Star Trek - Nemesis

Data Day Living

Star Trek - Nemesis
USA 2002 Directed by Stuart Baird
Paramount Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: This one has spoilers.

And here we have the franchise killer.

Star Trek Nemesis is the last hurrah for the Star Trek - The Next Generation crew in the film series... so it’s kind of a pity it’s such a terrible movie. I remember when this came out and having high hopes for it... then walking out of the cinema kind of numb and indifferent to it. More like Star Trek Numbesis. Certainly with no desire to go back and watch it again.

I can’t totally pin down why this movie is so ultimately dreary because the story certainly feels like a Star Trek story, although the addition of a supervillain who is a partial clone of Captain Picard thrown into the mix is really something I could have done without, to be honest. It’s a shame because I really paid no attention to that particular character, Shinzon, when the movie was first released. I just didn’t like him and it’s only now that I’ve rewatched the movie that I realise it’s an early appearance, in a very prominent role, for Tom Hardy, who now, pretty much, has superstar status in Hollywoodland. I have to say that, looking at what he did here, he certainly gave it his all and gives the kind of performance I would expect him to be able to give but... it’s just a badly conceived and written role. That’s the real problem, I think, with this character.

Another problem with the movie, and I think I might have touched upon this in my review of Star Trek Insurrection (reviewed here) but it’s even more noticeable here, is that for a television show that invested a lot in being more of an ensemble collaboration with the various actors portraying the Next Generation crew members in equal amounts, this movie really does become the ‘Picard and Data Show’ for the majority of the running time. Most of the other characters don’t have a heck of a lot to do in this one, with the exception of a brief sense of closure in that Deanna Troi and Commander Riker (Marina Sirtis and Jonathan Frakes) finally get to tie the knot and are heading for another marriage ceremony on Betazoid... Troi’s home planet. Of course, regular viewers will know that marriage rites on Betazoid involve the entire congregation being naked and, to be honest, I think I would have much rather seen a movie about that than what we’ve got here.

The story is pretty much centred around Picard and a plot by the Remans (the brother race to the Romulans... oh, right, a Romulus and Remus joke, finally) to destroy various... um, blimey. This is how good this film is... I only watched it a few days ago and I’ve already forgotten the actual details of the villain’s fiendish plan, other than he needs Pickard’s blood to prolong his own life. However, the plot starts off early with Picard, Worf and Data looking for the scattered pieces of an android with a similar positronic brain to Data. They find an identical version of him, a prototype double played by the same actor, Brent Spiner, and they start rebuilding him on the Enterprise. For some reason, the producers chose not to use the already established identical android Lore from the TV show in the plot, which would have made more sense but which might have been too complicated and involved to sum up quickly for a stand alone audience.

However, anyone who had already heard the rumours would have realised at this early stage in the film that the producers of the film series are hedging their bets, trying to have their cake and eat it at the same time because, just like Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Kahn saw the death of a popular character (only to have him brought back in the very next film - my review of that one is here), so too, does Star Trek Nemesis. Namely the death of the very popular Lt. Commander Data. Spiner had already wanted to die in the previous Star Trek film, Insurrection, but this time he gets to go. However, presumably because the wiley producers wanted to ensure a way to get the character back after waving a big enough pay cheque, they have introduced here a duplicate in every way, apart from in memory. Since Data’s memory is downloaded into said android in this one (as a mask to the audience of finding a way of turning around a plot predicament posed in this film), it would be easy to have the former personality take over in the next movie, I’m sure, if this film proved popular. My understanding is that, this indeed was more or less the plan for the proposed sequel but, since this one badly flopped at the box office (in comparison to any of the previous films), that sequel never materialised on our screens.

Having said all this, though, there are a couple of nice things about the movie. Such as the Troi/Riker scenario, for example. And the fact that when the ‘away team’ go to the alien world to put together the android left to them as bait, the director plumps for using a different kind of film stock (presumably) and filters to give that whole section of the movie a much different feel to the rest. Also, the two handers between Tom Hardy as Shinzon and Patrick Stewart as Picard are kind of interesting... just not really something that does the pacing any favours when you put the thing together. Good, interesting acting doesn’t necessarily mean you get a good final product.

But other than those things... yeah, not much going for it. And that extends to the scoring too, I’m afraid...

