Nemisees, Nemesi

There's a story that the producers of Star Trek: Nemesis wanted Nicholas Meyer, who directed Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country to direct their film. He asked to be allowed to rewrite the script himself, and when the producers refused, he turned down their offer. In that moment, the Star Trek franchise ended and would need to be pumped full of youth and lens flares before it would be suitable for human consumption again.

But you can't really describe Nemesis as being fit for human consumption. It's probably the most frustrating of any of the films, because if Nicholas Meyer had been allowed his rewrite and if he had been behind the camera, I have no doubt it would be the best of the original ten Star Trek films.

I don't mean to talk Nicholas Meyer up so much. After all, I don't have much love for Wrath of Khan, and while I quite liked The Undiscovered Country, it's no masterpiece and has its fair share of flaws. The problem is that up to this point, very few Star Trek filmmakers have had any experience behind the camera before making their film. Really, the only experienced director was Robert Wise, who made what is probably my favorite of the original six films. After that we had Nicholas Meyer make Wrath of Khan, his first movie, and then we had Leonard Nimoy for two films, then William Shatner, then we brought back Meyer. For Generations, we had David Carsons, who had never made a film before, and then First Contact and Insurrection, the first and second films of castmember Jonathon Frakes.

Now we have Stuart Baird, who will now be my go-to associative image for the word "hack". He shoots and stages the movie like his kid's first basketball game. Baird is an editor of some note, notably for his excellent work on Casino Royale, Lethal Weapon and the original Omen. He's got Edge of Darkness coming out soon, which looks like an entertaining, straightforward action film with a really pissed off Mel Gibson and directed by Martin Campbell. I'm sure his work there will be excellent as well, but as a director, he's really an unfortunate choice. He's the entire reason this film fails.

In this space adventure, Picard and the Gang run into a clone of Picard named Shinzon, played by Tom Hardy, one of our finest young actors. He has taken control of the Romulan and Reman (I GET IT) empires and is planning to destroy the Federation by killing their favorite sexagenarian. In other news, Data uncovers an evil clone named B-4 that has next to nothing to do with the plot.

Something I'd like to address. Picard's second-in-command, Riker, is retiring to spend more time with his back hair and Data is being promoted to his position. I get that Data is supposed to be this series' Spock, but Spock was capable, badass and Leonard Nimoy. I wouldn't trust Data to lick stamps. He's always malfunctioning and going kill-crazy, and he comes off like a child. I suppose that's the point, but I wouldn't trust him at the helm of the ship should the captain be taken hostage. How about Worf, whose every command would be "furrow brow angrily"? Or the unnamed helmsman afraid to take much action after what happened to the gay helmsman from First Contact. Or the ship's cook.

So Stuart Baird. I suppose we should get back to him. His action scenes are so by-the-books, so unengaging, so uninteresting that I couldn't imagine that he bent over backwards for this directing job, if the stories are to be believed. There's no flash, there's no panache, there's no passion for the art. For instance, there's a car chase scene. What happens in the car chase? They drive, they shoot, they escape. Shot from the middle distance, most likely while the crew was at lunch. There's a shootout. They let a sixty-year-old man fire two guns at once, one of which is a rifle. He takes cover and takes pot shots while Data deciphers a foreign language to operate the door controls. He doesn't pull much out of this excellent cast, especially Patrick Stewart, who has a script that finally comes within swinging distance of his immense talent, but he seems so disaffected and tired of the role, and the director is so incapable of getting anything out of him, that it might be his saddest work yet.

Worse yet is Tom Hardy, a brilliant actor in a very high-profile role, where he was obviously directed to say things quietly and menacingly, stand in the darkest part of the set and be bald. When I saw that he was in this film, I immediately got excited, thinking that we would at least get a good performance from him. It's such a fucking shame that Baird manages to squander the talents of Tom Hardy, but it's almost a feet of incredible failure. That's like making Chuck E. Cheese boring.

And speaking of Chuck E. Cheese, the script still suffers from the same problems, namely we spend a lot of time focusing on side characters just to appease fans, not because they can be effectively worked into the script. We get to address fun themes, like the nature of self and Picard goes up against a real villain who he has an emotional stake against. It has all the makings for a dark film where the Enterprise crew battles their most dangerous villain yet, but everything about the execution is terrible. There's really not one thing that the crew or actors get right, and it's disheartening. If the producers had given Meyer a few months to rewrite the screenplay, the franchise could have had its biggest hit ever, instead it got its lowest-grossing film ever and killed any notion of a Voyager or Deep Space Nine film.

I just wish the producers could have figured out what the problems were. They've had the same problems this entire series, and they never learn anything from the successes or failures. When the Insurrection script was rushed through development and even the director condemned the film, they didn't learn anything. When they hired Nicholas Meyer a second time and ended up with a good, successful film, they learned nothing.

These films have ignored very simple doctrines of filmmaking that could have saved them. Almost every one of these films, good and bad, seems to lack even basic filmmaking craft. The producers could have mined the independent scene for talented young sci-fi directors, which there were plenty of in the early 90s, especially, given that the Star Wars generation was just making an impact.

What a waste.

4/10