It is a shame, but I don't lay any of the blame on Hardy whatsoever. I actually think his performance is absolutely fine, it was the script that was the problem.
Nemesis aka The lousiest villain ever!!!
- Thread starter Discofan
- Start date
It is a shame, but I don't lay any of the blame on Hardy whatsoever. I actually think his performance is absolutely fine, it was the script that was the problem.
The TNG films had a fairly horrifying knack for wasting good talent.
Malcolm McDowell
Alice Krige
F. Murray Abraham
Tom Hardy
The first two at least got some fairly meaty roles, though I wish we'd gotten to see a bit more pathos on Soran's part, but the second two were put into horrible cardboard villain roles.
I almost feel like F. Murray Abraham in particular would have been better cast as Ru'afo's second-in-command, who actually shows some character development during the film.
Malcolm McDowell
Alice Krige
F. Murray Abraham
Tom Hardy
The first two at least got some fairly meaty roles, though I wish we'd gotten to see a bit more pathos on Soran's part, but the second two were put into horrible cardboard villain roles.
I almost feel like F. Murray Abraham in particular would have been better cast as Ru'afo's second-in-command, who actually shows some character development during the film.
First thing's first, we need to keep in mind that the villain's name matches the scope of the movie and Shinzon is an amalgamation of - in no order - the words "zone" and "sh-- (wait, they can't say that word unless it's on that cartoon show with the creepy children who said it 90+ times in that one episode...)"
Shinzon's anger should be toward the Romulans who created but didn't humanely abort their little lab experiment in a highly contrived means to infiltrate Starfleet via a clone of Picard to teach them how to bake magic brownies or something.
Revenge also to those Remans for all the abuse they pummeled him with (but not the ones who helped him build that ship in the background with no sensor noticing a dang thing anywhere... or the TLDR moment: "this movie contrives so much in a shallow attempt to be deep").
Of course, let's humor the unstated notion that Shinzon might be insane (or at least using any teensy thing Picard loved to get him mad - so why not the woman from the season 6 episode or his fried family or the whole of "The Federation"(tm)" instead of a big blue lump in space before it became tealified...), but the script is so much bunkum in so many ways it's not much worth entertaining because - and here's yet another nitpick - using Earth out of the blue as a focal point for nothing more than a throwaway climax is just lame and Trek generally avoids that. Earth wasn't even peripheral in the script and nobody cared about the tree Picard etched his initials into before getting by Boothby not to or whatever that scene was...
That said, the movie has a couple set pieces but even "Conspiracy", which has a similar problem with "connect the dots" and "glossed over dialogue to get from point A to B", is still a better-crafted story and doesn't need huge epic-- sigh, and I like the ramming scene but it almost felt like they had a great idea to do a space ram and scribbled a movie around it.
I suspect psychology, Romulan in this case, is a little more complex. Or human psychology since the show can only do different things to only the extent that audiences won't bugger off out of indifference. Man, I watch too many British comedies, their euphemisms are too much!
As much as some of the screenplay writers lacked writing experience - or the best they could do was a plot hole-packed movie involving Roman times and only had great visual effects and thus won a ton of awards for being the best thing ever made... again, NEM is chock full of ideas -- way too many to be fleshed out properly and some were just too contrived to suspend disbelief over.
Oops, I should have started reading the next paragraph - I just covered some of this, LOL!
And just how many more did Soong cobble up and bury in various parts of the galaxy to begin with? By TNG season 7 it was beyond trite in "exploring Data's family"(tm) then we meet Data's "mommy" too. That dude had some ego problems man, with Lore as he was made first, all Soong needed to do was to reprogram the subroutines and other function and object calls instead of disassembling him and putting him in a dry ice locker with the butt now-understandably mooning the camera (and by extension the viewers) after Riker activated the door-open sequence, and there's never been a nicer looking virtual tush, but that's another story...
The script avoids it, because... drama?
But let's try something in-universe: California proposition 65 states wearing two of them will cause cancer. I suppose.
They just needed the story to go elsewhere instead of flowing organically from within.
Naah. Melodrama as rich and flaky as this puts all those tasty brownies and magical pie crusts to shame...
Pretty much. The tv trope of shoehorning someone in out of the blue doesn't exactly have much in any way other than "diminishing returns". Unless we can get a way to have people forgetting then those surprise twists won't diminish ever again. "Hey chef, get me some more of that brownie mix and add in the following ingredient'--" "Only if it's legal!" "It is in some states! So get some cheeseburgers for afterward too!"
Generally, even a crap story has one or two set pieces that still genuinely had some potential or were good. That ramming scene almost makes up for a lot in this movie-- but if this were the beginning of a 2-part movie, which it wasn't because the movie posters pretty much sledgehammered the audience with "the final journey blah blah blah", then whatever part 2 was and surely it would have been scripted to explain away so many of NEM's more bizarre issues...
Riker's whistle reference is probably to bookend TNG's premiere. It's a bookend as pointless as Shinzon wanting to destroy something completely unrelated to his problem (which Picard clearly was not, which reminds - this is the other set piece that's worthy in that Picard is tolerating and trying to find ways to accept him legitimately and completely. Shinzon is so off his rocker... yet for a crazy guy could still draw up blueprints and schematics for that ship and get it built with no sensor going "beep beep" anywhere...
x1000.
The TNG films brought in some great actors, who were hamstrung by questionable scripts that felt more like astroturf laid down for cast reunion shindigs where they forget about the audience (even the hardcore fans who, unlike TOS fans, didn't have to wait a decade for something new and in 1979 they weren't cliquing about either.)
Krige had the best of the bunch.
Abraham definitely hit a homer and you hit a nail on the head, being the 2nd in command may have brought more depth to him but those little scenes where Ru'afo tells of "eliminate them" just adds to a villainous nature (that's desperately needed, despite the 'sympathetic villain" fluff that INS was also unevenly trying for).
Making Soran the overdone trope of "sympathetic villain" without any depth, much less menace, just had McDowell at too great a disadvantage (the backstory was covered sufficiently in "Q Who" and given the El Aurians are so close to Earth, that begs other questions...) Deleted scenes added some villainy that were desperately needed. And, yes, Kirk's original death scene is a lot more powerful and proper tragedy than what was eventually put into the movie (complete with the unintentional pun about a bridge...)
As with Star Wars prequels, bringing in big names can only do so much if they're struggling with uneven scripts...
Tom Hardy's underplayed style actually helps a very poor script. To my understanding he had developed depression after this movie because of the low box office ratings. He was rightly so a breakout star, but NEM wasn't even bothering to try at this point in the franchise. But there are plenty of scenes where he nails it and then some.
Ignore the script - focus on the acting:
Hardy's good. Way too easy to see why he was cast. Removing some of the excess upchuck from the movie's overstuffed and half-baked scipt with those little lumpy chunks that show it wasn't quite stirred properly and NEM could have been truly, fully, and legitimately epic; spectacular on all levels and not just "the precious"... especially in getting Jerry Goldsmith back, a real coup for the production. Instead, the franchise left with a sigh after an inebriation-induced vomit at the bowl.
Never mind Data being written off and lines pinched directly from TWOK and TSFS, which only went to show how half-baked that half-baked NEM was...
Oh yeah,
Shinzon doesn't want the ship destroyed so what do they do? Go pew pew to where the ever-never-fragile warp core starts to light up like firecrackers.
Nitpick aside, the scene in of itself is surprisingly exciting, then comes the awesomeness between Stewart and Hardy. How they got the Scimitar built is still so contrived...Similar threads
