Problems with Nemesis

[ancient]

David cgc said:

Putting aside that a boarding party is totally unnessessary to begin with.

This must be some new definition of the the word "totally" which doesn't include "last ditch effort to steal Picard's blood." Because, aside from that, there wasn't any reason to send the boarding party. I can understand how you might've overlooked that, considering it was only Shinzon's entire reason for ambushing the Enterprise rather than heading straight to Earth.

If they can beam in, they could just as easily beam Picard out.

But these nitpicks are not the point anyway. The movie just wasn't any fun to watch. Hell, I love TFF even though it's almost as nonsensical. I can forgive Chuck Norris style plots as long as the movie is fun. Nemesis I found to be both bland and nonsensical. That is the main reason I find it poor. And once you don't like a movie, you tear it apart at the seams for not making sense either.

The same goes for any movie. Take the Star Wars prequels. If you found them fun, the lame stories don't matter to you. On the other hand, if you think they are simply annoying, you won't forgive the story holes either.

 

[Ssosmcin]

I know new folks to the BBS aren't up to speed on all posts. But, jeez, it's been 5 years and everyone has the same complaints and opinions about the film that they've had since it came out. It reminds me of how, after a while, I stopped reading interviews with James Doohan because I can only hear how Scotty is "99% Doohan and 1% accent" so many times.

We should pin a thread that says, these folks think Nemesis sucks and why and these folks think it doesn't. And leave it at that. I read these things hoping to get new insight, but it's the same responses over and over and over. It's like listening to arguments between religious people and atheists. Just sayin'.

Sorry, forgive me. It's late and I'm out of Chex.

 

[ancient]

Hey, we need to repeat ourselves for the newbies.

 

[cardinal biggles]

And for those of us who haven't been keeping score the past five years.

 

[Computer]

David cgc said:

ancient said:

And while we're picking nits, notice that the slug line says it's "NIGHT." If the Remans are so sensitive to bright lights, why didn't Riker and Worf just crank up the ceiling lights to maximum intensity? Or bring their palm beacons and shine them in the Remans' faces? Could have made their job a lot easier.

And we clearly see that corridor force fields do still exist when Data does his space flight so...er...quarantine shields up? Anybody? Hello? Echo...echo...echo...

Yes. I see your point. The Remans would clearly have been stopped by such measures. If only they had had some sort of... device... which could emit dangerous energy in a directed fashion for destructive purposes. A... directed energy weapon, if you will. If they had a "gun" of this type, they could've destroyed power and security systems that impeded their progress, reducing the lighting level on the decks and defeating any forcefields that were in their way.

However, since it's clearly impossible that a heavily armed boarding party might've shot some shit up while making their way through a ship that was in the process of having the crap kicked out of it, I suppose the only possibility is a gigantic plot hole. The idea that we may have been intended to understand that the Remans (or any other boarding party in the history of Star Trek that had a security team respond to it, rather than being penned in by forcefields) had the ability to defeat standard intruder control measures is too fantastic to contemplate.

Computer said:

David cgc said:
Of course, the crew we see in AGT is not the same crew we saw at the beginning of "Encounter At Farpoint."

That was called progress.

So the changes in the seven years TNG was on the air was "progress," but the changes in the eight years between the end of the show and Nemesis wasn't? Right.

You must've hated the TOS movies. "Why is captain Kirk all mopey and desk-bound in TWOK? A mere eleven years ago, he was a vital action hero, and since we haven't seen the intervening decade, clearly he should be exactly the same as we left him!"

To be honest Ive only seen a couple TOS episodes so their development as a cast never really stuck out to me, i pretty much always took them at face value in the movies since I never knew their personalities to begin with.

 

[Timo]

For me, the fight between Riker and the Viceroy is the one part that makes perfect treknology, plot logic and drama sense. Shinzon wanted Picard alive, desperately. Without using lethal force, the best he could do was to punch a hole in the ventral shields of the E-E. Inserting a team there would be possible even when extracting Picard from the dorsally located bridge would not. And of course said team would then fight its way up the ship ASAP, disabling security measures and turning down the lights wherever they went.

What makes little sense (on this particular subject - the other nonsensical items shall go unmentioned here) is how Shinzon seemed to consider kidnapping Picard a low priority for the first three-fourths of the movie...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[David cgc]

Timo said:
Inserting a team there would be possible even when extracting Picard from the dorsally located bridge would not.

