Star Trek: Nemesis (Stuart Baird, 2002)
There has been a long-standing tradition that the even-numbered Trek films are good and the odd numbered ones mediocre or bad. Star Trek: Nemesis – the tenth Trek film, and almost certainly the last involving the full “Next Generation” crew – mixes enough good, bad and indifferent elements that it would have been held up as vindication of that theory whether it was been odd or even numbered. The villain of the piece is Shinzon, who has masterminded a political coup in the Romulan empire by the empire’s underclass, the Remans. Story logic would dictate that Shinzon would be Reman himself, but Nemesis is founded on twin contrivances: firstly, that Shinzon is a clone of the captain of the starship Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard, and secondly, that Shinzon has somehow come into possession of a prototype for the android Data. These plot points are, on close examination, patently absurd, but they serve their purpose of providing a personal link between the villain and the hero of the piece.
The first half hour of the film does not bode well, with a lot of awkward interpersonal moments and misguided “humourous” touches. Riker and Troi get married (memo to Star Trek writers: nobody cares), and the film repeats the mistake that blighted two of the worst entries in the series, Insurrection and The Final Frontier: a character sings. After this, mercifully, the plot gets underway as the Enterprise diverts to an isolated planet to investigate strange sensor readings. In true Trek style, there’s no attempt to show us an alien landscape that doesn’t simply look like a remote part of Earth, and it’s in this unimaginative location that the crew stumble on the prototype for Data. It’s also the location for one of the feeblest action sequences in recent memory, as the crew race in a dune buggy to escape from machine-gun wielding aliens. At this point I was groaning inwardly. Not only is the chase badly staged, it is totally unmotivated and unexplained (we never find out who the crew are fleeing or why they are being attacked).
Fortunately, things improve once the plot gets properly started. Shinzon’ origins might be implausible, but Josh Logan’s script manages to wring some interest out of the conceit of using the hero’s clone as the villain, as Picard must face off against the darker aspects of his own nature. Logan co-wrote Gladiator, and the scenes in which Shinzon deals with sceptical underlings and politicians echo the actions of the evil Commodus in that film. Even stronger, though, is the resemblance to the second Trek film, The Wrath of Khan, still recognised as amongst the best in the series. Once again the captain of the Enterprise must face off against a genetically modified super-villain with whom he has a special link. Once again, things build to a climactic one-on-one space battle between two ships, and again a character must make a heroic sacrifice to save the ship. By cloning Wrath of Kahn so closely, the filmmakers have managed to reproduce many of the earlier film’s strengths: these latter portions of the film are fast-moving and entertaining.
What’s disappointing about Nemesis is what it doesn’t do. When Nicholas Meyer wrote and directed Wrath of Kahn, he was following on from the disaster of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. That first film had tried for an epic scope, with big themes and spectacular special effects, and the result was an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful film. Meyer’s follow-up therefore served to bring the series back to basics. It tightened the focus, placing the characters to the fore, and acted out its drama on a relatively small scale. The movie series followed its pattern, and ever since the Trek movies have unfolded on a surprisingly small canvas. It’s a series typically built around one spaceship travelling between space stations and encountering villains who are usually also in control of only a single vessel: there’s very little sense that we’re exploring a vast wider universe as there is in the Star Wars series. The planets visited by the Enterprise crews are either distinctly Earth-like wildernesses or conspicuously set-bound. We don’t even get a sense of what the future Earth is like: it is barely glimpsed, usually in shonky matte paintings to establish Starfleet headquarters. (The only detailed view we get of Earth in the movies is in Star Trek IV, and that’s of present-day San Francisco.) While the television series gradually enlargened the Trek world, the movies seemed determined not to overreach. The television series “Deep Space Nine” plunged the Federation into a massive, extended war, but the biggest conflict the movies showed us was a five-minute space battle in First Contact pitting the Federation fleet against a single ship.
The Trek films got by with such limited ambition in the 1980s, when Star Wars was seemingly all over and nobody was making big, epic science fiction. But the computerised effects of the 1990s allow science fiction and fantasy movies to depict realistic alien worlds of a previously unseen scope: whatever you think of the new Star Wars movies, nobody could deny they take the audience on a journey through some amazing locations. Nemesis, stuck in its “two ships firing laser cannons in deep space” mode, suffers from comparison to these big budget, epic movies. It ultimately feels like a two part episode of “Next Generation” with a handful of big special effects shots tacked on. This is not necessarily a criticism – I liked the show – but I think it explains why nobody really gets excited by a new Star Trek movie anymore. This stuff is available for free, in overwhelming quantity, on television.
The most intense moments in fandom are moments of anticipation: for Star Wars fans it was waiting in the queues for Episode 1 in 1999, while for Trek geeks it was awaiting Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. These moments are inextricably linked to denial – the completion of the first Star Wars trilogy, the cancellation of the original Star Trek series – and the actual meeting of the pent-up demand paradoxically acts to diminish interest. Trek, it seems, has been killed by its sheer availability, with four TV series (of up to seven seasons each) and ten films appearing since 1979. It’s no longer even a core interest amongst science-fiction and fantasy geeks, with other franchises (such as Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Star Wars, even X-Men) stealing Trek’s prestige. Trek fans have managed to become an insular group, off by themselves in the corner: the nerds of geekdom. After all, with so much Trek around, don’t you have to be obsessive to eagerly await more? If Paramount wish to revive the franchise, and get regular people looking forward to seeing Trek again, they may need to cut off the supply for a while.
And then hit us with something big.