Star Trek: Nemesis

Last weekend I was in the video store, thinking how good space battles must look on my new television, when it occurred to me that I have never seen the last Star Trek: The Next Generation movie, Star Trek: Nemesis. It’s strange. Though I was never a Trekker (or a Trekkie for that matter), The Next Generation was one of the few decent science-fiction shows that aired during my youth, and I was a fan. I’m sure I saw the other three Next Generation movies in the theatre, but never Nemesis.

Well, this would never do.  How could I live with such a hole in my sci-fi geek knowledge? I picked up the movie for £5 and brought it home to await the next quiet evening. Last night was that evening.

Let me just say this straight off. Star Trek: Nemesis is a bad movie. In fact, it is bad in almost every way.   Its premise is silly. Its pacing is terrible, and it is filled with pointless Hollywood-isms. No, it isn’t the worst Star Trek movie (thanks to Star Trek V, it would take something really special to claim that title), but it also isn’t worth watching unless you are a die-hard fan...

***SPOILERS***

So here’s the premise. A few decades ago, the Romulans created a clone of Captain Picard in the hopes of fashioning the perfect spy.  However, the next Romulan government discarded the plan and the clone, and sent Piccard MkII (now named Shinzon) to the horrible mines on the planet Remus. Shinzon spent the next decade planning his revenge and, by means never fully explained, manages to escape his prison, create the galaxy’s most fearsome warship, lead a military coup and become the leader of the Romulan Empire. Sigh.

Seriously, how did anyone agree to a script that had a clone of Piccard as the bad guy? It’s worse than that though. Shinzon is not fully grown, so our fearsome baddy is actually a petulant teenager bent on destroying earth because...well, I’m sure there was a reason in there somewhere.

So, throw in another android that looks exactly like Data (because Lore wasn’t enough), a bunch of space orcs, a new type of super-deadly, previously theoretical radiation, and 60 minutes of really dull dialog and you’ve got the first half of the movie.

The second half is just as bad, if slightly more action packed. My favourite low was when the baddies send a boarding party over to capture Piccard, a boarding party consisting of six guys, six guys to capture the captain of a ship containing hundreds, if not thousands, of trained personnel. Smart.  Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work, but it does allow Commander Riker to personally kill the orc that used mental powers to assault his wife.

If I’m being negative, it certainly isn’t without reason, but there are a few good moments.  Probably the best is when a hole is blown in the wall of the Enterprise’s bridge, exposing it space. There is also a really cool scene where Data jumps across the void of space from the Enterprise to the enemy ship.

Unfortunately, both of those just serve to set up the whimper of an ending, when Data heroically sacrifices himself to save everyone (which feels like a last, desperate, attempt to bring gravitas to an otherwise pointless film).

It is quite sad to see the Next Generation crew go out on such a story. While the series certainly had its flaws, its run was filled with interesting, complex philosophical questions in the best traditions of science-fiction. And even though I often found their conclusions a bit liberal and utopian, I give them credit for their exploration.

Soldier – The Stupidest Bits

Yesterday I admitted to having a soft spot for the much-loathed movie, Soldier. However, that doesn’t mean I think everything about it is great. In fact, some parts are just downright stupid.  After a bit of consideration, here are the stupidest.

1. Garbage Planet: As I mentioned yesterday, I think a garbage planet is an awesome setting for an action-adventure movie. It’s also a heavy-handed metaphor for what is happening to the main character. Unfortunately, it makes no sense what-so-ever. Assuming for the moment that someone is willing to go through the trouble and expense of getting garbage off of earth and up into space, why not just fire it into the sun or out into the void of interstellar space? Heck, if you absolutely feel the need to dump it on another planet Jupiter is a lot closer and you aren’t likely to do much damage to its environment.

Instead, in Soldier, vast garbage ships make the run to another solar system and dump their trash on a human habitable planet! You don’t have to read much sci-fi or study deeply into astronomy to realize that human-habitable worlds are few and far between.  Are you really going to waste one as the galactic dust-bin?

2. Todd Survives the Trip: Okay, let’s give them the garbage planet. Now the main character’s presumed dead body is thrown into a garbage ship, taken who knows how many light years, gets dumped, and manages to survive the trip!  So, not only is someone transporting all this garbage, they are doing so in cargo holds safe for human survival.   Then, the garbage ships drop low enough into the planet’s atmosphere so they can drop their contents low enough that someone can survive the fall.  

3. Planet-Killer Bombs: Near the end of the movie, the head bad guy turns to one of his underlings and says something like ‘Do we have any of those planet-killer bombs onboard’.  Wait, the ranking officer needs to ask if they have any weapons capable of blowing up a planet on the ship? Good job reading the pre-mission report.  It gets worse, his subordinate answers: ‘we’ve got fifteen of them’.  Fifteen? Just encase you need to blow up this planet and fourteen more on the way home…Luckily, an officer of the bad guys (unspecified) military rank can detonate planets without too much worry about repercussions – hey, it was just a garbage planet anyway…

Re-watching Soldier

Soldier, starring Kurt Russell, was box-office bomb when it came out in 1998, and it's not hard to understand why. The plot is wobbly, the villains are horrible caricatures, and the special effects already looked dated by the time it hit the screen.  And yet, I kind of like it.

Soldier tells a very simple story about a man trained from birth to be the perfect soldier. He follows orders without question and he kills without compunction. He knows no life other than warfare. But what happens when he ages out and is finally replaced by a better soldier?  Well in this case, he is dumped on a garbage planet, recovered by a group of stranded colonists, tries his best to understand what it means to be human, and then gets into a huge fight at the end.

It’s a small-scale movie, about one ex-soldier, that doesn’t even concern itself with what is going on in a wider galaxy. In many ways it is probably closer to a western than a space opera, and it has many elements I like.

The garbage planet itself is a very cool setting, with lots of room for interesting scenery. Kurt Russell does a fantastic job conveying the conflicting, confused emotions of an abandoned warrior, while saying less than 100 words in the whole movie.  The uniforms and equipment of the enemy Soldiers are very cool retro-sci-fi, with heavy armor and gas masks. Finally, the drawn-out fight scene at the end is filled with a variety of weaponry and plenty of explosions!

Okay, the movie didn’t win any awards and it probably didn’t deserve to, but there is enough in it for me for a fun night’s worth of entertainment.

It makes it into the DVD collection.