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.
The film was directed by Stuart Baird – a terrific editor who cut a number of classics including The Omen, Superman: The Movie, Lethal Weapon, and Casino Royale – and written by John Logan – the playwright whose screenplay credits include Gladiator, The Aviator, Hugo, and Skyfall – and it makes an immediate difference to have two genuine movie vets (with five Academy Award nominations between them) in charge. Baird and Logan are the first major creative voices on any of the Next Generation films who didn’t come over from the TV series, and they bring a different energy to the proceedings, one that feels especially vital when one binges these films all in a row. The Original Series films had movie people on board from the start, like Robert Wise and Nicholas Meyer, and they set a tone that the films would feel meaningfully different than the TV episodes that came before. Logan and Baird don’t work magic here – Nemesis is very far from perfect – but they pace and shoot and cut this thing like it's an actual movie, and it is an immediate breath of fresh air.
In particular, this is the first Next Generation film that has an actual pulse when it comes to staging action, that feels like it is attempting images that could never be pulled off on a TV schedule or budget. Data and Picard’s escape from the Scimitar where the Captain pilots a small Romulan fighter jet through the halls of the ship is a ton of fun – a theme park ride a la Disney World’s Star Tours, basically – and the ship-to-ship action in the third act is genuinely incredible. I love how utterly desperate it all feels, taking its cues from Wrath of Khan in creating an impossible, unwinnable Kobayashi Maru scenario for the Enterprise-E. Picard’s choice to go for broke and just ram the Enterprise into the Scimitar leads to some excellent visual effects and a startling series of images, with a scale of ship-to-ship destruction we’ve never seen before in Star Trek. There’s an argument to be made that the film gets too dark and graphic at times for Star Trek – Picard impaling Shinzon with a metal beam, only for Shinzon to drag himself along it like Lurtz the Uruk-hai at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring is well outside the franchise’s usual boundaries of violence – but overall, the grimmer, deadlier tone works for me here.
Shinzon himself is at once the best and worst thing Star Trek: Nemesis has going for it. Watching the film today, it’s something of a trip to see a very young Tom Hardy in the role, years before anyone knew who he was, but he’s outstanding – much of what has made him great in the years since is fully on display here, equal parts menacing and charismatic, larger-than-life and terrifyingly immediate. His introduction scene is fantastic, directed with so much tension and mystery, the gradual reveal of his relationship to Picard proving deeply compelling. It’s a better scene than anything in the first three Next Generation movies. I even love Shinzon’s costume; it’s silly, but in a good way, this strange translucent purple material that glows with a rainbow sheen, but is dark enough to still look menacing.
I don’t love how they strand Hardy beneath increasingly thick make-up and saddle him with a bunch of bad physical tics as Shinzon is dying in the final act, which not only robs the performance of the genuine menace you get early on, but also points to how much they lose this thread on the character by the end of the film. The premise is so interesting: There has been a Romulan coup by the Reman underclass, and the leader is not only human, but an abandoned clone of Jean-Luc Picard. That’s a great, juicy mystery to build a Star Trek film around, but Shinzon’s actions never line up with his motivations. He was created, then tortured, then abandoned to slavery by the Romulans, then shown kindness by the Remans, but is now trying to destroy Earth for reasons that never add up, and incidentally wants to kill Picard because he needs the Captain’s blood to stay alive. It’s convoluted and quickly reduces the character to generic destructive villainy, and it's a shame, because I can so easily imagine a great version of this story where Shinzon has no plans against Picard or the Federation at all, but actually wants his help tearing down the Romulans, with Picard having to navigate both the sticky politics of the situation and his relationship with this tortured clone.
What really doesn’t work with Shinzon, though, is the extremely rape-y subplot he gets with Deanna Troi, with his psychic invasions of her mind heavily coded as sexual assault. Troi has had almost nothing to do in the TNG films up to the point, so it would be very nice to give her more material, but this is absolutely the wrong way to go about it. Picard’s reaction when he learns of Shinzon’s assaults are even worse. Troi requests to be taken off active duty – which seems like a perfectly logical and responsible decisions by a senior officer with access to sensitive information, let alone a human being deserving of safety and privacy – and Picard instead insists she let Shinzon do it more to gather information from him. It is as out-of-character a move as anyone has ever been asked to play in Star Trek – Picard is intensely protective of his crew, possibly to a fault! – and the entire subplot is just gross, cruel, and meaningless, a definite low-point for the film.
On the positive side, Data’s dramatic sacrifice really does work for me. It is an obvious nod to Spock’s death in Wrath of Khan, yes, but it doesn’t feel like empty creative theft. The film does a lot of planting throughout for the eventual pay-off, from Data singing “Blue Skies” at Riker and Troi’s wedding, to establishing the idea of the single-use teleport device when they escape from Shinzon the first time, to the introduction of B4. It’s a good emotional through-line running across the movie, and when his death comes, it’s a strong moment that feels very in character: Data puts the transporter on Picard and activates it without giving the Captain a chance to protest, because Data would of course know that this is the only way everybody else survives. His humanity drives him to save his friends, and his robotic nature allows him to analyze the situation with cold but objectively accurate logic. And this is where Nemesis having the scope and cinematic sensibilities of an actual movie is essential, because the overwhelming desperation of the Enterprise and Scimitar’s destructive battle makes Data’s sacrifice feel diegetically earned.
The aftermath, though, is what really sells it. I love the little toast the crew shares for Data, as the characters on the verge of going their separate ways, with Riker calling back to “Encounter at Farpoint,” the first episode of The Next Generation, and the moment where he met Data on the holodeck, humming. While Star Trek: Picard would eventually mess around with resurrecting Data, I actually really like the entire idea of B4 here. B4 is not Data, and Data is never coming back, but Picard uses Data’s life story to help set B4 on his own life’s path, and just as the Captain goes to leave the room, B4 starts singing softly. It’s a strong, emotionally affecting moment, and a great note for the film to end on.
That said, Nemesis had an alternate, extended ending that can be seen on the DVD and Blu-ray, which includes Picard and Riker meeting the Enterprise’s new 1st Officer. Riker gently hazes him before leaving, and then Picard has a final captain’s log about going somewhere “no one’s gone before,” which is a good forward-looking way to send these characters out, their adventures continuing even if we don’t see them anymore. The scene also has a fairly stupid joke about the Captain’s chair finally getting seatbelts after the Enterprise’s repairs, but overall, I wish they had kept this material in the film. The final note with B4 starting to sing is the right ending to the arc of this specific movie, but the longer sequence is a better farewell to The Next Generation as a whole, to its larger cast and the sense of ongoing adventure Star Trek thrives on.
My enthusiasm for Star Trek: Nemesis only goes so far – this is a wildly imperfect movie – but especially when placed next to the other Next Generation films, this one is very nearly a breath of fresh air. Its follow-through fails to match its ambition, but it still scores better on both counts than the last three films, and when it works, it actually works pretty darn well. It’s not quite manna from heaven, but it might just be water in the desert, and by now, that’s enough.
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