Star Trek Novels and Canon

[Christopher]

Although it is quite amusing to see Picards childlike glee as he drives it for the first time.

Not to me. Because that doesn't seem in character for Picard. It's more like Patrick Stewart being self-indulgent and getting away with it because he's the star.

*doesn't get the hate for the Argo...*

I don't hate it...I just hate the way that it was used. Personally I think it's a pretty neat idea, and something that adds a little more depth to the Star Trek Universe, but I felt the set-piece it was created for was wholly out of place, and inserted into the movie as a way of artificially making its first third more exciting.

True. The dune buggy itself is not the problem with the dune-buggy chase. The problem is that they cut out a really vital character scene and kept in an interminable and utterly pointless action scene.

What's frustrating is that Star Trek was originally intended to be a dramatic series with a certain amount of action, but all the movies from TWOK on have been made under the assumption that it's an action-adventure series first and foremost. So there's a tendency to shoehorn in action at the expense of story.

Personally, I think the biggest mistake was taking as an assumption that they should cast someone other than Patrick Stewart to play Shinzon. Tom Hardy was thoroughly unconvincing as a young clone of Picard. If the role of Shinzon had been written with Patrick Stewart in mind, and we saw him play off against himself on screen (something which Star Trek has repeatedly done very well, particularly in TNG - Will and Tom Riker, Data and Lore), I think it would have gone so much further to be a good movie.

I don't agree. You get a better performance from two actors facing each other in the flesh and playing off each other's energy than you ever could from the same actor giving two separate performances (with some anonymous script girl reading the other part) and then cutting them together digitally. I agree that Hardy wasn't absolutely convincing as young Picard, but that's no worse an affront than the unconvincing depictions of space and physics in the visual effects. It's poetic license. Heck, I once saw a stage Hamlet where Hamlet was white and his biological uncle Claudius was black. That was unconvincing if you dwelled on it, but that's why they call it the willing suspension of disbelief.

What matters is the quality of the acting, and I thought Hardy did an effective job. The scenes between Picard and Shinzon were the high points of the film, and it was largely because these two actors got to play off each other in the flesh so many times. (People rightly compare this film to TWOK, but it avoided one of TWOK's biggest mistakes, which was never putting the hero and villain in the same room together.)

 

[Omega Particle]

I don't agree. You get a better performance from two actors facing each other in the flesh and playing off each other's energy than you ever could from the same actor giving two separate performances (with some anonymous script girl reading the other part) and then cutting them together digitally. I agree that Hardy wasn't absolutely convincing as young Picard, but that's no worse an affront than the unconvincing depictions of space and physics in the visual effects. It's poetic license. Heck, I once saw a stage Hamlet where Hamlet was white and his biological uncle Claudius was black. That was unconvincing if you dwelled on it, but that's why they call it the willing suspension of disbelief.

I would agree with you if we were talking about a play, but the nature of TV and movie-making is so disjointed anyway that there seems to be a lot of circumstances in which you don't get two actors playing off one another for any extended period of time.

I also think that Patrick Stewart's talents as an actor could have more than made up any deficiencies in lacking an actual second actor to play off, but that's probably just a taste point on which we'll differ. I was personally not overly impressed with Hardy and think there were certainly better actor/script choices to be made.

But that's all just a matter of taste about these circumstances, I think, and probably just because Hardy didn't quite sell it for me. After all, I may very well end up singing the praises of Zachary Quinto as a young Spock playing off against Nimoy in the new movie, so we'll just have to see.

 

[T'Bonz]

Gee, what yanked me out of the movie was the dumbshit plot.

Yeah, well that too.

I never could buy that Shinzon got out of the mines in the first place and was able to take over the Romulan government.

He would have never made it out of the mines. There was nothing to indicate how he escaped or won the loyalty of the Remans along the way.

Plus - unless the clone was "quick grown" somehow, it made no sense to me for the Romulans to have made a clone of Picard.

The whole movie was a clusterfuck. "Nemesis" was permanently eradicated from my personal Star Trek canon.

 

[SeerSGB]

Look at it this way, it could've been worse. They could have made Shinzon Lore instead, or they could hav had the clone been the clone of James T. Kirk.

 

[Christopher]

I never could buy that Shinzon got out of the mines in the first place and was able to take over the Romulan government.

He would have never made it out of the mines. There was nothing to indicate how he escaped or won the loyalty of the Remans along the way.

