I haven’t watched Insurrection in years. But I was watching a YouTube video a few days ago which was playing the Ba’Ku theme as background music. I liked it. And, I knew it was familiar. I remembered it was from Insurrection. So I started trying to find the mp3 and piano sheet music for it.. Well this lead me to watching the dvd last night. And this time, I was really impressed with the movie. Aside for half a dozen cringe worthy jokes, A British Tar, the bridge joystick and Ruafu’s scream, it is really a good story. Ruafu is a good villain. And if you ignore them using similar macguffin self destruct in Generations, Nemesis and Enterprise S3, it makes sense. Though I think they should have ended with Ruafo imprisoned on the holoship and Picard and Worf destroying the macguffin from the Sona’s ship. BTW, The sheet music arrives Friday. Just wish my stupid fingers didn’t take so long to learn new pieces.
If you can count on anything, it's Jerry Goldsmith elevating a film regardless of it's quality. It's definitely one of those films where the score is better than the film itself. Sadly I fit on the other side of the spectrum when I find myself re-watching it. This movie simply does not compliment what was happening in Star Trek at the time. It's just... Gah! The idea of seeing what the Big E was doing during the Dominion War is such a lost opportunity to see the crew in a different light. Thousands are dying, and I'm watching Picard dance in his quarters while the Enterprise sits around doing nothing. Question ConRefit79. Have you ever read Michael Piller's book 'Fade In'?
The Dominion war was over by then. Love the morality conflict, the argument between Picard and Dougherty, the ship and uniform designs, the soundtrack, Geordi seeing a sunrise for the first time, Data learning from a kid, Data walking underwater, playing with a fish... it's beautiful.
I like it more than most apparently. The concepts are important ones, and it's more philosophic than other trek movies.
No, I haven’t read it. As for the Dominion war, yeah when the movie premiered I was hoping for that. By the end of DS9, I had my fill of that war. Insurrection feels more like TNG. And I miss that. The Sona produce Ketricel White for the Dominion’s JemAdar. So you could say they’re part of the Dominion. Although the story doesn’t explain how they reached the Gamma Quadrant and achieved so much power in only a century.
They were never from the Gamma Quadrant. They are outcasts of the Ba'ku race, who originated in the Alpha Quadrant. The So'na went into business producing the White for the Dominion to serve their own interests.
There are missed opportunities. The dominion war thing has already been mentioned, but on a broader scale, the movie had a much bigger budget than did First Contact, but somehow feels cheaper and less 'big' in scale? Much of the money went on exaustive location shooting in the forests and mountains of northern California, which is noble, except that the workprint then featured too many long scenes of the crew marching through beautiful scenery which the studio heads determined slowed the movie down too much so it nearly all got cut out. Wasted money. Add to this that the Baku village set, erected on location, ends up looking like the stock standard cheap backlot 'village' set used throughout TNG's seven seasons (you all know the one, it debuted in The Ensigns Of Command and was noteably used in The Inner Light among many others), so again it feels pointless and costly. You could have shot this movie on the usual sets and a little location shooting at Vasquez Rocks like they would've done on TV, and the end result would have felt almost identical. Given it cost a lot more money than that, it feels like someone made some serious errors during production. One just feels the whole movie could have looked and felt bigger. It's ironic that the man who wrote The Best Of Both Worlds, the inspiration for the previous movie, delivers here such a workman-like script. It totally feels like TNG, which is good, but it utterly fails to feel like a movie, which is bad. All of that said, I don't actually hate it.
I think it's inaccurate to say Insurrection was a good movie. I could buy "entertaining" but definitely not "good"
A few years back, (to quote Jim Kirk, "12 years? Incredible!") I went through a phase where every weekend after everyone else went to sleep, I would bake a frozen pizza, pour some mountain dew, and while dipping the slices of pizza in ranch sauce I would watch Insurrection all the way through. I did it every weekend for two or three months. I discovered that, while First Contact was the superior effort of the TNG films, Insurrection was theraputic for me, like a brain massage almost, similar to how The Motion Picture was for me a few years earlier. Both films have great ambiance, and yet neither film is referenced that much or even remembered as being that good in modern Trek. I love the warm colors, the soft music and the spectacular visuals of Insurrection. Like a youtube commenter posted once, "Star Trek is like coming home". Insurrection is a perfect example of that sentiment.
