Malcolm McDowell joins cast members from the 1960s television show Star Trek and the 1987 sequel series The Next Generation, including William Shatner and Patrick Stewart.

Picard and Data determine that Soran, unable to safely fly a ship directly into the ribbon, is altering its path by removing the gravitational effects of nearby stars.

The Duras sisters attack, and Enterprise sustains critical damage before destroying the Bird of Prey by triggering its cloaking device, and firing photon torpedoes when its shields drop.

Recurring characters from the series return, including Barbara March and Gwynyth Walsh as the villainous Klingon sisters Lursa and B'Etor Duras, Patti Yasutake as Enterprise nurse Lieutenant Alyssa Ogawa, and Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan.

[12] Glenn Morshower played an Enterprise-B navigator; he apologized to the director for a poor first rehearsal, because as a Star Trek fan he was unused to performing along with actors he had idolized for years.

Tim Russ, who appears as an Enterprise-B bridge officer, played a terrorist in "Starship Mine" and a Klingon in "Invasive Procedures", and later joined the cast of Star Trek: Voyager as the Vulcan Tuvok.

[15] In 1992, months before the official announcement of a followup to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Paramount Pictures executives approached The Next Generation producer Rick Berman about creating another feature film.

[14]: 308  Berman informed writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga that Paramount had approved a two-picture deal[14]: 308  approximately midway through The Next Generation's sixth season.

Moore recalled that "we wanted to aim high, do something different and big... We knew we had to have a strong Picard story arc, so what are the profound things in a man's life he has to face?

Picard's personal tragedy was written as his brother Robert's heart attack, but Stewart suggested the loss of his entire family to add emotional impact.

Finding the concept uninteresting, Zimmerman designed a three-story circular set to give the impression the actors were inside a star map dominated by screens.

[21]: 54  The backlit starmaps that covered three-quarters of the wall would have been infeasible to create in the years before the rise of large-format inkjet printers and computer graphics software.

The ship was a modification of the Excelsior, a model designed and built by Bill George and effects house Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock a decade earlier.

[15] The surrounding spacedock for Enterprise's maiden voyage was a modification of the model created for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979),[14]: 319  refurbished and modified to better fit the film's anamorphic screen frame.

[22]: 79  Because Generations featured the Enterprise-D separating into its saucer and engineering sections, the original 6-foot (1.8 m) model built by ILM for the television series was removed from storage.

[14]: 320  George changed the paint job, as he recalled they had been in a rush to prepare the model for television and its green-and-blue color scheme did not properly read on film.

The redesign was abandoned, and the cast wore combinations of the uniforms from The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine; the only new addition was an Eaves-designed angular communications badge that replaced the previous oval shape.

Time was so short that Jonathan Frakes and Levar Burton borrowed the costumes from Deep Space Nine actors Avery Brooks and Colm Meaney.

The scenes of Harriman, Chekov, and Scott reacting to Kirk's apparent death were filmed a week later, to allow time for the deflector room to be suitably distressed to visualize the damage.

Filming of the scenes took place in April 1994, while residents were still skittish from the recent 1994 Northridge earthquake; the effects staff deliberately hid the set shakers until cameras were rolling to elicit more genuine reactions.

[14]: 307  The Enterprise-D crash scenes were filmed mid-May 1994, and were among the last remaining shots before the existing Next Generation sets were demolished to make way for Star Trek: Voyager.

Test audiences reacted negatively to the death, so the scene was rewritten and reshot over two weeks[25] so that Kirk sacrifices himself by leaping across a broken walkway to retrieve Soran's control pad and de-cloak the probe.

[22]: 81–82  "When creating something from scratch, it's always important to rough out the whole thing... because there are so many paths you can explore, it's easy to get bogged down," recalled effects co-supervisor Alex Seiden, who had worked as a technical director on the planetary explosion of Praxis from The Undiscovered Country.

[22]: 83  Knoll decided the ribbon was a rip through universes, filled with chaotic energy, taking inspiration from images he had seen of magnetic fields around Uranus from a Jet Propulsion Laboratory simulation.

[27] Critic Jeff Bond wrote that while McCarthy's score was "tasked with straddling the styles of both series", it offered the opportunity for the composer to produce stronger dramatic writing.

[52][53][54] The Orlando Sentinel's Jay Boyar agreed, but said the film minimized the television series' tendency to "bog down" by moving to the next scene before boredom could set in.

[56] Jay Carr of The Boston Globe described the film as "reassuringly predictable", saying that it featured elements that would be recognizable by the fans of both series but that the lack of surprises was a benefit.

Critics such as The New York Times' Janet Maslin suggested that despite being "predictably flabby and impenetrable in places" and suffering from technobabble, there was enough action and spectacle to engage others.

[62] People's Ralph Novak called Soran a "standard-issue Trek villain",[64] while Maslin, Newsweek's Michel Marriott, and Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum enjoyed the performance.

[61][64][65] Novak wrote that Data's subplot of learning about emotions was a highlight and probably the most enjoyable part of the film for non-fans,[64] while Ebert said that the premise "could have led to some funny scenes, but doesn't".