- by Owen Morton
Okay, let’s talk about Star Trek: Nemesis. And let’s not talk about it in a complementary manner. While I am by no means a Trekkie, or Trekker, whichever, anymore (I have successfully worked through that unsavoury stage of my life), I do still watch Star Trek in its various incarnations on a semi-regular basis. This in effect boils down to The Next Generation on BBC2, since – thank Christ – Enterprise has now finished on Channel 4 and I have not the remotest desire to put myself out by attempting to watch it on Sky 1. However, I have, over the last term at York, come to the conclusion that, just like Enterprise, The Next Generation is splendidly badly-acted and usually badly-written as well, although there is the occasional breakthrough into the mediocre.
Still, I expect better from the movies. Okay, we all know how bad most of the Original Series movies were (or, if we don’t, I’m about to tell you). They could occasionally be halfway decent, but when they were bad, they were really dreadful. The Next Generation movies have been for the most part all right, though, if you ignore Insurrection. And what with all the big and very impressive films that have come out recently – Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, specifically, especially the latter, which I’ve now seen three times – you’d think the producers of Star Trek: Nemesis would think that if their film was going to do well, they’d have to make it good. With this in mind, they got on board a writer who wrote such things as the very successful Gladiator, and a director who’d also done very impressive things, though I can’t currently remember what.
Combine this with lots of money to spend on special effects and suchlike, and you’d think they’d be laughing their way to the bank with the proceeds of the best Star Trek film yet. Instead, what they’ve come up with is just an awful film, with the most far-fetched stunts and ultimately pointless plot. I had the misfortune to see it on Monday night, and I’m still trying to forget about the things that were just plain stupid in it.
Okay, no one expects Star Trek to portray things realistically. A series set aboard spaceships in the future which encounter aliens which just happen to look almost exactly like humans and have such amazingly convenient devices as the transporter and the universal translator isn’t exactly what you call kitchen-sink drama. But Star Trek: Nemesis just took this too far.
Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start (as Julie Andrews might put it – and go and watch The Sound of Music if you’re confused by that reference, but it’s not really worth it because you’ll find that all I did was lift a piece of her dialogue out of the film and insert it into this article, so if you have no interest in The Sound of Music further than that piece of dialogue, there’s no real reason to go and watch it, and I’m going to close these brackets now and pretend they never really happened).
In the Romulan Senate, all the leaders of the Romulan Empire are assassinated by an extremely unpleasant device which gives off some form of green dust which makes everyone turn to stone and then shatter when they hit the floor. Meanwhile, the newly-promoted Captain Riker is marrying Counsellor Troi aboard the Enterprise, which is then diverted to go to the Romulan homeworld to enter negotiations with the newly-appointed head of the Senate, a fellow called Shinzon, who happens to be from Romulus’ sister planet, Remus.
En route, they go down to a planet where they find an android called Before, who is an early prototype for Data. This is where the first irritating stunt appears. Attacked by a group of people who are driving tanks, the gallant Enterprise crew – who are themselves in a vehicle which fits nicely into a shuttlecraft – beat a hasty retreat. They drive around for a bit, then – by remote control – Data pilots the shuttlecraft to hover just over the edge of a canyon. Picard then drives the vehicle over the edge of the canyon and it just so happens to fly directly into the shuttlecraft. Stylish, huh? No, just stupid. If the vehicle were going so fast as to build up that type of velocity to fly as far as it did over the edge of the cliff, it would also a) crush Picard, Data and Worf, and b) not stop going once it went into the shuttle. The only way that manoeuvre could possibly have ended was with the death of all concerned, and thus the end of the movie (which I suppose might have been a blessing).
Oh, and by the way, unless I was totally not paying attention and missed it completely, there was never any explanation of who the people in tanks were and why they were attacking our heroes.
Right, so having acquired this new android called Before, the Enterprise continues to Romulus. While they’re on their way, Geordi and Data work to see how good Before is. They load all Data’s memories into him, for no apparent reason (but it becomes extremely obvious why they did it later on).
