Why Is Nemesis Unpopular?

[Timby]

Most of all, though, the script is terrible, in plotting, characterization, and (especially) in terms of dialogue.

This is the biggest problem, really. I have no idea how John Logan keeps getting work, and if you ever need an explanation for why you never let fans write the movies, Nemesis is Exhibit A.

It's just such a lifeless and perfunctory script, with much of its beats being lifted from other (better) works:

- Generic dune buggy chase with Three Kings-style bleach bypass cinematography? Check!

- Picard touring the ship as it prepares for battle, delivering a solemn monologue? It worked great in "The Best of Both Worlds," let's do it again!

- Lore was a great "evil Data," let's have another Soong android except this time he'll be evil and dumb!

- Battle inside a nebula? Wrath of Khan did it, so we should, too!

- Battle against a cloaked death ship? Hell yeah, we're going to do this shit Undiscovered Country style!

- We need to kill the lovable science officer / captain's best friend, but he needs to make a heroic sacrifice to save the ship! Thanks for the inspiration, Spock!

- Oh shit, we need to have our version of "Remember" ... OK, stupid Data will sing Irving Berlin!

- The ticking time bomb weapon of death worked so well in Insurrection, so let's use that again, too!

The movie blows.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

So true. A movie that tries to be good by mindlessly aping good movies is not destined to be one, itself.

The dune buggy chase has got to be one of the most wrongheadedly superfluous scenes in Trek history.

 

[SpocksLeftEar]

--Worf has nothing to do, like every other movie. This always confuses me as I thought Worf was a very popular character. Why are the movies the Picard and Data Show?

This is what you get when you agree to promote two of the lead actors to producers. This gives them much more influence, and the story inevitably revolves around them and no one else.
Apart from this bit STX was so bad because it was a poor copy of "Wrath of Khan" with a villain who is as bland as a white wall and all of sudden appears out of nowhere.
STX was one of the reasons for the decline of the franchise, and that's the only remarkable bit.

 

[cardinal biggles]

What can I say about this film that I haven't said fifty-eleven times since it came out?

Not much. Nemesis is still shitty after all these years.

Poorly contrived villain. Poorly designed plot. Phoned-in performances from the TNG cast. Poor use of their guest cast. A poorly-written, fan-wanky script with plot holes so big you could pilot V'Ger through them, penned by the most overrated hack currently at work in Hollywood. And for the coup de grâce, sub-par directing from a man who never should have left the editor's booth (where he did, and continues to do, outstanding work) and only got the gig because Paramount owed him a favor.

From the negative reviews to the negative fan reaction, to the distinction of being the only Trek film not to open #1 at the box office, to its reputation of (with Enterprise) having helped kill the franchise (or at least new stories in the Prime Universe), Nemesis deserves all the scorn it receives, and more.

The budget was far beneath the ambitions of the script, preventing the movie from realizing action of any scale, which makes it feel cheap, compromised, and unexciting (and the fact that some of the budget went to a silly car chase doesn't help matters).

The budgets were far beneath the ambitions of every Trek movie script from Wrath of Khan to Nemesis. The TOS films compensate with better writing (as you pointed out with your comparison to Search for Spock), while the TNG films tried to compensate, for better or worse, by making Picard the action hero he never was. Throwing more money at Nemesis would have simply resulted in the film being an even bigger flop.

 

[GalaxyX]

The movie had so many things wrong with it. It regurgitated a lot of the same worn out TNG tropes, like the not funny at all "comedic moments", and the cringe inducing conversations like "Romulan Ale should be illegal" "It IS illegal!". Yuck! All to try to milk comedy out of mocking the characters.

Also it promises us Romulans, and instead we get these vampire creatures right out of an Ed Wood movie.

[snip]

Then the whole movie is dark (literally and figuratively). I wanted to scream "Damn it! turn on the goddamn lights!". The whole movie was depressing, particularly watching all the characters looks so worn out, tired and looking like they could give 2 fucks.

Then they kill off Data. You do not. kill. Data. You just don't do it!

