Is Nemesis unfairly criticized?

[Shinzon4u]

I find Nemesis much more polished than the other three TNG films.
It looks great, it has an interesting plot that serves as a nice capstone to both Picard and Data's lives, it has lots of well acted drama helped by the fact that Hardy is a fantastic actor, it has an excellent score, it has a kickass ramming scene, etc, etc, etc.

Anyway, do you like NEM?
Do you hate it?
Has time changed your opinion of it?

 

[Lance]

I like Nemesis. I certainly don't dislike it. But I also believe there's a much better version of it that was left on the cutting room floor.

Watching it at the time in the theater, it had the right tone for me. It felt like an adequate, not necessarily spectacular but certainly satisfying enough, finale for the TNG cast. Again, there are deleted scenes that would've enhanced this.

My only beef would be that I do find the Picard/Shinzon/Cloning stuff to be a bit of a damp squib. B4 I thought was ok, but Shinzon IMHO would've been better served as being a villain in his own right, without this connection to Picard. It felt forced.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Anyway, do you like NEM?

No.

Do you hate it?

Yes.

Has time changed your opinion of it?

No.

 

[Lance]

In terms of the question asked by the thread: Nemesis probably is unfairly criticized. It's not the best movie ever made, but neither is it as bad as the vitriol directed towards it suggests. And its heart is often in the right place.

 

[Paradise City]

Nemesis is a fair outing all in all. I think it's bewitched somewhat by TWOK in the manner of Data's demise. I thought the volte face from tea to Shinzon going after Picard was a bit too abrupt. I do go against the grain in liking the concept of Shinzon however. No, I don't understand the sheer vitriol the film gets.

 

[Takeru]

I don't hate it, there are scenes I hate (driving a car through the desert and shooting at the locals, the bottomless pit inside the Enterprise) and it's a bit too close to TWOK but I think it's better than Insurrection.
I like Tom Hardy but not as a clone of Picard because he and Patrick Stewart just don't look alike, he should have played an original character, the nature vs. nurture thing wasn't really explored anyway.

I did like the romulan plot and the implication at the end that the federation and the empire would have improved relations under a new government, Donatra's role should have been bigger.
I also liked several characters moving on and finally leaving the Enterprise, I liked Troi and Riker getting married, while they were never my favorite couple ending the eternal "will they, won't they?" was good

Another thing I disliked was B4, it made Data's sacrifice feel meaningless. TWOK also had a build in trapdoor to bring Spock back but they didn't have a clone body and his memories in a jar in sickbay at the end of the movie while still while the other characters mourned.

 

[RomulanCommander]

I don't hate Nemesis so much as I think it had so many missed opportunities. Rather than Shinzon, it should have been Sela (makes sense, but Denise Crosby's acting chops are so-so), or Tomalak (Andreas Katsulas was a SUPERB actor, and would have been an awesome big bad), and the coup could have been a rebellion led by a fringe reunification group who broke away from Spock's movement and allied themselves with the Remans. And instead of B4, it could have been Lore stolen and reassembled by the Tal Shiar.

 

[SPCTRE]

Is Nemesis unfairly criticized?

Do I think a lot of the criticisms of NEM are fair? Absolutely.

Do I think that some of the flak the movie gets around here can be a bit hyperbolic? You bet.

(but this place would be boring without the hyperbole)

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

My only beef would be that I do find the Picard/Shinzon/Cloning stuff to be a bit of a damp squib. B4 I thought was ok, but Shinzon IMHO would've been better served as being a villain in his own right, without this connection to Picard. It felt forced.

It's a nurture vs nature debate that seems totally out of place and wholly unnecessary. Shinzon may be a clone of Picard, with all that his genetics would bring him, but he was brutalised from childhood in labour camps so of course he's going to have a different mentality from Picard. If Shinzon was to be a clone, then why not have Patrick Stewart fulfil both roles (with some CGI youthisizing)--not that I'm saying Tom Hardy was bad in the film, but Sir Patrick knows the character better and could easily carry off two separate and varied performances. I do like the notion of a cloned/created human infiltrator that was separate from Picard, that would've been an interesting direction to take.

There are also other little things throughout the film (more continuity errors) that bug me greatly.

 

[Paradise City]

Picard/Shinzon disturbing each other by their mere existence was the pivot of that film. If anything, how troubled they are by each other should've been brought out more.

I also like the novels touch. That these events which only lasted a day or two unleashed mayhem and splits across the empire that spanned decades.

