STAR TREK: INSURRECTION (1998) Maybe not the worst, but close enough I've long been fond of calling this the worst Star Trek ever; the basement, the bottom rung. At least part 5 had Spock, right? But after seeing it again, I suppose I was the tiniest bit harsh. I don't think this is as bad as Nemesis turned out to be; I mean, what could spell out the problems Trek has been mired in more perfectly than a scene which tries to draw tension from Geordi LaForge listing off how many phaser banks and torpedo bays the enemy ship has? Great Khan's mullet, that movie sucked. But Insurrection definitely belongs in such undistinguished company. It is the most single-episode-like of Star Trek movies, and thus the movie that tries the least to give us something we would want to pay for, when we can always just watch something comparable for free on TV. Worse; this is the movie equivalent of one of those Ferengi-centered Deep Space Nine episodes; it wants to be cute and funny and to teach me a nice lesson, but mostly succeeds at making me feel a little ashamed to be a life-long Trek fan. Looking back, this was probably the point at which I should've figured out how much serious trouble Trek was in. But I went into denial and simply shrugged it off as a bad movie, and it didn't really sink in until I saw Nemesis. It's more than a bad movie. It wasn't the beginning of the end - it was the point of no return. Insurrection opens with the nauseatingly sweet living-off-the-land idyll of the Ba'ku, an agrarian society of people who will later need constant rescuing (more later on the lady who can't swim), but are in the meantime being surreptitiously studied by Federation scientists under the orders of a facelift junkie played by F. Murray Abraham. Just why a Federation admiral (Anthony Zerbe) is taking orders from obviously evil aliens (I mean just look at them! Look at F. Murray Abraham's villainous sneer!) is not clear. Among these scientists is the android Data, who walks around in an invisibility suit (among the Ba'ku, on dirt paths...think about it, 'cuz the makers of this movie didn't) until his programming determines he should take it off and run around half-visible, freaking everybody out. Kind of a cool entrance, as he starts with just his head. Other cast members aren't so lucky. The Enterprise has been reduced to a diplomatic vessel, and Captain Picard sighs the rhetorical question of if anyone remembers when they were explorers. The only answer to that is, on TV - ten Star Trek movies so far, and exploration hasn't had anything to do with any of them. Captain Picard is made to sing, dance in front of a mirror, and wear a goofy headdress and generally throw dignity to the wind. The singing is bad (not to mention a shameless setup for one of Brent Spiner's vanity performances) but the headdress is just degrading. Maybe worse, Worf gets a zit and LaForge has a scene where, blessed with regenerated eyes, he gets to enjoy his very first sunset. Call me jaded and cynical, but I believe this is what the kids these days call "totally gay". There are radioactive rings around the planet which give people living on the planet eternal youth. Sweet, you might think; this would slaughter Rysa in tourism, or at least real estate. But the Son'a - the evil facelift aliens - want to reap a more immediate benefit of the rings, by destroying them and thus making the planet uninhabitable. Not so cruel as to kill off six hundred inhabitants of the planet (wow, a whole six hundred...would they even know if anyone moved in beyond that mountain in the background?), they have a plan to carry them off in a holodeck-equipped ship fitted to make them think they're still on the planet, where they'll eventually find out they're aging normally too late to do anything about it. Zerbe's admiral is part of this plot because he believes the Son'a's findings will benefit the Federation's people, and all it costs is the unnatural immortality (they moved to that planet, they didn't come from there) of six hundred people who aren't interested in sharing. Thus lies the ethical question as the root of the story's conflict. I do like that the question asks Trekkies to stop asking "What would Spock do?" and see how much they really believe that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. But this dilemma would be a lot more easy to get sucked in by if its circumstances were less convolutedly contrived; the rings take ten years of exposure to affect people on the planet, though minor effects - Klingon acne breakouts, Riker getting unusually horny even for him - are felt immediately in orbit. Predictably (hell, it's suggested right in the title), all of our Enterprise heroes agree that such a relocation is unacceptable. Ethical questions whose conclusions are so easily and singularly arrived at aren't very fun, are they? Would it be too much to ask for even ONE Next Generation regular to voice a dissenting opinion? Star Trek: Insurrection seems like it might have been made by people with their hearts in the right place, trying to place more