It hadn't occurred to me before, but I think that maybe with the darker sets, the bit about the Romulan ale, and so on, they might have been trying to call back to Star Trek VI, since they had a pretty good idea it would be the last outing for this crew (self-fulfilling prophecy, that, but, yeah). The HUGE thing they missed is that VI still ended with some hope - we all already knew there was someone to continue the Enterprise's legacy. We had no such promise with Nemesis, so it felt more like an actual END than a hand-off. Especially with killing Data. None of the crew got killed off in VI, thankfully.

Nemesis had some really good stuff, though, particularly in the space combat scenes. And I even think Shinzon was a decent villain, if he had been handled a little better. But what KILLS this movie for me is B4 coming out of nowhere (Data *could* have been trying to create an offspring again, would have made more sense than some additional random prototype and sensors being able to detect it several systems away) and even more so, the entire Reman species coming out of nowhere! Seems like something we'd have come across before in the history of Trek - novels, screen, etc - doncha think?!

That's right, the entire movie was depressing to the max. All the TOS movies ended hopeful, even TWOK. By the time I saw TWOK I already knew about TSFS, so Spock's death didn't have any effect on me. However, I can tell the movie tries to end in a very good light, sort of like saying "yeah Spock is dead, but this is the Trek universe, where anything is possible! so don't be surprised if you see him again"

Nemesis did not do this at all except for the B4 whistling scene, which in no way, shape or form made me believe that was going to be Data again. It was just going to be retard B4 with some of Data's memories. Sorry movie, it just didn't work.

B4 was completely pointless, and his presence cheapened whatever pathos could have been earned from Data's (pointless) sacrifice.

Shinzon's existence makes no sense at all. Once the Romulans decided not to go through with their (stupid) plan to replace Picard, they simply... shuttle him off to Remus? Huh?? It occurred to no one that the existence of a clone of the flagship's captain might cause some kind of diplomatic incident later? As if the Romulans are above summarily killing people! The second the plan was scrapped, Shinzon should have been put through an incinerator, or dematerialized and then scattered into space.

Shinzon could have been an interesting villain without any connection to Picard, but then they would have had to think through his motivations instead of giving him a cheap "revenge" shtick. There was potential in the situation: the Romulan government suddenly in shambles, Reman rebels running amok. Federation leaders, after what they'd been through with the Dominion, would likely want to turn the situation to their advantage. Picard would be driven to do what's right, regardless of politics. The question is, would freed Remans be a greater threat to the Federation than the Romulans themselves? Should the Federation stand by while a Reman uprising exacts vengeance against their Romulan masters? Can the Federation afford to have that kind of chaos in their backyard? There was the potential for a lot of moral ambiguity here with no easy answers, and instead they shied away and went for the cheap and simple. I had high hopes for a Romulan-centric movie, though I was always very lukewarm to the whole clone concept.

The space battles are pretty exciting. That's the only part I could say I really enjoyed, but then you can get a good space battle in lots of places, and it's no excuse for having a shitty story.

That's what I thought we were going to get: A Romulan political intrigue story. I was thinking to myself "finally we're going to see what TNG has been cock teasing us with for 7 years!)

And we get.......vampires?

And with the space battles, at least it was the first in a Trek show or movie, where shields are 90% and the ship isn't tearing itself apart inside already (That seems to be a ridiculous trope in all post TNG Trek, where even the first phaser/torpedo hit is gutting the ship from inside, sometimes even requiring evacuation of engineering/consideration of ejecting the core, and the shields haven't even dropped below 90% yet )

But what pissed me off is that I always wanted to see those huge D'eridex warbirds in action. And what do we get instead? These scrawny seagull looking ships that looked like they needed to eat.

I cannot picture the Romulans flying around in those. They are a proud race and like flying around in huge D'eridex class warbirds! not these skinny anorexic ships they have in this movie.

 

[sonak]

A lot of story flaws and silly ideas.(Picard, a senior citizen, going off to fight alone on the Scimitar, for example) Shinzon never really works as a supposed "dark mirror" for Picard as they are nothing alike. The movie seems to ignore developments in DS9 about Worf and the Romulan Empire.

However, the movie's not really that bad. It's an improvement over Insurrection, and mostly suffers in fandom from coming out at a time when the franchise was in serious decline.

 

[Armored Saint]

It's just such a lifeless and perfunctory script, with much of its beats being lifted from other (better) works:

You can also add Shinzon as a Sela recycling. At least, if Sela had been implicated in Shinzon creation, she would have kept him on Romulus or kill him. The Romulans are used to kill "useless" children and it was unstrategic to send him in the trash with Remans.

