I'd have made the films about exploration. Now, I'm no writer but even something simple like....
On the edge of Federation space, Enterprise finds derelict ship that it extremely old, big - or otherwise interesting.
They explore the ship
It powers up and is about to explode!
They can't stop the overload to beam out. They race to search for a transporter room or shuttle on the ship. They find a transporter room and beam out to......????
The derelict explodes, crippling the Enterprise on the edge of the neutral zone. They are drifting out of control into hostile territory.
Twin adventures ensue as we get a disaster movie in space with a ticking clock - and an adventure on.....a living asteroid filled with strange beings...or, maybe it was a Borg relic and their creepy descendants are living somewhere.
Definitely is a step up, though the Borg were definitely being overused by then. Then again, after FC, it would provide a chance to do a sequel on the big screen and do something better with them.
[quote[I don't know, but pretty much anything would have been better than the insipid 'Insurrection' or the franchise killer 'Nemesis'.[/QUOTE]
IMHO, INS killed the franchise, and NEM was supposed to be the phoenix after years of development to put out a polished, well-crafted script-- eh, well, almost...
INS was shoving and scribbling in too many half-baked ideas all over the place, most of which backfire because things other contradict, or don't align, or because nothing culminates to a proper and engaging threat - even the movie succeeding it four years later proved that all the events in this movie were pointless, not to mention that, after thinking about it for a while, the Baku seem to come off
worse despite being the ones we're supposed to side with, probably because they're pretty or something. Definitely were pretty something, but I digress. The self-destruct trope is incredibly glaring, and for a machine that doesn't have any rational need for one, except for some gimmicky action. Worse yet, Data looks mighty angry at the start, despite overt dialogue stating "he didn't take (the emotion chip) with him" by Geordi, who then makes a summary order to send over Data's schematics to Dougherty and his friends, which I thought Maddox and others already had copies of and it makes more sense for starships to have a copy of master databases since a subspace link to HQ would take a long time for updated to get refreshed... and that emotion chip line is barely into the start of that movie. I won't mention the FTW song, which had me sinking in my chair in the theater in total embarrassment in 1998. Fans and non-fans agreed - it was crap. The fact that the movie's shock reveal is two steps shy of Jerry or Maury (and definitely was a bit faddish a trope by 1998) does not help, but would have if the movie did a better job at defining everyone but it can't even get any consistency for Starfleet and if it's the lot of them, a faction of baddies, and the story didn't really want to take the risk anywhere. It played it safe. But that's just glossing over that flick. Now onto what should have saved Trek:
NEM was supposed to be the franchise's phoenix IMHO, except the whole thing feels almost as if nobody gave a damn and instead shoved in as much as possible for some bunny-brained de4spire to be "EPIC"! If this were 1998, you'd bet correctly that "EPIC" would be in italics, underline, overline, bold, 128pt serif font* that would also use the BLINK element attribute** - something the HTML consortium removed for a halfway decent reason, but I digress: It's all very strange because, dune buggy bit aside, there is a flow and tense feel that they nail -- and it's the first film in some time that puts levity low on the priority list. Tone can only go so far, though. It's an unfocused mess of a script, with more contrivances that are supposed to shock and awe, and yet somehow don't... Drama, whether it be fiction or nonfiction, still needs to have its own set of rules, use them deftly and consistently, and not overload the adventure with shallow gimmicks. It still bugs me that just a few small tweaks and changes would have turned that jar of blop into a true honey pot. NEM easily could have been so much more,
with ease. Even the new warship, the super-dee-duper one, would be more credible if the Romulans made it-- but before I digress into everything debatable about this flick too far, I'll reel myself in with a summary: INS was and still is an overstuffed joke, and NEM dropped the ball in trying to get Trek back to basics. Even the poster's appearance and tagline feel fatigued. But it's easier to fathom how NEM could be made to be a riveting success. INS is just nonsense that made a lot of season 1 somehow look
better as a result.
Both films sorta reminds me of Homer Simpson's website, too:
Head to 0:39 for the fun!
*
Jokerman, oddly enough from 1995 as I wrote footnote two first and then this one came to mind and - voila - it's amazing what was borne out of 1995...
** sorry, couldn't find a website with a suitable analog for blinking text to make you feel like it's 1995 again, and the youtube videos are all tarted-up manure-- wait, just found one:
Yeah, I agree - it's a shame the tag was abandoned.
