The late, great Leonard Nimoy (Spock) was apparently not one to be trifled with, at least when it came to what he viewed as bad scripts. And is ends up, he did not think much of the script for 1994’s Star Trek: Generations, the first Star Trek film to feature the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Of course, Generations featured several cast members from the original series as well, including William Shatner as James T. Kirk, but the film was supposed to have a lot of more of group that started it all. Originally, it was even going to be directed by Nimoy himself. The only problem was, Nimoy didn’t like the movie.
Longtime Trek executive Brannon Braga breaks it down in theTNG oral history book, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years. “ director… was initially Leonard Nimoy… Nimoy read the script and hated it and felt of the script was Data’s emotion chip story,” Braga recalled. “By the way, he probably wasn’t wrong.”
Braga also said that Nimoy and Rick Berman, the executive at the center of more than one Trek controversy, would never speak again. “They were both pissed at each other.”
Generations served as a bit of a passing-of-the-baton moment for the two crews, something that was very intentional on the part of Paramount. Still, while the complete cast of The Original Series, was supposed to appear in the movie, only Shatner, James Doohan (Scotty), and Walter Koenig (Chekov). Perhaps some of the absentees shared Nimoy’s feelings. “Generations bothered me,” the actor said. “My God, what are they doing? Why that scene? What’s this scene about? Where are they going with this? That was the reason I wasn’t involved in making it. There was a character called Spock who had a dozen lines you could easily assign to anyone else, which they did.”
Yikes.
And Nimoy didn’t stop there, saying that he barely even considered Generations a movie. “Star Trek seven was a media event. Generations… two captains meet at the Nexus. Okay. Something to sell. And they sold very hard on it… But I don’t think the picture was very good.”
He’s miles away from the unfeeling Vulcan we see on screen here. Personally, I enjoyed Generations, although I can see Nimoy’s point. As for the entire original crew appearing in the film, I actually felt that only having Scotty, Chekov and Kirk worked. Having them all show up would have made things feel crowded. Likewise, Kirk’s death at the film’s climax worked for me as well, although I’m not sure we really needed to know how that character’s story ended.
Regardless, for his part, Berman believes Nimoy might have been on to something. “When Leonard read it, he said, ‘This needs a page-one rewrite’. I told him … and we parted ways. It was unusual for us to write a script with no director involved at all. Mr. Nimoy is right that he probably should have had a pass at the script.”
Now we’re off to ponder what might have been…
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h/t ScreenRant