Cool idea. Frankly I thought the mere concept of 'Remans' was bollocks. But if it had to be done, your way would be interesting.
Also worth noting that the novelization was GREAT.
Nemesis
- Thread starter heavylids
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Cool idea. Frankly I thought the mere concept of 'Remans' was bollocks. But if it had to be done, your way would be interesting.
Also worth noting that the novelization was GREAT.
Motivation shift may be the wrong way to word it. Perhaps it was just bad handling of revealing his motivations. I mean, at first it's "I'm doing this for my Reman brothers.", then it's "I'm doing it to get back at the Romulans.", then it's "I'm doing it to escape Picard's shadow.", then "I'm doing it to destroy the Federation." and none of these are ever adequately followed through on (esp. the "Reman brothers" thing since he apparently has them killed for their mistakes).
I think there's some over-thinking of his motivations here.
From the movie standpoint, having Shinzon's target be Earth makes it a much more high-stakes story and adds to the drama of the final battle.
Plus he already had his revenge on the Romulans when he destroyed their government and took over the empire himself.
From the movie standpoint, having Shinzon's target be Earth makes it a much more high-stakes story and adds to the drama of the final battle.
Plus he already had his revenge on the Romulans when he destroyed their government and took over the empire himself.
I wonder how hard it can be to write a good villain. I mean, Stephen King does it all the time. So do the dudes from Criminal Minds.
It's not so much creating a good villain. It's creating a good TREK villain.
Yes, two very different things. A good Trek villain needs to have some kind of purpose or reason for his/her actions. Picard and the Federation had nothing to do with Shinzon being sent to the Remen mines. Shinzon was just being a baby because he was a shitty clone of a greater man. I like the actor and think he did the best anybody could possibly do with such a poorly conceived character.
Shinzon's motivation was to show the Romulans his superiority over them. He took over their government and he was then going to do the one thing they could never do - cripple the Federation by going after Earth. It would have shown what a stronger leader he was over any previous Romulan praetor.
Yeah, I like the old Romulan Warbirds better too. The new ones were, I don't know, just too sleek and generic looking. The old ones had a more interesting design.
Agreed. They looked like overgrown Klingon BOPs
I personally love them. I still prefer the D'deridex-class ships, though.
Not that I don't agree....but why do you think that a Trek villain needs more purpose and reason than a non-Trek one? Doesn't compute.
A good villain is a good villain is a good villain. No matter where you put him/her.
Exactly.
Agreed. I think that an ST villain needs to tie into the history of the ST world in some significant way to really be effective (Dukat and Chang being the best examples), but that's the only real caveat, I think.
Also, I love the design of the Valdore, myself. Thought it was an awesome, modern Romulan design (and nice to see that the Romulans don't just have a single class of capital ship).
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I think a lot of the TNG movie issues are the culmination of a number of factors, but the main thing is that nobody just lets the writer sit down and write the damned movie. Everyone has a say and too many people have real story approval. Patrick Stewart has to approve the story or he won't do the film. For better or worse, a lot of what Insurrection ended up as was because of him. And not just in regards to Picard's arc. Reading Michael Piller's unpublished "making of" book was really educational. Over the years, people have suggested substituting Remans for Sela or bringing back TV villains, or returning the series to exploration and making statements. Patrick Stewart nixed that, saying it was "TV series material, not movie material." The films must be, in his view, fast paced, exciting, sexy, and bigger than life. Everything TNG never was. Where Brent Spiner was more concerned about Data, Stewart lokked at the overall film and wouldn't sign on the dotted line until he was happy with it. To be fair, some of what he suggested was correct, but as long as he was going to be asked to participate, the TV series was a totally separate entity, and series style plots were not allowed.
Fans who wanted the TNG movies to be more like the show never had a chance. There would be no exploration, no series guest characters having large roles, and nothing which required gobs of exposition to fill in the movie audiences who haven't seen the TV series. I do, however, swell with gratitude for him saying Barclay didn't need to ever come back. When he was written into the Insurrection story, Stewart suggested that his lines and screen time be given to one of the regular cast. Good idea, that.
Writers write, actors act. Sometimes they twain shall meet, but they shouldn't always. Had someone told William Shatner "your story sucks. Please stop writing and just direct the script we give you," TFF might have been a less ridiculous film.
By the way, I really enjoyed Nemesis and The Final Frontier. I enjoy all of them...
Fans who wanted the TNG movies to be more like the show never had a chance. There would be no exploration, no series guest characters having large roles, and nothing which required gobs of exposition to fill in the movie audiences who haven't seen the TV series. I do, however, swell with gratitude for him saying Barclay didn't need to ever come back. When he was written into the Insurrection story, Stewart suggested that his lines and screen time be given to one of the regular cast. Good idea, that.
Writers write, actors act. Sometimes they twain shall meet, but they shouldn't always. Had someone told William Shatner "your story sucks. Please stop writing and just direct the script we give you," TFF might have been a less ridiculous film.
By the way, I really enjoyed Nemesis and The Final Frontier. I enjoy all of them...
I enjoy all of them, too.
Until this day, I have never encountered a "rabid" NEM fan, though, like there are rabid Abramsverse fans (sort of like me
).
Until this day, I have never encountered a "rabid" NEM fan, though, like there are rabid Abramsverse fans (sort of like me
).
Actually...I enjoy all of them, too.
Until this day, I have never encountered a "rabid" NEM fan, though, like there are rabid Abramsverse fans (sort of like me
Neither have I, come to think of it. In my experience, NEM fans - even people that love it, despite its flaws, or those that don't see some of the flaws - are pretty mellow about it.
STXI - which, for the record, I thought was good, if not great - has disturbingly "rabid" defenders and attackers. I suppose I can understand why the movie would be somewhat divisive for Trek fans, but yeesh, people; don't kill each other.
On NEM: I rank it as "just under ok." I didn't think it was good overall, but it had enough cool bits to it to save it from "awful" status (which is where I put TFF, my least favorite Trek film). I LOVED some of the character interactions (including, unfortunately, some that were left out of the final version of the film and would have added a bit of depth), and thought the wedding scene was great fun. The effects were excellent, as was the music (Goldsmith remains the best composer Trek ever had, for my money), and the... actually, that's just about it.
I have to say, I'm with Bishop in regards to the plot; it was all over the goddamned place. It easily had as many pure inconsistencies/lapses in logic as STXI, but without being the plainly fun romp that XI is. TFF has fewer inconsistencies if you ask me; I find it to be a far worse film overall, and the plot is incredibly stupid, but it simply has fewer holes in it.
I wasn't a fan of Tom Hardy's performance, personally... though it's entirely possible that with a script that didn't suck and/or a director that didn't suck, he might have come off better. But I think the concept of Shinzon is pretty unsalvageable. Aside from all the obvious and oft-mentioned problems with the concept as presented (Shinzon's motivations were not at all shown, he didn't look or act like Picard, etc), I just think the idea of the "Picard clone" as some sort of Romulan plot is insane. It's WAY to convoluted and prone to problems to be believable as something the Romulans would even do, to say nothing of the question of "Was Picard really THAT important during the 2360's?"
The space battle LOOKED cool, but is partially ruined for me by the incomparable idiocy of the magical fan-wank supership that is the Scimitar.
Using Sela has some merit (I always thought she was a good, if not great, villain in TNG), but the REAL crime if you ask me when it comes to missed opportunities is that Nemesis - the "TNG Romulan movie" - didn't use Tomalak. Not ONLY was Andreas Katsulas a fantastic actor, but Tomalak showed up several times, including TNG's final ep. I always wanted to see a plot that involved him being a "will he, won't he" semi-antagonist during most of the film, who sacrifices himself at the end in order to stop the REAL menace, whatever it is, that had been revealed to be a threat to both the Romulans and the UFP (said threat could BE Sela, actually). Even more of a shame since Katsulas died a few years later...
Yeah, I haven't mentioned this at all, but holy shit was that ship stupid. It was like a ship some of my friends and I designed when we were in grade school to play in the old FASA tabletop tactical simulator. Not that I thought the space battle was all that exciting anyway, but the fact that they were fighting God's spaceship didn't really add much to the excitement for me.
I completely agree. How great would it have been to see him back in his role one last time. I don't know if he was sickly from his cancer when they were shooting Nemesis or not, but I think he would have been a far better choice than anyone else we got in this movie.
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