This was Jerry Goldsmith’s final score written for a movie (although I believe the film didn’t materialise as his last at the cinema... just the last one he actually wrote). I remember the press release at the time from Varese Sarabande records, the label that has put out the majority of the Star Trek movie scores in recent years. They promised a Jerry Goldsmith score that harkened back to the days when he was at the height of his powers (some of us believe he never really left those days... styles change and that’s not a bad thing), comparing this score to his original compositions for Star Trek The Motion Picture (reviewed here). So everybody was pretty ramped up to hear this thing and, when we finally got it, well... it’s a drab score, to be honest. At least the presentation of it on the album at the time of the film’s release certainly was. There was an expanded edition released a few years ago and this is somewhat better but it doesn’t mask the fact that this is definitely the least interesting or engaging Star Trek score that Goldsmith wrote for the franchise. Not a good one to go out on and I’m always saddened that this was the last thing he wrote. But, as always with a Goldsmith score, very appropriate to the movie on screen and supporting it the best way that a composer of Goldsmith’s status could support it. So maybe the drab film spawned an appropriate score... is my guess. We don’t even get to hear Goldsmith’s Klingon theme quoted in this because, frankly, Worf doesn’t have much to do here... which kind of says it all, I think.

What with this and the fact that the writers nearly destroy the Enterprise, once again, (that old crutch) this feels like a Star Trek movie that’s constructed from dramatic moments of its past. Very formulaic and lacking any real substance to the story, such as it is. They even give Captain Janeway from the TV series Star Trek Voyager a cameo (guess that means they all got back to their own universe then... never did see the later seasons of that show), after Jerri Ryan, who played the partial Borg character Seven Of Nine, twice refused a cameo in this movie.

It’s kind of remarkable, then, that after seven years had passed, J J Abrams was able to reboot the franchise, following on from the same timeline but going back to the past and changing the future via the inclusion of Leonard Nimoy as Spock. Those movies are both the past and future of the Star Trek franchise as we know it now... and they seem to be doing a pretty good job so far, although the trailer to the new one, Star Trek Beyond, doesn’t look great, to be honest. You can find my reviews of Star Trek 11 (one of my early ones so please be lenient) and Star Trek Into Darkness here  and here. As for Star Trek Nemesis... not a great film for the Next Generation crew to end on and not a good jumping on point, either, if you’ve never seen a Star Trek movie before. This movie really isn’t a whole lot of fun... you have been warned.

Star Trek @ NUTS4R2
Star Trek Series 1
Star Trek - The Motion Picture 
Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan
Star Trek III - The Search For Spock
Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home 
Star Trek V - The Final Frontier 
Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country
Star Trek - Generations (aka Star Trek VII) 
Star Trek - First Contact 
Star Trek - Insurrection 
Star Trek Nemesis 

Star Trek 11

Star Trek: In Darkness (aka Star Trek 12)

Star Trek Beyond

Independence Day - Resurgence

Resurge Gainsbourg

Independence Day - Resurgence
2016 USA Directed by Roland Emmerich
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Technically a slight spoiler for
the original movie, if you’ve never seen it.

Hmmm... okay. I guess we all remember the trailer campaign for the original Independence Day in 1996, right? Those of us who are old enough to remember... which it turns out wasn’t the case with the girl selling me my ticket to this screening, when I asked her about how this one was.

It was kind of a ‘wearing you down’ campaign for a hugely budgeted movie about Americans saving the planet from alien invaders by hacking into their alien technology with an Apple computer. This was in the days when Apple were truly great, of course, and not the huge, greedy, corporate money trap they’ve become in just the last few years. We all kinda half trusted Roland Emmerich in those days because he’d caught the current zeitgeist... or more like recreated it... when he brought out a movie before this called Stargate. So when we all sat down to watch the original Independence Day in cinemas, in spite of the gruelling trailer campaign, most of us kinda liked it. Which was okay and lasted about as long as until we got the home video version when, I suspect, a good deal of us realised that we would never want to watch this rubbish ever again.

So here we have a sequel that nobody wanted... or at least I didn’t... taking place 20 years after the original movie in both reality and fictional terms and calling itself Independence Day - Resurgence. I didn’t really want to see this one at all, to be honest, but I’d rather see it on my Cineworld Unlimited card for free (more or less) to find out if it’s any good rather than risk buying a cheap blu ray in a sale at a later point. So I went down to my local on its first Saturday morning and was astonished to find, just like the screening of Gods Of Egypt the week before (reviewed here), that there were only five people, including myself, in the screening for the 3D showing. So, yeah... wondering what that will mean for the box office.

Now, as it turns out, I quite enjoyed this sequel and found it to be a lot more engaging than the first movie. What surprised me, though, is that it felt like a different kind of film. Although the budget for this was somewhere around 165 million dollars... which is just silly... I would be lying if I were to say the money was easy to see on the screen and, despite an abundance of relatively impressive special effects shots, it actually felt more like a small, chamber piece of a sequel, rather than a full blown affair. The original movie back in 1996 maybe suffered from feeling too much like it was trying to be an epic movie. This time around, it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be too splashy and, surprisingly, that really helps it, I think.

