Then what part of Trek are you really enthused about?
What sunk the TNG movie franchise: Insurrection or Nemesis?
- Thread starter The Overlord
- Start date
Then what part of Trek are you really enthused about?
that's interesting, I think, like it or dislike it, that Generations has a very big and cinematic feel to it.(the meeting of Kirk and Picard, the Enterprise crash, the Nexus effects and the effects in general, etc.) It's also a great-looking film.
TOS and TNG, for the most part.
The films have been disappointing overall, right out of the gate.
I was really let down by TMP. It didn't reflect the best elements of TOS at all.
I really enjoyed TWOK. However, while TWOK brought character development of Kirk and Spock to the fore, more effectively than TMP did, there were many other (less important) aspects of TWOK that were completely incongruous with TOS, and not in a good way.
Swerving back towards being on topic, I think jayceee is right that GEN set the TNG part of the movie franchise off on a rocky start. I was certainly underwhelmed by it; it wasn't really that much of an improvement over TUC, which is really faint praise.
FC was certainly a significant step up, but there was a lot that I hated about it. I could let the reimagining of Zefram Cochrane slide, but revisiting the sort of sloppy time travel tropes that populated TVH—but without the redeeming element of an overall tone of light-hearted comedy—was really irritating to me. Nevertheless, FC is the zenith of the TNG part of the film franchise, as far as I'm concerned.
Ignoring the lackluster script of Generations, I only recently came to notice how good the special effects were for its time, from watching the blu ray version.
The older VHS and first dvd version (ie. non-anamorphic widescreen) I watched previously, looked rather awful.
Let's look at it through the box office. Ralph Winter believed TFF was so bad it almost killed the movie franchise. But as bad as many say it was, TFF still had the best opening weekend of any Trek movie to that point, and it made some money. On a budget of $30 million, TFF grossed $70 million, worldwide. So it wasn't a box office bomb. Just an unfortunate follow-up story to TVH. And, it justified doing a sixth movie.
INS was not a box office bomb, either. Its opening weekend brought in $8 million less than FC, but it still made $118 million, worldwide on a budget of $70 million. Not a great margin, but not a loss, either. That was only about $2 million less than GEN had brought in, though GEN had almost half the budget. If there was a problem, it was FC brought in considerably more money on a smaller budget. Like TFF, INS was simply a bad follow-up to FC, not really a sign that the franchise losing public interest.
The problem is, NEM was a bomb. Period. NEM barely covered its $60 million budget in worldwide gross. Personally, it's the only Trek movie going back to TMP that I never saw in the theater.
If NEM had at least made some money, any money, there could've been sound justification for another TNG movie for the crew to go out on. Instead, I think Paramount took it as a sign that he TNG franchise had played out its creative juices, fan interest alone could no longer sustain the box office, and it was time to put Trek on the shelf for a while.
Box office and budget information were taken from The Numbers. http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/series/StarTrek.php
INS was not a box office bomb, either. Its opening weekend brought in $8 million less than FC, but it still made $118 million, worldwide on a budget of $70 million. Not a great margin, but not a loss, either. That was only about $2 million less than GEN had brought in, though GEN had almost half the budget. If there was a problem, it was FC brought in considerably more money on a smaller budget. Like TFF, INS was simply a bad follow-up to FC, not really a sign that the franchise losing public interest.
The problem is, NEM was a bomb. Period. NEM barely covered its $60 million budget in worldwide gross. Personally, it's the only Trek movie going back to TMP that I never saw in the theater.
If NEM had at least made some money, any money, there could've been sound justification for another TNG movie for the crew to go out on. Instead, I think Paramount took it as a sign that he TNG franchise had played out its creative juices, fan interest alone could no longer sustain the box office, and it was time to put Trek on the shelf for a while.
Box office and budget information were taken from The Numbers. http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/series/StarTrek.php
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The post is self-explanatory no? I thought everyone knew what cinemascore was. Don't get in a huff because you were proven wrong.
Critically it's one of the highest rated blockbusters ever. Certainly the best received ST movie ever. The numbers bear it out (wtf are you looking at??)...no legs to stand on there. Top critics were at 93% fresh.
Actually, I wasn't found to be wrong. As per the discussion, CinemaScore provides no data to support what Star Trek fans in general thought about Nemesis. It only measures audience reaction on opening night.
Further research indicates that CinemaScore uses its score to predict box office returns for the film. Their results are behind a pay-wall, so we can't know whether their prediction was accurate in the case of Nemesis.
They also acknowledge that crowds on opening night tend to rank movies more favorably than at other times. That's another reason why your statement, that people who saw the film liked it, isn't an accurate statement. That may have been true on opening night, but we have no data for audiences on other days.