It hadn't occurred to me before, but I think that maybe with the darker sets, the bit about the Romulan ale, and so on, they might have been trying to call back to Star Trek VI, since they had a pretty good idea it would be the last outing for this crew (self-fulfilling prophecy, that, but, yeah).

In Star Trek VI there was some good reaons:
- The food had the same color.
- It was not a bad idea to drink something neither human nor klingon.
- It was itself a conspirator.
- Kirk and co were understandably uncomfortable. Seriously Worf, was it THAD bad for you to be there?

Throwing more money at Nemesis would have simply resulted in the film being an even bigger flop.

Kolarus III is the proof that they had already too much money.

And we get.......vampires?

It could have been worse, in 2002-03, it was the Blade and Buffy era, not the Twilight one.

I think there had a kind of interdimensional rift, because we had what we were waiting from Star Wars second trilogy: a main character's clone. And he came with the ugly Viceroy and Jar Jar Binks.

However, Nemesis is not bad as Die Another Day.

 

[Greylock Crescent]

It felt like a rough draft to a potentially good movie, but nobody bothered to edit it.

It felt like an example of bad fan fiction to me.

 

[GotNoRice]

Trek movies had come out about every 2 years for a very long time, then there was a 4-year gap between Insurrection and Nemesis. By the time the movie came out there was a lot of pent-up desire for a good trek movie.

In between Insurrection and Nemesis, both DS9 and Voyager ended. That meant that Nemesis was literally the last view we are ever going to get into the 24th Century timeline that began with TNG in 1987. It also made you wonder, since both Voyager and DS9 ended rather abruptly IMO, if they were going to make it into the movie somehow. Aside from the small Janeway cameo, there didn't appear to be any mention of DS9 or Voyager. They also completely ignored Worf's DS9 character progression. I mean, he became the Klingon Ambassador to Qo'noS yet the Ent-E calls and he's back to playing some dumb tactical Officer like the last 10 years never happened?

The emphasis on Picard and Data was as insulting as it was annoying. Data just isn't that interesting of a character at this point, and the obviously aging actor almost makes Data seem silly.

Too much reliance on gimmicks. Jeep scene, ramming the ship, etc.

My animosity for Nemesis comes mostly from the fact that from the very first time I watched it, I knew this was going to be the last 24th Century Trek movie we'd ever see. Whereas, if the movie had been good, with a compelling plot and relying less on gimmicks, it could have set the movie franchise back on track with us getting a new movie perhaps 2 years later. Perhaps that movie would have even had elements of DS9 or Voyager in it.

Instead the entire Trek franchise was swept up and tossed in the garbage, the name stripped away by execs with dollar signs in their eyes and re-used for a metrosexual reboot targeted at college kids.

RIP 24th Century Star Trek 1987-2002.

 

[BillJ]

By the time the movie came out there was a lot of pent-up desire for a good trek movie.

Obviously, there was no demand for a Trek movie period. Nemesis was beaten by Maid in Manhattan its opening weekend and things just got worse from there.

Instead the entire Trek franchise was swept up and tossed in the garbage, the name stripped away by execs with dollar signs in their eyes and re-used for a metrosexual reboot targeted at college kids.

RIP 24th Century Star Trek 1987-2002.

The reason 24th century Trek (and Enterprise) is no more is because it didn't change with the environment around it. The same basic dull characters, camera angles, music and spaceships hung around for twenty-five seasons and four movies. There was no growth and the franchise floundered against more creative and dramatically appealing fare.

I've been a fan of Trek since 1975 and the best thing about the Abrams movies is that they brought a sense of fun back to a franchise that had been missing it for far too long. YMMV.

 

[GotNoRice]

By the time the movie came out there was a lot of pent-up desire for a good trek movie.

Obviously, there was no demand for a Trek movie period. Nemesis was beaten by Maid in Manhattan its opening weekend and things just got worse from there.

Perhaps not among the general public, but there certainly was among Star Trek fans. Voyager had ended extremely abruptly, with almost no Alpha-quadrant followup, and DS9 left a lot of things ambiguous as well. Nemesis was our only hope at the time for getting any resolution to any of this. Obviously, it didn't deliver.

