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THOSE WHO REMAN Nemesis misses its mark early on, bouncing off of the atmosphere and trailing off into space. We are left, mouths agape, wondering precisely what drugs Trek executive producer and chief bottle washer Rick Berman is on. Word of mouth is disastrous as the good ship Enterprise sails off in this unsatisfying, humiliating finale. Nearly as big a disaster as Joel Schumacher's gay love fest Batman And Robin, Star Trek: Nemesis is, as that film was, an extinction level event. A franchise killer. The Remans looked goofy. The enslaved alien race from the Romulan sister-world Remus, the Remans were cast as slimy, pale-skinned bug-eyed freaks in prosthetics so laughably bad that I, and many around me, could not stop chuckling whenever they appeared on-screen in this year's spectacular Trek flop Star Trek: Nemesis. Eking out, at this writing, less than $40 million at the U.S. box office, Nemesis is the worst Stark Trek disaster since the William Shatner-helmed The Final Frontier. Adjusted for both inflation and budget-v-income, Nemesis may be the biggest Trek feature flop of all time. Patrick Stewart, his speech oddly slurred as though he'd suffered a minor stroke, sounded old and looked old and had an air of Take The Money And Run as this film rested squarely on the shoulders of his USS Enterprise Captain Jean-Luc Picard. A hokey, weak story about a Picard clone conquering the Romulan empire and gunning for Earth, Nemesis is filled with more plot holes than 1999's Armageddon, and that's saying something. At its base, the premise founders. We knew Remus, a kind of twin of the home world of The Romulans, existed, but we have never seen it, not even when Picard himself visited Romulus in the TNG classic two-parter "Reunification." It is unlikely that a planet could exist in so close a parallel orbit to another without the gravitational forces of each planet having massive effects on the other. It is extremely unlikely that, as suggested in Nemesis, that Remus would not spin on its own axis. If Romulus is spinning, and is close enough to Remus to almost build a subway between the two, it seems very unlikely that Remus would not spin on its own axis. The bigger problem, the biggest problem with Nemesis: the writers didn't know much about the Romulans. The Romulans were wimpy, something Romulans should never be. The Romulans have traditionally been, hands down, the scariest Trek villains out there. Scarier even than The Borg because The Romulans were deliberately evil (The Borg only conducted themselves in ways we decided were evil: the Romulans, modeled after the ancient Romans, prided themselves in being, well, evil). The Romulans are liars. They pride themselves in being liars. The entire fun of seeing The Romulans is waiting for the shoe to drop: waiting to see the reversal, the trick. The lie. Nemesis featured no liars and, practically, no lying at all. Everybody, even the bad guy, is telling the truth, keeping their word at all times, and going to extremes to prove it. The only deception evident in Nemesis is Paramount's presenting it as (a) good science fiction or (b) good Star Trek. It is neither. The notion that the poor, enslaved, goofy-looking Remans could be capable of building a massive, all-powerful space ship without the Romulans finding out about it is utterly ridiculous (every lame Trek film these days features a ship more powerful than The Enterprise. I guess that's rule one in the Trek screenwriter's guide: first, invent a ship more powerful than the Enterprise). There are, apparently, no Romulan warbirds in orbit around Romulus and none patrolling Romulan space (okay, let's say they're cloaked: they could have at least acknowledged that the Enterprise had passed by some twelve dozen warbirds on its way to Romulus). The Reman vessel, The Scimitar, is designed to be a planet killer, but do the Remans target the world of their enslavers, The Romulans? No. They go after Earth, to pick a fight with the United Federation of Planets, a Federation that would have certainly welcomed the Remans as allies just to stick it to the Romulans. It made absolutely no sense, none, zero, zip, zilch, that the Remans would want to conquer Romulus and then destroy Earth. If the Remans had learned anything at all from their crafty enslavers, they'd have made peace with the Feds and played the Feds off of the Romulans and, maybe then tried to destroy both. In this film, the very scary Romulans are presented as rational, reasonable, friendly folk who are out-witted and taken by surprise at every turn in some misguided attempt to make the bad guy Shinzon seem, well, bad. Shinzon would have seemed much tougher had they let the Romulans be, well, Romulan (and if he looked even a little less like a drag queen). Nemesis writer John Logan, who also co-penned the Oscar®-winning Gladiator, knows a lot about Romans but little about Trek and apparently nothing about how the Romulan villains function. Nemesis misses its mark early on, bouncing off of the atmosphere and trailing off into space. We are left, mouths agape, wondering precisely what drugs Trek executive producer and chief bottle washer Rick Berman is on. Word of mouth is disastrous as the good ship Enterprise sails off in this unsatisfying, humiliating finale. Nearly as big a disaster as Joel Schumacher's gay love fest Batman And Robin, Star Trek: Nemesis is, as that film was, an extinction level event. A franchise killer.
