This is my first thread: Do a Nemesis Rewrite.

[I am not Spock]

I don't mind the Remans. They can stay, but I did want to see more of the Romulans. Trek movies, in my opinion, have never really given the Rommies their due. They were promised in NEM, but we only got the Nosferatu looking Remans, and their whiny bald leader.

The deleted scenes should have been left in. Especially the Picard/Data one after the wedding.

Guinan and Wesley should have got more to do at the wedding. And if you're going to put Wes in a Starfleet dress uniform, AT LEAST explain why the hell he is wearing one. Did he get sick of being a Traveller, or what? What was the deal with him? Also, there should have been more guests at the wedding. O'Brien, for one.

Janeway was OK, but I agree about getting rid of the nods to FC and INS. See, I don't get the hate for Janeway's role in this film. The Trek universe needs to learn to open itself up a lot more, and include more of these crossovers.

And if you're going to put in the lame B4 subplot, why didn't they at the very least MENTION Lore? 'Are you sure this is a good idea, Captain? After all, remember a certain evil doppelganger of Data? Cough:Lore: Cough'!

 

[Dukhat]

One of the main problems of this movie was the total lack of explanations for things.

1. Who the hell were the Remans, and why the hell have we never heard of them before? Were they offshoots of the Romulans, or an alien race that was already living on Remus when the Romulans colonized Romulus? The film gives no explanation whatsoever. And if they were the original Romulan settlers, why do they look so different from Romulans? There's no way they should have evolved to look that different from Romulans in only 2,000 years, no matter how harsh their planet was. Obviously they look the way they do for "shock effect," basically "they MUST be evil if they look like that!" but they ended up as cardboard villains. It's hard to feel sympathy for them being enslaved when they came across like that.

2. What was the point of the Romulans cloning Picard twenty years ago? From what I remember, it was supposed to be an accelerated-aged Picard, so that he'd be the same age as the real Picard in just twenty years. But why would they have thought Picard would be important twenty years down the road? And how did they get Picard's genetic material twenty years before?

3. What's Shinzon's motivation? He talks about freeing the Remans and taking revenge on the Romulans, but then all of a sudden he wants to attack Earth? Why? What did Earth ever do to him? Unless Donatra and her allies wanted to attack Earth, but why would Shinzon really care what they wanted, since he was only using them to get what he wanted? (I know he also needed Picard's blood, but if he had half a brain in his head he would have known that Picard would have given him a transfusion had he simply asked for it, instead of his convoluted plot to steal it from him.)

4. And on the subject of convoluted plots: Shinzon finds B4 (again without an explanation as to how), and decides to use him both as a lure for Picard and a way to access the Enterprise's info. So the point here is to get B4 into Picard's possession quickly. So how does Shinzon do this? By breaking B4 up into different pieces and planting these pieces all across a planet with incredibly hostile natives, making it extremely hard for Picard to retrieve B4. What kind of a stupid plan is that? Why didn't he just place B4, intact, floating in space in the Enterprise's flight path for Picard to easily pick him up? (Because then we wouldn't have had that stupid dune buggy scene).

5. Where did Shinzon get the raw materials to build the Scimitar, and why didn't the Romulans know about this really large warship being built right under their noses? And did the Remans build it in their spare time or something, as if a slave has any spare time?


Janeway was simply a glorified cameo for Kate Mulgrew. The lines she spoke in the movie could have been spoken by anyone, since she makes absolutely no mention of events in VOY at all.

 

[bintak]

1) More actual character development at the beginning. Horray for R and D, maybe touch on any devlopments between P and C... and explain what's up with Wes being there and in uniform.

2) The destruction of the Romulan Senate has to be redone. I doubt security would be that lax. Maybe nuke it from orbit with the Scimitar and devastate the Romulan capital?

3) Janeway can stay but her comments about the last two movies have to go. Make it seem like more time has elapsed.

4) The scene on the planet where they recover B4... Ok the Argo can stay but do away with the chase scene. Maybe show the scooter/dunebuggy as having some actual scientific equipment.

5) Shinzon's condition. Do away with that. It was just silly to want to steal Picard's blood.... Don't they have artificial blood by then? Maybe transfuse Picard's blood slowly while replacing it with replacment synthectic blood in a controlled procedure? Nahh, just do away with this.

6) Shinzon's sudden quarrel with Earth. His beef should have been with Romulas. The Enterprise nearly paying the ultimate price hig above a long-time Enemy's homeworld would have been poetic, and fitting the true nature of Trek IMHO. I mean, the E-C went down saving Klingons and look where that led.

