This is the tenth in a series of essays on the first ten Star Trek
movies, comprising the Roddenberry-Berman era, and so completes the
Trekalog.
Star Trek Nemesis, the tenth and, as it turned out, final feature
film of the Roddenberry-Berman era, is by now a movie almost nobody
likes.
That includes some of the people who made it. Patrick Stewart, who
initially called it the best of the Next Generation movies, was subtly dissing the final cut during his promotional tour. He was later
quoted as calling the film “pretty weak.”
Even while defending the movie, Rick Berman (producer and co-creator
of the story, with John Logan and Brent Spiner) found ways to
be softly cynical about it. Cast members were soon talking about
tensions with the director on the set. (In her typically understated
way, Marina Sirtis called him an idiot.)
From the beginning Nemesis got a mediocre response both critically
and at the box office, and its reputation has not grown much in the
years since. I saw Nemesis in a movie theatre on its first day of its
general US release in 2002, and was more disappointed than not. I
saw it again during its first run and then on DVD, and was even less
enthused-- also dismayed and maybe a little angry at what
increasingly looked like the last lost opportunity. For there is now one undisputable fact: this was our last look at the Next Generation crew on the big movie screen.
More than 20 years later I’ve looked at it again a few times on
DVD, and in some ways Nemesis is not a bad movie. The narrative is
tight, with one thing leading to another, and every event contributes
and pays off. It has the over-the-top villain and the big space
battle that the loudest fans say they want. It includes incidents not
seen before in a Star Trek movie: a shuttle careening through the
interior of a starship, an android jumping through space from one
ship to another, and the Enterprise ramming another starship, not to
mention an attempted psychic rape.
And it certainly has a message, spelled out several times: to be
human is to strive to be better than you are. It’s a classic, core
Star Trek ideal, and one sorely needed in these times especially.
While its reputation was set a long time ago and people who haven’t
seen it in years still hold to the same opinion, I have to admit that
even after seeing it again—without the same emotional baggage—I
still don’t feel it. It still doesn’t land. And I have some
idea of why for me it doesn’t.
There was an unusually long delay after the ninth Star Trek film.
According to Rick Berman, Paramount wanted a new and younger crew for
the tenth theatrical feature. Berman pointed out that a new crew had
just been introduced on television in
Star Trek: Enterprise,
and another set of unfamiliar characters might be too much. The studio eventually agreed, perhaps grudgingly. The Next Generation and the
Enterprise-E would get another voyage.
Meanwhile, actor Brent Spiner (TNG’s Data) and screenwriter John
Logan were talking out ideas for the next Next Generation movie.
Logan had been a Star Trek fan since childhood, inhabiting the
Enterprise and Star Trek stories as he and his family moved from
place to place.
By this time John Logan was riding high as a screenwriter for
Gladiator, a box office and critical hit that won the Oscar
for Best Picture of the year 2000. (In fact he was one of three
named writers of that film--he reportedly wrote part of the second draft-- while its
star Russell Crowe claimed the script was incomplete and arrived on
set in sections, with lots of improvisations ending up on screen.)
Logan’s status got Paramount’s attention, and he pitched his
concepts to Rick Berman. Over the next year or so, Logan, Spiner and
Berman continued to develop the story, while Logan wrote numerous
drafts of the script.
Logan wanted a direct confrontation between Captain Picard and a
major villain to be at the center of the story. In interviews he
cited Khan in Star Trek II as the model. He wasn’t the last to do
that, and as we know now, in 13 feature films, a single, larger than
life villain has worked really well in a Star Trek movie exactly
once: in Star Trek II.
He wanted the villain and hero to have a personal connection, as in
Star Trek II. So eventually he made him a biological clone of Picard.
The first scene in Nemesis happens in the Senate of the Romulan
Empire. The Praetor dismisses the proposal by someone named Shinzon,
after which an innocuous box left on a table blossoms in a double
helix of laser light, and everyone in the room turns to dust.
