Star Trek: TNG Reviews - From Start to Finish!

Insurrection was the movie where they forgot they were making big screen movies, and went and did a Romance channel telemovie.

It's curious, in that for some reason the fact it isn't that bad somehow makes it all the worse.

That stretchy-faced makeup was possibley the stupidest makeup in Trek history.

Edit: nm.

I had just made the assumption on my own that they wouldn't just leave that emotion chip fused to Data's neural net. In fact, after it gave him problems that actually put other people in danger, I tend to believe they'd make removing it a priority.

Excellent review, sums up my thoughts about what was wrong with Insurrection.

Quite how Nemesis managed to suck even more, I'm unsure.

I think I could have stomached Insurrection better if they just went ahead and put in commercial breaks.

Yes. Watching a follow up to Nemesis would have been like the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark right after they opened it.

Insurrection could have only been a worse native American allegory if the Baku were an amazonian race of blue beings and Starfleet were transporting them out via space Ospreys...

Uh oh...

I would drive Donna Murphy through a bulkhead.

In a dune buggy? Oh wait, that was Nemesis.

Speaking of the joystick, does it even make sense to be able to control a massive starship like the Enterprise with a steering column? It's not a fucking X-Wing!

Remember in Relics when the ensign at helm rotated the Enterprise a full 90 degrees just by inputting the correct button presses? Why was the Enterprise D more sophisticated in that regard than the Enterprise E?

Something else I forgot to mention. I believe this was Michael Piller's last contribution to Star Trek. Shame he had to go out with such a weak ass script. Apparently his original idea was much darker and compelling but the studio had him water it down and make it funnier to appeal to the masses.

I guess the same sort of thing happened to Shatner with STV. It's too bad, because Piller was one of most important contributors to the success of 24th century Trek. His one really bad script just happened to be a feature film.



One more review to go!

By the way, is there any way i can save this entire thread as an archive or text file? I'd hate to lose all my work here and all of the comments if WF loses a few months of posts again... and I'm sure Kyle would like to save his Voyager reviews so that he can relive the experience again and again and again...

Ironically, because of all the posts we lost there is not a single mention or indication that I was ever even a moderator on this board... I probably had the shortest stint as moderator in WF history. I never even got my EliteForge pass.

Actually, IIRC, Piller was the one who found First Contact to be overly dark, and he came into it bringing in the Fountain of Youth storyline. Berman's contribution was pretty much restricted to the initial storyline with Data.

Memory Alpha has a pretty good description of the process that went into the development of the film. Basically, Piller had a great idea for an episode of TNG years after TNG went off the air. The fountain of youth storyline was never strong enough to support a film.

The biggest issue I had with the film was that the Federation should have been the villains, not simply bumbling accomplices. The Sona should never have been in the film. It actually could have tied brilliantly into DS9 - a desperate Federation fighting a seemingly endless battle with the Dominion, and at their doorstep, tucked inside a defensible nebula, is the solution to keeping the troops in prime physical condition and perfect health. I would have been fine with a plot involving the Federation collapsing under the weight of its ideology, and Picard standing up for the rights of the planet's inhabitants.

The end of the film would have been Picard securing the rights of the Baku, but knowing that, realistically, the public would never know just how close the Federation came to abandoning its mission out of wartime desperation.

Oh yes, what a joy that will be.

Anyway, there isn't a way to save the entire thread at once, but if you hit this URL, you can get the archive version, which compresses it into four pages that you could print to PDF if you had the appropriate software installed (or are running God's Favorite OS, OS X).

http://www.wordforge.net/archive/index.php/t-71233.html

DP

From what I've read, Suckanerection originally started out as a "Heart of Darkness" style action-thriller. Then Stewart got involved, said he didn't want another 'dark' trek movie right after First Contact, and the rest is infamy.


As an aside, I've just finished reading Clarke's 2001. As I was finishing the section where Bowman explores the hotel room & finds that it was copied from an old movie I realized that whoever wrote "The Royale" utterly ripped this idea off, right down to the 'props' left in the room and the spacesuit in the closet.

I should have my review of Nemesis up sometime tomorrow...

No rush. Its not like anyone's going to read it and say, "Wow! It was a good movie! I'll have to check it out!"

