To each his own-I find that it makes watching Insurrection more tolerable if I root for Ru'afo during the film.
Why Is Nemesis Unpopular?
- Thread starter Mr Light
- Start date
To each his own-I find that it makes watching Insurrection more tolerable if I root for Ru'afo during the film.
I voted that it's good. I enjoy the interplay between Picard and Shinzon. The meat of the movie is not the action, for me. The meat of the movie is asking the question "What it means to be human?"
In the day of shootings and violence, cyber-bullying, and movies that perpetuate the idea that a man is in his circumstances, Nemesis dares to make the argument, "It's never too late to change. And a man can overcome his circumstances." I think it was brave to show Picard at his breaking point.
Where the movie fails, in my opinion, is the action sequences. They are waay too long. They feel like the movie just stops and we have a little fun, and then we go back to the "boring" stuff that actually makes it a movie. Like, for instance, the musical cue after Picard says that the Enterprise must stop the Scimitar. It's a march, it's glorious music. It's exciting. Picard wasn't like that. It was Sisko that would do that. He was the guy who toured the ship and talked to Guinan about history. The ramming of the two ships was a low point, especially the relatively b-rate dialogue and performance coming out of Patrick Stewart's mouth. I turn off the movie when Riker battles the Viceroy.
Another problem is that Hardy is playing a straight bad guy throughout the film. His voice is gruff and his lines are like that of a Batman villain. He really isn't interesting to listen to. And that is why the audience doesn't really connect with the conflict within Shinzon about what kind of man he will be.
B-4 bothers me in how clunky he is handled. I don't like the forced moral dilemma of downloading Data's memory. The only scene with him I like, because it shows Data's disappointment, is when he cannot move. He turns up, and I want to shut off the movie.
All in all, it's the second best TNG movie, but I would rank it about 500 of the 650 movies I remember seeing in my lifetime.
I'm totally down for Picard trying to convince a bad guy to stop what he's doing so nobody has to fight to the death, but the way Picard goes about it is just wrong. Aspiring to be a "better person" is a very vague point that, when seen from Shinzon's point of view, is something that he's already accomplished. Think about his backstory for a second. Shinzon literally went from being a slave to the Romulans when he was just a child to liberating the entire Reman race and becoming Romulus' new Praetor. That is by definition "overcoming one's circumstances" to be a better person. I really don't blame Shinzon for not wanting to "conform" to Picard's way of thinking when he doesn't even get into specifics and lies about his condition.
It's not all that subtle and vague. Picard is talking about not letting violence and hatred control him. That the response that Shinzon had to being oppressed was to hate his oppressors and to conquer in order to save his civilization. Picard is appealing to Shinzon to choose the path of his childhood dreams (hope and curiosity), being better than "wasting [his] life in a blaze of hatred."
The film is average at best, so I voted average. An ok dumb action movie. A terrible TNG-finale.
The opening scene on Romulus was fantastic, and promised an epic Romulan story. Instead we got Remans. What a disappointment.
I kind of like B4, but no one mentioning Lore was a slap in the face of all TNG-fans. And Data's sacrifice was wasted on a cookie-cutter villain who wanted to destroy Earth for some reason.
B4 sacrificing himself would've made a lot more sense.
Insurrection may have been boring, but in the end it was a better TNG-story than Nemesis:
Generations and Insurrection: Average TNG-episodes
First Contact: Good Voyager Borg episode with TNG cast.
Nemesis: Random B-movie with TNG cast.
The opening scene on Romulus was fantastic, and promised an epic Romulan story. Instead we got Remans. What a disappointment.
I kind of like B4, but no one mentioning Lore was a slap in the face of all TNG-fans. And Data's sacrifice was wasted on a cookie-cutter villain who wanted to destroy Earth for some reason.
B4 sacrificing himself would've made a lot more sense.
Insurrection may have been boring, but in the end it was a better TNG-story than Nemesis:
Generations and Insurrection: Average TNG-episodes
First Contact: Good Voyager Borg episode with TNG cast.
Nemesis: Random B-movie with TNG cast.
The problem with the "it's never too late" message is the delivery. It would have been a message if Shinzon had done something to redeem himself at the end...but he was portrayed as a mustache-twirler through and through.
Poor writing and directing.
You know how people accuse JJ Abrams of making the series into a cookie cutter action series? Well, Nemesis does the same thing, only without the focus on character development, more focus on shock and with 60 year olds.
The whole scene where the Romulan senate is gassed was staged in a really cheesy sensational way that started the film off on a sort of obnoxious tone. They could have done something interesting with a Picard clone but all they did was make him into a malicious depthless Nosferatu figure which didn't really evoke any kind of emotional response in Picard beyond revulsion at his evilness.
