Unfortunately, the producers of DSC and PIC have decided that dark and depressing is how their shows should look as well.
Star Trek: Nemesis at 20 - Has Your Opinion Changed Over the Years?
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Unfortunately, the producers of DSC and PIC have decided that dark and depressing is how their shows should look as well.
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No, it's still at the bottom of my Star Trek movie list. I was excited when I saw it on the big screen, since that was the first Star Trek film I got to see in theaters, but that wore off quickly once I actually thought about it. To me the film is just so much wasted potential.
Depending on which day you catch me, I rate it 11th, 12th, or 13th. It shares My Bottom Three with INS and ID.
I saw this in the theater when it came out. I ranked NEMESIS as 10th place back then... dead last.
It currently holds 11th place now. (ST '09 and STID are 12th and 13th, respectively.) At least it's not dead last anymore, but that's only because two other films were actually worse.
It currently holds 11th place now. (ST '09 and STID are 12th and 13th, respectively.) At least it's not dead last anymore, but that's only because two other films were actually worse.
NEM had the potential for a very thrilling story. Picard gets cloned by the Romulans for a sinister infiltration plot but the project was abandoned and now the clone is a rudderless boat headed for disaster. Sadly the screenwriters couldn't craft a terribly good script and the direction further failed the movie's hopes and ambitions.
As an ambitious two-part episode in TNG this could have possibly been something great. As a theatrical film it just flounders and leaves you deeply uninvolved in most of what's happening.
As an ambitious two-part episode in TNG this could have possibly been something great. As a theatrical film it just flounders and leaves you deeply uninvolved in most of what's happening.
The movie stills feels tired as hell, which makes the action scenes feel almost desperate. The chase scene is serviceable but hardly going to give a Mad Max movie a run for its money. The space battle has great VFX but dramatically it has nothing on TWOK, TUC, Yesterday’s Enterprise, Year of Hell or The Die is Cast. Screaming shield percentages, stopping the action to have a cheesy moment for Deanna, having Picard make a ramming move that barely makes sense and adds nothing to the plot since it doesn’t even work… that’s not good drama.
Baird didn’t get the characters, the dialogue is turgid, Picard and Shinzon’s scenes have no fire, all the Romulans characters are boring AF, Data’s arc is unsatisfying, what little humor there is falls flat.
The plot is not interesting. Picard has a clone who is mad and dying, wants to blow up Earth, and must be stopped. Insert some retreads of previous Trek plots, notably The Undiscovered Country and Violations. They had 3 years before production started and this is the best they could come up with. John Logan is a talented writer of dramas and historical screenplays. He has absolutely no flair for genre fare, especially sci-fi, and has proven it over and over again.
It’s just not aging well. Still sad to see the TNG film franchise go from feeling fresh and untouchable in 1996 to worn out and past it only 6 years later.
Baird didn’t get the characters, the dialogue is turgid, Picard and Shinzon’s scenes have no fire, all the Romulans characters are boring AF, Data’s arc is unsatisfying, what little humor there is falls flat.
The plot is not interesting. Picard has a clone who is mad and dying, wants to blow up Earth, and must be stopped. Insert some retreads of previous Trek plots, notably The Undiscovered Country and Violations. They had 3 years before production started and this is the best they could come up with. John Logan is a talented writer of dramas and historical screenplays. He has absolutely no flair for genre fare, especially sci-fi, and has proven it over and over again.
It’s just not aging well. Still sad to see the TNG film franchise go from feeling fresh and untouchable in 1996 to worn out and past it only 6 years later.
For me, one of its biggest sins is the fact it left me feeling absolutely NOTHING when Data died. Heck, even the death of a minor character such as Ziyal on DS9 affected me more than this. The whole ending was such a shameless rip-off of TWOK (and the fact it took, what, half an hour for the Scimitar to deploy its weapon was almost in the realm of parody)—and so cynically manipulative that it fell utterly flat. You can’t help but feel sorry for the cast (minus Stewart and Spiner). The material they were given was incredibly poor. It ended TNG on such a sour note. I have high hopes that the next season of Picard will redeem that.
The following is NOT a reflection of Tom Hardy's performance:
One reason why the clone idea is naff is because Shinzon looks and sound nothing like Picard. The movie's attempt to explain the differences was an even stronger reason that trying for a clone wasn't the best idea. Now if they had thought about Patrick Stewart in a dual role, would it have been any better as TNG/DS9/VOY loved doing split screen action action action? (Not with the other contrivances shoved into a proverbial space more tight than a sardine tin.)
