Would this make Nemsis' ending more satisfying.

[Dale Sams]

I think Nemesis is...fine. I bashed it when all I had seen were snippets and knew the plot. "Clones??? CMON!" But once I saw the whole thing, I think it's 'badness' is overrated.

Though I would:

Replace B4 with Lore (requiring massive changes of course, and the end isn't that Data is in Lore, but rather that Lore is shaken enough by Data's death that he rethinks his path)

Remove the dune buggy scene.

Add back in a lot of the character stuff that got cut.

 

[wingsabre]

Honestly, the story for Nemesis was just bad. Not Final Frontier bad, but almost as ill contrived as the plot for Final Frontier. It had a poor villain, with attempts at fan service that ended up thrown at the cutting room floor. It would have been better if somehow Lore was revived and we dealt with a crystal entity plot, or if they had Sela be the main villain. The dune buggy scene was excessive and not necessary. If they were to break up the movie into television episodes, then it would make sense to include the scene. However, since it's a movie, it does very little to advance the plot, other than to open up the possibility of bringing back Data in the form of B4.

 

[TheSubCommander]

I've given it a great deal of thought (not having a life can do that to a person ), and IMO what Nemesis really needed to work with that story is for Shinzon to not be Picard's friggin' CLONE.

Look at it this way: North Korea. Imagine Shinzon as Kim Jong Un. He's the cocky young heir apparent to a long time nemesis of the Federation. There's been a spill in the Romulan senate and this new guy has become praetor. The Feds know nothing about him, and are cautious about what his true motives are, especially after he makes an offer of peace. All of this is exactly as seen in the movie, but where the plot splits with the established script is that in this version Shinzon isn't a Picard clone, but rather a genuine Reman... or possibly even a Romulan. The movie takes a more political flair, and Picard no longer has a 'personal' stake in the plot. Rather, he has to act as a professional diplomat, immediately aligning him to the Picard character as seen on TV. The plot could go in any number of better directions from this setup than it did in the actual movie. Shinzon being Picard's clone is a major headache in the existing script and makes a mockery of Shinzon as a villain (and Picard in the process too).

Instead of being a souless action shoot 'em up, instead Nemesis could have been an intriguing political drama... all without changing too much about the fundamental story setup. And with Shinzon being radically unhinged, they could still have worked some action scenes in to keep the popcorn munchers happy. Win/Win.

I agree Shinzon being Picard's Clone was the weak link of the film. Really, I don't think the film as a whole, was a bad one.

But I had always been of the opinion that where was Sela in all this? Personally, Sela being Picard's "Nemesis" makes a lot more sense than a clone of Picard wanting to kill him.

So, I think if they had substituted Shinzon for Sela, it might have been a better plot. However, the actress that played Sela, Denise Crosby, couldn't have hoped to be anywhere near as menacing as Tom Hardy was.

 

[M-Red]

With NEM, the broad consensus seems to be a total re-write would have been necessary to save it.


The entire plot and underlying thematic focus on the nature/nurture debate were completely out of place for TNG's last adventure.


-Shinzon as a Romulan Julius Caesar, indifferent to a small fish like Picard.

-No B4
-No Remans

-Riker and Troi already married, already in command of the Titan (off-screen character growth and narrative development worked just fine in the TOS films).
-No Earth destroying weapon

-No Sela (!)

-Allow Worf to be separated from the main plot and then worked into the main events in a believable way rather than just lazily throwing him back on the Ent bridge.

-Add Spock and make it a conclusion to the Unification storyline. Give it some scope.




NEM should have been TNG's capstone epic story. All the elements were there. In retrospect, the seeds of NEM's demise were probably planted when they greenlit INS. That meandering film added precious little to the TNG story and forced the final film to cover more ground than should have been expected. And then it went downhill from there.