Anyone hoping to see Will Smith reprise his character will have to make do with the substitute of that character’s son, played by Jessie T. Usher. He doesn’t get a heck of a lot of screen time to be honest but it’s okay because, like the first film, he’s joined by some great actors, a fair few who were veterans of the first movie. So we have newcomers Liam Hemsworth, Maika Monroe, Angelababy and the always watchable William Fichtner, mixing it up with the likes of the charismatic Jeff Goldblum, Judd Hirsch, the brilliant Bill Pullman and, playing a slightly less irritating version of the character he played in the first movie... Brent Spiner. And the icing on the cake is the amazingly brilliant actress Charlotte Gainsbourg playing the love interest/female professor element to the film, Catherine Marceaux .

Okay, so a bunch of cool cast members does not a cool movie make but, like I said, we’re in luck because this feels a little different to the kind of movie the first one was. I mentioned above that it’s not just been made twenty years later... it’s set twenty years after the first film too. What that means in terms of the world that survived the alien invasion in that first one is that man has evolved into a species where every nation is at peace and where the technology has advanced to a level far removed by where we are in the real world. This is pure science fiction in that we have a weapons defence system around the Earth, a moonbase and... yeah, it’s definitely a highly futuristic version of 2016 presented here. So it feels less like it’s trying to be a disaster movie and maybe that’s why, in general, this sequel is a lot more pacier and entertaining than the first outing. It doesn’t hurt that it doesn’t have the humongous running time of the first one either. It’s a straight two hours but, this time around, it doesn’t get dull and it flies by real fast, I have to say.

The film is quite clichéd, as you would expect it to be, but that doesn’t rip the teeth out of those old tried and tested movie conventions and helps build drama in a way that you can tell the director is an old hand at manipulating people’s emotion through moving image... which is no bad thing when you are directing a sequel that nobody really wants, I guess. For instance, the writers spend a good deal of time setting up just how powerful the Earth’s defence against any returning invasion forces are and, when they start doing this, you just know they’re setting you up so that they can quickly rip them out from under you and bring you back to the equivalent of bows and arrows against the Gods and... yeah, that pretty much happens and exactly when you’d expect it to, to be honest. But, in a way, you kind of know that has to happen in order to move the story on so it’s not so much of a disappointment and, like I said... it’s an entertaining movie.

The writers also, however, add another factor to this movie which I don’t want to spoil too much but... lets just say, there’s a lot of scope for a future sequel and if that happens, it’s probably not going to be going in a direction that someone who hasn’t seen this particular movie would expect it to go in. I don’t want to spoil the surprises here but, suffice it to say, man shouldn’t always be arrogant enough to think he’s the most important species in the Universe and that’s kinda highlighted here, no doubt about that.

Now, I would have loved it if David Arnold could have returned to score this sequel to one of his big movie hits but, alas, this time the scoring duties go to Harald Kloser and Thomas Wanker (the latter being credited as Thomas Wander on this one, for some reason). Now, it’s really not a bad bit of scoring and I am going to see what it plays like on its own (assuming a proper, physical CD gets released) but I did feel it sounded a little inappropriate and over-the-top in its thematic exuberance at certain points. However, this probably just means I’ll enjoy it a hell of a lot more as a stand alone album so... yeah, that’ll happen for me at some point, I think. It mostly seems to work though so... would’ve been nice to reunite Arnold with the franchise but this isn’t too bad either.

And that’s me done for this movie. I kinda liked this one and I really wasn’t expecting to. The script isn’t terrible, the line delivery is good and it doesn’t quite throw the USA patriotic thing down your throat constantly like the original movie seemed to do... which is always a good thing.  If you liked the first Independence Day movie, then you probably won’t have too much of a problem with this one. If you didn’t think the first one was all that great then.. you might be pleasantly surprised because Independence Day: Resurgence is a much smaller affair compared to the large sprawl of the first film. There’s a good chance you won’t be bored here at all, in fact. I was quite glad I gave it a go, even though the trailer looked terrible, so... yeah, maybe give this one a chance.

Star Trek - Insurrection

Insurrection Shuffle

Star Trek - Insurrection
USA 1998 Directed by Jonathan Frakes
Paramount Blu Ray

It’s a shame that this film wasn’t better received when it came out. Frankly, Star Trek - Insurrection seems, to me, to be a much maligned film and, though it’s not up to the calibre of the previous Star Trek movie, also directed by Frakes, it deserves a better reputation than it’s got. It’s actually the second best of the four movies in the series utilising the crew members from the TV show Star Trek - The Next Generation and, to be honest, Star Trek - First Contact (reviewed by me here), was always going to be a hard film to follow.

