AndrewBloom
CONTAINS SPOILERS8/10 4 years ago
[7.6/10] I’m always leery of how much the expectation game affects our experience of just about anything. Tell me that some movie is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and if it turns out to be merely very good, I may walk away disappointed. Tell me that some film is the worst garbage ever committed to celluloid, and it turns out to be simply a less-than-inspiring effort, and I may walk away deeming it underrated.
So who knows how much the reputation of *Star Trek: Nemesis* -- as the cinematic nadir of this franchise -- impacted my ability to appreciate its strengths and chastise its faults. This is the film that put the nail in the coffin for *The Next Generation*’s adventures. It’s the movie that put the entirety of *Star Trek* on the silver screen on hiatus for seven long years and ensured a reboot would follow. And despite all of that it is...pretty good?
Throw me out of the airlock, fellow Trekkies! I am a heretic, ready to throw myself upon the altar and plead forgiveness and nothing more than an android’s appreciation for culture and art. But whatever the reasons for my appreciation of this hated entry in Trek’s big screen canon, I cannot help but find it an imperfect but fitting farewell to the cast of heroes who all but defined my childhood conception of the just and the right and the stirring as conveyed in stories and speculative fiction.
Maybe it’s just the performers. Patrick Stewart gives arguably his best performance in any of the *Next Generation* films. Free from the obligation to play opposite William Shatner, or put on a brand of rage we rarely saw in the seasoned captain on the T.V. show, or to portray the generic action hero or romantic lead, Stewart’s take on Picard here is more in line with the officer we know and love. He is warm and gracious with his colleagues. He is hopeful but cautious with his enemies. And he is mournful but honoring of those he lost. Stewart is occasionally a bit too sanguine, but in the film’s high points, he more than delivers the shades of the bold but layered commander we saw in the series that birthed him.
And it must be said -- Tom Hardy gives it his all here. His take on Shinzon is a compelling one. Maybe I’m being forgiving of an early performance having seen his talents deployed elsewhere later in his career. But there is an intensity to Shinzon, a yearning and determination within him, which communicates the ways in which he has been scarred by his brutal upbringing and defined by his aspiration toward and opposition to the man whose blood and genes he shares. There’s shades of his turn as Bane in *The Dark Knight Rises* firmly present, from his “higher register, same cadence” vocal performance to flashes back to his upbringing in a dank pit. It’s true that Hardy chews the scenery in places, but *Nemesis* is an operatic film, and the young talent is up to the vigor and bombast the moment calls for.
The pair play well off of one another. Buoyed by a script which plays in the reflections on one’s past and attempt to define one’s future, there is an electricity when Stewart and Hardy share the soundstage. Shinzon’s anger, his desire to know and surpass the man in front of him, bleeds through the screen. And Picard’s curiosity, his chance to look back on the man he might have been had his life’s path forked elsewhere, adds depth to the interactions with his ersatz offspring.
That’s the cinch of this film. One of the defining traits of Jean Luc Picard from the earliest episodes of *The Next Generation* is that he did not want or even like children. And yet, he finds himself face to face with what might as well be his son. Shinzon shares his DNA. He wants to learn about his family’s history. He arguably (in one of the movie’s worst choices) has an Oedipal complex. In facing off against Shinzon, Picard isn’t just confronting is abandoned former self; he’s confronting a child he never had.
Therein lie *Nemesis*’s themes. In the best philosophical *Star Trek* tradition, the movie dives into the nature versus nurture debate. Picard is the star of Starfleet, a man who believes in altruism and justice at all costs. Shinzon is a butcher in training, one ready to unleash a galactic WMD to erase the legacy he has to follow. But Picard lived a comparatively charmed life, one where he caused a stir in his family by being the first to leave the solar system, but received the discipline and training that Starfleet offers.
Shinzon, meanwhile, lived under the bootheel of the worst of the Romulan Empire. That’s what makes him a compelling antagonist: both the fact that he is an alternate glimpse of what Picard might have been, but also the product of an oppressive system and a maligned caste with the wherewithal to rise against those who would hold him down. Shinzon is wrong to want to kill his erstwhile father, and to destroy Earth for reasons that mostly involve the need for stakes the audience can appreciate and understand. But he has legitimate grievances, motivations born of understandable resentments and challenges to a rotten system that allowed him to find common cause with brothers in arms oppressed by it.
Despite that, *Nemesis* zeros in on what differentiates Picard and Shinzon, and by extension their android counterparts -- a desire to better themselves. The film venerates the impulse to change, to grow, to evolve, rather than to stay stagnant or satisfied. It is, on the film’s account, what makes us the most laudable and human. Whether or not that’s true, it provides philosophical underpinnings to the contrast between hero and antagonist, a broader statement about identity and the nature of man that feels true to the spirit of the franchise.
That extends to the secondary story in the episode, one that sees Data and the rest of the crew of the Enterprise discovering B-4, a prototype Soong android who is not as sophisticated as Data, but who retains much of his basic structure. In the same way that Shinzon is a surrogate child to Picard, B-4 is a surrogate child to Data, one who is likewise, something of a clone, but more childlike, more grasping for meaning and purpose, than the more self-assured and self-actualized Starfleet officer. The parallels are as plain as the mirrored font used in the film’s (admittedly) title sequence, as *Nemesis* suggests that it is our experiences, and our choices, and our quest to improve ourselves, that define us, rather than our genetic (or positronic) structures.
