Nemesis was awful, but if it makes you feel any better, I agree with you on First Contact. That movie was awful too, from its very concept–I utterly hated the idea of a borg queen, it seemed like a complete retcon and change to what the borg where, changing them from the Borg Collective(a shared consciousness) to human ants. Also star trek has enough cool stuff going on, you do not need to time travel, and time travelling from one future spot to another future spot is also stupid.
I prefer to believe that there are no ST:NG movies, as they were all bloody awful.
First Contact. I just don’t understand why people like that movie
Agreed. But that was the last trek movie I saw until the JJ Abrams one. I just couldn’t get interested in the subsequent TNG movies.
In a way Trek has always struggled with making its movies feel like movies because of the whole “scaled-up-from-TV” aspect of it, with actors so familiar from the small screen, so maybe starting with a new cast/reboot in movie form will help with that. ST2 is great but still had a slightly low-end quality about it. The only totally cinematic-feeling trek movie, to me, was the first one, which was often dull but also had production values up the wazoo and one of the most epic scores ever composed.
A clone of Picard? Really? WHY? Why would the Remans put him in charge?
The Remans can secretly build dreadnought ships bigger and more powerful than anything the Romulans or Federation have without anyone noticing?
I could go on and on… Forgetting whether or not the action/battles were good, the plot was nonsensical, idiotic, illogical crap that I could outwrite in my first draft if you gave me two hours to write a Star Trek movie.
I just read a piece yesterday by John Scalzi ranking the Star Trek movies, and he points out that the director of Nemesis hasn’t been hired to direct another movie since.
It’s stupider than that. The Romulans started that Picard clone about 20+ years before, so unless they’re in the habit of cloning just about every Starfleet officer on the offchance that they become the key figure in Starfleet when they grow old, it was remarkably prescient of them to clone Picard, who was just one of what must be thousands of Starfleet ship captains when they started to clone him. Remember, Picard captained the Stargazer, a humble little exploration ship, for about 17 years before it was destroyed. He then got the Enterprise.
It’d be like one of us knowing for certain 25 years ago that a black dude by the name of Barack Hussein Obama would become president of the United States.
Aww, poor director, it wasn’t entirely his fault if you look at the script, not to mention the timing of the release.
All the ST:NG movies tried to do too much adding/retconning canon if you ask me. Remans are unnecessary, borg queens are unnecessary, there is more than enough fluff in the ST universe to build interesting stories that you have make up and break existing canon.
That’s not quite right. They used accelerated growth on Shinzon so Picard would have already been in command of the Enterprise by the time they decided to clone him. Wasn’t that why he needed Picard’s DNA in the first place? The accelerated aging was destroying his body?
I think regardless how you feel about the concept of the Borg Queen that First Contact is certainly the most entertaining of the TNG films. I felt like all the other ones (ESPECIALLY Nemesis) were probably in either rewrite hell or were 3.5 hour movies edited down into a confusing mess.
The evil aliens were getting illegal facelifts and Starfleet wanted their facelift tech but Picard didn’t want his handsome face to stop being special so he killed all the aliens. Then Starfleet had no choice but to forgive him because who could stay mad at that face?
Well he does have a bit of a point–it does seem at times like a cheap horror movie. The Remans look like Coppola-inspired vampires, there’s psychic rape, people getting vaporized, etc.
Hmmm… let me see if I remember his other points.
He hated the dune buggy sequence completely. Essentially everything about the B-4 plot from how they got to the planet to when they left is essentially deconstructed and destroyed, and justifiably so–absolutely none of it makes any sense and relies on such a incredible sequence of events that justifies being able to predict it.
The whole Shinzon thing is of course pretty weird–I think he had some problems with the whole upbringing, the slave in the mines thing, the picture of young Picard (who in the series had hair, and suddenly in the movie young Picard doesn’t). A few other nit-picky things (Picard says something about how their hearts are the same, which is not true because Picard has had an artificial heart for some time). How when Shinzon has Picard and needs to undergo the treatments (and is repeatedly reminded of such) he doesn’t let it happen. How Shinzon is extremely contradictory.
In the last act, he does a visual comparison with a) the firefight on board the Enterprise with the prison escape sequence in Star Wars and b) the end sequences in Insurrection and Nemesis, which are basically extremely similar.
How the Enterprise had to go meet the Federation fleet (and Admiral Janeway, how humiliating) which meant having to go through the green nebula, which was a perfect place to get ambushed by Shinzon. Why didn’t the Federation fleet meet them halfway? It was obvious where they were going, the other Romulans with Dizzy Flores certainly figured it out.
The space battle is a poor man’s Wrath of Khan space battle. In fact I think he said he felt it was a too obvious rip off of Wrath.
Riker was a generally useless character and it was incredibly dumb to send him down with Worf to repel the Reman boarders, but was done just to give him something to do.
The writer is basically a big Brent Spiner fan and wanted to give him things to do, and basically caved in to whatever wishes Patrick Stewart and Spiner wanted to put into the movie (namely the dune buggy sequence). And how it’s basically anti-Picard.
He doesn’t do a lot of hate on B-4, but he does note it makes no sense to give him the access/things that he did, saying something like, “Do you remember the last time they put together a Noonian Soong android they just happened to find?” and replayed scenes of Lore phasering Crusher and threatened to turn Wesley into a human torch.
Thanks for the list Alan. I really didn’t want to watch 40 minutes of review!
No arguments from me. Having a dune buggy at Star Trek levels of technology is just incredibly stupid. This whole thing was a complete fail from my point of view. I have no idea what they were thinking.
Okay, this was definitely a weird plot device. I wouldn’t say it was awful, but no I did not find it particularly compelling.
I haven’t seen Insurrection. But comparing this to Star Wars and Wrath of Khan is just silly. It’s like saying one SciFi battle is like another – which it certainly is at some level, but at some level the comparison is meaningless. While I suppose I could come up with a few similarities between WoK and Nemesis – specifically they end up in a position where Enterprise is in big trouble, and somehow the Enterprise captain has to come up with a way out – there are many more differences. In Nemesis, they are fighting against a superior foe, with the help of two allies; in WoK they are caught with their britches down and get beaten by an enemy which they should be superior to. In Nemesis they maintain almost full combat firing throughout the sequence; in WoK the scene is almost entirely cat and mouse with very little actual fighting. Etc. There are many more differences than similarities – unless your similarity is that they both involve science fiction combat.
Star Trek has a long history of having their bridge officers do all sorts of stupid things that they in fact should not be doing. Starting first and foremost with Kirk constantly transporting off the ship along with his most senior officers. Yes, this is stupid, but many (most) of Star Trek has similar problems.
Bottom line for me is that I enjoyed watching it twice and I just watched the Enterprise vs. Scimitar fight again tonight! I thought it was a fun movie with some very nice high points. The plot is admittedly rather quirky, and the dune buggy is incredibly stupid. This is no Wrath of Khan, but neither is it a ST1 or ST5 (actually I’ve never watched ST5 although I’ve heard it is absolutely awful). I just purchased the Star Trek: Original Motion Picture Collection (all six ToS movies) and the Star Trek: The Next Generation Motion Picture Collection (all four ST:NG movies) so I’m sure I’ll watch ST5 sooner or later – I think I’ll watch Insurrection next.
Nemesis is not great by any means, but I think Insurrection is clearly the worst TNG movie. It suffers the most from the feeling of just being a glorified episode of the show, and it’s a terrible episode.
Holy shit, I just realized that Nemesis and Insurrection had fused in my memory. I honestly thought it went: Generations (bad), First Contact (good), Nemesis (awful) and that’s it.
