Star Trek: Generations

I had a better time watching this than I expected, if mostly because there’s precious little of these characters’ stories that I could still watch for the first time. If the final wreck of the Enterprise is practically the only action on offer it’s a sequence that feels just as sentimentally tragic as it should to destroy what was the homey familiar setting of an entire series.But god, the subplot with Kirk leads to such shallow musings around how to age gracefully out of one’s heroics (and by meta extension, how to retire a character it may be uncomfortable to think of as ever growing old and doing ordinary things, that is if we think there’s a good reason to treat Kirk’s later life character arc as incomplete after the previous films). It arrives at a kind of perverse wish fulfillment with a character death that feels like it’s mostly there to avoid the question completely…And then we are left with Riker’s sardonic advice to never get old, har har har.

View Spoilers