I think one of the problems is that the emphasis of the film is less on action and more about moral dilemmas, with the film revolving around the Federation, who are traditionally seen as the good guys, taking a morally wrong stance, as they try to covertly relocate the population of a planet, the Ba’ku, to be able to harvest the particles in the planets atmosphere and use them to prolong the life of various people. So, yeah, it the old, ‘fountain of youth’ plot but with the added frustration of the establishment which ‘the good guys’ are supposed to be representing being, in themselves, a part of the problem and not a solution to it.

Now, I’m not going to defend this movie to the hilt here... there are some things wrong with it, to be sure, and I think some of the earlier script and story ideas, such as Picard being courtmartialed for his actions throughout the movie, may have been a lot more satisfying, dramatically, than the final version of the movie we are left with. However, I don’t think it’s fair to compare Insurrection to the dazzling brilliance of First Contact, which admittedly raised everyones expectations for this one, and there are some really nice scenes in here.

One of the things it does really well is play up the romantic aspect of the characters. Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis reprise their on screen roles as Commander Riker and Deanna Troi but, this time, they are allowed to rekindle the long lost romance which was already in their past before the timeline of the first ever episode of Star Trek - The Next Generation. This back story was briefly touched upon in the series but in this movie we see the two characters reunited romantically, and this includes seeing Troi in a bathtub as she shaves off Riker’s beard... making this the first time the character has been beardless since the first season of the show. Frankly, I think there should be more movies where Marina Sirtis is seen in a bathtub but, hey, that’s another story. Both Frakes and Sirtis play the scenes with a certain amount of charm and teasing enthusiasm that really makes their screen time whiz along nicely.

Similarly, Picard also starts up a romance, of sorts, with one of the planet dwellers, Anij, played so wonderfully well by actress Donna Murphy... always a pleasure to watch her on screen. Picard also has some good, comic moments in this and the movie itself starts off very strongly with a rebelling Commander Data taking on all his superiors in the quadrant, in an effort to protect the inhabitants of the planet. The disappointing part of that is the punchline that he has been damaged when shot at and so everything is wiped out in his android brain other than the difference to tell right from wrong. I would have much preferred him to have made this decision to fight the Federation on his own terms but I guess the end result amounts to the same thing... more or less.

This film also sees the restoration, due to the planet’s atmosphere, of Geordi La Forge’s eyesight, without any kind of electronic aid and, as he watches a sunset with his Captain for the first time, it’s another scene in a movie full of such scenes where the emphasis seems to be about how great it would be if everyone just learned to slow down and look at what’s going on around them. Which is great and something I can really get into... although bringing this aspect into the structural make-up of the movie does seem to kill the pacing, somewhat, I would say. But isn’t that kind of the point?

It’s actually quite a nice looking film and that goes for some of the special effects, too. There’s a sequence near the end of the movie where Riker in the Enterprise is playing a deadly game of hide and seek with the new ‘allies’ of the Federation (who want the planet for themselves, for reasons I won’t spoil here), in a sector of space known as ‘the briar patch’. It’s actually an echo of a similar set of scenes, to my mind, between Kirk and Khan in Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan (reviewed here) but these are some of the most beautiful and colourful shots of the Enterprise in this section of the film than any we’ve seen before or since. Some really great stuff.

There’s a downside to this too in that, unlike the original Star Trek series from the 1960s and the subsequent film versions, the Star Trek - The Next Generation episodes were always much more about being ensemble pieces which would explore aspect of all the characters, with everyone getting great chunks of screen time, sometimes a whole episode, to shine and explore their roles. In the movie versions, although the majority of the characters do have some nice scenes, the movies are much more focussed on Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard and Brent Spiner as Data... which is fine and, in some ways, tends to make the movies more focused, but ultimately does mean that everyone else gets considerably less time in the spotlight. Which is a bit of a shame, to be honest.

Once again, Jerry Goldsmith returns to provide another, very beautiful score although, like the movie itself, I think it’s also been underrated, somewhat, by people who listen to such things. After the standard Alexander Courage intro, rather than go into another version of his sweeping main title theme from Star Trek - The Motion Picture (reviewed here), which by this time was completely synonymous with the crew of The Next Generation, he does something completely different but appropriate to the opening title sequence of the peaceful Ba’ku and the observation of their culture. It’s a lovely them which I suspect is overlooked by some fans of Goldsmith’s work because it’s not particularly action oriented. However, there is also some good and very typical Goldsmith action moments during the film and, as a nice crowd pleaser, he also requotes the Klingon theme he used for the first film... and again in Star Trek V - The Final Frontier (reviewed here) and Star Trek - First Contact, this being the second time it’s been used as a heroic theme to underline Worf’s character at a certain moment.

