Star Trekking - Redux

The conspiracy theory is that one of his young relatives is running his social media accounts. Why would an 89-year-old TV actor know what the fuck GamerGate is?

I'm too lazy to read all of that.

Neverending give me the Cliff Notes version.

I'm more upset about RedLetterMedia sucking, but Shatner can be mad at them for whatever he wants.

Damn, I can't believe Shatner's nearly 90. That's wild.

"Will Shatner"? Just no.

To start things off positively, though, Nemesis has an intriguing and promising setup: a clone of Picard, named Shinzon, has become a Romulan political leader and claims to want to seek peace with the United Federation of Planets. Shinzon has also requested that Picard and his crew serve as his envoy during this time, and upon arriving, Picard discovers that he was cloned in the first place, much to his surprise. But it doesn't take long for Shinzon to reveal his true, nefarious intentions, leading to Picard quite literally having to fight himself. The first half of Nemesis I found sort of surprisingly engaging for the most part, especially once the reveal of Shinzon occurs. It leads to a scene/conversation between him and Picard where Shinzon relays his life story up to that point. And while said conversation is more than a little on-the-nose about the whole "nature vs. nurture" theme at the center of it all, it still proves to be a fairly interesting scene. Tom Hardy plays Shinzon, and I gotta say, seeing him and Patrick Stewart share a scene like this together is honestly pretty satisfying. Also, Tom Hardy gives a really solid performance throughout the whole movie.

Where Nemesis stumbles is...well, pretty much everywhere else. There are clear parallels to draw between this plot and Wrath of Khan's, but Nemesis quite frankly lacks the impact of that film. Once Shinzon (surprise, surprise) reveals that he doesn't really want peace and is just another villain, the movie just loses any intrigue it may have started out with. The second half of the movie devolves into mostly a series of action sequences, particularly an extended battle between Shinzon's and Picard's ships that starts out pretty cool, but just gets monotonous because it feels like it goes on forever. It all ultimately leads up to an ending that sees Data sacrifice himself in order to save everyone else -- not unlike the ending of Wrath of Khan -- but the impact feels lost here. And there's a reason for that.

You see, earlier on in the film, there's a scene which sees the crew travel down to a planet where there's "mysteriously" the disassembled pieces of another Data, i.e. a copy. Throughout most of the remainder of the film, the original Data's memories are transferred over to this new one. Why? Well, gee, it was like the movie was setting up something for the end where even though our Data may be dead, don't worry, there's this new one, so it's like it never happened. Also, beforehand, the crew seems to drop their curiosity about where this new Data came from, why and if it could possibly be some sort of trick/trap -- which it is. Also, the discovery of this new Data occurs on a planet which looks curiously similar to the one that had the berilium spheres in Galaxy Quest. Not only that, but it leads to an action scene involving what's essentially a car chase, something that just doesn't fit in this or the iteration of Star Trek that came before.

What it all boils down to is that Star Trek: Nemesis is a lackluster and disappointing entry in the series, made even more so by the fact that it ended up being the unintended finale to The Next Generation era. I honestly don't hate it, but it's not hard to look at it and see the problems so many others have with it.

I would be very surprised if they ever managed to make a worse Star Trek movie than The Final Frontier.

Come on, it's not that bad!  I mean remember that part when Scotty said 'I know this ship like the back of my hand' then bonked into the pole?  He didn't know it was there!  Gets me every time.

Ha! You made this exact same joke when I reviewed Final Frontier way back when.

And I just disqualified you.  So there!

James Doohan really sells the acting there.