The writer for Nemesis is the same writer as for Skyfall and Gladiator. Scenes were staged in a way that works for James Bond but doesn't work for Jean Luc Picard.
Also Data's death seemed about as forced, contrived and meaningless as Trip's.
Hey, maybe Nemesis is a holodeck recreation of somebody from the 26th century, written by an action holoprogram writer!
You know how people accuse JJ Abrams of making the series into a cookie cutter action series? Well, Nemesis does the same thing, only without the focus on character development, more focus on shock and with 60 year olds.
The whole scene where the Romulan senate is gassed was staged in a really cheesy sensational way that started the film off on a sort of obnoxious tone. They could have done something interesting with a Picard clone but all they did was make him into a malicious depthless Nosferatu figure which didn't really evoke any kind of emotional response in Picard beyond revulsion at his evilness.
The writer for Nemesis is the same writer as for Skyfall and Gladiator. Scenes were staged in a way that works for James Bond but doesn't work for Jean Luc Picard.
Also Data's death seemed about as forced, contrived and meaningless as Trip's.
Hey, maybe Nemesis is a holodeck recreation of somebody from the 26th century, written by an action holoprogram writer!
You know, again I am left feeling from having seen the deleted scenes that this version of Picard was in the movie... he was just left on the floor of the editing suite.
There's a small, but great, scene that was filmed but cut from the movie, where Picard goes down to sickbay and watches the crew getting prepared for casulaties in battle. And he laments to Beverly Crusher that the HMS Beagle went on it's voyages without a single musket aboard. It's a quiet, contemplative scene which completely nails exactly the tone you describe above, the Captain Picard of the TV series who used to debate the philosophical issues of his dilemmas, rather than simply taking the 'action hero' route.
See, the trouble with Nemesis is that all these "little" trims -- and some of the scenes are as small as only a 30 seconds -- add up to a big difference when each and every one of them is an intelligent character scene. The end result is a movie which is a Big Dumb Actioner. Nemesis wasn't conceived that way, it wasn't shot that way. But thanks to the decisions made in the editing room, it ended up that way.
Nemesis had it's heart taken out and left on the cutting room floor.
This scene could have actually worked, but the blatant attempt at an Enterprise reference ruined it. Leave that stuff in the JJverse.
An Enterprise reference? That's more than a bit of a reach....
I know one of the ships on the map is the USS Archer, was there another Ent reference?
From this site
That's why Nemesis is unpopular
RIKER: Why did we abandon our posts on the bridge to come down here and fight these guys? Shouldn't we have a security detail?
WORF: Because the audience expects main characters to be involved in every scene.
RIKER: And why are we the first ones to arrive, even though the Remans came in through the bottom of the ship and we had to come from the bridge at the top of the ship?
WORF: How the hell should I know? Maybe most of the crew is on vacation. And why are the lights so fucking dark?
RIKER: Dim red light makes everything look more foreboding.
WORF: But didn't they say that the Remans see really well in the dark and can't stand bright lights? Why don't we crank up the lights to fullbright and blind 'em?
RIKER: Shut up and just try to look dramatic.
That's why Nemesis is unpopular
RIKER: Why did we abandon our posts on the bridge to come down here and fight these guys? Shouldn't we have a security detail?
WORF: Because the audience expects main characters to be involved in every scene.
RIKER: And why are we the first ones to arrive, even though the Remans came in through the bottom of the ship and we had to come from the bridge at the top of the ship?
WORF: How the hell should I know? Maybe most of the crew is on vacation. And why are the lights so fucking dark?
RIKER: Dim red light makes everything look more foreboding.
WORF: But didn't they say that the Remans see really well in the dark and can't stand bright lights? Why don't we crank up the lights to fullbright and blind 'em?
RIKER: Shut up and just try to look dramatic.
I also enjoy Nemesis. I appreciate it as a valuable part of NextGen history. But Nemesis wasn't a proper finale of Berman's Star Trek story. It was unfinished. It still cries for good sequel. For it's final part, which indeed should have become a good send-off for TNG-crew (like Undiscovered Country was for TOS-crew). But it's too late, of course.
It's funny how a film went out of it's way to establish the Remans from hating bright lights and absolutely no payoff whatsoever. If you watch a film like Back to the Future, almost everything that is given screen time is a set up to a pay off, even building signs. These are the bad guys who upon first meeting them give us a weakness to exploit and they don't go anywhere with it.
I'd say TNG got it's proper finale in "All Good Things" ...they just kept going, though.
^This, 100%.
TNG got it's proper finale in "All Good Things", indeed!
But after that "they just kept going". Maybe it was a mistake to make four pointless "to nowhere" movies?
I did like three of the TNG movies so I'm glad they made them. Maybe they should have had AGT as the last movie instead of the end of the TV series.