Even if he had gotten rid of the shields around the bridge, would he have been able to just snatch Picard out of there? Even the Borg needed to send in a couple of drones to physically capture him.

 

[ancient]

Timo said:
For me, the fight between Riker and the Viceroy is the one part that makes perfect treknology, plot logic and drama sense. Shinzon wanted Picard alive, desperately.

For someone so desperate to keep Picard breathing, he...well, blows a huge hole in the bridge of the Ent-E, just so he can have a staring competition. Which doesn't make sense even if he didn't care what happened to Picard.

Shinzon was written as a total boob for the entire length of the movie.

 

[Timo]

Oh, no disagreement about that. It's just that, once things get to the part where the Viceroy roams the E-E, they briefly start making sense, sort of.

Which in itself makes sense, sort of. The henchman is much better off and acts more logically when rid of his idiotic commander.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Sean Aaron]

My problems are really more with the run of TNG movies rather than just Nemesis, but Nemesis is really the capper.

The subject of the TOS movies was raised and I would be surprised to find fans that don't consider them the best written and directed series of Trek films and the reasons aren't hard to see. Basically you had no show for close to 20 years and the fans were there and the show had a life clearly beyond expectations of its creators. The main strength of the films (at least the 2-4 arc) was the willingness to be freed of the constraints of the show. You had real character development and major chances were taken (killing Spock, splitting up the crew, etc.). The fact that the story continued made it even more compelling.

This is part of why, for me at least, Star Trek V was such a disappointment as it looked like we were building to major conflict with the Klingons over the Genesis planet incident and it gets deflated for a bit of fun. I enjoyed the interaction between the three principles, but the story itself felt like a major non-sequitor. Star Trek VI was a nice send-off and had some of that flavour of the core arc for TOS. Really the show and characters were reinvented in a positive way whilst respecting the continuity from the tv series.

TNG on the other hand seems to have been handcuffed by its success as a television show. Major character development in the form of Data's emotion chip in Generations gets undone apparently because people at the top thought that they could get back casual fans by presenting the crew as they were in the show -- basically they were scared to take the characters beyond the constraints of the show. Picard's character arc seems largely defined by tragedy. I still don't understand why his family needed to die in Generations for the sake of his identifying with the antagonist played by Malcolm MacDowell. Surely their shared experience with the Borg would have sufficed. The use of Kirk to "bridge the Generations" felt completely forced. I personally saw no need to "hand the torch." I thought that was nicely covered by Spock in the tv show. It results in the entire plot feeling rigged just to enable the meeting of Picard and Kirk and its not very compelling.

Firt Contact had some nice development with Data and good central plot, but my main problem with that is Picard's characterisation as being hell-bent on revenge in a completely unsubtle nod to Moby Dick despite the fact that we saw him seemingly deal with his Borg-related demons in "I, Borg", and this disregard for events in the series leaves such a bone in the throat that I don't own the film on DVD and haven't seen it in years.

Insurrection had some fun moments, but the central story was not compelling and really better handled in the tv series when the plight of the colonies in the Cardassian-Federation DMZ was first explored in TNG and later DS9. The bit where Picard confronts Anthony Zerb's character was cringeworthy. The Federation Council's backing of the operation was just a throwaway line and didn't convince me; there just weren't enough Federation personnel backing the Sona to make this position convincing or make it look like anything other than a rogue Admiral's operation. The villain was quite good, but then he's a good actor and I felt he rose above the material.

Nemesis really left me angry after all of this. You have the promise of the Romulans taking centre stage and yet our introduction to the Romulan "Senate" makes it look more like the Romulan coffee klatsch with poor backgrounds (especially bad on a big screen were the detail is clearer than desired in this case -- makes one wonder if they were filming with an eye to how it looked on a widescreen television on DVD) and a less than half-filled chamber. As is typical of much modern cinema there is no 1st act. We see the Senate and they get assassinated. We have little to no background on the antagonist or anything else. If we were bringing back a villain from the tv series like Tomalak or the head of the Tal Shiar from DS9 this would be forgiveable (a la Star Trek II), and even that wouldn't be so bad, but again Picard has to have some kind of bout of ennui in the film so let's make it a clone and have him fret about whether or not he has the same darkness within him. Very poor concept for a story with Picard, a man who in the course of the tv series probably had more than his share of soul-searching to be strongly affected in the way portrayed. It's really not convincing and feels like an excuse to have the space battles that dominate the film at the expense of actual plot. Again, this kind of story would have been better told in a two-part tv teleplay. And not to be a major dig, but just something that struck me was how old the principles looked in the film; given the subpar plotting it added to the impression of a tired franchise running out of steam. The Riker/Troi wedding was cut down far too much; Worf on the bridge is a complete non-sequitor and even the throwaway line to address this (which was from deleted wedding scenes) isn't compelling. The discovery of B4 or B9, whatever, seemed totally unnecessary except as a get-out clause to bring back Data; time that would have been better spent on making a better main story and greatly reduces the magnitude of his sacrifice at the end. The Troi psychic-rape scene was equally pointless if only to give the character more screen time, but it doesn't serve the plot at all. And of course Crusher, as usual, might as well not even be in the film.