of an emphasis on allegory and humor and less on the explosions which seem to define about 90% of cinematic sci-fi for the last dozen or so years (though there is a little bit of that - even more pandering than usual, as Data gets a terrible attempt at an action movie catch phrase with "Saddle up, lock and load!"). Star Trek comedy almost never makes me laugh, but when it's successful, it can make me smile. When it's REALLY successful, it can make me chuckle. I like smiling and chuckling, so if they want to make Star Trek comedy, I'm all for it if they can pull it off and keep me smiling throughout. But this movie's wide-ranging crappiness is only made worse by that, because most of the humor is not funny. Like the musical duet between Data and Picard. This is neither musical nor comedy, though it attempts to be both. There's another reason why Data dying in Nemesis had no punch - that was two movies in a row where Data sings, and I was relieved that we wouldn't have to suffer through any more. It gives me a smile to hear Troi and Dr. Crusher talking about boobs - Trek is usually totally sexless beyond some tamely revealing uniforms - but this leads to a joke which suggests that Data doesn't know what boobs are, which isn't funny because I just can't buy that. The action in this movie might be played down compared to the other recent Trek movies, but there's still some there...it's just not very good, like a spaceship battle (with effects less convincing than those in the previous Trek adventure) in a nebula-like region of space called the Briar Patch, making inevitable the line "It's time to use the Briar Patch just like Bre'er Rabbit did." Then Riker pilots the Enterprise with a joystick. A joystick! Some of it is in the form of empty, easy bits of heroism, like when Picard saves a woman from drowning, or when the boy who didn't trust Data falls down and cries out "Father!" but his father can't save him so Data saves him. (This is the same kid that asks "Do machines ever...play?") Questions linger...some of them don't matter, I guess. How did the Federation and Son'a construct the "duck blind" on a hillside overlooking the Ba'ku village without the construction ever being noticed? What happened to Geordi's robo-eyes when real eyes grew back, did they just pop out and land in his soup? But that lady who can't swim bothers me. Why is it that the Ba'ku woman, who is in good forty-something physical condition, has no TV or DVD players or internet or long commutes to work to eat at her time, and has been living next to a lake for three hundred years, has never seen fit to take swimming lessons? It ends with a typical "You disgust me...but you can still be saved!" scene, and of course there's always one villain who turns sympathetic and is instrumental in securing the heroes' victory. So far as Star Trek villains go, the Son'a are whiny, unpleasant to look at, and unsurprisingly, never showed up in Trek lore again. What unfortunately does continue to show up in Trek lore to this day is dialogue like "The metaphasic radiation of the rings is in a state of extreme flux!" This is referred to in scripts as "(tech)"; it is referred to by viewers as babble. It sounds cool until you figure out that it means nothing, and then it sounds like shit, and that's one of the primary reasons why I barely ever watch anymore. (tech) is not an acceptable substitute for dialogue with personality. Another example on display here of why I've tired of the show: there's no disagreement among the Enterprise staff about the ethical dilemma, because virtually every regular character in every Star Trek series has exactly the same set of morals and value systems (one could blame Starfleet Academy for weeding out anybody who doesn't fit a pretty specific mold, but even the Maquis all turned out like the rest of 'em). There's a delightful Farscape episode which employs the old sci-fi device of characters switching bodies, enabling actors to play the other actors' roles. If that happened in Trek, would we even notice? Probably not - and I'm sure there'd be a long-winded (tech) attempt to explain it, too. As down as I've been on Trek lately, I don't think it's dead. But I think it needs to hibernate, maybe for a long time. There was ten years between the last episode of the original Trek and the first big-screen movie - a similar wait now wouldn't hurt anybody, except of course the few who depend on wringing out the last few bucks Trek has left before somebody else ends up with their jobs. I had some hopes for Enterprise, but they've since been dashed, a seemingly well-intentioned show fallen victim to suits who are afraid to take any real chances with their cash cow. Given its failing ratings, and the movies' diminishing takes, some sort of serious change seems inevitable now. I don't know exactly what kind of change (part of me fears semi-regular TV movies with "all star" casts of people like Dr. Bashir and Tom Paris), but I think something's imminent. It might well be nothing. BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE