“Don’t be so vain.”
I struggled with how, or even if, to include the Star Trek: The Next Generation feature films in Blogging the Next Generation. They are such weaksauce antecedents to the series. Of the four films, only Generations – yes, Generations – bears any real stylistic, thematic, or conceptual relationship to the television show it’s adapting. The rest are widely hit-and-miss efforts at fulfilling whatever Paramount felt were the requirements of a big-screenization of the Star Trek franchise. They are horrible stories, made by (at best) mildly competent craftspeople, viciously underserved by miserly budgets, and categorically unable to compete in the widening world of big-screen blockbusters in which they found themselves. They are, in sum, a wholly unworthy effort for the legacy of Star Trek: The Next Generation. And yet, they’re a part of the family. I didn’t really want to conclude #BloggingTNG by doing a run of four pieces on the feature films, as the real Next Gen, the one I grew up with, ended (and ended brilliantly) with “All Good Things.” But nor did I want to omit the feature films entirely, for obvious reasons. So here I am: sprinkling them into the mix, haphazardly over time. And in reverse order.
If the Next Generation films are a bad lot, Nemesis is the worst of them. It pains me to say that, only because I do in fact feel great empathy for the creative attempt that Nemesis represents, and still find some aspects of the film meaningful in harshly compromised ways. But there is no getting around the fact that on an execution level, Star Trek: Nemesis is a total creative disaster. It is a disaster from the title down, and gets worse from there. (The naming conventions of the Next Gen feature films are startlingly precise corollary for the overall malaise of the franchise. With all due deference to the need to get away from roman numerals by this stage in the game, the four Next Gen feature films sound like CD-ROM video games from the 1990s. Of these, Nemesis is – again – the worst. Star Trek: Nemesis sounds like a badly-written fan film.)
A fan film, indeed, it is. John Logan – coming off Gladiator, and en route to Skyfall – hired himself out to Paramount as a big fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and his fandom shows in the detail, but not the execution, of the final screenplay. He is certainly aware enough of the ins and outs of various fanboy wishlists to marry Riker to Troi at the head of the picture, bring Wesley back into the frame (unexplained!) and Guinan and Worf too (also unexplained!), and to push the Romulan Empire (sorta) into the adversarial role they so capably occupied for the majority of the run of the series. He must also be a fan of the Lore character, although I’ve never been able to work out why Nemesis bothers inventing another Soong-type android to cause trouble for the crew of the Enterprise. Why B4? Why not just bring back Lore?
B4 is only in the picture at all to fulfill the producerial mandate that Data – ostensibly the most popular character on Next Gen – be given a throughline of relatively equal weight to that of Captain Picard, who has been nominated as the de facto hero of the Next Gen feature films. This, of course, all runs contrary to the group strengths of the series, and has resulted in Worf being rewritten as a buffoon, and both female characters, Crusher and Troi, being written out altogether. The former is excruciating, but the latter is outright unforgiveable, and it is stunning that even in this film – where we are meant to bear witness to a supposed crisis of self for Captain Picard – the best Logan can do with Deanna is marry her off to Will (and then later, subject her to the horrifying “psychic rape” subplot), and the best he can do for Beverly (Picard’s confidant and best friend, to say nothing of longstanding romantic interest) is… have her in the back of a few scenes. It’s senseless.
The prevailing impression in much of the picture is one of extraordinary cheapness. Visual effects are poorly rendered and unconvincing; the needless detour to the Kolaran system at the beginning throws a Starfleet Dune Buggy into the picture for no reason whatsoever, but the best the movie can do in terms of conjuring an alien landscape is drop an awful colour filter on some desert location photography. (Compared to this, the exteriors of Star Trek: Insurrection are nearly Lawrence of freakin’ Arabia.) Likewise, the production does away with the existing Romulan Warbird design and creates a new, far stupider ship for Shinzon; its exterior profile is a visual mess, and on the inside, the Scimitar must be one of the ugliest standing sets in all of Star Trek. The entire film is ugly – the Romulan Senate is ugly, the interior of the Enterprise is ugly, even the wedding in Alaska is ugly – but the Scimitar sets are so ugly they don’t even pass as credible professional work.
