"Tomb Raider" was on cable yesterday and I was half watching it when a couple of things jumped out at me. 1) the ancient city looked a lot like the Klingon High Council building from TNG and like the Romulan Senate from Nem. 2) the ancient clock device looked a lot like the miniture Thalaron device used at the start of the film. During the credits I saw that Stuart Baird was an Exec Producer of the film. I read on IMDB that he did uncredited editing in order to get the director's job of Nem. I didn't watch the movie too closely to see if there were other things that got dumped into Nem as well.
Baird did emergency, last-minute editing jobs on Tomb Raider and Mission: Impossible 2, both of which went on to make bucketloads of money, so Paramount told him that he would get the director's chair on an upcoming high-profile film as a way of saying thank you. And that high-profile film wound up being Nemesis.
Baird is actually a quite decent film editor. But just as print editors are not always good writers, good film editors are not always good directors (Baird is a case in point).
Baird is an excellent editor (he did most of Richard Donner's best films) and actually a pretty reasonable director...he was just the wrong choice to direct Star Trek.
I cannot agree on that. I liked his style in NEMESIS. He also co-editted that film. It feels more grounded, the cinematography is much more firm that the one we saw in INSURRECTION and even FIRST CONTACT.
His direction on a visual level was fine but I found his direction of the actors to be mediocre. YMMV
Baird does emergency work for Paramount all the time. Paramount wanted to fire Stephen Sommers from GI Joe and replace him with Baird but the film's producer intervened. It's rumored that he did some uncredited editing on the GI Joe sequel too.
I find NEMESIS' visual style to be ... no style at all. Not a stylistic choice favoring lack of excess, but basically no flare for shooting movies period. Baird is the editor-turned-director nightmare, like most later Spottiswoode, just piling up footage so you build something out of editing, not actually designing for the scene. Look at the longer (as in endless) cut scene of Picard and Data in quarters w/ booze and you'll see somebody who has no idea how to stage anything at all to camera. High school plays have better staging, Christ, he makes Shatner look like Walter Hill by comparison (then again, that's because Shatner actually understands composition, probably better than Frakes and Nimoy.)
The cinematographer was Jeffrey Kimball. And I wasn't speaking of Baird's ability to direct. I should have been more specific...In my opinion, he was the wrong person to make decisions on what material should be used and what should be discarded on a Star Trek film.
I like the look and style of "Nemesis". And Baird really is a good editor; just seems like he doesn't quite know to get the best from his actors.
Structurally speaking NEM is set up well. The problem with utilizing the actors and fully fleshing out this last TNG story I lay the fault at Rick Berman's feet. He knew this would be the last movie with the TNG crew and I don't think he did enough to sum up 'All Good Things' about TNG by the end of NEM. Instead we get the same ambiguous ending we got in VOY "Endgame".
If you think about it, though, that was kind of always the problem with the TNG movies. "All Good Things..." was such an excellent finale for TNG, both as a general summing up and also how they made it dovetail with Q's trial from "Farpoint." Even though the ending of AGT makes it clear that the crew's mission continues on, it was a great ending, and what more needed to be said? As a result, all four TNG movies had this sort of superfluous, tacked-on feeling. Yeah, the shift to movies gave them more money to play with for visual effects, sets, and extended location shoots, but I'd argue that as far as story and character go, none of them were markedly better than what we got from seven years of TV.
Hmm. You may be onto something here. TOS fans were (famously) left wanting more when the show was cancelled prematurely, so they were ecstatic when TOS (finally!) returned to the screen. But TNG had reached a perfectly satisfying conclusion--and was barely gone long enough to be missed before the TNG movies started rolling out. Maybe that's why they (arguably) didn't quite catch on like the TOS movies did.