A Reman bonds with Shinzon. C'mon... tell me you're not snickering. From what, by all appearances, seems to have been a contentious parting of ways from the previous Trek Film crew after 1991's Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Berman finally took center seat of the film franchise. Berman had been executive producing the very successful television show and took command after Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's death in 1991. Berman sent not only The Original Series cast to the showers, he also handed out pink slips to the film franchise's most creatively successful people, including Leonard Nimoy, Harve Bennett and writer/director Nicholas Meyer, who had, together, produced the more successful of the Trek franchise films. None of my whining here is intended to minimize the phenomenal impact Rick Berman has had on the Trek franchise. Indeed, were it not for Berman's innovations and dedication, I'd likely not be writing these words at all, and Star Trek would be a fond memory. The earliest seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation were so astoundingly bad, so sleep and belly laugh inducing, the show might have died prematurely. But, as Berman's control of the show increased, so did the show's focus. While certainly loved as the show's creator and inspiration, Gene Roddenberry's sensibilities were far too lofty for 80's television. Berman, from all appearances, helped bridge the gap between Roddenberry's vision and the realities of what works in today's crowded TV market. While losing none of its lofty ambition, Next Gen, under Berman, evolved into a well-rounded and mature ensemble piece, finally hitting its stride with the season three cliffhanger, "The Best of Both Worlds." With season four, TNG took off like a rocket, becoming the most successful franchise series of all time, and launching three spin-off shows: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager and the current Enterprise. While many Trek fans actively rail against Berman, I have a great deal of respect for how the franchise has flourished under his direction, how Roddenberry's concepts have matured and congealed into our cultural lexicon. Bringing his TV folks to feature film, Berman apparently thought a camera was a camera and Trek was Trek, missing the point that Nimoy, Bennett and Meyer were successful feature film directors who had worked in movies, real movies, for years. Making the jump from the small screen to the big screen, Berman installed his TV people to make Generations, Berman's first Trek feature film (subtitle: Picard versus Caligula). The closest Generations came to looking like a feature film was the dim lighting on the Enterprise D in its first scenes, lighting so low it puzzled TNG fans, who wondered if Picard had forgotten to pay the light bill. Beyond that, in most every sense, Generations looked like a TV show, was written like a TV show, was shot like a TV show, sounded like a TV show, and failed as a motion picture.
The Generations rule broken: Only The Very Best Commanders Available Are Ever Given The Enterprise's Captain's Chair. From Robert April (the first commander of Kirk's ship) to Christopher Pike to Kirk to Enterprise-C's Rachel Garrett (from the Next Generation episode "Yesterday's Enterprise"), the captain of the USS Enterprise was a force to be reckoned with. Breaking this rule simply to plant the bumbling John Harriman (played with stuttering aplomb by Spin City's Alan Ruck) was offensive to me in the sense that the producers violated the fan trust for a short term, lame plot device.
