The SmarK DVD Rant for Star Trek: Nemesis.
People who have read my reviews of the season sets of Star Trek: The Next Generation are well versed with my disdain for the writing talents of Brannon Braga by now. However, up until this movie came out, partner Rick Berman had escaped much of the critical and fan backlash due to his involvement with Deep Space Nine, a fan favorite show.
That all changed when Paramount decided to release the tenth big screen voyage of the Enterprise, Nemesis, a week before the Two Towers debuted in theaters. With a North American gross of a little over $43 million, Nemesis gained the dubious distinction of being the biggest flop in the entire run of the Trek movies (with almost the entire audience abandoning the movie in the second week) and Trek fans began piling on the scorn for the movie itself, for reasons I can’t fathom. Soon after, Paramount declared that Nemesis would be the last movie in the Trek series, and blame seemed to fall on Berman’s head. Really, it was the marketing department who scheduled the movie against the juggernaut of the Christmas season that are to blame, but Hollywood never lays that sort of blame where it belongs.
The Film:
Essentially a Next Gen remake of The Wrath of Khan, Nemesis is centered almost entirely around Data and Picard, which is where much of the good and the bad with the movie lies.
The movie opens with the long-awaited wedding of Troi and Riker (which should have occurred in the final episode of the series) and immediately there’s a ton of touches for the Trek fans, like cameos by Whoopi Goldberg and Wil Wheaton, and a real sense of family that was missing from the more sterile Insurrection.
The movie immediately moves into space, where the crew is at their strongest (again, another mistake made with Insurrection) as they chase down lifesigns that seem to indicate another android on a planet relatively close to their path. As I’ve noted before, for someone who’s alone in the universe, Data has a big family. The android is one of the early prototypes abandoned by Dr. Soong (as mentioned in an obscure episode of TNG), which he named “B-4”. For whatever reason, the crew takes it at face value without even stopping to ask if it might be Data’s evil twin Lore, but I assume that the studio wanted to keep possibly confusing plot points for casual viewers to a minimum and thus omitted any mention of him. At any rate, B-4 is more childlike (i.e., retarded) version of Data, minus the intelligence and witty banter. Data downloads his entire memory into B-4’s head in order to smarten him up a bit, but that’s a lot of information for one poor guy to take in at once. Hell, the poetry and painting sections alone would fill a room of supercomputers.
Thus begins the parallel nature of the main stories, as Data faces his mirror, crack’d, and the main villain comes into play as the Enterprise is called to the Romulan homeworld following the millionth political upheaval there, this one resulting in the outcast sister world, Remus, producing the new Praetor in the form of Shinzon. Shinzon turns out to be a clone of Picard gone wrong, and in fact so wrong that he has developed the usual superweapon for killing the entire human race found in sci-fi movies, and intends to start with our heroes. To make matters worse, he has a badass super-loaded warship that’s about 3 times the size of the Enterprise (talk about overcompensating ) and can use his Reman buddies for psychic projections (and you know what that means Troi Gets Hysterical!). By the end, the Enterprise has had the shit kicked of her literally three or four times over, and it comes down to someone making the ultimate sacrifice to keep Shinzon from firing his doomsday weapon.
For some reason the movie was trashed after the fact by overzealous Trek geeks, but it’s easily one of the best movies in the series, with a focus on the two strongest characters and ample opportunity for both of them to steal the movie. The story is darker than anything Trek has done (mental rape, death of a major character, implied torture of the younger Shinzon and Irving Berlin songs all permeate the 2 hour running time) and is only matched by 1996’s First Contact, which was lacking the epic space showdown that this one produces. Whereas First Contact wavered between a cosmic Die Hard and a comedy, Nemesis produces a real sense of dread and menace from start to finish, and everything is focused towards that direction. It’s really intended as Data and Picard’s journey, and everyone else is secondary towards that goal. I know people were upset that characters like LaForge and Worf were trivialized by the movie, but Worf really had everything that his character was going to say in DS9 and no longer even belongs on the Enterprise. This of course leads to the question of how Worf got back into Starfleet after being promoted to an ambassadorial position in the finale of DS9, and that’s unfortunately the result of someone like Stu Baird, who isn’t a “Trek person”, directing the project.