That Logan would select the Romulans as the focus for this film was
predictable, since they are based on the same Roman Empire he
wrote about in Gladiator. Like other stories about Rome from
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar forward, that movie concerns internal power politics, treachery and murder. So does the opening of Nemesis. (How there can be an interstellar empire aping ancient Rome so closely has always been an embarrassing aspect of the Romulans, which is unfortunately emphasized in this film.)
Like the hero of Gladiator, the villain of Nemesis is a former
slave—this time from the enslaved world of Remus. (In the myth of
Rome, the city was founded by the twins, Romulus and Remus.) But
Shinzon is not Reman by birth—he is human, born in a test tube from
the DNA of Jean-Luc Picard, meant to someday replace Picard where as a Romulan agent he could undermine Starfleet and the Federation. 
As Shinzon tells Picard in their first private meeting, then the Romulan regime changed, the plan was dropped, and the very
young Shinzon was abandoned to die in the dilithium mines of Remus.
Instead he grew up to become a military leader in the Dominion Wars,
helped by the Reman known as his Viceroy (played by Ron Perlman in
heavy Nosferatu-alien makeup. That is, the influential 1922 German expressionist vampire film of that title by F.W. Murnau, not of course the 2024 remake.)
Before that however, we see the Enterprise crew celebrating the
wedding of Will Riker and Deanna Troi in Riker’s native Alaska,
after which the Enterprise is off to Troi’s Betazed for a wedding
ceremony there. On the way, Geordi picks up a positronic signal on
an obscure planet near the Romulan neutral zone, where pieces of a
Data-like prototype, called B-4, are found and reassembled. (The
sequence on this desert planet features a new ground vehicle—a kind
of open-air, hyper-dune buggy-- in scenes that were subjected to
mockery by some fans. In seeing it again, the more conspicuous
challenge to credibility was that the planet’s pre-Warp aliens sped
around in exactly the same kind of vehicle, right down to the goggles
they all wore.)
So from here, the Data/B-4 pair is thematically linked to the
Picard/Shinzon pair, although B-4 serves also as a plot device and a
possible escape hatch when—is it possible to call this a spoiler
after 20 years?--Data sacrifices his life.
Though Shinzon turns on the charm at first, it pretty quickly becomes
apparent that his fearsome huge starship, the Scimitar, is a weapon
generating something called thalaron radiation, and is bent on
destroying all life on Earth.
Though the plot turns out to be not much more than an Evil Twin
story, cloning was a hot topic at the time Nemesis was made.
The first animal was successfully cloned in 1996 (a sheep named
Dolly.) In 2000 the first “rough draft” of the human genome was
produced. The next few years saw a race between a government project
and a corporate project to finish the genome. In particular, Craig
Vetter, who ran the corporate project, was often on television hyping
the importance of the human genome. When completed, it would be the
key to ending human diseases and improving human health and
performance—and longevity.
Hyping the importance of the genome played into a kind of genetic
determinism that was dominant in science and the popular mind.
Richard Dawkins, in his classic The Selfish Gene and other
works, championed the gene as the major if not sole determining
factor in human evolution, in interaction with the environment.
According to biologist E.O. Wilson, this was generally accepted until
2010. Other scientists began questioning it after that, seeing large
roles for epigenetics (factors other than DNA), behavioral means and
symbol-based means (language) in human evolution.
As scientists dug deeper into genomes, they realized that the
existence of particular genes wasn’t enough in itself—some genes
didn’t “express,” but were still passed down, with the
potential to be turned on under unknown circumstances. In any event,
once the human genome was sequenced it did advance the diagnosis and
treatment of some diseases and conditions, but it turned out not to
be the miracle panacea it was hyped to be.
Cloning was a bugaboo on Star Trek several times before, threatening
a human’s sense of uniqueness and identity, as well as the threat
of its “deep fake” capabilities to replace people, the intent of
the Romulan plot. That, in turn, is a standard science fiction device
in various permutations (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc.)
Moreover, problems with animal cloning suggested that the process
might not produce as exact a copy as in science fiction and the popular mind. Even twins with very nearly the same DNA are not completely identical or
indistinguishable in all respects, even if they are raised together.