Given the existence of other data indicating an overall negative reaction to the film, the fact that CinemaScore claims that opening night ratings are skewed high, and the fact that the movie tanked, there's reason to doubt that veracity of the claim that "people who saw it liked it."
http://articles.latimes.com/print/2009/oct/13/entertainment/et-bigpicture13 discusses how the score is used to predict returns and how ratings are skewed high on opening night.
http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=daily&id=startrek10.htm demonstrates that most tickets sold for the film domestically were not on opening night. Further evidence of Nemesis bombing at the box office can be found there.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_trek_nemesis/ provides evidence of a negative critical reaction, and nonscientific evidence of negative audience reaction.
And Mr. Ebert hasn't seemed much for action films lately, I believe.
Seriously?
I think my answer to the original question has been posted already. Insurrection was too episodic and not epic enough. It had a good premise, also as described in this thread, but the execution was small and juvenile.
Again, as mentioned, Stewart's and Spiner's meddling in the creative process was not helpful especially with Nemesis. If Data sings, the movie is pants. Nothing about Nemesis made sense, not the Romulan clone plan, not B4, not the motivations...
I'm still convinced that the core of a decent TNG movie exists somewhere in the deleted scenes of Nemesis. Sure, we're still stuck with that damn Argo scene on the planet. But some of those missing scenes have got a lot of heart that the movie desperately needs to off-set the sheer stupidity that Baird actually left in his final cut.
I was very surprised how good all the deleted scenes were and how much more they focused on the characters. Too bad Baird took a knife to the film!
But the 2009 film did well because for the first time in a long time, it made Star Trek fun.
I completely agree. I liked TNG as a TV series, but really disliked the movies, because the tone and pace of TNG just didn't work for a movie format, in my opinion. And to me, it felt like everyone was trying to reinvent their characters in the TNG movies - Picard is suddenly doing action scene after action scene in contrived situations, suddenly being portrayed as a rule-breaker when we had seen him be quite conservative in the TV show, go-karting on a planet in a dune buggy ... Worf is threatening to kill Picard for calling him a coward ... it all pulled me out of the story... I felt like I was watching one of those TV reunion shows, where the actors or writers seem to be creating charicatures of their former character roles, rather than something new... The exciting frontier exploration, adventure, and action feel of the original series was what a movie needed, and when TNG tried to replicate that in their movies, it didn't work...
But the 2009 film did well because for the first time in a long time, it made Star Trek fun.
I completely agree. I liked TNG as a TV series, but really disliked the movies, because the tone and pace of TNG just didn't work for a movie format, in my opinion. And to me, it felt like everyone was trying to reinvent their characters in the TNG movies - Picard is suddenly doing action scene after action scene in contrived situations, suddenly being portrayed as a rule-breaker when we had seen him be quite conservative in the TV show, go-karting on a planet in a dune buggy ... Worf is threatening to kill Picard for calling him a coward ... it all pulled me out of the story... I felt like I was watching one of those TV reunion shows, where the actors or writers seem to be creating charicatures of their former character roles, rather than something new... The exciting frontier exploration, adventure, and action feel of the original series was what a movie needed, and when TNG tried to replicate that in their movies, it didn't work...
Good points.
Beverly was an afterthought in all the movies, sadly. The writer's need to keep Picard single for the movies really harmed their relationship.
The really tragic thing about Nemesis in particular though is that while the good doctor was effectively overlooked in both First Contact and Insurrection (and the fans made sure the production team knew it), the script for Nemesis actually gives her a terrific part. She's the closest member of crew to Picard, on a personal level, and those deleted scenes show it. We don't really get a feel for Picard's angst over being cloned in the final cut, whereas those scenes where Beverly gently reminds him that he and Shinzon are different people is a gentle reminder of the closeness of their relationship. As are their scenes together at the wedding, and the spiritual coda with her keying him in from Starfleet medical ("Jean Luc... save the last dance for me.") Gates even says in the DVD special features that she actually recognises Dr Crusher in the script of Nemesis, unlike the previous two movies where she was just 'there'. But alas, Stuart Baird cut out all her scenes. They finally had a story where Crusher had a key part to play, but they blew it anyway.
Nobody came away from Nemesis intact though. People talk about the TNG movies being 'The Picard & Data Show', but even their story arc got ruined by the director's scissors this time around. I almost subconsciously make allowances for the deleted scenes now whenever I rewatch it, so at least the idea of Data trying to help his little brother along by performing the memory upgrade makes sense to me in context of the missing scenes where he tries to teach B4 to mature, instead of just coming out of thin air as a bizarre plot device intended to carry the actor through to the (non-existant) sequel like it does in the final cut. As I've said before, you know a TNG movie really went wrong when even Brent Spiner's plot got ruined in the editing room. :facepalm:
Had to make room for the dune buggy somehow. 
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