When the ship reaches Romulus, the entire senior staff beam over to Shinzon’s flagship, the Scimitar. I could ask if this is intelligent, given that the Romulans are known to be hostile, but I have enough criticisms to make of this film, without adding things which are extremely common in the series as well. Shinzon, of course, turns out to be not entirely what they’d expected, in that he is a) human, not Reman, and b) a clone of Picard. How terribly exciting.
At this point, the film has lasted about three quarters of an hour already and now goes through about half an hour of further dullness, which firstly suggest that Shinzon only wants peace with the Federation, then creates a dreary and annoying back story to explain where he came from, and then we start getting a few hints that Shinzon has actually got another agenda, surprisingly enough. I mean, does any mission in Star Trek ever go exactly to plan? (Apart from the one in the Next Generation episode I saw last night, of course, but that made for a very boring episode, so perhaps it’s better that they don’t.)
At some point, Shinzon beams Before aboard his ship, then, not satisfied with this, kidnaps Picard as well. He now makes the mistake that most villains – including and especially Skeletor – do: he gives Picard detailed information about what his evil plan is. It’s nothing too complex, actually: it’s to kill everybody on Earth by using that weapon which killed all the Romulan senators at the beginning. Quite why he wants to do this, I really couldn’t be certain. I suspect the writers didn’t have any particular clue either, but they were hoping people wouldn’t notice this massive gap in plot, in that the baddy didn’t actually have any motive. Anyway, he further reveals that he’s going to kill Picard before that happens, but we are left in suspense as to why.
Now comes a really stupid bit. Left alone with just one Reman guard (and it’s odd how similar the Remans look to the Orcs in The Lord of the Rings, or indeed to the Master in Buffy), Picard sees Before come in. But … is it really Before? No, it’s not. It’s Data. Somehow, someone anticipated that Shinzon might beam Before aboard the Scimitar, so they cunningly substituted Data instead. Admittedly, Shinzon did say to Picard that Before was the bait, but bait for what? He may have lured Picard to that planet and got him to pick up Before, but everything else he’s done could just as easily have been accomplished without Before even being there. I mean, the Enterprise would still have come to Romulus without Before. Shinzon could still have beamed Picard over to the Scimitar without Before. And, perhaps most importantly, Picard wouldn’t have had the chance to somehow deduce that Before was all part of Shinzon’s plan, and accordingly substitute Data, thus meaning that Picard wouldn’t have had the chance to escape.
So it’s just really stupid. Firstly, the presence of Before brings Shinzon no benefit whatsoever, and secondly, no one aboard the Enterprise could really possibly have figured out that Before was in any way connected to Shinzon. But hey, we don’t argue with this. It just gets better.
In effecting their escape, Picard and Data discover that the random Remans wandering around the ship are as bad shots as any henchmen are in any movie, and so are in no danger from them as they run right in front of their guns into a shuttlebay. Once in the shuttlebay, they decide to nick a shuttle to fly away in, but for some terribly complicated reason it’s too difficult to open the shuttlebay doors for their exit. Instead, they fly the shuttle round the ship, which has corridors which are conveniently wide enough for them to do this. Almost as if Shinzon specifically designed the ship so he could fly shuttles down its corridors.
