Star Trek Nemesis (2002): **½

Directed by Stuart Baird

This is an even-numbered Star Trek movie, so by all rights it should be a good one; everybody knows this is how Star Trek movies work:

• Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Kahn
• Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home
• Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country
• Star Trek 8: First Contact

See? Undeniably the best of the movies. This one, being the tenth, should have been up there with the others, but it really wasn't. It wasn't any better than Star Trek 9: Insurrection (Or "Planet of the Hippies" as we like to call it here). Actually, it was a lot less fun than that last one, mostly because for some dumbass reason they didn't have Jonathan Frakes direct this one after doing such a snappy job on the last two.

So the story is about a clone of Picard who was made by the Romulans to replace the real Picard. After a change in government the project is abandoned so cloney boy is sent to Remus to be a slave. He gets pissed, grows up, and takes control of the Romulan government. He's still pissed, though, and wants for some reason to kill everyone on the planet earth, and has discovered some sort of radiation that'll do that, and has loaded up a perfectly cloaked ship with the stuff. Since he was intended to replace Picard, the Romulans did some funky stuff to his aging process (Picard is, what, in his 60s?), so now cloney boy is all growed up and dying, so he needs Picard's body.

Sounds all right, huh? It's not actually that bad of a story, but the movie just feels butchered. After I saw it I went and read about it and discovered that almost a complete hour was taken out of it! Yikes! Unfortunately you can really feel it. Moments aren't allowed to develop, you're just moved from event to event. And it's not like Frakes's movies, which were really fast-paced but somehow kept themselves together, mostly because they were SUPPOSED to be fast-paced. This was planned to be the last Next Gen movie, and as such it was supposed to be more meditative and make the audience think about what they're watching. But most of that gets cut just for the action, which ain't all that much to write home about it.

Yeah, so it just seems like another little adventure, not something important enough to make the final Next Gen movie about. Not monumental enough, like First Contact or Undiscovered Country or anything. It boils down in the end to just the Enterprise vs cloney boy's ship, which we've seen things like that hundreds of times now. There was nothign really new in this movie that was left in the final cut. It kind of pisses me off that all this stuff'll be in the DVD no doubt, but what I was given didn't interest me enough to warrant watching that DVD.

-Christopher Grant Harris

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