Of course, this is still a big (or at least moderate) budget sci-fi film, so it can’t all be highfalutin navel-gazing, and is all but legally required to fill the frame with action. That tends to be where the movie falters. Picard’s four-wheeler sequence has become infamous and in the fandom and rightfully so. This set of scenes, where he all but pulls a *Dukes of Hazzard* on a pack of Tusken Raiders, is utterly gratuitous. Picard flying a miniature Reman shuttle through Shinzon’s ship is fine enough but unnecessary. And as seemingly befalls most *Star Trek* movies, the third act eventually starts to feel a bit like static with unavailing ship-to-ship combat, and eventual hand-to-hand combat, that seems designed more to meet a quota than to advance the story or wow the audience.
Despite that, a few of these moments stand out. While entirely extraneous, Riker’s Jeffries Tube fight with a Reman grunt has a touch of verve to it, and at least works to give a more personal touch to the semi-nonsensical battle going on around him. Data’s leap across the vacuum of space to reach Shinzon’s ship carries a certain tension and determination missing from many of the film’s more high-octane scenes. And while Picard’s pew-pew firefights with his adversaries go on too long, and his physical struggles with Shinzon and his men are a little silly, there’s an air of tragedy when he impales his young doppelganger, and the dying young man pulls the weapon through his own body to bring himself closer to the man he both resents and admires. This is a film that runs more on emotional logic than on...you know...actual logic, but in a few moments, that works well enough to make you forget its worst excesses.
What cannot be forgiven is the way it decides to finally give Counselor Troi something to do by making her a rape victim. This sort of “violation” as a character-defining moment was already a tired trope in 2002, and given how many times Troi ended up randomly pregnant or otherwise possessed by some random being on the series, it’s downright insulting to pull that nonsense once again in the group’s last silver screen outing.
This franchise has, unfortunately, proven time and again that’s not capable of handling this sort of thing with any grace or understanding of its devastating impact (see also: *Enterprise*’s god awful handling of a similar storyline with T’Pol), and it’s the element of *Nemesis* that is impossible to excuse. That’s particularly true given how Troi asks to be relieved of duty and Picard essentially responds, “Nah, I know you’ve been through horrific trauma, and there’s no telling whether it could happen again, but we might need you later, so just deal with it.”
Still, at least *Nemesis* finally gives Troi something meaningful to do! While the setup to get there is abhorrent, the film at least has the good sense to give the ship’s counselor a moment of triumph in response. The moment where she turns the tables and uses her Betazed powers to locate the Remans on Shinzon’s ship and thereby discover its location despite the cloak, is arguably her greatest triumph in the whole series. For however much *Nemesis* does inexcusably wrong by Troi in its first act, it at least uses that misstep to build to an outstanding victory for her in the third act.
That’s just one of many elements that makes *Nemesis* feel like a self-conscious goodbye from a chapter of the franchise that theoretically could have continued. Lord knows that from the very first movie starring the *Original Series* cast, the *Star Trek* films were meditating on whether our familiar heroes would be hanging up their spurs. It’s a proud tradition for *Trek* films to suggest that these brave spacemen the audience has been following for so long might be a few months away from retirement.
Despite that, *Nemesis* seems to know it’s a final outing. It’s chock full of pleasing fan service, whether it’s Picard ordering tea, saying “come” when his ready room alarm buzzes, or cheekily saying “make it so,” or fan-pleasing appearances from Guinan, Wesley, Janeway, and even Spot. Data dies. Riker and Troi finally marry and plan to move to another ship. And as always, we close with scenes of our heroes together, an image of the ship that’s sustained them, and the stirring fanfare of the sort that’s moved Trekkies since 1966. While far from flawless, *Nemesis* at least has the decency to feel like a farewell to this crew, albeit one not quite as potent or moving as “All Good Things”.
It’s worth noting, then, the possibly coincidental ways in which this resembles the final outing for the *Original Series* cast. There’s the same proposal of peace from an old enemy gone wrong. There’s a similar awkward but hopeful dinner scene. There’s a gesture toward a new, better relationship with a longstanding foe at the end of the picture. *Nemesis* even seems to borrowing a little bit from *The Wrath of Khan* with Data’s sacrifice for the good of the many.
In that, the film suggests something a little bit radical. Shinzon shares Picard’s DNA, but through his life experiences, he is more apt to commit genocide against a people to justify his own existence than to strain for the greater good. Data is made of gears and circuits, not even human, and yet he has learned from his mentor the value of the greater good, the drive to improve oneself and to protect those you care about. In the end, *Nemesis* posits that for a man who eschewed starting a family, Data is Picard’s true son, and the young man who shares his genetics is a veritable stranger.
That’s what gives the final moments of the movie weight. Picard adopts the thousand-yard stare when he sees that glimpse of the person he might have become die at his own hand, and sees the son he never quite acknowledge as such sacrifice himself to save his surrogate father’s life. There is palpable pain when the crew of the Enterprise toast to their absent friend (with Picard wine, no less). As Brent Spiner himself noted, the actor was beginning to look too different from his 1987 counterpart to portray an ageless android, and the presence of B-4 (and his Irving Berlin tune) feels like too easy an out. But there’s still force in Data giving his life, ending his quest to better himself, in the name of saving his friends, and humanity.
Sure, the plot mechanics and, well, actual mechanics, that lead to that point are more than a little thin. The critics of this film have reason to complain. There’s still unnecessary action. There’s still questionable plot developments. And craft-level details like the costumes and even the score leave something to be desired.
But *Star Trek: Nemesis* does not deserve its hate or its refuse-ridden reputation. Two great actors command the screen throughout. Notions of identity, of self, and what connects us and makes us who we are permeate the film in the best *Star Trek* tradition. And for all the films plot bungles and overextended action, it anchors the feature around the moral choices, and their impact, of the series’s best characters.
Whether it’s a product of expectations or not, *Nemesis* is a pleasant surprise that vindicates one of the core relationships of the series and reveals, with heartbreaking abandon, that for however much Picard sidestepped building a family, he built one anyone, and says goodbye to many children, as this generation fades into the next.