All said and done, however, it’s certainly not among the greatest of the Star Trek movies, to be sure, but equally, it is one of the two greatest Star Trek - The Next Generation movies. I think regular fans of the show may find themselves having a much better time of it with this movie, now that some years have passed, than they did when it was first released into cinemas. Certainly, I suspect, it will be much better remembered than the last of the Next Generation movies, which was soon to follow... but I’ll get around to watching Star Trek - Nemesis sometime soon and hopefully get a little more out of it than the terrible experience I had at the cinema with that one. We shall see.

Star Trek @ NUTS4R2
Star Trek Series 1
Star Trek - The Motion Picture 
Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan
Star Trek III - The Search For Spock
Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home 
Star Trek V - The Final Frontier 
Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country
Star Trek - Generations (aka Star Trek VII) 
Star Trek - First Contact 
Star Trek - Insurrection 
Star Trek Nemesis 

Star Trek 11

Star Trek: In Darkness (aka Star Trek 12)

Star Trek Beyond

Star Trek - First Contact

The World According To Warp

Star Trek - First Contact
USA 1996 Directed by Jonathan Frakes
Paramount Blu Ray

And so on to what is undoubtedly the greatest of the Star Trek - The Next Generation movies and almost, but not quite, the best movie in the entire run of movies of either generation... I would still say that Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home (reviewed here) is still better than this one... but only just.

This was the second time an actor who plays a member of the crew of the Starship Enterprise went behind the camera and directed the film while still playing his character on screen. On this one it’s the turn of Jonathan Frakes, who plays Will Riker in the show and movies, to take the helm and... well he does an absolutely fantastic job here. Like his predecessor in Star Trek actor turned director, Leonard Nimoy, Frakes also directed two movies for the franchise - this one and the next one, Star Trek: Insurrection. My recollection of Insurrection is that it’s much maligned but really not too bad a film. First Contact, on the other hand, is absolutely wonderful.

The film starts off with Patrick Stewart’s character Captain Jean-Luc Picard having a nightmare about his previous experiences with the Borg Collective (or The Borg, for short) and these were at the time, and probably still are, the most iconic and downright threatening of all the Star Trek villains created in the show’s history. They debuted a few years earlier in the Star Trek - The Next Generation TV show and their reputation as being an almost unstoppable, collective consciousness who see the human race and countless other lifeforms as mere insects to be assimilated and then brushed away, made them a fan favourite and ensured their longevity and future appearances on pretty much all of the other Star Trek TV shows after their debut. Star Trek: Voyager even had an ex-Borg turned good, Seven Of Nine, as part of the crew. Captain Picard is perceived as a survivor of this experience in much the same way that one might perceive a survivor of the holocaust in the Second World War.

At the opening of the film, the Borg engage the Federation but Picard and the crew of the new Enterprise (that’s NCC 1701-E by now, if anyone’s counting) are ordered away from the rest of the fleet... presumably because Picard was once assimilated into the Borg collective and his superiors don’t trust him (and don’t realise his experiences give him a unique perspective on how to fight the Borg). As they monitor the raging battle, however, it’s clear that humanity is having serious problems defending itself from the Borg and so Picard rushes tot he rescue. Stopping only to emergency beam up Worf (who had gone on to be a crew member and regular character in the TV show Star Trek: DeepSpace Nine by this point), the Enterprise leads an assault which destroys the Borg ship. However, a pod escapes and starts warping backwards in time. The Enterprise follows in its wake, going back in time, and are protected by this ‘warp bubble’ when it turns out the Borg went back and wiped out humanity in the past, turning the Earth into one big machine planet. With the crew of the Enterprise the only ones left of humanity, they have to try and stop the Borg in the past and bring the timeline back into what it was before the Borg got there. Meanwhile, some wiley Borg have started to slowly take over and assimilate parts of the Enterprise... so we have simultaneous story threads taking place as some of the crew members have to fulfil a very specific mission on Earth, while the others are fighting to save the Enterprise and stop the Borg from calling other Borg from far away galaxies in the past. It’s all go, that’s for sure.

And that's the basic plot set up. But there are lots of interesting things to note about this movie.

It’s not an unusual thing for a time travel movie such as this one, for instance, to have the crew of the Enterprise travelling to fix things in their past but, to have that past era still be way in the future of the audience watching it is something a little different to what we’ve seen before. That era being the mid 21st Century, when Zephram Cochrane invents and tests the Warp Drive... an act which quickly leads to the Earth’s first contact with alien worlds, changing the course of our planet forever and leading the way to the Star Trek universe as we know it. This is, of course, the mission that the ground crew have to ensure still happens but once Zephram Cochrane gets wind of his ‘revered’ status in the future... well he’s not necessarily jumping at the chance to change the course of history.

