Thursday 9 July 2015

BREAKING THE COMPLETIST - Star Trek: Nemesis

Looking at my compulsion to collect DVDs... like movies I don't want to own, even to complete the set.


Every odd Star Trek film sucks, they say.  But they usually have all the films in their Star Trek collection.  One I don't own and don't want is Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) (Star Trek X: Nemesis [Blu-ray])


Previously, I've done one of these of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and Star Trek: The Final Frontier (1989), and some may be thinking I just don't like original series movies, but, no, there's a Next Generation film I don't want to own.

Star Trek: Nemesis was created as the last Next Generation film, the actors had been playing these parts on and off for 15 years.  They'd made a film every two years for the first three, but waited four for this one.  And this one, was decided to be the last.  And that's part of the problem.  They throw in a fan-service wedding to finally wrap up the Riker/Troi thing established in the pilot.  They kill off a character and they split up the crew at the end.

Like the previous two Next Gen film Picard gets the made plot and Data gets the secondary one and everyone else is basically a support role, and after a few films with this formula it's got a bit stale and predictable.

Data's subplot suffers from the same problems.  They find a prototype model of Data.  Which is exactly what Lore was in the series itself.  Did I mention stale and repetitive?  But worse than that, it's forced into the story in such a way that why it telegraphs and then undermines a major plot point, and in doing so instead of creating closure for the series it creates a dangling plot thread.

The main plot has its own issues.  The set up is hard to swallow.  The oppressed minority Remans easily take over the Romulans, but are controlled by the only person with the genius to do all this:  A clone of Picard.  As annoyingly unbelievable as the set up is all hope for an interesting political storyline is lost when it turns out that the villain is just another dying madman out to destroy the universe out of spite.

A poor ending for the Next Generation crew and a film I don't want to own.


Should I give in an buy it just to complete the set?  Do the survey.



~ DUG.

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