Even the idea of a clone would have worked better if they didn't try to play it out past-tense, with him locked up in the middle of a prison planet, where he managed to cobble up the GOAT and somehow nobody noticed even a blip, either energy emanations or even materials vanishing - least of which being all the very people who put him in prison to begin with, whom he promptly killed. Shinzon didn't have the whole of the prison on his side...
A few small tweaks easily could have saved this film, rendering it more than a handful of cool set pieces and ideas mucked together badly. Not sure what was worse - the directing or the scripting, and I'd swear Skyfall was still a lucky fluke, where its plot issues (holes and/or conveniences, of which there are many) are more easily overlooked (due to its direction?!)
Some "dark'n'depressing" is okay. TWOK handled it surprisingly well. So did TOS: "The Omega Glory" has a goofy ending thanks to it being an original unused pilot dug up and reused, but it starts out pretty dire too with a creepy and horrific death sentence that still gives chills to this day, with plotting handled fairly well. "Charlie X" also ramps up the horror element, and it's no less dark and depressing to have an unstable teenager with godlike powers used maliciously and partly due to him being a teen and acting out of angst...
I didn’t hate NEM to begin with. I thought it was infinitely better than INS, which isn’t a high bar to cross, but it was still a more likable movie by my particular tastes.
I think I like NEM about as much as I did when I I saw it on opening night. Yes, the plot is contrived and silly in parts, but if I could love and accept the ridiculous plots of the two films that followed (09 and ID), then I certainly can’t hold those things against this one.
I think the look and feel of this movie is the most cinematic the TNG movies ever got. The action scenes are well done, and have a dynamic element to them that we never saw on the show or in the previous movies. I thought there was some touching stuff in there from a character perspective as well.
On the other side though, with 20 years of reflecting and information about the movie available to us…it is absolutely mind-boggling that this wasn’t a better film. Most of the cut scenes should have been included or swapped in for other less relevant material. It’s like they deliberately cut out all of the good character moments that would have added weight and meaning to the film, and they left in an inane mix of plots and sub plots. That’s one of the things I’ll never understand.
On the whole, I put it just underneath FC in my ranking of TNG movies. GEN had its heart in the right place, but was even more of a tonal and structural mess than NEM (despite a great performance by William Shatner and Sir Pat) and INS was a feature-length “Aquiel” -level of boring and bad.
I think I like NEM about as much as I did when I I saw it on opening night. Yes, the plot is contrived and silly in parts, but if I could love and accept the ridiculous plots of the two films that followed (09 and ID), then I certainly can’t hold those things against this one.
I think the look and feel of this movie is the most cinematic the TNG movies ever got. The action scenes are well done, and have a dynamic element to them that we never saw on the show or in the previous movies. I thought there was some touching stuff in there from a character perspective as well.
On the other side though, with 20 years of reflecting and information about the movie available to us…it is absolutely mind-boggling that this wasn’t a better film. Most of the cut scenes should have been included or swapped in for other less relevant material. It’s like they deliberately cut out all of the good character moments that would have added weight and meaning to the film, and they left in an inane mix of plots and sub plots. That’s one of the things I’ll never understand.
On the whole, I put it just underneath FC in my ranking of TNG movies. GEN had its heart in the right place, but was even more of a tonal and structural mess than NEM (despite a great performance by William Shatner and Sir Pat) and INS was a feature-length “Aquiel” -level of boring and bad.
Starting at 17:33 Steve Shives goes through a pretty good examination of how NEM aped INS and its story structure but wound up a considerably inferior movie. NEM is often called the TNG version of The Wrath of Khan but it's actually a lot more like its immediate predecessor in the franchise, and not in a lot of good ways.
Yeah. Other than Data dying (the "Spock" character of TNG), and time marching on, I don't see much similarity between TWOK and NEM.
If anything, I see more of a parallel between TWOK and FC in the sense that FC is like TWOK in reverse: The Captain wants revenge instead of The Villain. Both films are also sequels to episodes from their respective TV series.
Then there's the other similarity: TWOK is the best TOS Film and FC is the best TNG Film.
If anything, I see more of a parallel between TWOK and FC in the sense that FC is like TWOK in reverse: The Captain wants revenge instead of The Villain. Both films are also sequels to episodes from their respective TV series.
Then there's the other similarity: TWOK is the best TOS Film and FC is the best TNG Film.
I remember writing this for a review way back in 2002. Sadly, the producers of Discovery and Picard don't seem to have gotten the memo! 
"The tone of this movie is completely wrong, Star Trek is not a dark and violent universe. What happened to the happy, fun and intelligent future, where mankind explored the stars – instead we get a dumb, dark, doom laden, sub par and derivative action film. We even find out that the Remans are unusually light sensitive – if they’d beamed onto the well lit TV set of the regular show, they wouldn’t have been so effective in combat. Why do our usually quite intelligent heroes not turn up the blasted lights?"
