STAR TREK: NEMESIS
  
STARRING:
Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn,
Gates McFadden, Ron Perlman
2002, 116 Minutes, Directed by: Stuart Baird
 Description:
Picard (Patrick Stewart) and his Enterprise-E crew encounter Shinzon
(Tom Hardy), a younger clone of Picard, rejected by the Romulans as the
human weapon of an abandoned conspiracy. Raised on the nocturnal Romulan
sister planet Remus, Shinzon now plots revenge against Romulus and Earth but
needs Picard's blood to carry out his scheme.
—
Amazon.com
Somewhere
towards the end of Star Trek: Nemesis, the latest
Star Trek big screen to feature the “old”
Generation crowd, exhaustion set in. How many times have I
seen the crew of the Enterprise reroute the power from the rear deflector
shields to the front shields to compensate for power loss during a pitched
climactic battle with an archenemy?
I don’t know, but
ever since The Wrath of Khan back in 1982 moved
the movie franchise to more of an action movie premise when Khan and Kirk
battled it out in the memorable battle between two star ships at the end, I
am sure we have seen this happen quite a few times.
At one point, the
Starship Enterprise E was even utterly destroyed. “Lots of letters in the
alphabet,” I remembered Captain Picard (still ably played by Patrick
Stewart) shrug laconically. I think this was in First
Contact (1996) – I could be wrong. And I think they did the same exact
thing in the next movie, Insurrection (1998).
Or am I confusing it with the 1994 Generations?
I
don’t know anymore. The Trek movies sort of blur into one another.
There is the one with the whale (The Voyage Home)
which we liked and the one in which they sang campfire songs which we hated
(The Final Frontier). In-between we have a lot of
clichés unique to the franchise: those shields that never seem to hold! the
lack of safety belts! the ceaseless techno babble!
In Nemesis
Captain Picard battles it out with an evil clone. I am sure this plot has been
done before, probably as far back as the original 1960s TV series. The clone has
it in for the Earth (although I couldn’t exactly understand why) and has
taken over the evil Romulan Empire after some skullduggery.
Don’t get me wrong:
this isn’t a bad Trek movie and fans won’t be disappointed. The
action is intense, and the special effects are well done. We also get to see
what happened to some of the Next Generation crew in the end. Without
giving too much away, this would seem to be the last big screen movie to
feature the Generation crew. Who knows who will take their place?
Maybe the universally despised Voyager crew? I don’t know.
Nemesis
unfortunately isn’t such a fond farewell. The underrated 1991
The Undiscovered Country saw the Kirk, Spock, et
al crew off in more style. Perhaps it is because that movie focused more on
character issues than Nemesis, which instead eschews science fiction
elements in favor of action. Recommended for Trek
fans, those who however suspect that the franchise has exhausted itself,
won’t find anything in Nemesis to contradict their beliefs.
(By the way, is it
just me or is there anyone else out there who believes that anyone who has
invented faster than light space travel and teleportation would use
something more technologically advanced than a futuristic-looking dune
buggy? Maybe a hovercraft or something . . .)
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