The Next Generation makes an uninspiring leap to the big screen.
So, what did I think was the problem here?
* There’s a long stretch (basically the first hour with the TNG crew) that feels little removed from an episode of the show. A relatively slow moving one at that. There simply isn’t the scale of threat that the previous movies have involved.
* It takes far too long to reintroduce Kirk, and he has nearly nothing to do once he’s back in the film.
* There’s a whole bunch of additional padding that helps nothing (Lursa and Betor! Data’s emotions! Picard’s family!), or which could have been done a lot more gracefully.
* There’s a lot of ‘random stuff leads to terrible consequences’. The Enterprise is destroyed mainly because a lucky hit takes out the conn. Kirk dies when a bridge falls on him. Not good writing.
There are some great bits and pieces here. Picard and Kirk together is nice. The Nexus scenes are fairly well pitched (other than the gratuitous horse riding). Soren is a fairly convincing villain. But overall it’s a miss.
341 down, 396 to go. A few more DS9 episodes, and then Trek series number five kicks off.