Zephram Cochrane, of course, is a bit of a Star Trek fan pleasing addition to the storyline. Played here by James Cromwell, he was originally played by Glenn Corbett in the original 1960s TV show episode Metamorphosis. Ironically, he was played as a much younger person although the events of that episode were set many hundreds of years after the events of this movie. Which is okay, because he was being kept young and alive by the strange alien being in love with him on the planet he ended up on. So it actually makes sense to have Cochrane appearing as an older looking guy here, even though he’s younger looking in the earlier show. Of course, there’s a little slip in that Zephram Cochrane was said to be from Alpha Centuri in the original episode but, I’m sure this can be easily explainable as a slight lapse in the full info and the crew of the original Enterprise’s remembrance of it. Of course, it would have been great to have Corbett reprise the role in that it doesn’t matter he should have looked older but, alas, he was already three years deceased by the time this film was produced. Cromwell plays the role really well, though, and turns Cochrane into a real flesh and blood character with the short time he has in the role.

There are some other pleasing cameos in the film for Star Trek fans too... both human and non-human. We have the return of the Dixon Hill 1940s noir holodeck novel that Pickard invents in the TV show and, appearing in this, as a completely different character, is Ethan Phillips who played Neelix in the TV show Star Trek: Voyager. Also cameoing from Star Trek: Voyager is Robert Pickardo as another iteration of the holographic Doctor he plays in that show. And, of course, Dwight Shultz returns as the stumbling Lieutenant Barclay, the character he played as a semi-regular guest appearance in later seasons of Star Trek - The Next Generation.

And then we have the Borg themselves, of course. Here we have a new character in the form of Alice Krige as ‘The Borg Queen’... which a lot of people were quite annoyed about, given what we know of the species as a collective consciousness, but I think they can kind of get away with it here to some extent. She is primarily there to go toe to toe with Brent Spiner’s popular character Data, in a section of the film which I personally refer to as ‘The Last Temptation Of Data’. She does a magnificent job here, inhabiting an almost visually iconic character and clearly holding her own against, and complimenting, Spiner’s much loved performance. Which apparently wasn’t easy as both the costume she is wearing, the make up and the black contact lenses... were apparently more than challenging.

Speaking of contacts... LeVar Burton’s Geordi La Forge character has finally ditched the visor he’d been wearing in the role for the previous nine years and has robotic eyes instead, finally letting fans of his character be able to see what he looks like properly. It’s actually not as much of a jolt to the system seeing him like this as you might think and I found myself accepting his new look pretty much straight away.

For the musical score we have the late great Jerry Goldsmith returning to the franchise, where he would stay until the recent reboot movies. Assisting him with additional scoring on this one is his son, Joel Goldsmith, who is also not with us anymore. He can sure write music that sounds like his dad might have composed it, though. Together, they provide a score to the movie which is one of the best of the series and which brings some beautiful new themes along with the return of Goldsmith’s famous Star Trek - The Motion Picture main theme (which had been associated with Star Trek - The Next Generation since that show had started anyway) and the Klingon sub theme which he used in that one and which returned in his score for Star Trek V - The Final Frontier (reviewed by me here) and which is now used as a ‘hero theme’ for Michael Dorn’s Klingon character Worf... which is a nice touch.

And that’s about it on this one. Star Trek - First Contact is full of action and it really doesn’t pull its punches on the horror of the Borg situation either... even Picard is shown ‘mercy killing’ one of his own crew just before they are fully assimilated into the Borg collective and he has no problem mowing down ex-crew members turned Borg with a machine gun in a scene either. Additionally, my favourite Next Generation character Deanna Troi, played as always by the lovely Marina Sirtis, gets to play an outstanding drunk scene opposite her on-screen lover Will Riker, as played by director Jonathan Frakes, and she does it really well. Would liked to have seen these movies making more of her, to be honest. But this is just great and the film loses none of its charm and power for me now, watching it 20 years since seeing it on its original cinema release. Frakes manages to give us one of the ‘almost perfect’ Star Trek movies and, although he does a fairly good job on the next one, if memory serves me correctly, this really was the last hurrah in terms of truly great Star Trek films until the reboot from a few years ago (the third installment of which is out in cinemas this summer, I believe). If you need a jumping on point for the Star Trek - The Next Generation universe... well this movie is one of the most entertaining ways to do that, it has to be said. So if you feel a hankering to go and watch one of these things, as Pickard would say... “Make it so.”

Star Trek @ NUTS4R2
Star Trek Series 1
Star Trek - The Motion Picture 
Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan
Star Trek III - The Search For Spock
Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home 
Star Trek V - The Final Frontier 
Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country
Star Trek - Generations (aka Star Trek VII) 
Star Trek - First Contact 
Star Trek - Insurrection 
Star Trek Nemesis 

Star Trek 11

Star Trek: In Darkness (aka Star Trek 12)

Star Trek Beyond

Star Trek - Generations

Buying The Farm

Star Trek - Generations
(aka Star Trek VII)
USA 1994 Directed by David Carson
Paramount Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilers, of course.

