For many years, the fifth Star Trek movie (The Final Frontier) stubbornly and proudly held its place at the bottom of the pile. The Motion Picture, the first Star Trek movie, was totally bizarre and kind of on Stanley Kubrick's jock, but it was long-awaited by fans and ultimately pretty okay. Star Treks II-IV are widely regarded as the best of all Trek films, with the action-packed The Wrath of Khan being the most widely known and loved and the lolz-filled The Voyage Home being the most popular box office-wise. So, what's a self-satisfied franchise sitting perched atop that mountain to do? Where is there to go?
Straight down, apparently.
With a new television series in its infancy, Star Trek's exhausted writers began what was to become a long-running struggle (sometimes won, sometimes horribly lost) against the temptation of recycling and diluting old plot points. I don't even want to explain The Final Frontier to you right now because it's almost completely dull, and the mission to find God in the center of the galaxy or whatever is just so LAZY. It's the Wizard of Oz meets the first Star Trek movie (which, might I remind you, was not that great but could stand on its own campy merits. However, you can't go back to that after releasing three amazing blockbusters) and then crapped down to an unrecognizable level. Good writing probably could have saved this plot, but, uh...
But I'm not here to talk about ST:V, and honestly, I'm probably not even qualified to do so because I haven't watched it in ages. I haven't even watched the Rifftrax of it (I probably should, so I feel better about it and so people wittier than myself can supply me with jokes about it.) I'm here to talk about the tenth movie to be released under the Star Trek banner.
It's called Nemesis, but you can call it "Whoops".
Hot on the heels of a boring but passable ninth movie, Nemesis was supposed to be totally sweet. The first few minutes are really cool, actually, with a shot of the Romulan Capital and Senate and some crazy political intrigue, making you think, "Whoa, something that wasn't explored as much as it could have been in the series. This is gonna be intense!" Too bad they decided to continue the movie after that point. (Much like The Happening, they should have cut it off after 5 minutes.)
Cut to Riker and Troi getting married, Picard giving some windbaggy toast, and (almost) everyone looking positively PLEASED. Yawn! Why do all the Next Generation movies have to start with boring crap? Kirk and the gang are always climbing mountains or stealing ships or painting "HMS Bounty" on their stolen Klingon cruiser, but Picard and crew are always.. being ceremonious. It's bull, because I KNOW Troi can party.
But wait! It gets better! The Enterprise-E gets diverted and has to check some crap out on a planet, AND THEY GET TO DRIVE AROUND IN A DUNE BUGGY. At this point I'm pretty sure they just wrote this for shits and giggles, and/or after watching Galaxy Quest one too many times. Anyhow, wah wah wah, they find a Data prototype who's even more cluelessly hilarious, blah blah blah who cares and eventually they have to go to Romulus. (Sorry for the I-don't-care confusion, but you'd know approximately the same amount about what was going on if you WERE watching the actual thing right now, so don't worry.)
Picard meets a man who turns out to be HIS CLONE: Shinzon. The Romulans bred him years before to use him against the Federation, but then abandoned the project, and the clone was banished to crappy mining moon Remus, where he got pissed and vowed revenge and universal domination, etc. He's pretending that he wants peace with the Federation but he's really just plotting a complex scheme to wreak havok, and after some twists and turns the day is saved, and that's basically the rest of the movie.
Big issue #1: Crappy with the female characters YET AGAIN. Newly Domestic Troi's incapacitated by some brain interference, Crusher's underutilized as usual, and the female Romulan, Commander Donatra, is a classic Hollywood 'spurned woman betrays her lover' or whatever. She couldn't change her mind and do what was right because she was a highly intelligent military commander or anything, of course; she just wanted to fuck Shinzon's shit up cause he didn't want to bone. Barf x34534905345098.
Big issue #2: THEY STOLE THE ENDING OF THE WRATH OF KHAN. The movie was tolerable enough the first go-round, I suppose, but when they got to the part where Data sacrifices himself to save the ship, but lives on in his prototype B-4 who is child-like and has to re-learn everything... are we noticing AN EXACT REPLICA yet? The SAME crap happens with Spock in The Wrath of Khan and beyond, and his death and funeral comprise one of the most touching scenes(a rare Shatner moment of actual good acting)/excellent story arcs in Star Trek history. Trying to touch it within this dung heap of a movie is just insulting.
I get it. Everyone was tired when this came out, and Star Trek needed a breather. That doesn't mean you should forgive it and watch this movie more than once for canon's sake. Just do like me and pretend it never happened, and hope with me that J. J. Abrams' upcoming Star Trek reimagining will revitalize the franchise with fresh blood and less old dudes sitting around and farting.
Some of you might be reading this and thinking, 'how can you be so venemous about this one particular movie, when many of these problems happen elsewhere in Star Trek?' The main answer to that is that the producers and writers should have known better by 2002. To be simplistic: sexism and racism in 60s Trek sucked, but it was still progressive for its time, AND writers should have (and often did) get better about that as time went by. One can understand, to a point, the flaws in other, older Treks and still appreciate them because of their redeeming qualities; this film, supposedly the culmination of 35 years' work, had almost nothing going for it, and that's why it was so supremely disappointing.