"The tone of this movie is completely wrong, Star Trek is not a dark and violent universe. What happened to the happy, fun and intelligent future, where mankind explored the stars – instead we get a dumb, dark, doom laden, sub par and derivative action film. We even find out that the Remans are unusually light sensitive – if they’d beamed onto the well lit TV set of the regular show, they wouldn’t have been so effective in combat. Why do our usually quite intelligent heroes not turn up the blasted lights?"
To be fair, the bridge looked dark in every movie from TUC to NEM. So the thinking was probably that they wanted DSC and PIC to look more like the movies. I prefer the dark look. Though not in GEN, only because I don't think it suits the Enterprise-D. A bright-looking bridge would've gone against the mood in FC and NEM. To be fair, even though I'm not too keen on the dark E-D, having a bright-looking set would've gone against the mood of GEN as well. INS is the only TNG Movie where I think everything looking bright would work.
I think the way things look has to match the tone of the story being told. Especially in a film where you don't have to have the same look from week-to-week.
First Contact on the Enterprise-D, looking like an episode of TNG, being lit like one, being directed like one, and having the same type of bland soundtrack most of Star Trek had at the time would've killed the whole movie.
I think the way things look has to match the tone of the story being told. Especially in a film where you don't have to have the same look from week-to-week.
First Contact on the Enterprise-D, looking like an episode of TNG, being lit like one, being directed like one, and having the same type of bland soundtrack most of Star Trek had at the time would've killed the whole movie.
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Yeah, I agree - you need the movie lighting, rather than the lit for TV look. BUT - these baddies are sensitive to light, so crank up the lights! It's a more intelligent and 'sciency Star Trek' approach than blasting them with phasers.
And there's more illogic to trample on Roddenberry’s dream. The Enterprise is being shadowed by Shinzon’s cloaked ship and is desperate to rendezvous with the fleet for protection. On the way, they enter an area of space/plot contrivance where long-range communications don’t work. Data and Picard note this and then, well you can guess what happens. Not to mention that Riker kicks the evil Reman off the catwalk and into a bottomless pit…..........on a starship.
To quote Mr Data, 'I hate this!'
It’s a shame too, because at its heart, there is something worth making here. Ultimately it’s a story about ‘nature versus nurture’, and about what makes us who we are.
Why did the bad guys on the planet where they found b4 look like remans
The natives of Kolarus III just happened to look reptillian and similar to Jem'Hadar. Just another example of Trek aliens of the week transferred to the big screen.
I here this from a number of people, and I always scratch my head. Trek has, in my experience, done a mix. It can be fun, and violent; intelligent and dumb, dark and light. Trek, especially TOS and even early TNG, flirted with the darker aspects of humanity and didn't flinch away from them. Hell, the episode of TNG I recall the best as a younger was a Q one where Wesley gets speared through by an ugly Napoelonic dressed soldier. That's fun? O_o Or Picard shooting himself. Or going further back with McCoy having to kill the last of a species, or Kirk watching helplessly as an enemy commander must kill himself out of duty.
Nemesis may be a poor Trek outing, but it definitely didn't get the tone from nowhere. It's all throughout Trek history.
And them being pre-warp?
Another trope of Trek that always comes in handy when our heroes have to visit a planet to do something important and then get out as fast as they possibly can. The crude Kolaran dune buggies helped sell the feel they were stuck in their own solar system or even on their own planet for the time being.
I always thought NEM was fine. Not spectacular, but fairly solid by odd-numbered Trek movie standards (if you accept the theory that Galaxy Quest is the secret tenth Star Trek movie that threw the curse out of sync). I'm honestly more bothered by the fact that it's really brought down by Baird's direction. If Frakes had taken the risk of being typecast and agreed to direct a third Trek film, same plot, same script, I'm sure it would've come out better, just by having the cast have a little more fun (it's amazing to think that the same amount of time separates Farpoint and NEM as Corbomite and TWOK, and everyone seems so much more tired in NEM than in TWOK, the movie about how old the crew was getting), and better editing choices from someone who had more of a feel for TNG (it's more horrifying to think that if the post-wedding meditation on life, death, and the finite span of time between them had been included in the final cut, the first season of PIC probably would've never happened).
That reminds me, there was a thread about whether PIC improved your opinion of NEM in retrospect. It actually lowered my opinion of NEM, because without NEM, we wouldn't have gotten a weird fix-fic of a season.
That reminds me, there was a thread about whether PIC improved your opinion of NEM in retrospect. It actually lowered my opinion of NEM, because without NEM, we wouldn't have gotten a weird fix-fic of a season.
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