“All field units. Intercept the android.”
There’s a new Star Trek movie in theatres, and I’ve got pretty serious problems with it; which makes this a perfect time to continue my backwards troll through the endlessly problematic Star Trek: The Next Generation feature films, bringing me to Star Trek: Insurrection, a.k.a. Star Trek 9, and – arguably – the origin of whatever problem in the franchise grew so massive that it compelled Paramount to hit the reboot switch, wiping out 40 years of Star Trek continuity. Something about the mood in the room changes with Star Trek 9, and the franchise crosses the border from mainstream fare to fan service, even though the fans didn’t like it much either. This was 1998 – Deep Space Nine was wrapping up (Worf’s presence on the Enterprise explained in a line which is, delightfully, interrupted before finishing, as though to assure the audience that no one cares), Voyager was in the middle of its lackluster run, and Enterprise was imminent. Less than half a decade later, Star Trek would be a dead duck. The tide turned here.
“Can anyone else remember when we used to be explorers?” Captain Picard quips in Insurrection, a line repeated almost word for word by Scotty in Star Trek Into Darkness, and one which sums up the basic problem of the entire Star Trek feature film project from 1979 to the present day. Star Trek, in its true form, doesn’t make for particularly profitable movie concepts. I’ve frequently said – when complaining about the Abrams regime’s seeming inability to tell an actual Star Trek story in their Star Trek movies – that there are really only two Star Trek feature films that are proper Star Trek stories; Insurrection is one of them (The Motion Picture is the other), and they both suck as crowd-pleasers. Admittedly, I like Insurrection a bit more than you probably do; I also dislike First Contact, so we’re going to have issues later.
But if you’re going to spend any multiple of tens of millions of dollars on a big screen blockbuster, I know as well as anyone that you’ve gotta be batting for a more mainstream crowd with your science fiction adventure than any story like Insurrection could hope to deliver. I’m sort of amazed to this day that this movie was greenlit at all. One of the frequent knocks against Insurrection – that it looks and behaves like a Next Gen TV movie – is very true, but to me, this is a strength. Remember, I like Star Trek: The Next Generation. Insurrection isn’t a patch on the better episodes of the series, but it’s more like the series, in many ways, than Generations, First Contact or Nemesis.
The movie is written by champ Next Gen showrunner Michael Piller, which makes another reason why this is a good time to tackle Insurrection for Blogging the Next Generation. Piller joined the Next Gen team in Season Three, and after having been uninvolved in both Generations and First Contact, was brought off the bench by Berman to screenwrite here. I’m endlessly tantalized by reports of Piller’s original intentions for the script – he nicknamed it “Stardust,” and claimed to be trying to write a Molière-ish comedy for the Next Generation crew, where our heroes comes upon the fountain of youth and begin acting like a bunch of teenagers as a result – which is where you find the DNA of such ideas in the final film as Riker and Troi’s hormones pushing them back together as a couple, and Picard becoming a rebellious enough “young” man to go up against Starfleet. (And, of course, Worf’s zit.)
But wherever that draft is, it never went anywhere, and it got blended with an alternate attempt to do Heart of Darkness with Data as Kurtz – and if you think of Insurrection as the bastard offspring of one script trying to be Molière and one script trying to be Conrad, all while Rick Berman was trying to deliver the requisite number of action beats that First Contact indicated the audience wanted, you end up with what you have here.
The obvious outcome is that Insurrection has no idea what it’s trying to be. First Contact might have been hackdom of the highest order, but it knew what it wanted to be: it wanted to be hackdom! Without obvious science fiction predecessors like Aliens or Close Encounters to tap this time, Jonathan Frakes – directing his second feature film – has nowhere to turn for stuff to rip off, though he does attempt a Wild Bunch shot with our gang, which ain’t bad. (He also inadvertently lands on one of the most amazingly gruesome visuals in the whole franchise, when he dissolves from Picard’s rank insignia being removed and laid on a table, to four blunted teeth in the ruined mouth of a So’na officer who is in the middle of a dental surgery procedure.)
Insurrection’s story itself is just as weak-willed. It begins as a Prime Directive morality play where the So’na, an… erm… evil plastic-surgery species, are trying to forcibly relocate a people called the Ba’ku from a planet with fountain of youth properties. But the Ba’ku are ultimately revealed to be from somewhere else anyway, and technologically advanced, and the same race as the So’na, so the Prime Directive becomes irrelevant and the Ba’ku’s status as victims sort of vanishes with it. It becomes hard to care much about Picard and the gang’s efforts to defend a group of 600 people who have an unconvincing claim to a natural resource which could improve the life of trillions of people across the Federation. But this is a science fiction adventure movie, so we need an adventure; and that means arming up the Next Gen crew with guns and sending them into the hills of Northern California to shoot space drones and fight the plastic surgery men.
Yeah, it’s pretty silly. And yet, I like it a lot more than First Contact and Nemesis and nearly as much as Generations. It has one of my all-time favourite Next Gen beats, when the fountain of youth rejuvenates Geordi’s eyes and he goes to the planet’s surface to watch his very first sunrise – and let’s face it, Levar Burton has all-time prizewinning brown eyes. Meanwhile, the location photography throughout makes a brighter and more visually appealing picture than its predecessor, and the goofball “fountain of youth” reactions from the crew – particularly Riker and Troi speeding through the rekindling of their romance in three scenes and a bubble bath – have a lot of warmth and humour to them.
F. Murray Abraham is so unbelievably bad as the bad guy, Ru’afo (whose name sounds like “You’re awful”) that he actually swings back around to being good, so much so that I ape his screaming and whining fits on an average of two times per month. (I’ve yet to work out how to make my forehead split open and spit blood in the middle of a petulant “NNNO!,” of course.) And the So’na in general are such a batshit idea for a villain race – they want to be young, so they undergo regular skin-stretching procedures – that I embrace the weirdness. Their production design is flat-out awful, from their costumes to their makeup to their ship, which is one of the reasons the species fails from the get-go as a credible menace. This is where you begin to sense that the complexity of rendering a Star Trek adventure for the big screen had begun to outstrip the amount of money Paramount was willing to spend on the Next Generation movies. But the big battle between the Enterprise and Ru’afo’s people in the Briar Patch, in which our newly-beardless first officer invents the Riker Maneuver, is pretty great. And, y’know: the Riker Maneuver.
And hey, on that point – it’s lovely that the rest of the internet caught up to Frakes’ chair-straddle gag this week, but seriously? You’ve never noticed that before? I’ve been hopping chairs like that since 1989!
Star Trek: Insurrection gets two and a half Enterprises from me.
Blogging The Next Generation ran on Tuesdays on my Tumblr for about three years, as I worked my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. The Star Trek: The Next Generation feature film series is also available on blu-ray.
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