7) The final battle with the Romulan warbirds... Yes we KNOW the Scimitar is tough but we don't need it to wipe the floor with two throw-away ships. It would have been better if a Romulan and a Starfleet ship worked together to bring down the Scimitar. Keep the ramming scene for #8.

8) The boarding action, Since we're doing away with the whole need to abduct Picard we can finally see the vaunted Starfleet Marines in action. They board to take the ship down from within, and discover a doomsday device aimed at the Romulan homeworld.

9) Data, being quick of hands and full of Science beams over to deactivate it but he cannot and the only thing he can do is take control of the Scimtar and move it out of orbit where the Very Bad Thing dissaipates harmlessly (and he dies) while the Enterprise is in a decaying orbit.

10) Two Starfleet ships followed by half the Romulan fleet arive and tractor the E-E to a higher orbit saving the day.

*shrug* What do I know? I just like epic battles with a sprinkling of character development here and there.

Actually you have a very good notion of where the movie plot should head than either that tyro, Logan, or braindead Berman had.if we have to stick with the stink story with which they started.

For one thing, your vision is more Trek than the actual Nemesis, more like what a true Trekker writer might write, than the bilge story we received.

One thing I might suggest should go. Thalaron radiation? That stupidity just sucked any hope of taking Nemesis on a level, as even farce, away from me.

Radiation that turns flesh to stone?

Never mind the B4, or the other garbage in the story that a script surgeon can fix in rewrite; I despise the utter contempt that this writer and this director had for us, the audience, when they pulled that piece of utter crap out of their "imaginations" and showed it to us on the screen.

Anyway, I like your story ideas very much.

That gives us now two possible rewrites:
a. The slave as holograms revolt seeking their Human rights within the Federation, with Shinzoin the Picard hologram anti-hero as their Spartacus champion.
b. The original storyline minus B4, the Argo, the kitschy Remans, but involving enslaved Romulan subjects with a Human captive "Spartacus" Shinzon leading their mass revolt, with the Federation caught in the dubious moral position of having to help the Romulans against their slaves, lest the "jihad" Shinzon unleashes, plunges the alpha quadrant into total war and destroy everyone in a mass bloodbath involving something realistic like genetic warfare or an exploding star that he would set off as a gamma ray bomb as a terror weapon.

Civil rights in one plot, or the conflict between civilization with its sometimes attendant evil that comes with order and total anarchy, are tweo Trek stories worth telling.

Either one of those stories, you could make into a good script that not even Patrick Stewart or Rick Berman could screw up.

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

b. The original storyline minus B4, the Argo, the kitschy Remans

I've always imagined that the Remans were introduced in Nemesis so that Enterprise could eventually have a Romulan arc without our heroes meeting any Romulan. Maybe I'm wrong.

 

[cardinal biggles]

2. What was the point of the Romulans cloning Picard twenty years ago? From what I remember, it was supposed to be an accelerated-aged Picard, so that he'd be the same age as the real Picard in just twenty years. But why would they have thought Picard would be important twenty years down the road? And how did they get Picard's genetic material twenty years before?

There's two main reasons I've been able to come up with for them going after Picard at that point in time:

1. They targeted him specifically because of information extracted from Tasha Yar. The Romulans captured her along with the other survivors of the Enterprise-C at Narendra III, and if they were somehow able to ascertain that she was from the future, they could have realized that this Captain Picard would be very prominent in 20-30 years. Of course, that's assuming Tasha would give up such information, so it becomes a bit iffy there.

2. Picard was one of many young up-and-coming Starfleet officers who the Romulans tried to clone. As people died or ended up with less prestigious commands over the years, maybe genetic material was thrown out, or other clones were banished as well, and Shinzon was the one who made it the farthest (because of Picard's prominence) before a new government's change of policy led to his banishment on Remus as well.

 

[Peach Wookiee]

Those are some good theories, biggles.

 

[Gibraltar]

And why Earth as the target? If, as Shinzon supposedly did, you really hated the Romulan people and wanted to mess with their mindset, wouldn't Vulcan be a more appropriate target? After all the Romulan people have supposedly always yearned to either reconcile with or conquer their cousins, haven't they?

It's just the Earth in Jeopardy threat has been so overdone in Trek that it would make for a nice change of pace to threaten another Federation world.

 

[Peach Wookiee]

Earth just matters to everybody...That's why they keep doing it. But showing the Battle of Betazed could've been cool...

 

[I am not Spock]

Yeah, the 'Earth is the centre of the universe' story got very old in Trek. I would have liked to have seen the battle of Betazed on screen, or, as mentioned above, an invasion of Romulus or Vulcan. Hew-mons, they think they are the be-all and end-all of everything.