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Nero: Worst villain in a Star Trek movie yet?

Oh, no - not the worst. But pretty ordinary, too. This wasn't Bana's faul. He just wasn't given enough to work with. I've said this in other threads so forgive me for repeating myself, but because he wasn't given very much to do other than look menancing and tormented, he was basically the Standard-Issue Scifi Villain.

It's too bad - he looked fab, the ship was gorgeously evil-looking, and Bana's a good actor. It was a waste of a Romulan, if you ask me.
 
I think Bana did the best he could do with what he was given, and made Nero watchable at the very least. I do think he came across as a bit too two-dimensional in the film, which glossed over his back story and motivations, thus lessening the character. In the Countdown comic, Nero is given much more focus, and it allowed me to appreciate the character a little more, but that's of no help to those who didn't read it. I think it would have fleshed him out significantly if they had incorporated more of the info presented in the comic into the film, but alas, that's not what happened.
 
you'll find more on Nero when they release the DVD according to the writers in a recent interview.

Like in deleted scenes do you mean or are they going to do a feature about his characters past in the special features?
 
Nero was just and rip off Shinzon and he was hardly a great villain to begin with. The villain was one of my gripes of the film.
 
I think Nero was quite a good villain if i'm honest and open about it but he definitely needed more screen time and more lines to say.
 
Nero was just fine. He wasn't meant to be a military genius or someone with a grandiose plan for ruling the universe. He was just a madman fixated on getting revenge on Spock for an irrational reason. Nothing more.

And I was actually happy the writers took that approach. It seems like every Star Trek movie as far back as I can remember has tried to introduce a villain who would be "the next Khan," and in the case of the TNG movies, they not only failed miserably at creating a great villain, but they also made the main characters into pale caricatures of themselves.

For once we got a movie that didn't even attempt to make the villain the focus; Nero's purpose was just to set the plot in motion; the movie was really about Kirk, Spock, and crew.

The writers can try to create "the next Khan" in the sequel if they want. (Heck, I guess it could actually BE Khan.)

Also, in any list of the Trek movies' worst villains, you can't ignore Robert from Star Trek IV. How could he send the whales away without even letting Gillian say goodbye to them?! :mad:
 
I didn't like him much at all the first time I watched the film. But Nero didn't seem that bad on second viewing, but I can't say if that's because I appreciated him and Bana's portrayal more or because my expectations had already been sufficiently lowered.

I think Nero's best moment was the scene where he killed Robau. After that he fell off. He was a weak villain. Kruge, Chang, Borg Queen, Soran, Shinzon and Ru'afo all had more depth. In particular, Shinzon and Ru'afo seethed in a way Nero never really did. I'm still off put by the "Hello I'm Nero" line or him calling Pike by his first name.

One of my friends thought it was a way that Nero showed disrespect, and a poster on one of these forums thought it was Nero being true to his humble roots, but I still didn't care for the line.

There was too much of Nero's backstory not explained. If you didn't read Countdown, you wondered where did a miner get a ship like that? And where did that ship come from? Even the Scimitar looked something like a Romulan warbird, a mutated one perhaps.

There wasn't enough time spent on Nero, showing his pain, his hurt, and how that twisted him into a man bent on revenge. He was a poor man's Khan, without the charm or the backstory to build on. I think Nero's character would've been better served with a couple scenes set in the 24th century Countdown-style to show his relationship with Spock before things went sour, so that the audience can get a better understanding of why he hates and blames Spock so much. I think part of Spock's retelling of how he failed to save Romulus should've been said by Nero.
 
There wasn't enough time spent on Nero, showing his pain, his hurt, and how that twisted him into a man bent on revenge. He was a poor man's Khan, without the charm or the backstory to build on. I think Nero's character would've been better served with a couple scenes set in the 24th century Countdown-style to show his relationship with Spock before things went sour, so that the audience can get a better understanding of why he hates and blames Spock so much. I think part of Spock's retelling of how he failed to save Romulus should've been said by Nero.

I agree completely! Having a bit of Nero before he went so crazy with revenge would have added alot to his character.
 
I'd have to agree. He was basically a one dimensional stereotypical bad guy in black, in an otherwise fairly good movie. Granted some of the past villains where kinda lame, like pretty much any one that appeared in a TNG film. Nero is just a shade more inexcusable because he couldn't break the cycle.
 
Nero was just fine. He wasn't meant to be a military genius or someone with a grandiose plan for ruling the universe. He was just a madman fixated on getting revenge on Spock for an irrational reason. Nothing more.

And I was actually happy the writers took that approach. It seems like every Star Trek movie as far back as I can remember has tried to introduce a villain who would be "the next Khan"

Nero's quest for revenge owes a lot to Khan. However, I agree that the "simple man," hard-working miner idea is a good one.

That said, based on the movie alone, the audience is hardly aware that this is the case. It is mentioned once briefly in passing by Nero, and I would guess most casual viewers would emerge from the theater having retained nothing about the character other than his desire for vengeance.

He is at best a functional villain who can easily be identified as villainous and is suitably foreboding. In the end he is not too different from the Red Matter he uses: a plot device stripped to the bare minimum of functionality.
 
Sadly, whilst I didn't think Nero was that bad, it did seem like a giant waste after casting someone as good as Bana.
this pretty much how I feel about it. I think Bana did great thing with the character, but an actor like him could have done so much more of Nero was given a bit more thought by the writers
 
I don't think he was the worst villian...I'm going to give that distinction to Shinzon (no offense to Tom Hardy but Patrick Stewart should have been given the chance to play his own clone) with Sybok a close second. Nero was pretty ordinary, and I think his motivations for doing what he attempted were pretty classic. He'd lost his homeworld, his wife and his unborn child. Of course that would enrage anyone...especially when no one seemed to be able to prevent it or take action to prevent the destruction of Romulus (I highly suggest people read Countdown for Nero's back story...also the novelization has his Romluan name as Oren with accent points on the O and E making it translate into Nero in Federation Standard). Eric Bana did a great job with what he had...I'm sure that the Klingon Prision sequences were deleted and hopefully restored on the DVD. I would have liked to have had a brief scene where Nero explains how a simple Romulan mining vessel becames a colossal warship (again read Countdown for those who want the non-cannon answer).
 
I liked Nero and like others have said, he isn't supposed to be the Joker of Star Trek. He is more like Liam Neeson's villain from Batman Begins. Ras al ghul wasn't the best Batman villian, though he too had a plan to destroy the entirety of Gotham just as Nero wanted to destroy Earth and Vulcan.. etc...

Ras and Nero are merely a villain for these characters to fight in order to come together. So in my mind he may not compare to Khan, but that doesn't bother me, they each had a different function.

By the way, who is the villain in Voyage Home? The probe? the police from the hospital? ;)
 
Not the worst, the "god" who shoots laser beams from his eyes takes that trophy by a wide margin.

Nero was an awesome bad guy to everyone except the anal cannon crowd.
Do you even have a clue what you are talking about? I don't give a damn that this movie changed the canon, I don't like the fact that it was a bad movie with a bad villain. Stop spreading crap.

Sybok was...a character of depth and complexity...

Wrong. He was a zero. :)
Sorry Dennis, but you are being mightily unfair on Sybok. Don't get me wrong, I think that TFF is a terrible movie and certainly worse than Star Trek, but Sybok did show a level of complexity that most antagonists in Trek movies did not. At the very least I can credit him with realising his mistake at the end and sacrificing himself to help the others escape, none of the other Trek villains did anything even remotely like that. Sybok is not a good villain but he wasn't bad and was certainly better than Nero.
 
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