Then I'm not sure what yours was.
Except ID wasn't a TWOK ripoff, and Nemesis was. As for 'gratuitous action scenes,' every Trek movie since TMP has had those.
Why is Star Trek: Nemesis hated so much?
- Thread starter Damian
- Start date
Then I'm not sure what yours was.
Except ID wasn't a TWOK ripoff, and Nemesis was. As for 'gratuitous action scenes,' every Trek movie since TMP has had those.
I don’t hate it, but it was a wasted opportunity, and maybe it paved the way for Nero to be such an appalling antagonist; it set a precedent.
And it’s the little things, like turning up at Romulus and no one appearing for twenty odd hours, which they didn’t like, so they went to red alert for no reason.
Shinzon, spent his formative years as a Rommie punchbag in a Dilithium mine on Remus, and he wants to take it out on Earth, who didn’t even know he existed. The Remens, with their mighty battleship put aside their grievances toward their Romulan captors, are senselessly loyal to a human clone. They’ve stage a coup, except that they haven’t, they murdered the senate and the Romulan military just went with the flow, but that aside. The now freed Remans squander their opportunity to right the wrongs, but instead throw it all away.
I don’t hate the movie, but a lot of it was shit.
And it’s the little things, like turning up at Romulus and no one appearing for twenty odd hours, which they didn’t like, so they went to red alert for no reason.
Shinzon, spent his formative years as a Rommie punchbag in a Dilithium mine on Remus, and he wants to take it out on Earth, who didn’t even know he existed. The Remens, with their mighty battleship put aside their grievances toward their Romulan captors, are senselessly loyal to a human clone. They’ve stage a coup, except that they haven’t, they murdered the senate and the Romulan military just went with the flow, but that aside. The now freed Remans squander their opportunity to right the wrongs, but instead throw it all away.
I don’t hate the movie, but a lot of it was shit.
Because Into Darkness is a better film. Not a perfect film, but better.
I know you're speculating but it's been established through good writing the device may have strengths but had to have some sort of balance. For story purposes it would not be much of an obstacle for our heroes if the device didn't have a standard. I don't doubt improvements but not something where it would not have some risks if the user were detected. I don't know why this is so difficult for cloaking device lovers to understand.
I would like to think the crew of Star Fleet, including Ops and Science Specialists would manage to figure out a cloaking device was used by an enemy; at least a hundred ships would be around to protect Earth from some terrorist attack. In any case, the Remans taking out Earth would be a crazy and delirious goal.
Well, as we learned in TMP, Star Trek (2009) and STID, among others, is that Starfleet never seems to have the ships where they need them. Too much time in the Laurentian system I guess.
Starfleet has a Pakled in charge of scheduling long term ship maintenance. they just seem to all be in drydock at once.
I for one liked the Remans and the reveal that they had been badly treated by the Romulans over the years! So are Remans native to Remus or like the Romulans are they from somewhere else (Vulcan?) Riker also mentions that the Remans were pressed into service against the Dominion giving some continuity with DS9 and the series belonging together along with Admiral Janeway in the first half of the film!
JB
JB
I think in some of the novels, it was revealed that the Remans started out as the same species as Romulans, but were mutated/altered by some native microscopic life to be able to survive the conditions on Remus better, or something like that.
Kor
It was in the Vulcan's Soul novels. They depict the original settlers to Romulus from Vulcan. A group volunteered to be the first to start up Remus due to it's dilithium but they were later betrayed. The Remans were basically an offshoot of the Romulans, and if I remember correctly some genetic engineering was used to help them survive.
Now, of course that's not canon since it wasn't on screen. I guess they were going with the idea that neither was indigenous to Romulus and Remus, and the Remans did have pointed ears also which may indicate a common ancestor.
What plot points did 2009 lift from TWOK?
Sure there were little nods - kirk eating the apple in the kobayashi maru test, those slug type creatures nero used on pike, but no substantial plot points as far as I can see.