Instead the entire Trek franchise was swept up and tossed in the garbage, the name stripped away by execs with dollar signs in their eyes and re-used for a metrosexual reboot targeted at college kids.

RIP 24th Century Star Trek 1987-2002.

The reason 24th century Trek (and Enterprise) is no more is because it didn't change with the environment around it. The same basic dull characters, camera angles, music and spaceships hung around for twenty-five seasons and four movies. There was no growth and the franchise floundered against more creative and dramatically appealing fare.

First Contact was a fantastic movie, and I didn't think Generations was half-bad either. A good plot is all it takes.

 

[BillJ]

Perhaps not among the general public, but there certainly was among Star Trek fans. Voyager had ended extremely abruptly, with almost no Alpha-quadrant followup, and DS9 left a lot of things ambiguous as well. Nemesis was our only hope at the time for getting any resolution to any of this. Obviously, it didn't deliver.

Not among any Trek fans that I knew. Most of the fans I knew were totally burned out on Star Trek. I was totally burned out on Star Trek and I didn't care about follow-ups to Deep Space Nine or Voyager.

First Contact was a fantastic movie, and I didn't think Generations was half-bad either. A good plot is all it takes.

Star Trek: First Contact was a zombie movie wearing Trek clothes. I'd rather watch Nemesis.

 

[GotNoRice]

Perhaps not among the general public, but there certainly was among Star Trek fans. Voyager had ended extremely abruptly, with almost no Alpha-quadrant followup, and DS9 left a lot of things ambiguous as well. Nemesis was our only hope at the time for getting any resolution to any of this. Obviously, it didn't deliver.

Not among any Trek fans that I knew. Most of the fans I knew were totally burned out on Star Trek. I was totally burned out on Star Trek and I didn't care about follow-ups to Deep Space Nine or Voyager.

I guess we knew different fans. Back in the day even this board was going nuts with excitement in anticipation of Nemesis.

First Contact was a fantastic movie, and I didn't think Generations was half-bad either. A good plot is all it takes.

Star Trek: First Contact was a zombie movie wearing Trek clothes. I'd rather watch Nemesis.

Everyone's opinions are different of course but First Contact is almost universally accepted as being the best TNG movie. It also has the highest IMDB rating.

 

[Timby]

Perhaps not among the general public, but there certainly was among Star Trek fans. Voyager had ended extremely abruptly, with almost no Alpha-quadrant followup, and DS9 left a lot of things ambiguous as well. Nemesis was our only hope at the time for getting any resolution to any of this. Obviously, it didn't deliver.

Not among any Trek fans that I knew. Most of the fans I knew were totally burned out on Star Trek. I was totally burned out on Star Trek and I didn't care about follow-ups to Deep Space Nine or Voyager.

I guess we knew different fans. Back in the day even this board was going nuts with excitement in anticipation of Nemesis.

I would say "going nuts" is an overstatement. There was a fair amount of interest in it, and people were intrigued by John Logan writing (this was before he was exposed as a bobo who piggybacks on other people's work), but the wind fell right out of the sails when the script leaked (and a blogger named The Facer did an annotated review of it) and people realized it was going to be a massive pile of dogshit.

 

[Lance]

The dune buggy chase has got to be one of the most wrongheadedly superfluous scenes in Trek history.

I've seen at least one fan edit which omits it entirely, and the movie loses nothing. A quick shot of our crew on the planet picking up pieces of android, then a cross-fade back to the Enterprise. Tightens the scene up nicely. Really shows just how superfluous it is.

If only the rest of the movie were so easy to fix!

 

[GalaxyX]

By the time the movie came out there was a lot of pent-up desire for a good trek movie.

Obviously, there was no demand for a Trek movie period. Nemesis was beaten by Maid in Manhattan its opening weekend and things just got worse from there.

Instead the entire Trek franchise was swept up and tossed in the garbage, the name stripped away by execs with dollar signs in their eyes and re-used for a metrosexual reboot targeted at college kids.

RIP 24th Century Star Trek 1987-2002.

The reason 24th century Trek (and Enterprise) is no more is because it didn't change with the environment around it. The same basic dull characters, camera angles, music and spaceships hung around for twenty-five seasons and four movies. There was no growth and the franchise floundered against more creative and dramatically appealing fare.