Safely back on the Enterprise, the crew realise that Shinzon needs Picard because his own cloned DNA is breaking down, and he needs to take all of Picard’s in order to survive. I’m tempted to ask why he didn’t do this immediately once he got Picard on his ship, instead of buggering about making gloriously melodramatic statements, but I suspect that to ask this would be a waste of my time. Anyway, Shinzon now starts acting really stupidly and tries to destroy the Enterprise. I don’t know why, given that if he blows up the Enterprise, he’ll kill Picard and not be able to use his DNA. I would imagine that the writer figured out that his entire movie didn’t make sense and thought he’d better just insert a space battle to keep everyone happy. Cannon fodder arrives in the form of two Romulan warbirds, which are immediately blown to smithereens, and then Shinzon, realising he’s soon going to die, decides that if he’s going to die, everyone on the Enterprise might as well do so as well. I’m actually rather confused by this decision. At this point, the Scimitar is winning the battle. Picard has used all his photon torpedoes and phasers, and his last remaining battle tactic – which consisted of ramming the Scimitar, a dubious tactic if you ask me – has just caused only minimal damage. Shinzon even has a boarding party on the Enterprise which is under specific orders to find Picard and bring him back. He’s still got a few hours to live, which is presumably more than enough time for him to get Picard’s DNA. But anyway, he decides to impose a stupid time limit by powering up his weapon, which – in destroying the Enterprise – will deny him any opportunity of fulfilling his pointless ambition of killing everyone on Earth. The weapon takes seven minutes to load. That’s seven minutes for the crisis to be averted. No trouble.
Picard beams over to the Scimitar with the intention of blowing up the weapon. Personally, I’d have beamed a bomb over there, if it’s possible to beam things. But hey. He fights his way to the control room, where he shoots everybody in sight, except for Shinzon, of course. He leaves him alone and goes directly for the weapon. Of course, Shinzon tries to stop him, armed with two knives. Picard, on the other hand, is armed with a big bit of wood. I don’t quite know why this big bit of wood was lying around on a state-of-the-art spaceship, but hey (as I think I’ve said several times in this article). But despite this tactical disadvantage, Picard manages to win the fight, impaling Shinzon on the wood, just as Buffy would a vampire. He then prepares to blow up the weapon, even though this will kill him as well.
But wait! While the fight with Shinzon was going on, Data has managed to get over to the Scimitar as well! He did this by jumping out of the Enterprise and grabbing hold of the Scimitar as he flew past, then opening one of those handy unlocked doors that you do tend to get on the outside of spaceships. I simply could not believe it when I saw this. This totally tops the other ridiculous reality-defying stunts we’ve seen in this film. Jump from one spaceship to another? No. Just no.
Anyway, Data gets to the weapon, sticks a little device on Picard which instantly beams him back to the Enterprise, then fires a phaser at the weapon and blows it up, which also blows him up. He whispers, “Goodbye” as he does so, which might even provoke an emotional reaction if the audience’s minds hadn’t been so messed about by the up-until-now utterly pointless presence of Before that they just instantly assume the android that’s just been blown up is, in fact, Before.
As it turns out, it was not Before that got blown up; it was Data. Or, if it was Before, Data plays a very cruel joke on his crewmates by pretending right up until the end of the movie that it was him and not Before. But still, because of the presence of Before, the audience really don’t care that Data’s dead. And I mean that. Data may be one of the most popular characters in Star Trek, and this death scene was presumably intended to rival that of Spock’s in The Wrath of Khan, but since, in Before, there is an immediately obvious replacement for Data – one that even comes ready-equipped with Data’s memories, thanks to that oh so convenient scene earlier in the film! – it really doesn’t matter that Data himself is gone. The film might have been redeemed by this surprise killing of Data – I certainly didn’t see it coming – if Before hadn’t been there to dilute the whole thing. I mean, if there is another Next Generation film, we can be reasonably certain that Before will essentially have taken over from Data.
Actually, while we’re on the subject, the tagline for the film is ‘A Generation’s Final Journey Begins’, and let’s hope this was the last Next Generation film. Insurrection wasn’t particularly good, but wasn’t dreadful really, but it was certainly a step down from the previous film, First Contact. Nemesis is appalling compared to Insurrection, and that’s really saying something. Clearly Star Trek has outlived its use; it has really been deteriorating for some time, and now it’s just being milked for all it’s worth – which, if it continues along these lines, won’t be very much in the near future.
Now what we really need is a Buffy movie …