I figured they were once Vulcans too, but mutated from living in the dark, radioactive wastes of Remus.
I thought the whole revenge idea Nero had and the idea of him using his ship as a weapon of mass destruction (instead of the Genesis device). It's not that I didn't like Star Trek (2009), I thought the storyline was very good. I'm just a bit tired of the old villain has a revenge gripe trope. Beyond bordered on that but Krall's motivations were a little more complicated then simple revenge (and Beyond did not otherwise remind me much of TWOK). Schinzon's motivations in Nemesis were a bit more complicated then simple revenge too, but other elements of Nemesis borrowed heavily from TWOK
Hmm.
Thinking about it, he ‘wanted to do much more than kill’ Spock too, as well as the whole marooning thing. (But thats also a nod to TOS) and it’s a villain motivated by grief for a lost wife, who blames a man who promised to help him, holding him responsible for a natural disaster that led to his situation (a supernova and a planetary explosion) and in both cases steals experimental tech and the ship it’s on from the federation. They are both not short of devoted followers. Kirk is Saavik to Pikes older Admiral in some respects, though there’s no Spock intermediary. There’s a cadet crew aboard enterprise essentially, responding to a distress call too, and the Klingons mainly guest in the test scene. There’s even an element around a son rebelling against the imagined father figure.
Never seen it that way before, but I think you are onto something.
Yeah, and the writers of Star Trek (2009) have admitted TWOK is basically the Holy Grail of movies for them. I think they were influenced greatly by TWOK in their writing. There are some points you made that I hadn't picked up on too. Now, I don't think all of it was intentional but I do think it played into their thought process. Ditto for STID (some of which was overt--like the whole death scene, but in reverse, I'm sure they thought they were being cute there but I was just like OMG, seriously, and then the Khan scream
). And again, there's a lot I liked about Star Trek (2009), the whole it's not a pure reboot, but different universe sort of thing I thought was a different avenue to take. It allowed them to 'reboot' Star Trek to allow them freedom to tell new stories, but it didn't trash everything that came before. And I liked a lot about STID too. I was glad Beyond finally seemed to break the cycle. There was a revenge element to Krall, but I don't honestly see a lot of TWOK parallels with Beyond (and there were nods to a number of Star Trek films in Beyond).
NEM gets the heat because when you look at it closely, there is a great Trek movie in there, somewhere. As others have stated up thread, it's a missed opportunity and doing so on the last chapter of the TNG story ends the hugely successful series with a lot less pomp than the TOS cast got in The Undiscovered Country.
The great irony of NEM is that for a film that 'finally' features the Romulans in a cinematic frame, there is very little screen time devoted to Romulans at all! Again, others in this thread have mentioned this. It's nearly comedic - making a movie about Romulans but not using Romulans.
Commander Donatra for example is a more flushed-out and established character in NEM than Shinzon ever was. She even has a little arc and comes through the story a hero to our main characters. Too bad she barely gets 3 minutes of screen time. I hope it's canon somewhere that she and Picard had some drinks together after the battle.
In my dream version of this film, she'd be a lead character and Picard and co would help the Romulan government wrench control of their military back from Shinzon... yes, that's sort of what happened but I'd take out almost everything about Picard vs Shinzon on a personal scale. It just doesn't work.
You could even criticize NEM solely on the basis of unnecessarily rehashing themes from other Star Treks:
The great irony of NEM is that for a film that 'finally' features the Romulans in a cinematic frame, there is very little screen time devoted to Romulans at all! Again, others in this thread have mentioned this. It's nearly comedic - making a movie about Romulans but not using Romulans.
Commander Donatra for example is a more flushed-out and established character in NEM than Shinzon ever was. She even has a little arc and comes through the story a hero to our main characters. Too bad she barely gets 3 minutes of screen time. I hope it's canon somewhere that she and Picard had some drinks together after the battle.
In my dream version of this film, she'd be a lead character and Picard and co would help the Romulan government wrench control of their military back from Shinzon... yes, that's sort of what happened but I'd take out almost everything about Picard vs Shinzon on a personal scale. It just doesn't work.
You could even criticize NEM solely on the basis of unnecessarily rehashing themes from other Star Treks:
- Telepathic mind rape via Troi
- (Another) long lost Soong model
- Clone wars sadness (character deals with being cloned without permission)
- Ship that can fire while cloaked
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You know, I do agree with some of the criticisms of the film. It was just for me I enjoyed the better parts more than I disliked the parts that were lacking. I agree for instance that the mind rape was a bit gratuitous (though it explains why Riker wanted so badly to take down the Viceroy), though there was a cut scene that actually featured a pretty good camera angle that swooped over Troi, I actually kind of liked that scene. I already noted the B-4 scenes seemed to serve no purpose other than to dangle a possibility of resurrecting Data. I didn't care for the whole clone of Picard storyline, however that's a catch-22 because a major theme of the movie is what would Picard do in Schinzon's shoes, and that was an element I did like.
I had less of a problem with the firing while cloaked thing only because I figured it was introduced in TUC. So we knew it was possible almost 100 years earlier. It was sort of surprising to me it took someone this long to figure out how to perfect it. I loved the outside design of the Scimitar--I thought John Eaves did a great job with that, it looked mean, predatory and even angry (I do agree with some that the inside sets were sort of ho-hum, I did like the lab Picard was transported into when he was kidnapped for some reason though).
And the final battle was everything I wanted in a movie. And the Enterprise ramming the Scimitar was a great scene IMHO (then the Scimitar pulling away)--though I was happy they repaired the Enterprise, I really wasn't in the mood to destroy another ship. The detail was pretty good there, even showing a lot of debris--sometimes those details get lost.
Yeah, and the writers of Star Trek (2009) have admitted TWOK is basically the Holy Grail of movies for them. I think they were influenced greatly by TWOK in their writing. There are some points you made that I hadn't picked up on too. Now, I don't think all of it was intentional but I do think it played into their thought process. Ditto for STID (some of which was overt--like the whole death scene, but in reverse, I'm sure they thought they were being cute there but I was just like OMG, seriously, and then the Khan scream
And again, there's a lot I liked about Star Trek (2009), the whole it's not a pure reboot, but different universe sort of thing I thought was a different avenue to take. It allowed them to 'reboot' Star Trek to allow them freedom to tell new stories, but it didn't trash everything that came before. And I liked a lot about STID too. I was glad Beyond finally seemed to break the cycle. There was a revenge element to Krall, but I don't honestly see a lot of TWOK parallels with Beyond (and there were nods to a number of Star Trek films in Beyond).
I still think it's a stretch to be comparing 2009 to TWOK though. 2009, was a fresh, original take on Trek (hence it's good box office showing), there's very little here that feels lifted from other Trek outings IMO other than the odd nod or homage.
STID obviously is a more contentious outing, but as the film is effectively an alternate universe take on 'Space Seed' featuring the aforementioned villain, comparisons to TWOK are going to be unavoidable. That being said I thought the reverse death scene, and Spock scream was a step too far for me, but ultimately, it's a couple of minutes screen time out of a 2 hour + movie, so it gets a pass from me, the rest of the film is it's own thing, and is a damn enjoyable blockbuster.
You can't say the same about Nemesis though. That film has several quite large plot points that appear to be almost flat out copied from TWOK, from the weapon having 'the ability to consume organic material at the subatomic level' - spoken by Crusher, which is very similar to some the dialogue in Kirk's quarters in TWOK, data planting his 'Katra' in B-4, ship battle in a nebula where communications are lost, to the villain setting off the weapon in a final suicide bid, to data's sacrifice. The film positively reeks of it desperately wanting to be TNG's TWOK.
