IIRC, he was injured and the surgery he required was too expensive. Should blind people feel unhappy cause Geordi can see?
Yeah, Avatar is pretty visuals wrapped up in a generic story and looking back on it can be somewhat uncomfortable given it adopts the ''white savior'' trope pretty hard near the end: I would have liked for the aliens in Insurrection to look more impressive than just being white people in space, but Insurrection probably has not aged as badly as Avatar has in terms of bad themes. There was an sfdebris review of this film (its down now, so I cannot link to it), where sfdebris says the best route they could have gone, is to have Riker side with the Federation and Picard side with the Ba'ku and have them fight each other, that would have bigger stakes than what we got in the film. Yeah, they are not saving Earth from a Borg invasion, but there is emotional stakes in a fight between Riker and Picard. If they just wanted to do a straight good vs. evil story, maybe do some story about the evils of colonialism, but do not muddy things up by making the Son'a secretly Ba'ku. Either cut the Son'a out and it's just Star Fleet that wants to exploit the Ba'ku or make the Son'a completely alien and have them be stand-ins to various colonial oppressors we saw throughout history. Yeah, the visuals looked amazing, but I do not think that story aged well, as noted in the videos above.
I think that is a great point is that the emotional stakes are not that high. We have generic aliens of the week, and an evil admiral. There is no conflict between the crew over the rightness or the wrongness of the actions, which is something that I think Trek can suffer from is deliberate moralizing and making it clear what the right decision is. Some times, a lot of times, things are not black and white and this movie missed that opportunity to have such a conflict in the crew. But, that's due to Michael' Piller's experience with Roddenberry.
That sounds right to me... Geordi was offered alternatives to his VISOR at least twice during the series and turned them down.
In terms of the spirit of tng i think it represents it best from all four Feature films, although some think, it is too much of a two part episode from tng. I think there was some good character development. Datas emotion chip now was portable which is just fine by me. Once again picard proved us all and Doherty that he is uncorruptable and still represents the ideals of the federation while starfleet and the federation were still recovering from the dominion war and the 2nd borg incursion. I also liked the evolving relationship between riker and troi. Ruafo as a villain was presented fairly well by abraham. I also liked the initial concept of the filn which included romulans and a rogue starfleet captain who was doing things in... the neutral zone if I remember correctly. I would have also liked that darker take of the movie. But i like insurrection the way it is, but still it has some flaws.
Movies with magical elements (and INS's were so badly contrived, plus rendered completely pointless in the very next movie when Geordi is shown flashing his implants again)... Agreed. So much of the movie is overstuffed with ideas and things, of which most only do the movie an injustice: Someone high up in 24th century Starfleet is corrupt, yet again Silly song and dance that insulted the intellect of diehard and casual viewers alike Bad guys who were kicked out by the good guys so they're actually the bad guys... it's like a very special episode of Jenny Jones or Jerry Springer only with crack glib, incomplete, and stereotyped references to the distant past magical radiation that doesn't even kick in until puberty begins - how convenient! It's a fountain of youth! the notion "We know how to do it but won't", because as a result of that the rest of the universe won't do it too (okey doke)... who needs their mommies and daddies when a Klingon or Romulan commander need do nothing but sneeze and they'd all be wiped out, never mind the Borg or Dominion or Pakleds or anyone else - but thankfully the magical radiation is useless the moment one steps out of the star system Data's fused emotion chip is now readily removable whenever needed, did Geordi call up Argyle or Maddox to bring in the blowtorch and desoldering gun? Wasn't turning it on and off at will in the previous movie not good enough? Or are they hoping he misplaces it, thus interfering with a society that finds the chip and manages to figure out 1/6,000,000,000,000,000th of it despite having no manual or 9V battery to power it up with (without frying it too), and then the real fun begins... Characters had symptoms of cellular regeneration/de-aging before they got into the system (Worf's sleepy time problem happens before Dougherty tells Picard not to enter the system because their ship hasn't been modified to withstand the radiation... since they all act like horny teens, unlike Dougherty's crew... if the whole Briar Patch has the magic radiation, then nobody should experience anything until after being there for some time.) The direction and soundtrack were magnificent, silly song aside... And I liked the joystick. Press the fire button to activate warp engines! Boom...
I've noticed there are quite a lot of similarity in the themes and ideas between Insurrection and the French comic book Valerian: Return to Alflolol. Both feature a group of long-living aliens native to a planet, whose natural resources the heroes' own community wants to exploit. The aliens have no interest to technology, but choose to live close to nature and also possess strange psychic powers. Their presence is a problem that the community, led by a hard nosed governor, tries to resolve by moving them to a reservation. The ethical dilemma drives the heroes to go renegade . Of course Star Trek had to add the evil Son'a in the mix, because the utopian Federation can't turn into a villain.
I watched INS again the other day. It's worse than I remembered. It's a really, really bad Trek film. So cheesy and plastic, with bad under- and over- acting. It has not aged well.
Also the Baku aren't native to the planet, which for me at least changes the dynamics of the situation.
Well they had been living there for 300 years, certainly long enough to establish their presence. That's longer than it's been since building the first colony in Australia. As a parallel, the aliens in the comic had also been away on a little trip of 4,000 years.
Living there a long time still doesn't mean they're native, though. It may be unfair, but I'd give more credence to being there for 4,000 years than 300 as well. The part that rubs me the wrong way is that whether the Baku are native to the planet is the difference between whether they always had the benefits of the rings, or were merely lucky enough to find them before anyone else did.
An interesting change to the Insurrection story could have been that the planet with its youth effects also prevented advanced technology from working (but that wouldn't be the case with extracting the particles), make it more sympathetic for why the Son'a and the Federation members didn't want to, wouldn't be willing to just come to and live on the planet.
Well, I think Dougherty and the Briar Patch kinda covered that sufficiently. It's basically the middle of nowhere. I agree that it would have upped the stakes a little though.
I like it. It's not as ambitious as other films and that's OK. It feels right. It feels like the series. At the time it came out I didn't like it at all though. I wanted a big old shoot em up. Ooh yes! This is it exactly. Except for dipping pizza in ranch, hard pass on that
I believe the issue is one of consent. It's likely the Baku would have agreed to vacate the planet if they knew it needed to be done to cure disease and etc. But they were never asked, right?
In fairness, I believe they did explain that in the novelization - by that point, Geordi had been able to build him a new and improved one.