The fact that the ensemble nature of the tv series is completely discarded in favour of the Picard and Data show is also a great disappointment. I think the lack of an arc a la II-IV leaves these films feeling like big-budget sub-par two-part tv episodes; and in the two-parters the ensemble nature of the show still comes through. The TNG films just don't feel like major events considering they come in the wake of an impressive body of work; as such they should have been bigger and bolder than they were instead of just trying to vainly exploit casual fans of the tv show and bring in non-fans with crass space battles and explosions. It's a tired horse to beat, but Voyage Home didn't have one goddam space battle in it; it's a good show with a good message and is driven by plot, PLOT DAMMIT! I don't understand how that lesson could have been so badly forgotten.

 

[mahler5]

What about the Prime Directive. Any explanation for the violation?
This was VERY poor storytelling.

 

[Nebusj]

mahler5 said:
What about the Prime Directive. Any explanation for the violation?
This was VERY poor storytelling.

I guess I'm stumped for trying to think of any way that Picard's Supercar adventure in Eegah's territory would change the course of the planet's natural development. I realize there are people going to try saying, ``Well now their scientists are going to go full-bore working on antigravity hovercars and they'll probably build super star-destroyers in ten years now instead of being as non-evil as aliens wearing heavy latex appliques can possibly drag themselves into being'', but that makes quite a few really wild assumptions about a society that I can't see holding up.

 

[mahler5]

Did they not open fire on the "native" inhabitants?

 

[cardinal biggles]

I thought that was only after the "natives" started shooting at them.

 

[Peach Wookiee]

^I can't remember where I saw it, but there was a situation like that in a sci-fi mag in the 90's.
Two Starfleet officers had been captured by a primitive society, and as they're in a huge cooking pot, one of the officers says, "Right now, I say to heck with the Prime Directive, let's break out the phasers!"

 

[cardinal biggles]

Sounds like something that would have been in one of those single-panel cartoons they'd run in Starlog.

 

[phrog]

Meh. I've participated in threads on this board, other boards, conversations in real life, instant messenger, etc. as to why Nemesis was inconsistent, stale, error filled, and overall a pain to watch... so I won't get into listing it here again.

Suffice to say, there's only one way I'll be watching it again in it's entirety... the day Rifftrax releases a Nemesis track.

 

[cardinal biggles]

I was going to say something along the lines of "The only way I will ever watch Nemesis again is if I'm totally shitfaced before the film even starts," though I might be willing to pony up for a Rifftrax.

 

[blockaderunner]

Charles Trip Tucker III said:
So what if the crew is well past their prime? Aging isn't a bad thing.

No one said it was (I'm aging as we speak). The problem was that NEM, heck, all the TNG films, never acknowledged aging and mortality as part of the human experience (INS even went as far to use the Fountain Of Youth angle to avoid any aging concerns) to the extent that the TOS movies did. They knew they were getting old and they knew the audience was smart enough to see that, so the writers used that to their advantage with comedic and dramatic effect. The TNG films, probably following the trend set by fans who refused to believe that their immortal heroes could never grow old and die, amped up the action (which TNG was never about, with some exceptions) in a hilarious and vain attempt to make the characters appear young. It just ended up looking like a Rolling Stones concert: Pathetic and laughable to all but the most hardcore and rose-colored glasses wearing fans.

 

[Sean Aaron]

To be fair blockaderunner, the central theme of Generations was mortality, although a bit forced with the unnecessary massacre of Picard's family and the unnecessary inclusion of Kirk.