Yet I still love the film. I think the visual effects are largely excellent, and clearly the best in the TNG series, the Enterprise E never looked and moved as good as it did in this movie, and the ship battle I still find to be thrilling all these years on, and the desperation at the end on both sides makes for an exciting finale to the film, despite it being heavily influenced from TWOK. Some of the sets fell a bit flat though, especially on the Scimitar, where it all looked a bit cheap and bland in places, still 60 million ain't a fat lot of cash for a major sci fi film made in 2002 so corners had to be cut somewhere. At least the FX wasn't the horror show that TFF was.
Data's death scene could and should have been much better, but I think the scenes afterwards on the bridge and in Picard's quarters make up for it, and it brings a tear to my eye still.
Same goes for the wedding - a lot of people here deride this scene but Picard's 'family' part of his speech always makes me feel emotional.
I found the score to be superb also, way better than Insurrection, and easily on a par with First Contact.
Being a big fan of Tom Hardy, I always enjoyed his performance in this, but the 17 hour wait in orbit when he needed Picard's blood was lame and unnecessary. A lot of people also slate his motivations for attacking earth, but I was always fine with them, he is much more powerful with the backing of the Romulan military (who let's not forget were goading him to attack earth) than he would be alone, and would have become the leader of the most powerful empire in the quadrant had his plan come off, still, his character could have been written better.
Other things that needed rethinking for me was finding bits of B-4 around the planet which was just contrived nonsense, the buggy scene in general, the Reman boarding scene (just turn the fucking lights up!) and the fight with Riker was piss-poor too.
I really appreciated the darker, more adult tone of the film too, again, I can see they were going for a harder edge with this (like TWOK surprise, surprise) but it works for me, especially after the lame humour and awful, pretentious Baku from the previous movie.
Overall I find the positives outweigh the negatives for me, and I'll rewatch this film at least once or twice a year, whereas I just don't the other three TNG films. It's just a good sci-fi action romp with some of the best starship porn in the whole series. I know I'm kinda wrong, and anyone who actually says to me they think it's garbage - I won't really disagree too much, but I just really enjoy this movie.
I certainly think an argument can be made that Nemesis had greater similarities to TWOK than both Star Trek (2009) and STID. Jaime had some interesting points (some of which I didn't even pick up on). I think what I saw in all 3 films that was pulled from TWOK is the whole villain has a revenge grudge and wants to destroy Earth with a weapon of mass destruction. It was the major plot point that after I saw STID I thought, I hope in the next film we can at least have a villain with different motivations. Beyond had a little of that too, but Krall's motivations were a bit different, and the rest of the movie was pretty far removed from TWOK (plus, I was just so happy that Earth was not involved at all I probably would have forgiven almost any oversight--even the stupid Sabotage scene).
But yeah, while I don't think the film is above criticisms, it really just comes down to the simple I liked more than I disliked. And yeah, I think there were little bits that had they been developed better this could have been a blockbuster film. There were little nuggets that I wish they had developed further. Like his motivations for destroying Earth--he basically wanted to prove to himself and everyone else that while he appeared human, he was nothing like them--that was poorly developed. And I too thought Hardy made a good villain (I compared him to Luckinbill's Sybok--while I didn't care for Sybok being some never before seen brother of Spock, I couldn't knock Luckinbill's performance--ditto for Tom Hardy).
And I dare to say the final battle was probably the best of the movies. Star Trek (2009) had the Enterprise battling the Narada, but Abrams constantly shaking camera and excessive lens flares pretty much washed everything out (I swear I was getting motion sickness), STID was a little better but was brief and the Enterprise was greatly outgunned by the Vengeance until the torpedoes were used (though I was glad that like Nemesis, they decided to add a debris field between the ships--always amazed they forget that little detail). Beyond's space battles with the swarm were interesting, but not really comparable. But Nemesis had a sustained battle between two somewhat comparable ships (the Scimitar had their cloak but the Enterprise wasn't without it's own teeth, and the ramming scene is one of my favorites of the films).
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