Coming after the mighty First Contact, Insurrection felt like the biggest Trek let down since.. well.. ever (as wasn't about for Motion Picture, kind of liked Trek V at the time, and Generations had some merit with Soran, Kirk etc )
I like it. It's not as epic as First Contact, but I don't epic in every single movie. There a lots of small things that could have been handled better, but overall it's a good and enjoyable movie. I really like the funny bits and the cheerful atmosphere among the TNG cast in this one, it feels like (the good parts of) a class reunion.
I was 16 when Insurrection came out. Hated it then, despise it now. The only redeeming factors of the movie are F. Murray Abraham's performance and the battle between the Enterprise and the Son'a cruisers (up until the atari joystick makes it's appearance). There is literally nothing compelling about the plot and the stakes aren't high enough. For me it's the death knell of 90's trek and a prime example of how staid and tired the franchise had become. The Ba'ku should have been removed. It was a federation planet and they were not native to the planet. Give me a story of the Federation trying to do the same thing but to a planet of billions and Picard's resistance would have been something i could believe in and get behind. Picard risking his career for 600 people who had no right to the planet or it's magical properties that could help save trillions of lives? No thanks, I'm good.
Dammit Jim, I got so nostalgic for the pizza with ranch and Insurrection night viewings that I duplicated the experience a few hours ago. Each time I watch Insurrection, I remember just how un-bad it is. Unlike Generations, Nemesis or Beyond, there aren't any really unforgivable things this movie does, and it's not as cheesy as Star Trek V (although many of the effects are a bit dated now). Sometimes, what Star Trek does best is deliver a feel good movie that doesn't take itself too seriously (unlike the previous four films, which all seemed to try to one up each other with the high stakes). Not every Star Trek film HAS to be The Wrath of Khan.
More than 600 aliens with no ethnic diversity who are not native to the planet that is sovereign territory of an interstellar power, that is for sure. There is a big difference between removing a native indigenous population dependent on the radiation to survive (which the ba'ku aren't) and removing a bunch of settlers who have basically taken a planet that didn't belong to them (which the Ba'ku are). The Federation would actually have the right to remove the Ba'ku as the planet fell in federation space. Picard carries on like the federation were sending the Ba'ku to a gulag when it was planned from the beginning that the Ba'ku were being sent to a near identical paradise planet to continue their lives. Insurrections biggest failure is it's lazy and superficial moralising. It treats the viewer like an idiot and asks that we look at the morality of the issue in black and white terms. But it's not that easy. The radiation would benefit trillions of beings. What if there was a planet with a population on the verge of extinction because of a disease the federation couldn't cure. What if the planetary radiation could cure the disease and save an entire species from extinction? Wouldn't that be worth moving 600 people to another warm and sunny planet? The story would have a million times more compelling and challenging if it had asked bigger questions like that.
The Sheliak or the Cardassians would have bombed the Ba'ku settlement from orbit with no thought. The Federation were going to move the Ba'ku to another planet, most likely within Federation space where they could live their lives in peace but not have the benefit of living forever. The Ba'ku had no right to the planet and no right to a naturally occurring substance that could help trillions of people.
The Ba'ku settled there long before it became Federation territory. It was Klingon space for a while before the Feds got it. Why would they not have the right to settle if it was unclaimed then?
Never was going to happen. Not in a million years. I knew that back then, and it still makes sense now. Insurrection is the weakest of all 13 franchise films by a long margin, but it's not because it wasn't a "Dominion War" film. They had literally just done a "Borg War" film. There was no fucking way they were ever going to make yet another "war" movie, particularly one based on a television series that, at the time, disappointed them with regard to viewership.