Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Stewart). The pair face off against villain Tolian Soran (McDowell) from destroying an entire planetary system in his attempts to return to an extra-dimensional realm known as the Nexus where he will never age. Director David Carson is a British director who cut his teeth rather incongruously on Coronation Street but he had also directed a number of episodes of the Star Trek: Next Generation TV show so he had worked with the characters before. Generations attempts to act as a bridge between Kirk and co and Picard’s Enterprise crew but it all feels a little bit flat. Shatner is always worth watching on screen as Kirk and Stewart’s mix of warmth and gravitas is a nice counterpoint to him but McDowell as Soran doesn’t feel like a particularly threatening adversary. It is pleasing to see Shatner as Kirk one more time but you do wish that they found something a little more interesting and challenging to do.

Star Trek: First Contact, which was released two years later, is a far better affair. Picard and crew have to stop a time-travelling Borg from preventing Ephraim Cochrane (Cromwell) from making first contact with aliens back in the 21st century. Of courses since Picard was taken over by the cybernetic nasties in the ST:TNG show, he is more than a little bit conflicted here. First Contact manages to fuse a sense of fun with sci-fi drama and is the most entertaining of the four ST: TNG films.

Star Trek: Insurrection sees Picard up against corrupt Federation Admiral Dougherty (Zerbe) who, in cahoots with another alien race the Son’a, intends to steal the regenerative energy of a planet that is inhabited by a group of peaceful aliens who eschew technology. Abraham plays Son’a chief Ru’afo and he lends an air of gravitas to proceedings while Zerbe offers a suitably oleaginous performance as the corrupt Federation admiral. Insurrection is a decent stab at a feature-length Star Trek adventure and lifts the overall quality of the films included here. Spiner as Data is likeable here too.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for Star Trek: Nemesis. Notable as one of the first films to feature Tom Hardy in a prominent role, Nemesis introduces us to Romulan Shinzon, who has taken over the Romulan Empire in an attempt to make contact with Captain Picard. Shinzon has a dark secret: he is the clone of Picard but with a disease that can only be cured through some sort of scientific procedure involving Shinzon and Picard. Shinzon lures Picard to his seeming doom through planting a copy of Data on a distant alien world. The script here is truly awful and the plot unravels about halfway through, descending into a space pantomime. Perlman as Shinzon’s right-hand man is caked in so much bizarre clown makeup doubling as Romulan that even he can’t save this abomination. Hardy looks as if he’s about twelve years old here, prancing around in gear that wouldn’t look out of place in some seedy Soho S&M club. Nemesis killed Star Trek: The Next Generation on the big screen and it took the first season of Picard in 2019 to resurrect its reputation.

The legacy extras here are fairly decent although if people have these on the older Blu Ray releases, they would have seen them or own them already.

With the Original Series films, the arithmetic followed that alternating films were up to scratch. But here it is the second and third films which are worth watching. Generations is a flat and ultimately dull adventure while Nemesis is an awful poorly made mess. Frakes proved here that he has become a fairly talented film director with a good eye for pacing. The rest of the cast are pretty decent throughout but it is ultimately Stewart who holds all of these films together.

The picture quality is obviously quite a but sharper and brighter than they were in their original Blu Ray releases with a better sound quality too.

However, for fans who already own any of these four films, I am not sure what you are getting here except for perhaps a slightly improved picture quality over the previous Blu Ray editions. So recommended with an extreme caveat that if you have bought these before, you won’t be getting much more than what you already own. It was nice to revisit First Contact and Insurrection again but watching Nemesis one more time reminds you of how they lost their way for many years.

Star Trek: The Next Generation 4 Movie Collection is out now