Actually it was said that the normal regenerative effects of the planet would take at least 10 years to affect the Son'a.
How could a Star Trek fan NOT like Insurrection?
- Thread starter Danoz
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Actually it was said that the normal regenerative effects of the planet would take at least 10 years to affect the Son'a.
It's not hysterical to me and I know the voice is put on. I've watched the Angry video game nerd and the nostalgia critic online and those guys don't bother me but this just wasn't at all funny to me.
Okay, this thread inspired me to watch INS for the first time in a few years. It's certainly goofy, but you know what? It's fun. I love watching Riker and Troi flirting with each other. The boob comment doesn't bother me. It never did. Girls talk about their boobs. I don't expect this to change in the 24th Century.
Some things are dumb. Data floating. The Joystick of Doom. I would have preferred those things to be left out.
But overall, it's a fun little story.
Some things are dumb. Data floating. The Joystick of Doom. I would have preferred those things to be left out.
But overall, it's a fun little story.
That's right, but didn't they also say that 10 years would be too late for some of the So'na?
After reading this thread I was thinking about Insurrection some more, and I realized something: To this day, every time I watch the movie my thoughts will go back and forth. I might start to be persuaded by the arguments for moving the Ba'ku (like using the radiation to help billions), but then I will go back to agreeing with Picard and crew. I don't know if the writers intended it to be such a gray area, but I think the fact that people are still arguing about it 12 years later makes it a better story than people give it credit for.
Which makes you wonder what the bloody hell is meant to have happened at the end. The guilty Son'a hang around on the planet to die, basking in the arrogant forgiveness of the Ba'ku? It's got all the worst aspects of TNG, this film.
Several people thinking that it's stupid for different reasons doesn't mean it's a good story. I can't side with anyone, but that's more because I kind of hate everyone involved. Picard gets uppity since he's saving a people from relocation even though this isn't their home planet anyhow. The Federation higher-ups are too dumbass, the Sona are too far into "WE ARE EVIL" territory save for that one guy, and the Baku come off as so completely and utterly unsympathetic and unlikeable that it's impossible to really give a damn about any of them. By the end of the film, both the planet and the Enterprise blowing up with everyone on one or the other would be the only satisfactory conclusion in my mind.
It would be, if the film itself weren't a polemic designed to have us rooting for Picard and the Ba'ku all the way through. Watch some of the DVD interviews with Michael Pillar; he makes it clear that his intent was to create an allegory for the relocation of Native American tribes (e.g, the Trail of Tears), and so forth. So unless the early American treatment of native peoples is a moral "gray area," I'd say the film failed quite thoroughly.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
Man o man, you have really got it right there. I have wavered back and forth on the film, but when you spell it out like that, it isn't just a near-miss, but a BigFail (not grand enough to be an EpicFail, though.)
I've always figures the 'lighten it up' aspect of rewrites is what really damaged the film (same as I think is true for TFF), but maybe they were just plain 'off' in their thinking (same as most folks think true for TFF), with analogies that just weren't ... well, analogous ... to the relevant real history.
I think so. There's a couple of major issues with the premise of the film that damage the allegory beyond repair:
- There's only 300 Ba'ku, not millions. In order to facilitate Picard being able to hide and protect all of them, Pillar dropped the number of people involved to a tiny quantity. So Starfleet's not dealing with a large and unique society all of it's own, with it's a rich history, culture and relationship with their land; they're in a standoff with a retirement home. Why not negotiate with these folks? Like I said upthread, 300 people means that almost all of the planet is unpopulated. Surely something could have been proposed by one side or the other. But even more problematic is:
- The Ba'ku are colonists, not natives. All the town elders remember living on another planet before coming to the Briar Patch. They came on ships, set down, and within their lifetimes faced having to move somewhere else; it's inconvenient, but not traumatic the way the wholesale destruction of a native way of life has proven to be on Earth. That right there ends any comparison with any native peoples.
Which just sets up Picard's bravura moment, "How many does it take before it becomes wrong, hmm? A thousand? A million? How many does it take, Admiral?"
trevanian
Rear Admiral
And also makes me think that to put a real TREK spin on the issue, the Son'a should have looked like blonde yuppies and the Ba'ku should have been ugly to our eyes ... exposure to the planet's M.U.F. could have kept them young but (relative to our eye) hideous, so you'd have some IS THERE IN TRUTH NO BEAUTY action going on.
Of course, being that it is a major motion picture they have to play it safe and make the pretty people the ones you are supposed to 'root' for, but hey, DISTRICT 9 was still over a decade away, right? And D9 has more real SF content than most Trekflicks anyway. I'm actually getting more ticked about INS than I ever was on first viewing.
Wasn't the writing AGAINST TNG? Like when Picard gave Wesley shit and went nuts cause of the Indians in the DMZ. I mean this shit was far more important; the Federation were at war and the Ba'Ku had one damn village on the planet but were whoring everything for themselves.
He said that he liked Star Trek 2009 a lot.
One of the reasons I so disliked this movie is that it came after FC, which (for me anyway) was a really great Trek film. I even liked NEM better than INS (and NEM sucked).
In Insurrection, I wouldn't go so far as to say that the villain was in the right, but one does get the impression that the central conflict could have been easily resolved if all the characters on both sides just sat down and talked things out. It would not have made a thrilling movie, but that's a sign that the central conflict should have been something different.
That's pretty much how I feel about it. The movie is stupid and I generally agree with the complaints against it, but it's still fairly entertaining.
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