INS is flawed as all get out but I'll watch it in a heartbeat if given the option of NEM.
What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?
- Thread starter Amasov
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Agreed, while INS isn’t as theatrical as maybe it could have been, I always found it odd that people felt an outing that’s easily better than most of the actual two-part TNG episodes wasn’t up to snuff.
I'll see your NEM and raise you STID. (Lower you?)
INSs not that bad. NEMs not THAT bad. I haven't tried to sit through FF in a while. (Although I DID just buy it AGAIN a few months ago.)
That's definitely lowering the bar. STID is to date my least favorite Trek film and that's saying something.
I did a rewatch of all the films before Christmas and honestly, for me, there isn't one which I felt bored by or found myself scrolling my phone and losing track
Nem has some moments and the respect shown by the Romulan commander who comes to Picard's rescue (well tries to at least) tracks so well with how Picard becomes a trusted figure to the Romulans that it never feels like a "useless" film in terms of the overall story
For me SFS is my low point of them all - I prefer the original Saavik and in part it would have worked better being more about McCoy's mental state, Spock's being impacted by the Genesis Planet and that I think although that wouldn't have worked for a feature film as it would then likely be considered similar to Ins where it is a glorified episode.
Low point though for me with Trek is a 6.5/10 on a bad day as I just love it an unreasonable amount
Nem has some moments and the respect shown by the Romulan commander who comes to Picard's rescue (well tries to at least) tracks so well with how Picard becomes a trusted figure to the Romulans that it never feels like a "useless" film in terms of the overall story
For me SFS is my low point of them all - I prefer the original Saavik and in part it would have worked better being more about McCoy's mental state, Spock's being impacted by the Genesis Planet and that I think although that wouldn't have worked for a feature film as it would then likely be considered similar to Ins where it is a glorified episode.
Low point though for me with Trek is a 6.5/10 on a bad day as I just love it an unreasonable amount
FF is just like INS but with the TOS crew — it’s the one most like a regular episode, but lacks the theatricality most were expecting from a big screen adventure.
Agreed. And I like First Contact.
The problem with INS is that it's an utterly forgettable TNG episode.
I think that’s what strikes me the most about the TNG movies. There doesn’t seem to be any ambition with them. It doesn’t feel like anyone involved looked at the movies as an opportunity to stretch and try things they couldn’t do on TV. Maybe that’s because the realities of budgeting from Paramount wouldn’t allow that (e.g., in the commentary track for Generations, Ron Moore and Brannon Braga imply the penny pinching with the budget became worse in the transition from series to movies, since all the VFX became more expensive to be film quality), but all of the TNG movies feel like they could have been 2-part episodes of TNG.
A lot has been written and said about Roddenberry’s mistakes in producing The Motion Picture, and it’s a flawed movie, but you do get a sense of ambition from it. You do get the feeling the people behind it said let’s take the idea of Star Trek and these characters and see what we can do with it in this medium. And that just isn’t there with 7-10.
That's perhaps a product of TNG's two-parters being generally weak than INS being any good, but even then I don't think I'd agree it was better.
The writing was just *awful*; the plot was weak, the moral dilemma was never explored (if anything, our heroes were on the wrong side of it) and the dialogue was frequently cringeworthy. The pacing was jarringly artificial - the action sequences felt like they were on a timer. Even the direction and editing were bad (eg. the cut from a dark cave to bright sunshine never failed to elicit a groan in the times I saw it at a cinema, and the slow pan while our heroes put on tough expressions had me wanting to sink through the floor).
For me, it's not that it's a weak two-parter (which would be bad enough as a cinema experience, particularly following First Contact), it's that it's a horrible Trek instalment.
Insurrection was incredibly tone deaf. An Avatar-style story where the goal is to save the middle class, gated community white people.
Interesting. Tell me more.
At the end of the day, Rick Berman was just a TV producer, and his sensibilities defaulted to TV storytelling. Even the scripts for the TNG movies have the same sort of A/B plotting we'd gotten on TV for seven seasons.
There was a bit of "Let's try new stuff!" when they did GEN, but even then their ideas were pretty pedestrian. ("Let's give Data his emotion chip!" "Let's crash the Enterprise-D so we can introduce a new ship in the next movie!")
Honestly, TMP is the only Trek movie that has the scale and scope of a feature film, and I think a lot of that is because they hired Robert Wise to direct it. After that, they went with relative newbies like Nicholas Meyer, Leonard Nimoy, and William Shatner, who I'd imagine came cheaper than someone with the pedigree of Wise. I wish we could've seen what Wise could have done with a better script to work with.
Picard should’ve recused the Federation from the whole mess the moment it was found out the Baku and Sona were related.
Is it much of a controversial opinion when I say I like the first two TNG movies, but the last two less?
Not at all.
Suspected as much.
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