Shinzon is not really the strongest villain that the series has seen, but at the same time his purpose isn’t to be balls-out evil, he’s more of a challenge for Picard to reform him and try to redeem that part of him that he sees in himself. He’s what Picard would be had he continued his ways from Starfleet Academy. Picard spends the movie trying to save the mixed-up human part of Shinzon, and ultimately fails, and that’s what makes it a more complex movie than just good v. evil. I think they should have went further and had Shinzon betray Picard completely by killing him to end the movie (instead of the ending they went with) but a big part of Picard DOES die by the end of the movie, as his little extended family breaks up and leaves him.
The movie ends with the hint of an “out” for the big death and a sequel, but I doubt we’ll ever see it. It’s probably time to retire the franchise now before the wrinkles get any more pronounced than they already are.
I think that, overall, this is a movie that was very underappreciated by the core audience, but is going to be viewed in time as a much better film than the naysayers give it credit for being. It’s a more daring Trek film than the ones preceding it, and unfortunately movies that take chances often get left behind by the fans. Viewed as the end of an era, this is an exciting and involving space opera that closes up the loose ends of the characters and gives fans a chance to say goodbye to the people they’ve followed for 15 years.
There are, of course, major flaws with the movie, which I’m not going to deny. There’s no real sense of closure on the big death that ends the movie (which is probably because they wrote it with Star Trek XI in mind), continuity freaks will likely have a heart attack over some of the liberties taken with the characters, the fight between Riker and Viceroy feels needless and tacked-on, and as noted, most of the secondary characters are marginalized, to say the least. I don’t feel these flaws are enough to sink a very enjoyable Star Trek movie, however.
Ignore the curmudgeons and give this one a look.
The Video:
With a disc light on supplements and with no DTS, almost all of the space is dedicated to the bitrate of the video, and the result is the best transfer of the entire Trek series by a longshot. This is a movie heavy on blacks and greens and it all looks flawless. No compression problems I could see and even with all the dark tones, contrast was great throughout. An awesome job by Paramount.
The Audio:
Super-aggressive 5.1 mix here, with frequent trips to the surrounds for the space battles and good usage of the subwoofer for the big shipwreck scene, and some nice atmospheric ambiance during Shinzon’s creepy tete-a-tete conversations with Picard in the Romulan senate. I found that the center channel was mixed pretty low, however, making it hard to hear the dialogue at times without cranking up the sound, and that deducts from the overall score. I really wish Paramount would go full-bore DTS for movies like this, however, and not just roll it out slowly with stuff like the Jack Ryan collection.
The Extras:
As noted, pretty light compared to the recent Trek special editions, but I’m guessing that’s because they’ll double dip this one down the road, too.
At any rate, you get
– A commentary by director Stuart Baird, who has almost NOTHING interesting to say and drones on in a very British stage whisper throughout. I only lasted half an hour with this guy before switching to the normal 5.1 track for good. I’d kill for Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner doing a track.
– A selection of featurettes about the making of the movie, including 10 minutes on Baird’s directing, 5 minutes on the action sequences, and 15 on the cast’s thoughts on being a part of the final Trek movie. Basically the same thing (and from the same sessions at times!) as the interviews used on the TNG season sets. One interesting tidbit from Spiner is that Picard was in fact considered for the big death at one point.
– Deleted scenes, about 30 minutes worth total, most of which add nothing. However, there’s one major scene between Data & Picard where they discuss human nature that was an inexcusable cut, and an alternate ending where the new first officer gets ribbed by Riker that was also superior to Picard’s chat with B-4. The rest are easy cuts and are better off in the deleted section.
– Photo gallery. Who ever looks at these things?
– Trailers for the DS9 box sets and “The Hours”. Yeah, I’m rushing out to buy that one, Paramount.
The Ratings:
The Film: ****1/2
The Video: *****
The Audio: ****1/2
The Extras: ***1/2
