Star Trek: Generations/YMMV


 * Angst? What Angst?: Granted the movie was about letting go of past failures and moving on with your life but Picard seemed rather subdued in the fact that the Enterprise was destroyed in his brief absence. He even picked up a priceless artifact he got from a friend during the series that was completely ruined and set it aside like it meant nothing.
 * Of course, he does so because he's focused on finding his family album. These two things combined add up to making the point that it is people and loved ones who are important, not things.
 * Continuity Lock Out: A problem plaguing the modern Trek franchises, there's so much backstory to the TNG plotline that, as SF Debris puts it, "the backstory has backstory".
 * Dude, Not Funny: Geordi's reaction to Data's impromptu tossing overboard of Dr. Crusher... except it was absolutely hilarious for the audience.
 * Fan Dumb: The whole Why are they wearing two kinds of uniform nitpick completely fails when you remember that, for the whole of season 3, the Enterprise D crew were wearing both the old and new TNG variant. Starfleet has form in this area.
 * Hilarious in Hindsight: Kirk's surprise that Sulu had a daughter is funnier considering George Takei came out as gay.
 * After meeting her, Chekov comments that "I was never that young" and Kirk says "no, you were younger". Come 2009, everyone is younger, but Chekov in particular stands out.
 * Guinan's description of the Nexus as "like being inside joy" has gotten funnier since Whoopi Goldberg has co-hosted The View with Joy Behar.
 * Jerkass Woobie: Soran.
 * Magnificent Bastard: It's a bit of a stretch to call anything in this movie "magnificent," but Soran is a pretty audacious guy. He's not afraid to get down and dirty to enact his plan, which includes manipulating Klingons to help him blow up stars.
 * Narm Charm: Data singing about life forms.
 * The expressions of the entire bridge crew behind him take it from odd and charming to absolutely hilarious.
 * Padding: In spades.
 * The Problem with Licensed Games: The video game adaptation isn't bad, exactly. Its just very distinctly... average. If anything, it was probably hamstrung by an horribly outdated game engine: work on the game began in 1995, but it wasn't released until 1998, so the sprite based graphics and 2.5d gameplay meant it was simply outclassed by the games around it.
 * Tear Jerker: Despite the fact that the final battle between Soran, Kirk and Picard was a Missed Moment of Awesome, Kirk's last words, set to some really sorrowful music are still very moving.
 * Data's reaction to finding out Spot survived the crash.
 * Picard's talk with Troi about the recent death of his promising nephew and possibly being the last of his long family line.
 * During his time in the Nexus, Picard sees his nephew and has a very emotional hug with him.
 * They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Kirk meets Picard... in the last twenty minutes of the movie... and then he dies...
 * On the other hand, they couldn't just do that all willy-nilly. That probably would have made it worse. It was no doubt the best the writers could do.
 * Shatner himself co-wrote a series of novels that assumed he recovered from death, got back together with Scotty, and the two commandeered a mothballed Constitution ship for themselves. It's very long-running and has Kirk meet up with Picard again more than once to confront fan-favorite elements like the Mirror Universe.
 * There was some serious Executive Meddling involved, though: the screenwriters (Brannon Braga and Ronald D Moore) were told from the outset that a) the movie had to be a TOS/TNG crossover, b) said crossover had to be an original-cast prologue and a Kirk-cameo ending, c) there had to be a comical subplot (which is Data getting his emotion chip). Braga and Moore both admitted on the DVD Commentary that despite all this, what they wrote still wasn't up to scratch (both blame being over-stretched from having to also write the Next Gen finale "All Good Things" at the same time).
 * It could have been worse. Originally a lot of the higher-ups wanted a movie about the two Enterprise crews fighting each other. It was only once all efforts to find a way to have Enterprise-A versus Enterprise-D without either crew winding up looking villainous were exhausted that they decided to go with the Kirk-helps-Picard plot. Shatner even describes these early treatments in one of his autobiographical novels as being like every original series versus Next Gen online argument made into a movie.
 * Visual Effects of Awesome: The Enterprise-D gets some CGI treatment in this movie. The scene where the ship warps away from the Amargosa shock wave is gorgeous.
 * Plus the destruction of the Enterprise-D: first a saucer separation, followed shortly by the stardrive explosion, followed by the explosion's shockwave sending the saucer into the planet's atmosphere, culminating in several minutes of the saucer crash-landing onto the planet below. Even if you loved the good ol' Enterprise-D, you have to admit the destruction SFX were really well done.
 * By far the best bit? A lot of the film, including that iconic scene destroying the Enterprise D, was shot with very little 3D animation. The ship in the final crash was a scale model.
 * The one scene that got the most hype was the newly revealed Astrogation room. And it does look amazing.
 * And more amazing for the fact that it was the scaled back version of the one the designers wanted to build.