The handoff film between two Enterprise crews is a movie at war with itself, one story trying to retire a legend while another sets up the next generation on film. Generations opens with a bravura prologue, Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov aboard the brand new Enterprise B, and a rescue gone wrong that pulls Kirk into a spatial anomaly, the Nexus, a ribbon of energy where time stops and everyone lives inside their happiest memory. The concept is lovely. The execution is a shrug.

Malcolm McDowell’s Soran, a scientist willing to destroy a star and everyone’s solar system to reenter the Nexus and feel his family again, is a genuinely motivated villain in the Khan mold with none of the follow through, and the film keeps deflating his menace with Data’s comedy subplot, an emotion chip that has the android crying at poets and swearing in engineering. Picard’s grief thread, a nephew lost in a fire, gives Stewart a quiet scene in the Nexus that is the film’s emotional peak and then rushes past it.

Then there is the ending, the actual reason this film is remembered. Picard and Kirk fight Soran together on a desert mountaintop, Kirk dies stopping a rocket launcher with fists and a bridge, and the greatest captain in Starfleet history gets buried under rocks by his successor. It is a noble idea executed with the gravity of a TV movie, and the gap between what the moment should have been and what we got defines the whole film. Fascinating failures deserve honesty. Five out of ten.

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