Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

[I originally wrote this while furloughed in January 2019, during which I decided to re-watch — or in the case of the final two in the series watch, since I hadn’t gotten around to seeing them yet — all the Star Trek TOS and TNG movies.]

I never saw Star Trek: Insurrection when it was in the theatres and through sheer laziness never got around to seeing it until now. For some reason I had been under the impression that it was one of the good ones. My first clue should have been noticing that Insurrection was free on Amazon Prime while all the other Trek movies were $3.99 to rent.

When the closing credits began, my first thought was that I had not actually watched a movie. I had watched a longer, bigger-budgeted, below average episode of the TV series. Take the plot summary and drop it in the middle of most seasons of TNG and it would not stand out in the slightest.

The movie has one ambitious point. The Federation Council is actually on board with the idea of relocating these 600 aliens to another planet in order to reap the health and restorative benefits of the planet’s rings. But this idea gets dropped almost immediately as soon as it’s presented. Just one message from Riker to the Federation Council and they fold instantly.

Wouldn’t it have been a more interesting movie if they hadn’t? If they had radioed back ordering the Enterprise to stand down because the needs of the Federation outweigh the needs of the 600? It would have allowed the script, for example, to have Picard grab control of the 24th century equivalent of the FEMA Presidential text alert system to plead his case to the broader Federation. It would have been more interesting to me to see Patrick Stewart doing that scene rather than having him chase F. Murray Abraham’s saran wrapped head through duct work.

Other thoughts in no particular order:

• F. Murray Abraham looks like shit.
• One scene features Picard and Worf singing Gilbert & Sullivan to distract Data. Well. Klingons quoting Shakespeare? Good. This? Not so good.
• One feature of the planetary ring’s regenerative powers is that it makes Troi and Crusher begin to regain their feminine youth. Or as the script puts it:

“TROI: Have you noticed how your boobs have started to firm up?”

This I feel is well in keeping with Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future and I admire the filmmakers’ dedication with sticking to the source material.

• The hoops they’re jumping through to explain why Worf keeps ditching Deep Space Nine are getting more and more convoluted.
• Data goes completely batshit insane at the beginning, to the point where he (a Starfleet officer!) is ordered executed on sight. Instead, Geordi fixes Data by removing three vacuum tubes from his head and the subplot is never mentioned again. No one even questions it.

[Originally written in January of 2019.]