This was explained quite clearly in the film, in the conference room scene en route to Romulus. The Romulans used Remans as cannon fodder in the Dominion War, just as empires always use their subject races as cannon fodder. Shinzon was one of those "Reman" footsoldiers, and he proved himself a cunning and effective warrior, rose through the ranks, and won the respect of the Romulan military. (Something which also has plenty of real-world precedent. In the Islamic world, there are historical instances of slave soldiers rising to become the founders and rulers of whole empires.)

Plus - unless the clone was "quick grown" somehow, it made no sense to me for the Romulans to have made a clone of Picard.

It was clearly stated in the film that Shinzon was in his early 20s. 20-odd years before Nemesis, Picard would have already been a respected veteran commander due to his epic tour of duty aboard the Stargazer, so there's no reason why he wouldn't have been seen as a target for substitution. (Death in Winter actually established that he was sampled years before that, but that he was one of multiple high-ranking Starfleet personnel thus sampled.)

 

[JD]

I really think the Nemisis story really had alot of potential, if it had just been given to a better director, who actually knew Star Trek. IMO it's a bad sign when a director of a TNG movie doesn't even know that Geordi is human. As for the dune buggy scene, I really do think it was just badly written, and completely pointless.

 

[Omega Particle]

I really think the Nemisis story really had alot of potential, if it had just been given to a better director, who actually knew Star Trek. IMO it's a bad sign when a director of a TNG movie doesn't even know that Geordi is human. As for the dune buggy scene, I really do think it was just badly written, and completely pointless.

I agree that the Director has some culpability, but unfortunately even Christopher Nolan couldn't have turned the Nemesis script into a good movie. There were just too many flaws in the writing as well...

 

[BrotherBenny]

I really think the Nemisis story really had alot of potential, if it had just been given to a better director, who actually knew Star Trek. IMO it's a bad sign when a director of a TNG movie doesn't even know that Geordi is human. As for the dune buggy scene, I really do think it was just badly written, and completely pointless.

I agree that the Director has some culpability, but unfortunately even Christopher Nolan couldn't have turned the Nemesis script into a good movie. There were just too many flaws in the writing as well...

Actually, looking at the way Nolan has treated BB and TDK, I think the fall of the Romulan Empire would easily be developed by him. A script can be rewritten.

 

[MHJH]

Actually, looking at the way Nolan has treated BB and TDK, I think the fall of the Romulan Empire would easily be developed by him. A script can be rewritten.

Gotta disagree with you there. I tend to think that Nemesis and The Dark Knight have the same problem, namely that there's no real plot, just a bunch of events that happen one right after another. Though I'll give him this: A Chris Nolan Star Trek movie might be one of the prettiest damn things ever seen on a movie screen.

I'll say that Nemesis could very easily have worked as a film if it had any emotional resonance whatsoever, if you were given any reason at all to care about the characters in the film. Any amount of "give a damn" that was given by the audience to the Enterprise crew in that movie was left over from the TV show and the previous movies, and it just wasn't enough. An audience can forgive a lot of flaws in any movie if they care.

 

[Thrawn]

Actually, looking at the way Nolan has treated BB and TDK, I think the fall of the Romulan Empire would easily be developed by him. A script can be rewritten.

Gotta disagree with you there. I tend to think that Nemesis and The Dark Knight have the same problem, namely that there's no real plot, just a bunch of events that happen one right after another. Though I'll give him this: A Chris Nolan Star Trek movie might be one of the prettiest damn things ever seen on a movie screen.

I'll say that Nemesis could very easily have worked as a film if it had any emotional resonance whatsoever, if you were given any reason at all to care about the characters in the film. Any amount of "give a damn" that was given by the audience to the Enterprise crew in that movie was left over from the TV show and the previous movies, and it just wasn't enough. An audience can forgive a lot of flaws in any movie if they care.

Boy, you must have really missed the point of Dark Knight to say a thing like that!

But I do agree with the rest of your post completely.

 

[MHJH]

Boy, you must have really missed the point of Dark Knight to say a thing like that!

I suppose it's possible I missed the point, but while I enjoyed the movie as a whole, for the most part I just sat there picking out which pieces were lifted from which comic storylines. They didn't gel as a coherent plot for me, just a bunch of events. Batman Begins did the same thing for a "plot", but for some reason it worked there, but didn't work in the new film. YMMV, of course. I know I'm fighting a losing battle by criticizing that movie pretty much anywhere on the internets.

 

[Christopher]

Maybe the problem is that you were trying to compare it to the comics rather than judging it as its own entity. Given that it's a story with many comics influences, comparing it to the comics predisposes you to perceive it as a patchwork of multiple elements.