I imagine you've got the set-up from Clockwork Orange, where Alex has his eyes taped open and strapped into a chair so he can't look away from the film...

Otherwise you'd run out to watch something better. Like diseased warthogs mating.

I would think that after Measure of a Man, that they would leave that decision to Data.... and I don't see him doing that with the ability to turn the chip on and off. As a matter of fact, I would think Data would take the oppurtunity to try and learn to cope with his emotions as a human would have to. To consider the morality of his emotions and to explore the kind of man he wanted to be. After getting the emotion chip fused to his neural net and flesh grafted onto his body in FC, To see Data pasty white and acting like a clueless embecile in INS was more than a let down. Leaving the flesh on his body would have been the perfect reasoning to explain why Data seemed to have been aging as Brent Spiner the actor aged over time.

I didn't mind the pedestrian nature of INS so much, but what got on my nerves is the fact that they failed to grow the characters in this one. This was 1998. TNG had been around for 11 years at this point. Data wanted to be human, Riker wanted to be a captain, Picard struggled with whether he wanted a family or not and who knows what the others wanted, yet here they were in the exact same spots they were 11 years ago.

... and don't get me started about Worf.

Star Trek: Nemesis

This was supposed to be the last hurrah for TNG. But the movie was a disappointing mess of ideas and a lackluster adventure for the TNG crew. And it is really a shame because this movie had the potential. It could have been the best of the TNG movies. It could have been the Star Trek VI of the TNG movies. STVI showed us the overtures to peace between the Federation and the Klingons and this movie could have shown us something similar with the Federation-Romulan relationship which has been a part of TNG since the end of the first season.

But this movie wasn't about the Romulans. It was about Picard's retarded clone, Data's retarded brother, and their army from Mordor. I'll go ahead and say it right now: Shinzon is one of the worst characters to ever show up in a Star Trek tale. The godawful central character and the lack of a good villain torpedoed this movie. Rufao in Insurrection was sort of dull and generic, but Shinzon was much worse. He actually made this movie a painful viewing experience.

Where the hell did this dude come from anyway? Yeah, I know they explain in the movie that he was created by the Romulans to replace Picard and infiltrate Starfleet, but when would this have happened? They wouldn't have had any reason to clone Picard until at least the third or fourth season of TNG, when the Captain actually started to become a rather well known individual throughout the quadrant. Tom Hardy just didn't do a very good job as Picard's clone and I had to keep reminding myself that this was a clone of Picard. He was creepy, but not in a good way. It was almost like he wanted to molest Picard or something but settled for mind-raping Deanna. I dunno... his performance was just too over-the-top. You'd expect a clone of Picard to be a little more strategic and calculating like the real Picard. For that matter, why the heck couldn't they have just had Patrick Stewart play both roles? That would have been SO much more effective. I never believed that Shinzon was a clone of Picard, so none of the nature/nurture issues brought up by this even resonated with me. There wasn't a trace of Picard in the clone... so why bother making the primary villain a clone at all? Besides, clones are a pretty tired idea in science fiction and Trek has done clone/duplicate stories much better in the past already. They were just treading old ground here.

But the biggest problem with this movie is that it just doesn't feel like TNG. It's like whoever wrote this never saw a single episode of the show in their lives and just went off hearsay and general knowledge. This is a rather anal nitpick but why is the younger clone of Picard also bald? And why did they show a picture of a bald Picard from his Academy days? We know that he only lost his hair much, much later in life. In fact, he had some hair even when he was commanding Jack Crusher (see Violations, Tapestry, Rascals, etc.) Yeah, this is a minor quibble but it is not the only example of things in this movie being discontinuous with the TV series.

Why is Wesley back in Starfleet uniform at the wedding? Shouldn't he be a near god by now? Why would he go back to Starfleet after rejecting it so thoroughly in Journey's End? But, even worse, WHY IS WORF BACK AT TACTICAL ON THE ENTERPRISE?? When we last saw him on DS9, he had been made Federation Ambassador to the Klingon Empire, the perfect place for him after his long struggle with his two cultural backgrounds.