This brings us to Shinzon and the Remans, which, aside from some conceptual awkwardness (why bring the Romulans back into the game, only to feature an offshoot of their race that we’ve never seen before and which don’t make an enormous amount of sense, beyond their painfully obvious scripted design as “as badass as we can make them”?), are the only significant parts of Nemesis that I actually enjoy. The Reman makeup design might be painfully derivative (Nosferatu in space), but it’s a stunning prosthetic job by Mike Westmore nevertheless, with eerily translucent flesh over genuinely menacing visages. The “Prince in space” purple armour looks horrible in production photos but actually works quite well in situ, on both the Remans and on Shinzon himself.
And then there’s Shinzon, the first major film role for the terrific Tom Hardy. And in spite of everything he’s given (or not given) to work with, Hardy is far and away the best part of the movie, committing to one of the worst ideas in science fiction history (insane clone of Picard!) with relish, and doing a better-than-average job of convincing us that he is Patrick Stewart’s younger, darker alternate. I’ve long maintained that the best way to view Star Trek: Nemesis, if you must view it at all, is to take it as Shinzon’s tragedy, rather than Picard’s journey. On those terms, the film is within striking distance of actually working – there is a grand, gothic horror story in the systematic disintegration of this man, on a psychological (and later, painfully physical) level. Perhaps my fondness for Shinzon comes from the fact that he’s basically fucked from the off: there is never a point in Star Trek: Nemesis where he can accomplish anything beyond pitiable vengeance. That he takes out as much as he does on his way down seems nearly like an accomplishment.
Of course, the central notion of the plot – that by dint of being a clone of the Captain, Shinzon is somehow an emotional and intellectual mirror for Picard – is so faulty that it falls apart in Shinzon and Picard’s first major dialogue scene together. There is no logical reason for Picard to take the scenario as personally as he does, other than that the movie needs him to in order to justify its conflict (and its stupid title). Shinzon is no nemesis; he’s just a long-lost twin who turned out to be an asshole. (Remember when Riker had one? He handled it better than this. And he’s Riker.) The fact that Picard must seek assurance from Data that he is not responsible for the actions of his clone – though lovely from a whole-franchise perspective – is ludicrous. At least it’s well written: “I aspire, sir, to be better than I am,” Data reminds Picard, touching back on Picard’s own stated philosophies in “The Neutral Zone.”
Back to Data. The B4 subplot, and Data’s role in this film generally, is a reprehensibly transparent attempt to give Brent Spiner a series exit on par with Spock’s in Star Trek II, but it ends up aping that film’s structure so explicitly that it genuinely comes off as a joke. This was an unworthy move on everyone’s part. Nemesis was the last of the Next Gen movies; Spiner’s mission was over either way. If an organic value for the death of Data could not be found in the story, it should have been abandoned. The sequences following Data’s demise are nevertheless among the best in the film, as our remaining bridge crew process their grief in surprisingly heartfelt ways. Otherwise, the Death of Data imagines the climax of Star Trek II with all of the supporting architecture around aging and the no-win scenario excised – i.e. all of the stuff that gives the loss some poignancy and meaning.
Nonetheless, the film gives good battle. The entire back half of the movie is a surprisingly visceral tussle between the Enterprise and the Scimitar with more than a few surprising beats, from Troi’s empathic sense being used as a weapon, to the viewscreen of the Enterprise being blown out (and Bryan Singer being blown out along with it). Riker gets a chance to be Riker again for the first time in a long time, in a Kirk-esque fistfight with one of the heavies (Ron Perlman!), and Picard crashes the ship into his enemy as a rather deft Hail Mary pass. (Notably, Troi is at the wheel. That’s two Enterprises she’s clobbered now.)
Star Trek: Nemesis was released in 2002, a scant few days before The Two Towers, and I can’t imagine a more vivid cross-section of the high- and low-water-marks for the Hollywood film industry as a whole at that moment in time. It was a sad way for my beloved series to take its final bow. I’m quite fond of Shinzon’s death at the very end of the film: impaled on a rebar, he nonetheless continues to drag himself towards Picard, pulling the metal through his own body as he chokes his last. It’s a surprisingly precise metaphor for the whole damned thing: ten years ago this Christmas, Star Trek: The Next Generation died a graceless, grasping, gasping death, one unworthy of the better things the franchise had been.
For its sins, I award Star Trek: Nemesis one Enterprise out of five. Merry Christmas!
Blogging The Next Generation was a weekly series on my Tumblr as I worked through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. The Star Trek: The Next Generation feature film series is available on blu-ray.