It's a nurture vs nature debate that seems totally out of place and wholly unnecessary. Shinzon may be a clone of Picard, with all that his genetics would bring him, but he was brutalised from childhood in labour camps so of course he's going to have a different mentality from Picard. If Shinzon was to be a clone, then why not have Patrick Stewart fulfil both roles (with some CGI youthisizing)--not that I'm saying Tom Hardy was bad in the film, but Sir Patrick knows the character better and could easily carry off two separate and varied performances. I do like the notion of a cloned/created human infiltrator that was separate from Picard, that would've been an interesting direction to take

Maybe. But I think the film would draw accusations that it was too derivative of TBOBW if Stewart handled the villain role himself. I think Hardy acts well when Shinzon tries to make sense of Picard, interacts with him and dances around the fact that he's gonna kill him. When he switches to full on kill 'im role, it gets a tad too stereotypie I think.

 

[Trek Survivor]

Some of the criticism has a legitimate basis, but it often goes way overboard and into the arena of bandwagon-jumping/hyperbole.

I like "Nemesis" just fine.

 

[JamesRye]

Star Trek Nemesis is all kinds of wrong, it is truly bad. Firstly, it’s disrespectful to the Trek faithful. When we first meet B4, no one inquires if it’s Lore – Data’s ‘brother’ who we meet on numerous occasions in the TV show. They act as if they can’t believe that they’ve discovered another Soong android! This is even more ignorant because in the episode ‘Inheritance’, we discover that Data’s ‘mother’ is also an android – and is more advanced than Data. All this could have been covered with a couple of lines of dialog, so as not to ‘confuse’ the casual viewers.

The film’s main protagonists are the Remans, ‘brothers’ of the Romulans. Why had we not heard about this warrior race in the (at this point) previous 36 years of Star Trek storytelling? It beggars belief that these Nosferatu wannabes were included.

The film also has more flawed logic in it that any other Trek movie to date. The buggy scene is ridiculous. Why in Gods name do they do their reconnaisance in a dune buggy when they’ve got shuttlecraft?

Why does Commander Riker lead the security team to fight the Reman invaders on the Enterprise? For that matter, why does he have a fist fight with a Reman on a catwalk over a bottomless pit?

For what is supposed to be a farewell to The Next Generation, the supporting cast barely get to wave goodbye. Gates McFadden gets almost no screentime, and the film is dominated by Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner. Gone is the friendly ensemble of my beloved TV show.

The tone of this movie is completely wrong, Star Trek is not a dark and violent universe. What happened to the happy, fun and intelligent future, where mankind explored the stars – instead we get a dumb, dark, doom laden, sub par and derivative action film. We even find out that the Remans are unusually light sensitive – if they’d beamed onto the well lit TV set of the regular show, they wouldn’t have been so effective in combat. Why do our usually quite intelligent heroes not turn up the blasted lights?

The Enterprise is being shadowed by Shinzon’s cloaked ship and is desperate to rendezvous with the fleet for protection. On the way, they enter an area of space/plot contrivance where long-range communications don’t work. Rick Berman blamed the poor performance of Nemesis on ‘franchise fatigue’, but that’s a lazy excuse that holds no water. There’s not an original idea in this wretched film. In Star Trek VI, there was a ship that could ‘fire whilst cloaked’. Janeway rammed her ship into another one in Voyager, Data had a ‘brother’ in Datalore.

Also, Shinzons motivations make no sense at all. He should hate Romulans, not Picard.

 

[Paradise City]

Shinzon's motivations is that he's disturbed that he's a mere duplicate of someone else. He wants to be the real McCoy. More practically he wants to harvest Picard to keep himself alive.

We know about the planet Reman since TOS and if they are a slave race they'll be kept out of sight, doubly so, as Romulus has been in isolation for decades until The Neutral Zone episode -- and even then they remain a power that jealously guards their privacy..

 

[Nyotarules]

I like watching it on TV, never understood the hate it received. So there are plots holes , name one Star Trek movie or TV episode that does not resemble Swiss cheese?

 

[captainkirk]

Shinzon's motivations is that he's disturbed that he's a mere duplicate of someone else. He wants to be the real McCoy.

Go back and watch Time Squared. He just murders his temporal clone when stunning him would have been sufficient. Apparently there's only enough room in the universe for one Picard.

 

[mos6507]

If you look at it purely on the basis of the Shinzon / Picard scenes I'd say there was some good stuff there, especially compared to crap like Insurrection. But the fact it cost so much money and was meant as a proper sendoff, well, it was anti-climactic. I think by that time the TNG brand had been severely tarnished and it was going to take a lot of hard work to pump it back up again. It was a daunting task. I was surprised when I found out a new movie was coming out. It just seemed...long in the tooth. Sort of like the last X-Files movie. I had sort of emotionally moved on from being a TNG fan by then and filed it away in the "dead franchise" bucket.