Star Trek - Generations is not a great film.

Unfortunately, neither is it a very good film, either. At least it isn’t a bad film, which is I think the best you can say about this one... and providing you are able to suspend your disbelief at some pretty major plot holes.

Star Trek - The Next Generation had finally been cancelled and this was the year of its final season. So the number crunchers at Paramount obviously decided it was time for a next generation crew movie... something everyone wanted, to be fair... and decided to bring some of the 'classic series' cast back to bridge the gap and do a handover. Of course, the problem with that is that the two series’ take place over 70 years apart from each other so there was always going to have to be some way of bridging the time gap with a sci-fi concept. Whether that works in the film’s favour or not is best left to your personal response to the movie.

The film was originally supposed to have William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley returning as Kirk, Spock and McCoy for the opening sections of the movie but, alas, Kirk is the only one who returned along with a couple of other high profile, classic series crew members... who all did a grand job. Nimoy had apparently declined because he felt the script was not up to scratch and, it’s said, the majority of his lines were given to James Doohan as Scotty. DeForest Kelly was in such ill health by this point that, unfortunately, he wasn’t able to acquire the necessary insurance required to be on set... so his lines were given to Walter Koenig as Chekhov. Although some of these lines and actions don’t make sense coming from Chekhov, due to their medical orientation, Koenig does a terrific job of selling it to the audience and I suspect most people didn’t notice the tell tale signs that he and Doohan were delivering lines which weren’t, necessarily, originally written for them.

Now there are a lot of bad things about this movie, to be fair, but the spirit of Star Trek is still intact. Before I get to the bad stuff, though, I’d like to highlight the good stuff first.

Okay, so we have the opening title sequence which focuses on a bottle tumbling through space in slow motion. It looks pretty great and when it finally breaks on the side of the new Enterprise (that’s NCC1701 - B for anyone who’s keeping count) we realise that we have just witnessed the journey to a ship's christening. It’s a really nice sequence and not what you are expecting from a Star Trek movie. The other good thing about the movie is... the entire next twenty minutes. The antics of Kirk, Scotty and Chekhov leading up to Kirk sacrificing himself so that the crew of the new Enterprise can survive is absolutely great Star Trek. We then jump totally unexpectedly to 78 years later on board a different Enterprise... a version of it which is an old galleon at sea, in the holodeck of the Enterprise NCC1701 - D, getting us up to speed with the next generation crew who bowed out on TV the same year this movie was released.

And... that’s it for the good stuff.

No really. The movie gets pretty terrible from hereon in but with likeable performances from the majority of the new crew and a standout one from Malcolm McDowell as Professor Sauron, who gets to quote a piece of poetry with the best line of the movie: ““They say time is the fire in which we burn.” And, apart from Marina Sirtis as Counsellor Troi, who is easily the loveliest and sexiest person in the Star Trek universe... the rest of the movie is pretty... watchable but average.

And there’s a load of bad stuff to even out the good stuff, I’m afraid.

When Spock’s death was bound to be widely publicised back in 1982 for Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan, the directors gave him a kind of fake death at the start of the movie so that audiences could possibly be more hopeful when he’s back on his feet and deliver the killer blow at the end of the film, to try and get as much dramatic weight out of it as they could. Here, the writers try the same trick with the death of Kirk, killing him off early in the film so that, when they bring him back after he has been transported in time, the audience can be hopeful he’ll live after all. Unfortunately for the studio, the trailers clearly showed Kirk in later segments of the film so the early scenes were robbed somewhat of this dramatic weight and the later scenes were pretty much what you would expect. In fact, Kirk’s demise at the end of the movie was reshot after test screenings because the audience didn’t consider it dramatic enough.

There’s another reason why Kirk’s initial demise in this movie is quite badly approached, too. Before this movie, James Doohan had already appeared in a Star Trek The Next Generation episode called Relics, in which he had been trapped as a transporter pattern for many decades and is re-energised into the next generation timeline. When he is ‘brought back to life’, so to speak, he mentions something to the effect that he thought James Kirk himself would be leading the rescue party, as it were. However, in this movie, which can only be set earlier than when Scotty was trapped in the transporter, he cleary sees that Captain Kirk has died, from his point of view in history. So how would he not remember this incident years later when he is returned from limbo? This is a terrible continuity glitch and I remember getting really annoyed in the cinema when I saw this movie because it’s such an obvious, glaring fault. Absolute rubbish.

