STAR TREK: NEMESIS (2002) The curse has been broken! Long have Star Trek fans lamented the Odd-Even Curse, where odd-numbered Star Trek movies suck and even-numbered Star Trek movies rule. I think it's more than a little oversimplified, but there's definitely something to it. Well, fret no more, Trek fans - the curse has been smashed at last. Finally, an even-numbered Trek movie that sucks! Star Trek fans haven't had to wait over three years for a movie since before the movies were made. They've been getting antsy. And it doesn't help that the last one was almost as bad as the one where they went to find God. I fear that this is not likely to satisfy those pointy-eared jonesings - if it weren't for a good villain and a space battle that has its moments, Star Trek: Nemesis may well have been worse than any of them. Star Trek films have to perform a delicate balancing act - pleasing the fans while at the same time appealing to a broader audience without either sacrificing that which makes Trek cool for its fans (in metal we call that "pulling a Metallica") or alienating the casual moviegoer with too much Trekkie-type stuff. The movies that have pulled this off - 2, 4, First Contact - have, correctly, been remembered as the stronger instalments in this long-running series. Star Trek: Nemesis is likely to be remembered as one of the very worst, because it actually manages to bewilder newbies and infuriate old fans at the same time. After a prologue depicting the messy assassination of the entire Romulan Senate, ST:N opens with the wedding of Riker and Troi, who have been orbiting around each other throughout their stay in Trek history but never got to bumpin' uglies again until that last movie. This scene is, plainly speaking, awful. It's nice to see Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan, and she gets the scene's only good line. And the hated Wesley Crusher can be seen in the corner in a couple of shots, mercifully silent. But then we get Data singing, Worf turned into a goddamn pussy who can't hold his liquor, and...well, it's Captain Picard and his speech-making who is the focus of this scene. Shouldn't it be on the bride and groom? This is a good example of one of the key problems here. This was a little problem with the first six Star Trek movies; they heavily focused on the Big Three (Kirk, Spock, McCoy) to the exclusion of the other four, who spent most of their screen time saying things like "Shields up!" and "Yes, Admiral!" I say it's a little problem, because lines like that are most of what the Little Four had to do in the original series anyway; they have their cult fans but they really are just support personnel. But this problem has been magnified in two ways for the Next Generation movies. First is mathematical - all of these movies so far have primarily focused on only two characters, Picard and Data, leaving five in the dust. The second problem is that those five characters have had, over the years, a hell of a lot more characterization invested in them than the Little Four from the original series ever got. There admittedly isn't a lot to them that can be quickly and easily grasped by newbies, but that's no excuse - lots of movies have to start out from scratch and let their previously unfamiliar supporting characters come alive without being trod underfoot by the leads. The crew then finds dismembered pieces of a very Data-like android scattered on the surface of a planet near the Neutral Zone. (the script manages to work a car chase into this scene, which does, I defer, have a pretty cool resolution) Despite having a disastrous track record when it comes to re-assembling dismembered robots that look like Data (Data had an evil twin in the TV series; nobody mentions him here at all, perhaps for fear of scaring off newbies with unnecessary trivia) they put him together. This new one (cutely named B-4) has, to put it kindly, the mind of a child. So they download all of Data's memories in to his head - since Data has access to untold amounts of classified information, I'm going to assume they blocked that part off. Unsurprisingly, the mentally impaired robot later turns against the ship. Then Picard is informed by one Admiral Janeway that he is to go to Romulus, one of the homeworlds of the Romulan Empire, and talk with their new bigwig, Shinzon (Tom Hardy). Government shuffles are not unusual on Romulus, where everybody is really "sneaky", for lack of a better word. But this one's different - for one thing, Shinzon is from Remus, the "other" homeworld of the Empire, which has hovered way in the background of Trek lore for many years but I don't think anybody has ever said anything specific about it. Remus is like Romulus's deformed little brother, basically one big slave mine, run by Romulans and populated by the Remans, which are like burn-clinic versions of Nosferatu. Ron Perlman, who usually steals every movie he's in, plays Shinzon's Reman Viceroy. I couldn't tell it was him, and no, he didn't steal this movie. So the Enterprise goes to Romulus, and meets up with Shinzon's flagship, the Scimitar. A few stats are read off as to its number of phaser banks