 

[Shinzon4u]

Star Trek Nemesis is all kinds of wrong, it is truly bad. Firstly, it’s disrespectful to the Trek faithful. When we first meet B4, no one inquires if it’s Lore – Data’s ‘brother’ who we meet on numerous occasions in the TV show. They act as if they can’t believe that they’ve discovered another Soong android! This is even more ignorant because in the episode ‘Inheritance’, we discover that Data’s ‘mother’ is also an android – and is more advanced than Data. All this could have been covered with a couple of lines of dialog, so as not to ‘confuse’ the casual viewers.

The film’s main protagonists are the Remans, ‘brothers’ of the Romulans. Why had we not heard about this warrior race in the (at this point) previous 36 years of Star Trek storytelling? It beggars belief that these Nosferatu wannabes were included.

The film also has more flawed logic in it that any other Trek movie to date. The buggy scene is ridiculous. Why in Gods name do they do their reconnaisance in a dune buggy when they’ve got shuttlecraft?

Why does Commander Riker lead the security team to fight the Reman invaders on the Enterprise? For that matter, why does he have a fist fight with a Reman on a catwalk over a bottomless pit?

For what is supposed to be a farewell to The Next Generation, the supporting cast barely get to wave goodbye. Gates McFadden gets almost no screentime, and the film is dominated by Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner. Gone is the friendly ensemble of my beloved TV show.

The tone of this movie is completely wrong, Star Trek is not a dark and violent universe. What happened to the happy, fun and intelligent future, where mankind explored the stars – instead we get a dumb, dark, doom laden, sub par and derivative action film. We even find out that the Remans are unusually light sensitive – if they’d beamed onto the well lit TV set of the regular show, they wouldn’t have been so effective in combat. Why do our usually quite intelligent heroes not turn up the blasted lights?

The Enterprise is being shadowed by Shinzon’s cloaked ship and is desperate to rendezvous with the fleet for protection. On the way, they enter an area of space/plot contrivance where long-range communications don’t work. Rick Berman blamed the poor performance of Nemesis on ‘franchise fatigue’, but that’s a lazy excuse that holds no water. There’s not an original idea in this wretched film. In Star Trek VI, there was a ship that could ‘fire whilst cloaked’. Janeway rammed her ship into another one in Voyager, Data had a ‘brother’ in Datalore.

Also, Shinzons motivations make no sense at all. He should hate Romulans, not Picard.

They do mention B4 though.

 

[pfontaine2]

Frankly, I've always kind of liked Nemesis. Yes, there are scenes I'd prefer were not in the film but in general I like the scope of the film and a lot of the thematic elements. I felt it was ambitious and exciting yet there were certainly elements I was disappointed with. With such a large ensemble cast, there's always characters who are going to get short-changed but other films handled the ensemble better. If I had to give it a score, I would personally rage it a 7 out of 10 but of course your mileage might vary.

 

[cardinal biggles]

Is Nemesis unfairly criticized? No.

For me, the film's greatest sin is that it's just so meh. Insurrection, despite all its flaws, I enjoy more because it feels like a throwback to TNG of old. Same with The Final Frontier, which suffers the sin of trying too hard, and (bad VFX and awkward humor aside) ends up a noble failure.

Nemesis feels like it's phoned in. I never really bought into the forced relationship between Picard and Shinzon. They finally get the great Ron Perlman in a Trek movie, and it's in a totally wasted shit role as the Viceroy. Hack extraordinare John Logan's story is blah, and perhaps most telling is Stuart Baird's direction -- this was a gig Paramount owed him as a favor for doing uncredited "rescue edits" of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Mission: Impossible 2. He didn't give two craps about Star Trek, nor did he attempt to (unlike previous outsiders to the franchise such as Harve Bennett and Nick Meyer).

Nemesis isn't MTS3K-worthy because at no point is it so bad it's good. it's not even so bad that it's bad. It's just there.

 

[Vger23]

I like Nemesis I don't, even to this day, understand why it is so reviled. It's in many ways the best TNG movie...or at least tied with FC (which, conversely, I believe is unfairly praised).

Since fanwanky things like "where's Sela" and "how come nobody mentions Lore" and "dune buggies are teh sux!!1!1" don't particularly bother me, I guess I find myself fortunately more equipped to enjoy it.

I've made this point many times before, but if we held TWOK to the same basic standards that Nemesis is bashed for

"How does Khan know Checkov...continuity -- ARRRGHGGHH??!?!!"
"Too much pew pew and explosions"
"How come we've never heard of Carol or David before???"
"Far too many plot conveniences and contrivances!!!"

...TWOK would also be in the hallowed halls of "worst movie ever cut lose upon humanity" category some fans put Nemesis in.

I'll take Nemesis over GEN and INS every single day.

To each their own, I suppose.