Spoiler: The Dark Knight spoilers

I found the film's story very coherent. It was the story of the rise and fall of Harvey Dent, paralleling with the story of Batman hoping to complete his mission and pass the torch, only to end up having to take a new burden on his shoulders. It was the story of the Joker rising as a counterpoint to Batman and Dent, working to undo the order those two men brought to Gotham and drag it back down into chaos, and inflicting terrible cost on those men but ultimately failing to destroy their legacy of a better, nobler Gotham. Yes, the various events came and went a bit randomly, and it did go overboard on the fast-paced action, but it all had unified character and thematic threads holding it together.

And why are we discussing this on the Trek Lit board? ...Oh yeah -- because anything's an improvement over the 57,942nd rehash of the canon argument.

 

[Thrawn]

Boy, you must have really missed the point of Dark Knight to say a thing like that!

I suppose it's possible I missed the point, but while I enjoyed the movie as a whole, for the most part I just sat there picking out which pieces were lifted from which comic storylines. They didn't gel as a coherent plot for me, just a bunch of events. Batman Begins did the same thing for a "plot", but for some reason it worked there, but didn't work in the new film. YMMV, of course. I know I'm fighting a losing battle by criticizing that movie pretty much anywhere on the internets.

I mean, it didn't follow a typical dramatic structure, it was just one long tragic spiral, so I can sort of see where you're coming from, but I actually think that was a strength of the film. There was no point where the heroes reached bottom and turned it around - every battle that was won, immediately afterwards it just got worse. But I don't think there's a single scene you could've removed and had Dent's downfall work as well as it did; everything in the movie built towards the end. At least as I saw it.

And I didn't mean to get all militant fanboy on you - I'm hardly a religious Batman follower, and there were lots of legitimate criticisms of The Dark Knight. I'd just never seen that one before, and really disagree.

Um... but... back on topic... Nemesis sucked?

EDIT: Or, you know, what Christopher just said, much more accurately than I.

 

[David cgc]

...and the Enterprise flying off, rather than being locked up in spacedock, it would have sent me out of the theater with a smile of my own, and a feeling of hope that the adventure will continue.

I'm going to need to punch the guy who edited those deleted scenes. The shot of the Enterprise flying around from the beginning of the movie wasn't supposed to be the ending. It was going to end with it "locked up in spacedock," which is why the camera spent twenty minutes dollying back ever so slowly through the front of the bridge— that was so the special effects people could complete the shot with the camera coming out through the hole in the bridge and revealing... the ship in spacedock. Then, pan up to starfield, dissolve in credits, and everybody get the hell out of the theatre.

 

[Christopher]

Well, deleted scenes can't contain FX footage that was never shot. Unless the DVD producers are willing to shell out big bucks to complete the FX, you're pretty much stuck with whatever they can piece together from existing footage.

 

[Geoff Thorne]

Maybe the problem is that you were trying to compare it to the comics rather than judging it as its own entity.

Quoted 4 Truth.

 

[Trilliam]

Although it is quite amusing to see Picards childlike glee as he drives it for the first time.

Not to me. Because that doesn't seem in character for Picard. It's more like Patrick Stewart being self-indulgent and getting away with it because he's the star.

I don't know....it screamed "MID LIFE CRISIS" to me...(which summed up the whole catastrophy, er I mean, movie - lives not lived, paths not taken...any other New Age rubbish cliche inserted here).

 

[David cgc]

Well, deleted scenes can't contain FX footage that was never shot. Unless the DVD producers are willing to shell out big bucks to complete the FX, you're pretty much stuck with whatever they can piece together from existing footage.

Yes, but at the very least, they could've used the actual final shot from the movie, which was a closer match to the concept than a completely unrelated shot of the ship flying around. If there was a rough animatic of the scene, or even a storyboard, that'd be even better.

 

[HappyDayRiot]

And why are we discussing this on the Trek Lit board? ...Oh yeah -- because anything's an improvement over the 57,942nd rehash of the canon argument.

I personally love Nemesis. For me, the subsequent books have made a lot of the 'plot' much more coherent and fleshed out, and... well, I'm a sucker for the big space battle at the end. And every time I see it I laugh out loud when Worf reads off the amount of firepower the Scimitar was packed

 

[Deano2099]

I'd actually been away from Trek for a fair while, so worked my way through all the "A Time To..." series before watching Nemesis for the first time and while it was noticeably inferior to the prior films and said books, the continuity errors weren't an issue for me and I didn't actually hate it. Probably won't ever watch it again, but there's not many films that I will.