and torpedo bays - I don't remember the numbers, and wouldn't know how to compare them to Enterprise's, but everybody on-screen looks awestruck, so I guess it's a lot. The Scimitar can cloak, like all Romulan ships, but this one can fire while cloaked, like that ship in Star Trek 6. Treachery is afoot, and Shinzon reveals that he shares a very special bond with Picard, who we later see was bald even as a youth (must've been a cosmetic decision at the time, because a younger version of Picard had plenty of hair when we saw him in the TV series). There's one uncomfortable scene where Deanna gets mentally "invaded" by Shinzon and his Viceroy during a lovemaking session (hers and Riker's, not Shinzon's and the Viceroy's) - putting aside the fact that there's apparently a sheet between their naked bodies, this scene serves exactly two purposes. One, to cheaply show that Shinzon is evil. And two, so that Troi can ESTABLISH A PSYCHIC LINK later in the film. A fucking psychic link, right here where I didn't think I'd ever have to be subjected to one. Damn empaths. Dr. Crusher says a few medical things, LaForge says a few engineering things (and apparently, those eyes of his that grew back in the last movie didn't take), and Riker gets a very poorly-timed fistfight with a nameless Reman. It's late in the film, and we just saw the Enterprise and the Scimitar collide, sucking people out into space, collapsing deck after deck, death and destruction everywhere...and then we cut to this fistfight, which doesn't appear to be over anything (just why did the Remans board the Enterprise, anyway?). This is what we call an anticlimax. Beyond Worf's wussification in the wedding scene, he later whimpers about the propriety of appearing naked in a Betazed wedding ceremony (you'd think a hunky Klingon warrior would be cheerful about showing off his mighty Bat'leth), and is scarcely heard from again until he can remark about some Romulans that "they fought with honor!" Most Trek actors, I suspect, are at first just glad to be working, and much later, at peace with and grateful for the success their involvement in Trek has brought them. I get the feeling that Michael Dorn is in between the two, at the point where a shudder of dread goes down his spine when he sees Rick Berman on his call display. As for the top two, this is not a shining two hours for Data and Picard either. Data sings Irving Berlin, and is visibly not getting any younger or thinner (Brent Spiner has been saying for years that he wants Data to die while he can still convincingly be seen as an android that isn't aging). Patrick Stewart does his considerable best with Picard, who had a great seven years on the TV series, and one great movie. He and Hardy play well against each other; Hardy really does look a lot like him. But as one of the only Trek alumni who has been able to forge ahead with a non-camp post-Trek career (for that matter, the only one that comes to mind right now), you can tell that he's eager to move on. This makes three out of four Next Generation movies in which Picard at least tries to blow up the ship. Maybe this could go on his record and be used to encourage his retirement. As far as science fiction goes, the only idea this movie has any interest in exploring is the ol' nature-vs.nurture question, predetermination vs. free will, whether our lives/experiences or our underlying nature makes us who we are. We see this in both Picard's dealings with Shinzon and Data's with B-4, and I do appreciate that they're tackled in opposite ways, basically reaching the same non-conclusion. I mean, you weren't really looking for a psychology lesson, were you? One of the crew does indeed make The Ultimate Sacrifice at the end of the film - you'll note the lack of hype and absence of worried rumors surrounding this compared to, say, Spock dying in part 2. That obsessed fan in Trekkies with stacks of photo albums loaded with pictures of this actor is likely to be sent into either a crushing depression or religious ecstasy. Despite having been a faithful viewer of Star Trek: The Next Generation for seven years and catching every Star Trek movie since part 5 on its opening weekend, I found myself unmoved, partly because it was so expected, partly because it came at the end of such a bad movie, seriously hampering any power it could've had. Star Trek: Nemesis is a bad movie, and a bad Star Trek movie. I liked space hottie Dina Meyer as a Romulan commander, and director Stuart Baird seems to be able to put together an exciting space battle, despite those anticlimactic fistfights and, Cthulhu help us, the psychic link. But two really bad Trek movies in a row - especially with such a long wait between them - is bad news. Frankly, I haven't felt this depressed in quite some time. I think the makers of Star Trek are going to have to significantly re-think what they want to do with this franchise if they want to continue with it. Setting the most recent TV series, Enterprise, at the dawn of interstellar space exploration was a step in the right direction. The movies, I fear, have a grimmer future. BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE