Star Trek Sundays: "Nemesis" makes a valiant last stand

At least this one aspires to be a movie

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 fourth and final Next Generation film, STAR TREK: NEMESIS. Enjoy…

Star Trek: Nemesis

2002, Dir. Stuart Baird

Originally published in 200 Reviews, based on notes from 2022

Time for a hot take: Star Trek: Nemesis is the best of the four Next Generation movies, and it is not in any way a close contest. This is the only one that feels, in scale and pace and visual impact, like an actual, honest-to-god movie, a theatrical motion picture made to earn its price of admission, rather than an overlong episode of television dragged kicking and screaming into the auditorium. It has some genuinely cool ideas, a very memorable (if ultimately misused) villain, and at its best, it actually makes me feel things.