Beverly and Geordi, yet again, get absolutely nothing to do in this movie so no loss there. At least Will and Deanna are moving on. This is actually one of the things the movie did right. Will is finally a captain of his own ship and he and Deanna are finally married. They are actually moving on with their lives! Shocking.

And what about Data? Oh boy. Where to start? This movie damn near destroyed the character. As another example of things being discontinuous from the TV series, why did they re-assemble B4? Um... Jesus... don't you idiots remember the last time you tried to reassemble one of Data's 'brothers'? Why doesn't Lore get a single mention in this movie? Why do the crew so eagerly decide to re-assemble B4 and then why are they so shocked when he betrays them? For fucks sake, Lore tried to kill them all multiple times and even allied himself with Borg in an attempt to destroy the Federation! You'd think they'd have learned their lesson. But I guess John Logan or whoever wrote this had no idea who Lore was.

We are supposed to be moved by Data's self sacrifice at the end of the movie. But it's a cheat. When Spock died in STII, it really was moving and tragic. And at least they waited a whole movie before bringing him back. The introduction of B4 robs Data's death of any meaning or purpose, because you already know the writers have created an 'out' for themselves. No one should have been surprised when B4 started humming at the end of the movie. Even a casual fan could have seen that coming a mile away.

But now what? Data lives on, but in a far less advanced version of his old body. No emotion chip, none of the special circuitry created by Dr. Soong especially for Data. This is the worst sort of character regression. Data is stuck in the body of his retarded, prototype brother and gets to learn every fucking thing over again? It would have been so much better if they had just killed him off definitively.

Speaking of B4 and Shinzon... did the whole plan seem far fetched and unnecessary to anyone else? Shinzon goes to all the trouble of finding the parts for another Soong type android, re-programs it, scatters the parts on a planet that the Enterprise just happens to be close to, just so B4 can access the Starfleet computer systems and transmit the info? And then he just gets tossed aside like garbage? This is a Soong type android we're talking about. A being with superior mental and physical abilities. Surely Shinzon could have found some better use for the android then as simple bait for the Enterprise?

But nothing about Shinzon's plans made sense. If he had so much rage for his Romulan slavemasters, why did he attack Earth? Where did he get a weapon like that? Why would the Remans follow Shinzon? And why would the Romulan military follow Shinzon? We know from many episodes that Romulans are xenophobic and supremely arrogant... they'd never allow a human slave to become Praetor of the Romulan Empire. And why couldn't this movie have been about the Romulans? There were so many other interesting story ideas they could have picked up on from the series... they didn't need to resort to the farfetched Picard clone stuff.

I remember watching this movie at the theatre during the opening weekend. Oh man, it was terrible. Me and my friend were the only ones in the whole place! I guess everyone else was next door watching The Lord Of The Rings? They made the Remans look sort of like the Orcs from LOTR, but I guess that wasn't enough to draw in the big crowds.

There were a few good scenes in this movie but they were far and few between. I actually liked the battle between the Enterprise, the new sweet looking Romulan Warbirds, and Shinzon's ship. The wedding scene had the right idea, but the characters didn't really feel like themselves. And the scene at the end where the friends gather to mourn Data, almost managed to get me choked up... until I remembered that Data was sitting there in the next room. There were also some completely pointless scenes like Picard racing the dune buggy (was that supposed to be kewl?), the Deanna mental rape scene, Riker fighting the Viceroy, etc.

This was a hugely disappointing movie. Sure, it was much, much darker than the last movie and it lost most of the corny jokes but it also shed almost everything that was recognizable from TNG the series. And lest we forget... it had Admiral fucking Janeway! HOW does Janeway become Admiral before Picard? And how sad is it that Captain Jean-Luc Picard is taking orders from a crazy, erratic bitch like Janeway? Heck, she should have been court-martialed after VOY's return from the DQ, not promoted. They tried to throw in another lame reference to DS9 by stating that the Remans fought on the front lines of the Dominion War... but that doesn't really make much sense since the Romulans probably wouldn't have committed ground troops to any of the invasion campaigns. Remember, they joined late in the war? And it was stated on DS9 that the Romulans WERE NOT taking heavy losses like the Federation or the Klingons. Meh.

