Nemesis

By a marginal amount. I still would have hated it.

 

Oh man, I didn't notice I made a typo, "as if" instead of "as is." But I like it that way, it's funnier.

 

Well, I think that would be a bit stale in some respects. In all of the movies there was always a character, an antagonist or someone else who played off the crew or acted as the jump off point for the plot and were major players from Khan to the Borg Queen to Ilia to Jillian from "The Voyage Home." A major supporting role more or less. Outside of the minimal Viceroy character, you'd basically just end up with a film featuring almost exclusively the TNG cast members and two of them were playing basically themselves twice! At least with Tom Harding, he gave it a little of a dynamic and made it feel like, while this is still Picard's clone, he was someone different from the TNG grew making it a bigger dynamic cast wise, even if he didn't look squat like Patrick Stewart.

Now, if the Viceroy character was more upfront and more of a main character and not just the guy who grabbed Shinzon's head when he felt like it then maybe I could see Stewart playing him.

We didn't get a chance to see that scenario, so who really knows. But that's my take.

 

Which is yet another example of how bad the script was. It was as if Logan didn't think his audience would see Picard and Shinzon as mirrors of one another. He actually had to tell us.

Stewart's salary already took up a big portion of the budget. If he had played both roles, he would've demanded even more money. And since the budget was already pretty high, that would've forced the producers to make cuts in other areas.

 

If Stewart had played his twin, we could have had a plot twist worthy of "the last TNG film". Instead of Data dying and basically being replaced by his twin, Picard could have undergone that treatment!

All the better if this happens in secret, with Picard nobly giving his life for the greater cause, and Shinzon equally nobly taking over where Picard left off and carrying the Federation flag to the future, with nobody ever learning about the valiant sacrifices. That'd be right down the "Gladiator" alley that everybody was expecting from Logan, anyway.

Timo Saloniemi

 

That would've been an absolutely terrible idea and the fans would've been incensed. The writers behind the last Terminator movie thought of doing this. Have John Connor die and then have Marcus don his face and pretend to be Connor.

The idea of one person replacing another and no one ever figuring it out is something I'd expect from a soap opera.

 

Agreed.

 

...OTOH, that was the basic premise of ST:NEM.

That is, the only reason Shinzon even existed was because the Romulans thought it plausible that he could replace Picard. Which probably wouldn't be that difficult, considering how Picard steered clear of intimate relationships, wasn't really in speaking terms with his family, and was going to be aboard an isolated starship for an extended period of time anyway by the time Shinzon originally was to be fast-forwarded to maturity.

Whether Shinzon could still have replaced Picard in the 2370s is a somewhat different question. Still, it went against the best Dostoyevskian traditions that Shinzon was born for the replacement mission yet this never came to be. It's almost as bad as having Q give Bond a device for opening a safe in two seconds, and there not being a single safe in the entire movie. (Or almost as good, depending on whether you prefer a classic plot structure or a contrarian plot twist.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

The Romulans may have thought it plausible, but would the audience have? Just imagine a clone replacing you. Would they come preprogrammed with every conversation you've ever had? Would they know all the passwords you've memorized? Would they know that you forgot to pay your rent last week? It strains credibility to think that you could replace someone without someone else becoming suspicious. Sooner or later, they're going to catch you in a lie or not knowing something that you should.

 

I don't think Stewart playing Shinzon would have worked too well. The one exception is Shinzon's death scene; Picard "freezing" in that moment would have worked a lot better if the dude dying in front of him, and saying that creepy "I'm glad we could be together in the end" line, was HIM. But other than that, nah...

That said, I was never too impressed with Hardy's performance in the role. And frankly, I still think the only real way to "salvage" the whole Romulan Picard clone plot was to scuttle it entirely. It just does not work. B4 CAN work, IF his role in the story is changed and the manner in which he enters the film is no longer part of an incredibly circuitous plan by the villain (also if someone mentions Lore at some point!), but I think Shinzon just can't. His interactions with Picard didn't play well, his motivations made no sense (he barely HAD any), he spent most of the movie acting like an idiot, and the idea behind WHY the Romulans supposedly cloned Picard in the first place was absurd (speaking of ridiculously circuitous plans...).

Heavily flawed, unworkable concept right from the start, IMO.

 

Though I agree that I don't think it would've worked to have Shinzon replace Picard at the end of the film, perhaps if he had replaced Picard sometime between Insurrection and Nemesis, that might have worked, so long as the real Picard is captain of the E-E by the end. I liked the idea of Stewart playing dual roles. Though I didn't have a problem with Hardy and thought he did fine, I think it would've been cool to see Stewart be bad.

As for Terminator, I thought that idea was ingenious. I never got how the humans beat Skynet anyway, but if John Connor actually wound up being a machine, I could see how he might able to outthink Skynet. Plus, it would be a nice full circle kind of thing. And it would've been ballsy to do, and created an interesting set up for another round of movies. Unfortunately, Salvation went the safe route and left the Terminator franchise feeling a bit tired and been there,done that.

 

Many a popular movie is based on the idea at least. Starting with 1950s Cold War classics.

The Loganesque twist here would of course be that good triumphs in the end - that even though Picard gets killed and is replaced by Shinzon, it's for the greater good. Sort of like Sisko becoming Gabriel Bell.

Timo Saloniemi

 

And since the "clone" turned out to look nothing like Picard, we have a cast-iron reason for the Romulans shelving the daft plan.