Nemesis is better than Insurrection: Convince me otherwise.

[Qonundrum]

I finally got around to watching the 4K of Star Trek Nemesis. I'm sorry to say that the movie has dated real bad. It has a distinct "digital" look, weird considering that it was shot on film. As for the movie itself, it has a more consistent tone than Insurrection, but that tone is maudlin and Nemesis feels weirdly cheap and made for TV.

The early-2000s started the all-digital recording instead of film, and about a decade later all theaters had to migrate to digital projection systems. I remember seeing "Skyfall" in the theater and gradient banding in an evening sky (yep, it was teal) was a telltale giveaway.

The reason I dislike Nemesis more than Insurrection though really comes down to the plot hole and inconsistency. Why doesn’t anyone simply tell the computer to turn up the lights, which would blind the photosensitive Reman! Riker and the Viceroy have a manly fight and then the Viceroy is sent plunging to his death, like Palpatine. He plunges down a shaft that'd make the Enterprise about 100 decks tall.

On the plus side, that makes one of the worst gaffes in STV palatable by comparison.

The story is loaded with plotting problems, too many to count. The setup for Shinzon is so outlandishly contrived that it's amazing he doesn't turn to the camera and pretend to be Dark Helmet or Mr Roper.

There's the horrible trope of disfigurement equalling evil, the comical time it takes to fire the Thaleron thingy.

Possibly; everything relies on shallow ideas with contrived origins being "cool" or captivating, which it isn't. A few rewrites to get rid of excesses and contrivances would have improved this immensely. I didn't equate the trope of "disfigurement = evil", my mind was too much on "Shinzon is a discarded attempt to clone Picard for big gambit we never ever saw but put on a prison planet that's also the second class citizen planet (Remans) where he and a handful of people are able to build the bestiest bestest ship ever with no sensors in the galaxy making alarm bells over the amount of frigging radiation or energy emission... Let me guess: Big super-dee-duper megamegaship had the shields that even the shield's shield energy emissions won't be detected by anything-- goes back to the same theme of "big big bad, because reason". Even PIC3 did a better job at making it easier to roll along with, which it generally did quite well... NEM blundered mostly because it's mired down in origin story minutiae that just don't add up or hold up in this flick.

And Nemesis also comits the worst sin possible - it's a copy. A copy of TWOK and TUC - moreso even than the derided STID, which was actually trying to say something about drone strikes and America post 9/11. This film should be about nature vs nurture, but that debate is lost in all the silliness.

Many plot beats and then they copy and paste TSFS's absent friends speech, all of which was beyond hokey.

NEM deserved better. Tom Hardy got a raw deal and he worked a lot to get Shinzon to sparkle against the banal plotting. The movie was on the right track and there is a good story buried within it. I wonder when NEM went from a simpler draft into overload.

The saddest thing is, IMHO, NEM is better than INS, but INS's discarded rough draft is still better than NEM as filmed.