Hmm... what else? This review probably seems very disjointed compared to my past reviews. I'm just writing the stuff as it comes to my head, because I don't think the movie really deserves a scene-by-scene playback and detailed analysis. It wasn't the movie it should have been, and it certainly wasn't the movie I was expecting. But I will tell you how I think this movie should have played out in my next post. I have some interesting ideas for what they could have done to really end TNG with a bang, and you can tell me whether my script would have been better than the dreck we actually got. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

As far as I am concerned, First Contact was the final TNG movie. This one never happened. There was never a Shinzon, there was never a B4, and there was certainly never an Admiral Janeway.

This is how I'd rank all the Trek movies:

Star Trek II
Star Trek VI
Star Trek: First Contact
Star Trek IV
Star Trek (2009)
Star Trek III
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Star Trek: Generations
.
.
Star Trek V
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Star Trek: Insurrection
Star Trek: Nemesis



Rating:

I've said before, NEM was an acceptable vanilla sci-fi popcorn flick, as a Trek movie it was an utter abomination.

Just searched for the post where I rejigged the concept, to general thumbs uppery, but appears to have departed during a serverfart

Basically, if they'd had Shinzon created because Picard was an up and coming captain in his youth, then discarded him to the Reman mines after the Stargazer court martial, then pulled him out of the mines after capturing some Borg hardware, you have a history for why there's a clone and why he's so angry at both the Roms and Picard.

Using the info Starfleet handed out after BoBW - because you might just need your neighbour when fighting the Borg - the Roms turn Shinzon into their own version of Locutus with an aim to create their version of Borg as troops.

Shinzon beats the control mechanism, and launches his revenge against the Roms for all the things they've made him do, and then turns his attention to the one he blames for it all: Picard. Picard damage his own career, meaning Shinzon got to live in the mines instead of Starfleet as a spy. Picard got himself Borged, meaning Shinzon got to be butchered into a cyborg, and driven mad by the Roms controlling him and making him do things like kill his own family to prove how much control they had.

So now we've got a set-up that started at BoBW, Picard finally gets to take on his biggest fear in his own mind - his worst nemesis - Locutus. We've got a powerful enemy with a genuine reason for his grievance.

That would make a fitting end to the series IMO.

I keep saying I'll rewrite it for my own amusement, I'm going to have to, as I reckon my idea for Data's funeral would have every TNG fan wiping away a tear!

This movie was on AMC last week & I gave it another view. When it came out, alot of people were cursing director Baird for the debacle. But after watching it again, all of the blame should rest on Logan's shoulders. Then only questionable decision Baird made was the 'Remember Me' scene.


As for Nemesis improvement, how about Stewart plays Shinzon and someone else plays B4? Of course, better than that would be to drop Shinzon in favor of Tomalak and B4 is actually Lore. And no Wesley or Worf, except at the wedding (& not in uniform).

^Worf should've been used in his Ambassadorial role.

"The Klingons want a representative at these talk, and they've suggested an old friend..."

Battle commences later on, Red Shirt at tac gets killed, Worf takes over. Simples!

I don't know why, but, amid all the crap that Nemesis threw at us, the thing that makes me maddest is Shinzon being bald. We saw on three occasions that Picard had lotsa hair when he was a boy (Rascals), plenty of hair at 18-20-something (Tapestry), and a bit of hair when Jack Crusher died.

Kirk warned Picard away from accepting promotion in Generations. For all we do (or will ever ) know, he commanded starships into old age and retired straight into ambassadorship.

I don't have a problem with that. Worf was a part of the wedding party on Betazed, he could have been on board just for the ride. But not on duty and not in uniform.

I didn't mind Shinzon being bald, he could have done it to fit in with the other Remans. But they didn't need to make Picard's pic bald. That's just lazy. This fits in with the script I read. Everything is described in terms of how much it is like other works.

Well, Andreas Katsulas was dead by then, wasn't he? Would make it difficult to have Tomalak in the movie. Besides, his relationship with Picard was was similar to Koloth's with Kirk.

Now, get Sela in there - disgraced, out of power, and hankering for revenge.

Denise Crosby isn't up to pulling her own weight as a big-screen villain.

Just a note... Today is the 43rd birthday of Star Trek!

Yeah.

Me, ST and the Super Bowl are all the same age.

So you're still a punk kid. Be happy!