Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

I watched Star Trek: Nemesis last night, and now I'm hoping that if they ever make a fourth Terminator movie, the plot consists of Ah-nuld's Terminator and Robert Patrick's T-1000 saying, "Forget about John Connor. Let's go kill Rick Berman."

This movie is terrible.

Star Trek's onscreen history has been spotty, to say the least (check out my Star Trek Redux series, conveniently linked under "Notable Dispatches" for more!), but even when the Trek people have turned in an unsatisfactory product, I've at least been able to give them an A or B for effort. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier may not be a good movie, but I can see what Shatner was trying to get at and I know how Paramount stepped in, gutted his budget and basically forced him to dilute his story. Star Trek III: The Search For Spock has the worst production values of any of the movies, but it's still got a lot going for it, including the best distillation of the concept of Heroism I've yet seen. Even Star Trek Generations has some campy fun, even though its plot is a confused mess.

Nemesis, though, has almost nothing going for it.

The story is a lame blend of tropes from earlier Trek films, most notably The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country, with none of the epic quality that made those films so good. We get no feeling at all for the troubles at the heart of the Romulan Empire -- it's an empire, for God's sake, and yet it seems to have all the scope of Des Moines, with a ruling council the size of the Wyoming State Legislature. The TNG episode "Reunification" did a much better job, with more limited resources, at conveying the idea that the Romulans are a society.

Shinzon is a lousy villain. He's a whiny teenage kid who makes it obvious from his first minute of screen time that what he needs most is to have his ass kicked, and hard; but sure enough, we get scene upon interminable scene of Picard trying to understand him and come to terms with him and to make him see a better way and blah blah blah. I've read in other reviews that James T. Kirk would have locked phasers on target almost immediately, and I can't disagree. Hell, so would Captains Sisko and Janeway. This movie actually made Jean-Luc Picard a parody of himself: the guy who would rather talk and be the diplomat, no matter what the situation. Terrible. (And really, if you're going to do the "Hero and villain as two sides of the same coin" thing, you'd better do it at least as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark did it.)

So for all of the attempts to give Shinzon some background and reason for his evil, all we get in the end is a 24th century Blofeld figure, complete with incredibly goofy uniform and cavernous rooms to walk through slowly with his hands behind his back. I kept waiting for him to pet his white cat and kill some underling for failure. (Oh wait, he actually did that, so I guess I was just waiting for the white cat.)

And then there's Data. Honestly, I've long since stopped caring about his quest to become more human. It's gone far enough -- and yet this has, in some ways, been a significant plot device in each of the TNG movies, building up to his big "Spock sacrifice" moment. But never fear, we've got the whole "Katra in another" thing going on. Good thing he found that brother. Bonus points, though, if you can explain to me just why Data's other brother, Lore, is never even mentioned. I guess Lore is now the Star Trek equivalent of Chuck, the older brother of Richie and Joanie Cunningham from Happy Days who was so utterly forgotten that in the show's last episode, Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham loving refer to their "two wonderful children". This B-4 character -- inasmuch as he's a character at all -- only serves to jumpstart a few plot moments, and that's it. Lame.

The film's action sequences were also terrible. Does there really need to be a dune-buggy chase in a Star Trek movie, complete with an utterly implausible stunt at the end? Is "Let's fly this little spaceship through the halls of this big-ass space cruiser until we can find a thin spot in the hull to blast our way through" really a convincing tactic? When the Enterprise rams Shinzon's big-ass space cruiser, should the crew then stand around in utter silence, with the unspoken question "Uh, what should we do now?" written on their faces? And did anyone making this movie really think that Shinzon's "I will now use my superweapon to destroy you utterly -- just wait ten minutes while my big-ass ship unfolds its wings so as to look really menacing before we fire!" bit would actually increase the tension, as opposed to sucking it dry?

And do we really need more soap-opera scenes in which we catch up on the Enterprise crew and explain just why these career officers, with fifteen years or more in Starfleet, are still serving in the same ranks on the same ship? And can we have a Star Trek movie whose SFnal MacGuffin isn't just some new bit of made-up technobabble? And if you're only going to give Worf and Dr. Crusher and Counselor Troi a combined ten minutes or so of screen time, why not just get rid of them entirely and use that time for, oh I don't know, story? And why not let someone other than Jerry Goldsmith do the scores for these movies, since he's just turning in one boring, auto-pilot, paint-by-numbers Trek film score after another now?

I think Star Trek is done, I'm sad to say. I loved it, when it was good, and there was a lot of great stuff there. But it's over. It's time to move on to something new. I'm just sorry Trek had to go out with such a bad, bad movie.

Would the last person to leave the Enterprise please turn out the lights and close all hailing frequencies?