Nemesis is better than Insurrection: Convince me otherwise.

[Jeyl]

it hit a spot for me, continued some things set up in DS9 (closer ties with the Romulans) and added to it (telling us that Remans were used as cannon fodder - wonder what the Federation thought about that eh....)

They'd probably be more concerned about how, despite being enslaved to mine in caves and be used as cannon fodder, the Remans...

A. Managed to build a ship with more firepower than the Ent-E, more advanced cloaking technology than the BoP prototype and house a planet annihilating weapon BEFORE the Romulans did.
B. Find the time, resources and technological know how to build a secret base to build said ship.
C. Discover Thalaron and weaponize it to such a degree that they can selectively kill everyone in a single room to destroying a planet's entire population.
D. Gain the medical expertise to not only pick up the 'abandoned' Picard Clone project, but also gain the knowledge to see the medical procedure through.
E. Decide to wage a genocidal war against the Federation.
F. Gain control over the entire Romulan Empire.
F. Follow a Human clone as their leader who will kill his fellow Reman officers who failed to notice something that he himself also failed to notice.

This is why I like Khan. He only had a handful of his people to help him gain control of the Reliant and had to steal the Genesis Device in order to gain the upper hand on those who would oppose him. But even with that, he didn't know fully how the Reliant worked and lacked the experience that would have given him the edge he thought he had over Kirk.

Shinzon just gets a super duper ship with a bunch of "i win" buttons and only fails because he's so incompetent at everything.

 

[TheAdmiralty]

Agree with a number of comments here that Nemesis is better because there's a good movie hiding in there somewhere, whereas Insurrection is just all around misguided.

Nemesis should have dropped the "this time it's personal angle" with cloning and just had it be about the Remans doing a coup and then trying to genocide the Romulans. As a user towards the middle of the thread noted could have been an Undiscovered Country type situation having to overcome their bigotry towards Romulans. Picard made some uncharacteristic comments about Romulans on the show, essentially implying no Romulan could ever be trusted, and of course there's Worf. Would have also been interesting to do if they'd made Romulans the villains in Insurrection as was originally planned, then the prior film was Picard rebelling against a Federation alliance with the Romulans and then he has to decide to take their side in the next one. That also drops the awkward situation with the Son'a, where they were also from the planet and were expelled which makes the morality of the whole thing a lot more grey when the movie isn't going for it being grey at all.

Nemesis was also the first Trek movie since TMP to really feel like a "major motion picture" in terms of production values and not like a two part TV episode. Still has major issues of course that have been discussed extensively.

What is it with Trek films and mind rape? TUC had one too. And, perhaps, made even worse by the fact that it's one of the good guys doing it. Even Nicholas Meyer says he looks back on that scene with regret today.

That's not a "mind rape" in the vein of what Shinizon was doing. Spock was taking information out of her mind to save lives, he wasn't forcing her to think sexual thoughts about him. But yes, Berman did seem to revisit the mind rape concept several times (Violations on TNG, Nemesis, and an Enterprise episode) which makes me side eye him a little.