I've been a fan of Trek since 1975 and the best thing about the Abrams movies is that they brought a sense of fun back to a franchise that had been missing it for far too long. YMMV.

This.

They kept on rehashing the exact same styles in every single show and movie. For the movies they needed to at least update some of the more worn out stuff.

JJ Abrams Trek is what I wanted to see with the TNG crew, in the sense that they needed to drop the lame jokes and stale writing, and become a bit more fast paced and contemporary

Not among any Trek fans that I knew. Most of the fans I knew were totally burned out on Star Trek. I was totally burned out on Star Trek and I didn't care about follow-ups to Deep Space Nine or Voyager.

I guess we knew different fans. Back in the day even this board was going nuts with excitement in anticipation of Nemesis.

I would say "going nuts" is an overstatement. There was a fair amount of interest in it, and people were intrigued by John Logan writing (this was before he was exposed as a bobo who piggybacks on other people's work), but the wind fell right out of the sails when the script leaked (and a blogger named The Facer did an annotated review of it) and people realized it was going to be a massive pile of dogshit.

I remember my exposure to the script was a site that jokingly let you rewrite the script. I thought the script it was using was a joke script, and still went into the movie expecting something much better. I was wide eyed the whole movie to see that this lame "joke" script was repeating exactly the same in the movie.

 

[Harvey]

The budgets were far beneath the ambitions of every Trek movie script from Wrath of Khan to Nemesis. The TOS films compensate with better writing (as you pointed out with your comparison to Search for Spock), while the TNG films tried to compensate, for better or worse, by making Picard the action hero he never was. Throwing more money at Nemesis would have simply resulted in the film being an even bigger flop.

This is true, and I think the best films in the series modulated their ambitions to fit their budgetary constraints. When I point out that the script had more ambition than the budget allowed, that's not a criticism of the budget, it's a criticism of the script. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was made for less than any of the other films in the series, but it still holds up because Meyer and Bennett planned ahead and spent their money wisely.

Star Trek: Nemesis falls apart in terms of scope as soon as we see the Senate of the Romulan Star Empire and there's barely enough extras to populate a PTA meeting.

Considering that, adjusted for inflation*, the budget of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was $24.24 million (less than half of the $60 million that went into Star Trek: Nemesis), Baird, Logan, and Paramount did not spend their money wisely.

*From 1982 to 2002 dollars.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

The dune buggy chase has got to be one of the most wrongheadedly superfluous scenes in Trek history.

I've seen at least one fan edit which omits it entirely, and the movie loses nothing. A quick shot of our crew on the planet picking up pieces of android, then a cross-fade back to the Enterprise. Tightens the scene up nicely. Really shows just how superfluous it is.

If only the rest of the movie were so easy to fix!

What's so messed up is that there was no reason to shoot that sequence at all. No need to show the planet's surface in any way. No need for the action sequence. Just go into orbit over the planet, beam up the android parts, done. That probably would have saved a couple million bucks and the film would have lost nothing.

Wasn't that whole sequence something that got added because Patrick Stewart wanted more action-oriented scenes? There is no story reason to justify it, as far as I can tell.

And that's just one example of the many, many things wrong with the script, and with the film itself.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Instead the entire Trek franchise was swept up and tossed in the garbage, the name stripped away by execs with dollar signs in their eyes and re-used for a metrosexual reboot targeted at college kids.

Star Trek has never been a charity for nerds. Making money was always been Gene Roddenberry's and Rick Berman's #1 goal.

RIP 24th Century Star Trek 1987-2002.

Read the novels, the adventures of TNG, DS9 and Voyager continue on to this day (along with TOS and ENT)

 

[JarodRussell]

Wasn't that whole sequence something that got added because Patrick Stewart wanted more action-oriented scenes? There is no story reason to justify it, as far as I can tell.

Even if it was Stewart's demand, there is no reason why it is not integrated into the story properly. The attackers could already have been Reman for example.

John Eaves also once wrote on his blog that the buggy was supposed to be hovering, but that Baird shot that idea down because he wanted wheels.

But the argument "no need for an action sequence" is kinda faulty in itself. There is NEVER a need for an action sequence other than added spectacle. You can cut out the escape from the Scimitar, you can cut out the entire final battle from the script.