Even worse, Generations got Kirk so completely wrong, it makes us wonder if Berman has ever seen an episode of The Original Series. Generations centers around James Tiberius Kirk being trapped in a hokey plot device called The Nexus, where he is living out his life's ambition: being the husband of some woman we've not heard of before and splitting logs on a quiet ranch in the Midwest. Generations collapses in on itself at this point because it loses credibility and cohesive structure around the notion that this Norman Rockwell painting could ever be Kirk's (or Picard's) life ambition. The gag is, Kirk is so happy, he never wants to leave the Nexus. But his fantasy is so wrong, and so dull, that the audience wants to leave the Nexus. The trick is not so much to keep Kirk in the Nexus but to keep the audience there: to show us something so cool, so riveting, that we don't want to leave it to go back to the plodding Malcolm McDowell psychodrama. McDowell fails miserably as a villain because Berman and screenwriters Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga failed miserably to make The Nexus a compelling place for the audience.
Generations was perhaps an even greater disappointment because Berman and his team were capable of so much better. Lensed right before the idea-starved and stillborn Generations, the Next Generation's TV finale, All Good Things, was not only Star Trek at its finest but was, for the fans of TNG, the last time we ever saw those characters written well. Each successive film finds less and less for the cast to do, as the stories center on Stewart's Picard and Brent Spiner's Data. With the exception of a great moment for Michael Dorn's Klingon officer Worf in First Contact (Worf laments he has space sickness and then argues with the captain over the captain's refusal to abandon ship), the Next Gen crew mouth insignificant and interchangeable dialogue (Levar Burton admiring the dawn in Insurrection— aaiiieee). Academy Award®-winning actor Alfre Woodard steals Gates McFadden's scene as she argues with Stewart in Contact ("Jean-Luc— blow up the damned ship!"). Stewart's riveting soliloquy that follows ("The line must be drawn here. This far. No farther!") is the only moment in Picard's feature film life to date where Stewart's powers are truly brought to bear. Picard's ferocity is pristinely and expertly matched to his suffering as Stewart drops Picard's closely held veil and, in so doing, refocuses the plot, elevating Contact from a simple chase-the-goons story into an extremely moving drama about a rape survivor. The brilliance of that moment more than made up for the waste of our time with Zephran Cochran below or the violate-our-own-rules-just-because-we-can nonsense with the Borg Queen.
By the time Star Trek: Insurrection arrived in late 1999, Trek had split into two Romulus and Remus orbits: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager. Begun by Berman and Michael Piller, Deep Space Nine had aged wonderfully into a mature political drama that transcended the phasers and wormholes to tackle enormously complex issues of being. A darker vision than Roddenberry would have ever appreciated, DS9 tasted more like a Sigourney Weaver Alien film than the rosier, hokier, TNG, which typically hits the instant re-set button after every episode. With DS9, Berman and Piller (and, eventually, Executive Producers Ira Steven Behr and Ronald D. Moore, who helmed the more brilliant moments of the series) crafted an intelligent and thought-provoking serial where every action had long-lasting and far-reaching reactions. DS9 was an utter delight, hampered only by Berman's refusal to park an Enterprise-style space ship there (after two lame seasons with the crew riding around in shuttle crafts— snicker— Berman and Piller finally did give DS9 a star ship, but then insisted on breaking with Roddenberry's ground-breaking twin nacelle and saucer design; a mistake that cost them untold thousands of viewers, many of whom never warmed to DS9 because (a) the hero, Sisko, wasn't a captain (they finally fixed that) and, (b) they were stuck on the damned space station). Insurrection failed to captivate a Trek audience who had matured under Ira Steven Behr and Ronald D. Moore's very adult and very intricate DS9. When Insurrection hit the theaters, we were completely immersed in The Dominion War and assumed (well, I assumed) Insurrection would play into the war somehow. Instead, the war was hardly mentioned as Insurrection pursued a very lightweight and unmemorable TV plot about a galactic fountain of youth, replete with hammy over acting from Oscar®-winner F. Murray Abraham and a lifeless psuedo romance between Stewart and a flat and listless Donna Murphy. Insurrection committed two cardinal casting sins: bringing in Anthony Zerbe as the puffy admiral of the moment, and Gregg Henry— The Guy Who Looks Like David Hasselhoff (TM). Any film that has both Anthony Zerbe and The Guy Who Looks Like David Hasselhoff (TM) invites the stink of desperation. Watching Insurrection, I began expecting to see William Shatner, not as Kirk but as 80's TV cop TJ Hooker. Stark Trek Voyager, created by Berman and fan favorite writer/producer Jeri Taylor and eventually helmed by Brannon Braga, was a kind of Gilligan's Island with phasers. Voyager, quite simply, never worked. The writers never figured out what to do with Kate Mulgrew, the series' center seat Captain Katherine Janeway. She began as white bread and she ended as Admiral White Bread in a clever finale that thousands less fans watched than who'd seen the extremely lame pilot episode. Launched with a strong premise (half of Janeway's crew is killed and she is forced to share the ship with Starfleet deserters/freedom fighters called The Maquis), Berman, Taylor and ultimately Braga squandered every conceivable opportunity for interesting stories or characters. Robert Beltran, who played the Native American first officer Chakotay, was so relentlessly dull I tended to fast forward through any scene with him in it. The kooky comic relief Nelix was easily as annoying as Jar Jar Binks, and even the addition of the seam-splittingly buxom Jeri Ryan— a move so desperate and obvious it alienated thousands of female Trek fans; women who had applauded the casting of Mulgrew only to lose tremendous ground with this unnecessary sexist pandering— did nothing to increase my interest in this relentlessly lame show. Seen as the root of much (if not all) evil by a good segment of the Trek fan base, writer (now co-executive producer) Brannon Braga came aboard TNG somewhere around season four (likely around the time of Cause And Effect, a clever Trek-sizing of Bill Murray's amusing Groundhog's Day. Most everything dull or simply wrong about Trek, from that point to this, usually has Braga's name on it. Braga's take on Trek is so stultifyingly wrongheaded and boring, I cannot for the life of me imagine why he's still there. His elevation to co-boss is puzzlingly and saddening, as the arc of Braga's rise in Trek Management mirrors the downward arc of the franchise's overall health. That nobody else (by "nobody else," I, of course, mean Rick Berman) can see this is puzzling. The higher Braga's rise, the thinner the creative ranks of Trek writer/producers. This might have been a natural attrition, certainly, but the absence of a Ronald Moore/Brannon Braga team interview (the two wrote as a team for quite awhile) on last year's TNG TV episode DVD release suggests the two men— once buddies and partners— are now neither. Moore, most certainly the half of the team responsible for Picard's finest feature film moment ("The line must be drawn here!"), while Braga, I'd almost bet the farm, was the half of the team who thought cutting away from the Borg chase to lame scenes of a drunken James Cromwell dancing was a great idea.
So, what's left for Those Who Remain? UPN's occasionally interesting Enterprise, which marginally succeeds on the strength of it not being Voyager. In fact, Enterprise is refreshing in that it is not much that we have ever seen before in the Trek universe. It's biggest weaknesses: Scott Bakula in the center chair and Braga as the executive producer. Bakula, like Mulgrew before him, can't seem to find his mark. He began stiff and remains stiff at this writing. I am told Bakula is a very good actor, but what I am seeing is a guy who lost his way and wandered onto Paramount's lot somehow. He is wooden and uninteresting and I am never, never, rooting for the guy. Braga has never made any of the Enterprise NX-01 crew interesting enough for me to care whether or not the ship blows up. The existence of a pre-Kirk Enterprise is, in and of itself, a real slap to the fans, again demonstrating Berman and Co.'s willingness to discard the rules whenever they feel like it. Naming the ship Enterprise erodes the uniqueness of TOS and minimizes Roddenberry as it reduces his seminal work to just another series in a series of series. With Enterprise, Braga reduces every interesting premise, every episode that holds any promise at all, to utter tripe. Watching Enterprise, I find myself praying, mid-episode, that the episode will, somehow, pull itself out of the nosedive before it slams into the trees. It rarely does. Braga's storytelling style, his instincts, fairly inhabit the show, and those instincts are singularly bad. This is a guy who will have absolutely no career once Berman stops coddling him, because he has no resume. Only discs of TV episodes and films so unwatchable that infomercials and ritual suicide become attractive alternatives.
A hard-core Trekker since the 1970's, I've given up on Enterprise and will wait to see the next Trek film, if there ever is one, on disc. And that, my friends, is the death knell for Star Trek: waiting. Once a fan decides he can wait, it's over. The idea is to get the fans to line up in the rain for that first showing, and to return to the theater for multiple viewings. With each successive Berman effort, fewer fans have lined up. Next time, if there is a next time, they may not be lining up at all. Unless some miracle happens at the box office or in foreign and video releases occurs, we have probably seen the last of the Next Gen crew. We have certainly seen the last of Worf, the Klingon tactical officer played by actor Michael Dorn. Conspicuously missing from the fond memoirs of the Next Gen crew taped for the DVD releases this year, Dorn was the chief and most obvious holdout to signing up for Nemesis. From all appearances, Dorn seems hopelessly typecast as Worf, having played the Klingon for seven seasons on Next Gen and four on DS9, as well as in five feature films (he played Worf's grandfather in The Undiscovered Country). Interviews with Dorn are rare, but the pervasive rumor is he wants a life outside of Trek, something I'm sure he'd always assumed possible as the male model hunky pretty boy Dorn looks nothing at all like the feral Worf (it took them almost six seasons to get the head right: the head was always too big. By season six, Dorn had reinvented his body, sculpting it to model perfection, and with the slimmer and improved season six head piece, finally Worf looked less like a goof and more like a hunk). Nemesis presents no explanation for why Worf is on the Enterprise. In the final episode of DS9, Worf leaves Starfleet to become the Federation ambassador to the Klingon empire. But, wait, there he is, firing phasers, Berman and crew again missing the point they are ministering to a flock of fanatics who know this stuff. Nemesis offers Dorn absolutely nothing as an actor other than a paycheck and reinforcement of his Worf typecast. The last time Dorn had any opportunity at all to act was First Contact, which made very good use of Dorn. Insurrection and now Nemesis, however, don't even pretend to be ensemble movies. They are vehicles for Stewart and Spiner, and both men seem to be taking the money and running. While Spiner does seem to be trying to do interesting work (he's a fabulous singer, finally getting to show that off in Nemesis' opening scenes), a man of Stewart's sheer gravitas should be shamed for just walking through these limp stories. I imagine the Paramount execs are just shaking their heads, figuring they've squeezed the last dime out of Trek. The fact is, there is a huge fan base with open wallets who still want Trek. But we want good Trek. Blaming the spectacular collapse of this franchise on the fans or on the concept itself is likely the Berman/Braga strategy for covering their collective ass. The truth is, in any creative medium, there comes a time when people simply run out of ideas. New people, with new ideas, need to come along. Berman and Braga, clinging to their desks and office suites, have sold out the franchise just to keep their cushy jobs. And whoever is running Viacom/Paramount may not realize there's nothing wrong with Star Trek other than the guys running the franchise have run out of ideas. The corporate mentality works kind of like this: Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin killed that franchise, so now Warner's doesn't think Batman works anymore. There's nothing wrong with Batman. Batman's been here for almost 70 years. What's wrong is Schumacher, not Batman (not even Clooney), but Batman will take the brunt of the blame for this. Likewise, I predict Berman/Braga will remain in power and Trek itself will be punished for their lack of creativity, as Those Who Remain dwindle in size and strength, and this glorious piece of American pop culture fades to a fond memory. Christopher J. Priest
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Berman
and director David Carson deeply offended TOS fans (myself chief
among them) with his seeming disregard for TOS end of the story.
Chekov and Scotty mouthed lines clearly written for McCoy and
Spock after actors DeForest Kelley and Leonard Nimoy opted out of Generations
because the script treated them as minor add-ons, eroding their
weightier good-byes in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
Worse, Berman and Carson plant an incompetent boob in the
Enterprise's center seat. This, like First Contact's Borg
Queen, was a gross violation of the rules Star Trek has functioned
under since 1966. Half the fun of watching a show like Star Trek
is seeing the characters solve problems within the context of The
Rules: Cloaked Vessels Cannot Fire Or Use Transporters While
Cloaked (having run out of ideas, they've done away with that
one). Warp Drive Is Not To Be Used Within The Confines Of Solar
Systems (it has detrimental effects on the delicate balances
between stellar objects in orbit; this is a rule they've made and
unmade and keep forgetting about, as the Enterprise has often
jumped to warp speed while still in orbit around planets— a real
no-no as that could badly and irrevocably damage a planet's
ecosystem). Transporter Apparatus Is Huge And Draws Immense Power
(TNG reduced transporters (and warp drives) to work inside tiny
shuttlecraft, even though the power required to atomize a human
and beam him to another ship would likely require many times more
power than the shuttle uses for everything else. Voyager reduced
transporters to arm bands for convenient plot purposes, and Nemesis
reduces a transporter to the size of a quarter; small enough to
fit inside Data's arm— then only gives him ONE of these devices,
when he could have had a dozen stored in there). Breaking The
Rules for the convenience of the plot is a sign of weakness and
laziness, especially in a genre like Trek where dealing with The
Rules is the main fun of participating in the story.
A
plot device that made no sense at all, as Captain Harriman was
certainly more familiar with the Enterprise-B than Kirk. Harriman
was infinitely more qualified to go below decks and reconfigure
the deflector dish, and Kirk was infinitely more qualified to take
command while he did so. Sending Kirk, who could barely find his
way around the new ship, to go do this tricky, critical Scotty
Thing (leaving Scotty on the bridge?!) just took me right out of
this film, a film so obviously biased against TOS crew that I
almost left the theater. Generations was, for me, all about
Let's Get To The Next Gen Crew, a crew I had, at that time, never
seen. I had watched the pilot episode of TNG and found it
unbearably dull. I never watched it again, and never saw those
characters again until Generations. Starting their film
lives on the ship's holodeck, I was completely lost. I had
no idea they were on a holodeck. I had no idea what a holodeck was.
I mean, I figured it out at some point, but while I was figuring
out what I was looking at, I was not in the movie or in
the story. It felt like Paramount was flipping me the bird. Get
Lost You Old TOS Fanboy.
Picard's fondest wish is not raising a family
and having Christmas tea. His fondest wish is exploring the ruins
of some ancient archaeological dig while having to save Vash (his
Indiana Jones gal-pal) from the bad guys. Generations
offers no explanation for how Picard, singly, has the strength of
character and will to leave The Nexus— even moreso than Kirk
(another slap to TOS fans: Picard saves the day; journeying to
Kirk's fantasy (no explanation of how he found Kirk in there—
was there a map, "You Are Here..."). Picard should
have hit his comm badge and signaled the Enterprise, looking for
Kirk, and found him on the bridge of The Original Series Enterprise, in all
its hokey glory, with all the old guys in the cast, consoles exploding, camera shaking, as he battles the Klingons or, even
better, Khan. That Ricardo Montalban's Khan Noonien Singh, the best Trek
villain of all time, was not to be found in The Nexus shows us how
lost Berman and his pals were, or, alternately, how petty and
selfish they were: desiring more to distance themselves from what
has gone before than to please the audience who has kept this
franchise alive for 30 years.