Another thing the writers/producers do in this to give the public a grand spectacle of 'the first next generation movie' is... destroy the Enterprise... again. Even though we’d already seen that happen in Star Trek III - The Search For Spock (reviewed here). This time it’s the NCC1701-D that gets the treatment of being irreparably damaged, with the separated saucer section crashing on a nearby planet. For an encore, they blow the planet it landed on up and kill everyone on board... but that loses any dramatic weight when you realise there’s time travelling shenanigans going on, to be honest. You know the crashed saucer section and her crew will be back before long.

Okay, thing number three. About that time travelling Nexus Ribbon, as it’s called, which has an ‘echo’ of Whoopi Goldberg’s regular series character, Guinan, in it. Once Captain Pickard stumbles upon Captain Kirk at his farm house (in real life, William Shatner’s farm house) he talks him into coming out of the ribbon and helping him. He’s told by fake pseudo-Guinan that he can go back to whatever time he likes so they choose... um... just before everything was really going down hill and which caused a lot of everybody’s problems anyway. A point where the Enterprise saucer has crashed but the planet has not yet blown up. But at no point does anyone stop to say how this can be done... the ribbon has already moved on. How in heck do you leave it and come out at a time and space specific to where you want to be on the planet you left earlier? Also, since Sauron’s plot is partially a reaction to not being able to just fly a ship near the ribbon and get picked up by it without being destroyed... how the heck did Captain Kirk manage it? Well... the writers ‘get around’ this point by way of some creative editing which doesn’t actually show Kirk and Pickard leaving the ribbon and... um... just not talking about it very much again afterwards. So much for the ‘science’ of science fiction. This movie makes no sense.

Right... thing number four. Most people’s favourite character in Star Trek The Next Generation is Data, the android who wants to be human (think Pinocchio in outer space) and he is a brilliant character, lovingly portrayed by Brent Spiner. I’d personally still rather spend all my time with Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi but... lets get back to my point here. One of the appealing things about Data is his constant, level headed demeanour coupled with, often unintentional, dead pan humour. However, the writers decide to ‘up the game’ in this movie and he installs the emotion chip that he acquired during an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation. So in this movie, we have a Data who is trying to grow and learn how to deal with fear, humour, anger etc and... it’s just not Data. Worse... he’s irritating in it. Yes, before you all start waving your arms about at me, I know he’s certainly supposed to be really annoying in all the obvious scenes here but... well, Brent Spiner’s really good at it, as he always is with the character. Which means I just didn’t want to spend anymore screen time with him than I had to, in this movie. This film is a waste of a really good character due to the decision to progress that character emotionally, which I suspect Spiner might also have had a hand in when negotiating his appearance in the movie (although that’s honestly just me speculating here).

And one last nail in the coffin for this movie, as far as I’m concerned... Dennis McCarthy’s score. Gone is Jerry Goldsmith’s Star Trek The Motion Picture theme, which was re-acquired specifically for the TV series Star Trek The Next Generation. Instead the only linking things with previous episodes here is Alexander Courage’s original TV show them from the 1960s referenced in the score and the fact that a regular composer from the contemporary TV show, McCarthy, was brought in. Now I’m not saying McCarthy isn’t a good composer... I suspect he’s excellent. However, I never really got on with the Next Generation scores on TV and, years later, I found out it was alleged that the instructions from the producer of the show (and this movie) were for his composers to basically write wallpaper music without any strong content which could detract from, or lift, the visuals. They may have gotten away with that, to an extent, on the TV show but, as far as I’m concerned, they didn’t get away with it here. This is a bland and mostly unmemorable score. Not inappropriate, for sure, just not something that really catches the emotions and gets the pulse thumping like some of the other composers in the franchise had managed to do, to be honest. At least not for me... I know there are some fans out there who like this score a lot... I’m just not one of them.

So there you have it. Star Trek - Generations is a handover film which really, in all honesty, wasn’t necessary. I know a fair few were disappointed with this movie and I personally thought it was a shame to see Kirk go out like this. Not one I’d recommend anybody start on as it’s a bit tepid but, like I said in my opening, it’s not a bad movie... it’s just not a good one either. However, the crew of the NCC1701-D weren’t down yet... even if their ship was beyond repair. As it happens, when they returned to our screens in their next adventure, they did so in one of the best of the Star Trek adventures ever put on film. So I’ll be rewatching that one again sometime soon and you can be sure I’ll be putting the review up fairly promptly after that.

Star Trek @ NUTS4R2
Star Trek Series 1
Star Trek - The Motion Picture 
Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan
Star Trek III - The Search For Spock
Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home 
Star Trek V - The Final Frontier 
Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country
Star Trek - Generations (aka Star Trek VII) 
Star Trek - First Contact 
Star Trek - Insurrection 
Star Trek Nemesis 

Star Trek 11

Star Trek: In Darkness (aka Star Trek 12)

Star Trek Beyond