Star Trek Sundays: "Insurrection" is a bad movie, but a decent episode of TV
Michael Pillar, the TNG MVP, does his best to make it work
It’s Sunday, and we’re going through all 13 theatrical STAR TREK films, a series that includes a number of pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). We continue today with the third Next Generation film, STAR TREK: INSURRECTION. Enjoy…
Star Trek: Insurrection
1998, Dir. Jonathan Frakes
Originally published in 200 Reviews, based on notes from 2022
“Can anyone remember when we used to be explorers?”
I feel you, Captain Picard. I’ve been wondering that for a while, wading through these terrible movies.
In fairness to Star Trek: Insurrection, I do think this is the best of the first three Next Generation films. It is extremely far from great, generally dull and full of very dumb humor, and since I am writing about it now, I can’t imagine why I might ever revisit the film in the future. But each of the first three Next Generation movies are, in essence, just extra-long episodes of the show, and Insurrection definitely comes closest to feeling like a halfway-decent episode of The Next Generation I wouldn’t automatically skip in re-runs.
And that’s almost certainly due to the influence of Michael Piller, who wrote this film, and was the single most important authorial voice on the TV series. Piller was showrunner of TNG for Seasons 3, 4, and 5 – the show’s best years by a mile – and was the one who got the series on track after its rocky first two years, bringing together a talented, consistent writing team, increasing the show’s focus on its characters, and experimenting with letting outside writers pitch their own scripts, which led to classics like “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” Several of the series’ very best episodes are his – most notably “The Best of Both Worlds,” which he wrote both halves of – but his impact on the series was so much bigger than any one episode, and it’s fair to say that The Next Generation would never have gotten as far as it did, let alone reached a third feature film, without his contributions (Deep Space Nine fans are also indebted to him, since he created and got that show off the ground before Ira Steven Behr took over for the third season).
Insurrection is not Piller’s finest work – and he later wrote a full book on the very troubled development of the script, which was so candid that it was suppressed by Paramount and left unpublished until his death, when his wife Sandra released it online – but his fingerprints are nevertheless felt here. Piller was a beautiful writer, and you cannot smother that entirely. There are moments of Insurrection that really work, like Geordi seeing a sunrise with his own eyes for the first time, or some of the conversations between Picard and Anij, his Ba’ku love interest. There are character moments here that really sing, and moreover, this is the first Next Generations film that at least gestures at interesting philosophical questions. The Ba’ku are not indigenous to their planet, meaning the Federation’s prime directive doesn’t technically apply. There is good reason for the Federation to ‘take’ the planet – many lives could be saved and improved with the healing particles found there – even if the steps necessary to do so are obviously wrong.
I wish the finished film engaged with these ideas in good faith, because the “insurrection” concept of the title is a good one. I like the concept of Picard and company needing to stand against the Federation because of actual, meaningful questions of what is right and wrong in space exploration. But the choice is sadly pre-made for the characters, because the Federation is represented by a comically evil admiral partnered with the abysmal Son’a characters – led by poor F. Murray Abraham, left more stranded by bad writing and even worse make-up than perhaps any great actor who ever crossed paths with Star Trek – and so it all becomes a straw man debate. Picard and the crew are standing up against obvious corruption and black-and-white villainy, not engaging in real ethical debates.
For the main characters, this is also essentially a ‘fountain of youth’ story, with the particles on the Ba’ku’s planet rejuvenating each member of the crew in turn, and it’s mostly a frustrating missed opportunity. Other than Geordi getting his sight back, we mostly get a succession of bad jokes, like Worf going through Klingon puberty, or the “have you noticed your boobs firming up?” joke between the women, which the film really seems to think is hilarious. I don’t know what here was Piller, what was brought in by director Jonathan Frakes (who inexplicably allows his own character, Riker, to shave his awesome beard, an unforgivable sin), and what were bad studio notes, but Data’s "Saddle up, lock and load" moment might be the most obvious instance of ‘an executive marched into the room screaming blue in the face that they needed a fun line for the trailer’ in movie history, which makes me think the ‘too many cooks’ problem was felt in full force during the making of Star Trek: Insurrection.
Frakes never proved himself as dynamic a director as Leonard Nimoy did on Star Trek III and IV, and I would argue even William Shatner wringed more value out of Star Trek V than Frakes did in either of his Next Generation films, but he is, at least, a generally competent hand on the wheel, occasionally capable of brief moments of inspiration. The Riker-led battle in the nebula is decent, with some cool visuals for the nebula itself, even as the planet-side action, with Picard and the crew carting the Ba’ku around aimlessly in nondescript southern California environments, is mostly pretty dismal. But the final act is solid, with enough actual tactics going into how the crew tackles things that it avoids descending into raw technobabble. Tricking the Son’a by putting them on a holodeck is a better use of that idea than the random history cosplay it’s usually used for, and Picard getting beamed out of the explosion as F. Murray Abraham burns to death is a nice action movie ending.
I have very little enthusiasm for Star Trek: Insurrection, but there are at least moments here where this film feels like an authentic extension of the better periods of the TV series. Each of these first three Next Generation films are thoroughly inept at being movies, but Insurrections comes the closest to being a decent episode of television. At this point, I’ll take what I can get.
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