Liked:
The music
Riker avenging the violations of his wife - as a husband, that really resonated. Actually, Riker came off the best in this one. He always should have gotten the action material: it's why he was created.
Riker and Toi - married, finally.
Action - I love action. And the planet stuff, whcih everyone hates, is really well edited.
The sound effects - no kidding, the hand phasers sounded really tough.
The pacing of the last 45 minutes. Really nicely orchestrated.
Disliked:
Shinzon - guy made NO sense. At all. Real Romulans would have just vaporized him instead of sending a clone child into dilithium mines.
Worf: total pussy. Seriously, all he does is bitch, scrape a mechanical hand off his foot, press phaser buttons really boringly, and likes Romulans.
Picard: who IS this guy masquerading as Picard? Off character from his first scene onward, he's a jokey guy at the wedding, a guy with a mid-life need for speed on the planet, and a man of no action when Shinzon dies. Just stands there as the clock ticks. And why does he care about Shinzon like this? Because he learned that he would be an evil prick if he grew up mining dilithium with a bunch of ugly aliens and never getting laid? How is this a "whew, lucky fate spared me" sort of situation? Not to mention the whole "hey, let's assemble this mystery android on the way to Romulus."
Admiral Janeway. Nuff said.
B-4 - been said also.
Self destruct: note to Picard - self destruct is more effective if you sent it off when you are ATTACHED TO THE BAD GUY'S SHIP. Not when you pull away.
Let me also go on record in saying that, even with all of its flaws, I love Nemesis, while I agree the story is crap. All of the Next Gen films are way off the beam in quality compared to the series in general. Personalities are all wrong, the stories are too "action movie" and there are horrible plot holes in each one. So, why do I give bad stories like Nemesis a pass? Because it was fun. It made me laugh, it was exciting, decently acted, had an outstanding underscore. The TNG films were these weird, pumped up, almost cookie-cutter films, ground out with indifference by Rick Berman and his cronies; TV writers who had no idea how to mount a feature film. Nemesis, for its faults, actually feels like a movie rather than a bloated TV episode. It's also the only one of the four to have a writer and director who had experience in features. Apparently, not enough to be good at their jobs, but still…
The real problem with the later films is that there were too many cooks in the kitchen. We had Rick Berman, who slavishly played it safe and never took chances, sticking religiously to "Roddenberry's Vision" while forgetting that the best of Trek was also done by others (Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Gene Coon, DC Fontana, Harve Bennett, Nick Meyer, etc.). Then Paramount insisted that Earth be threatened in some manner, in order to give the audience something to relate to (because this is OBVIOUSLY a problem Star Wars had which Paramount wanted to avoid). Finally, Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner got story approval. Actors need to stay the F away from writing. This is what killed Trek 5.
More importantly, writers need to avoid the "wouldn't be cool" syndrome. Such as…
Wouldn't be cool if Picard drove a jeep with a gun on the back like in The Rat Patrol?
Wouldn't be fun to have the Enterprise ram another ship?
Wouldn't be awesome to have a hole blown in the bridge, sucking a guy out?
Wouldn't it be fantastic if there were 45 minutes of space ship battles?
Wouldn't be great if Picard and Data had parallel stories about their duplicates?
Wouldn't be amazing if we just took the script to Wrath of Kahn and reworked it enough so we wouldn't have to give credit to Nick Meyer?
You know, the classic movies gave a lot more screen time and respect to Sulu, Chekov and Uhura than TNG movies ever gave to Dr. Crusher. This and the pussification of Worf all helped to make the TNG movies mere bastardizations of the series upon which they were based.
Yet, I look at them like a hillbilly dad looks at his inbred children: he isn't proud of them, wishes they came out better, and everyone looks at them weird, but he loves all of them.
