Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

[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 don’t have too much to say about Star Trek: Nemesis. I hadn’t seen it until now but understood it had a poor reputation. Maybe it’s because my expectations were low, but I enjoyed it. Just the image of Worf hungover on Romulan Ale and cursing the name of Irving Berlin was worth the price of admission.

I like the world-building that’s done here, something that the previous TNG films had shied away from (perhaps because there were concurrent TV shows going on at the same time in the same universe). The fact that Romulus and Remus are twin planets was just something that’s a throwaway line in TOS’s Balance of Terror, but which is nicely built up on here.

The story starts falling apart in the last half an hour. There’s a sequence that’s very reminiscent of Khan’s detonation of the Genesis torpedo at the end of Wrath of Khan, but if you aren’t going to do this with Ricardo Montalbán quoting Melville, then what’s the point?

And the death of Data at the end. I didn’t like it. I felt that Data deserved a better ending than he got. When Spock dies at the end ofWrath of Khan, the movie had been building to that moment. Kirk had been noting the many times he’d cheated death and wondered how many more times he could get away with it. The story had kept ramping up the pressure. It wouldn’t be fair to the audience for the story to be resolved by having Scotty wave a magic dilithium crystal over the warp engines to fix them. A big story needed a big sacrifice to be made. At least on a first viewing, Nemesis really didn’t feel that way to me. It didn’t feel like the tone was moving towards that resolution. It just happened.

[Originally written in January of 2019.]