The movie plays with these themes of identity (Picard and Shinzon are
“mirrors” of each other; Shinzon complains that he is the echo
and Picard the voice, and so on) and the influences of environment
(Shinzon says Picard would be the same evil genius he is if Picard had
grown up in slavery, and Picard wonders if he’s right.)
But the idea that Shinzon and Picard have exactly the same perceptions and thought processes because of their genetic identity doesn't pass my smell test. It represents more disbelief than I could suspend. I've known identical twins. It doesn't work that way.
There is another fatal flaw of credibility to the movie: that Shinzon is a clone
of Picard is supposed to instantly create an intimate relationship
based on their genes. But in the story, they are just meeting. They
have no prior relationship in the real world, as (for example) Kirk
and Khan did. From a dramatic point of view, the relationship is too
abstract, and without content.
Shinzon is played by Tom Hardy, now a celebrated and accomplished
actor, in an early role. He is supposed to be a younger version of
Picard, although more physically battered by his hard life on Remus.
Tom Hardy creates a character worthy of a Roman epic. But after
seeing this movie a number of time over decades, I am still stopped
by one impression: I do not for a moment feel, believe or accept that
Shinzon is a clone of Picard.
Part of it may be the age difference, but the physical detail that
often give credibility to a young actor being accepted as a child of
an older actor—let alone a clone-- just isn’t there for me. Bald
heads aren’t enough. Rick Berman recognized this problem: Tom Hardy didn’t look like
Patrick Stewart, “so that was kind of hard to buy,” he said
later. “But we worked very hard.”
Moreover, while Hardy and Patrick Stewart act well in this film,
their scenes together feel like they’re in different movies. (The two actors apparently had no contact beyond their scenes during the
weeks of filming.) Hardy approaches Shinzon as a version of Ricardo Montelbam’s
outsized performance of Khan, while Stewart is a much more subtle and
understated Picard. (Picard in a scene with Beverly Crusher emphasizes that as a young man he was arrogant "and a damn fool" but that's not what I see Hardy playing.) As contrasting characters of different ages that
wouldn’t be a problem. But the continuing emphasis on the clone
aspect changes that, at least as you watch it.
The Data/B-4 B story continues throughout the movie, but there’s no
credibility problem there because Brent Spiner plays both roles, and
B-4 is a less sophisticated prototype. As a perhaps unforeseen
consequence, this is an obvious contrast to the not mirror-images of
Picard and Shinzon.
There are other bothersome aspects to the story and the backstory.
Reman society is not even suggested beyond a single dimension. Where
for example are its women? How did a slave society produce a starship
that dwarfs the Enterprise, with so much firepower that must require
huge supplies of energy? Where the hell did thalaron radiation come
from? Apart from the mind of a screenwriter.
And of course, Shinzon’s target is Earth. We won’t waste our
heroes heroism on a distant planet with only a few inhabitants (as in
Insurrection) or unknown alien planets (as in Generations). Earth is
the biggest hot button, though it might have resonated specifically
in 2002: filming had begun only weeks after 9/11, and America was
feeling vulnerable. That and the subsequent War on Terror changed
the direction of the Enterprise TV series and eventually all of Star
Trek, from novels to almost everything that subsequently appeared on
screen, right up to now. Nemesis was by no means the worst victim of
this.
Logan did provide some hints to credible elements of Shinzon’s
character and motivations. He was a human raised without other
humans. In Picard he sought a family lineage he could feel. The
idea of Shinzon regarding Picard as a father, and his pathological
need as a young man to outdo him, to conquer him, can be found in the
film, but not easily. His snarling assertion that by destroying
Earth, he would be more famous for a longer time than Picard, is a
motivation that could have been given greater prominence.
Shinzon is also fighting off death as a result of his cloning, so he attempts to kidnap Picard and drain his blood as a treatment for his
genetic malady--so in the middle of this muddle it's a vampire movie after all.
If these weren’t enough, Shinzon is also lonely, and immediately
attracted to the first human woman he sees, Counselor Troi. His
attempts at forcible sexual contact through psychic means does pay
off somewhat later as a plot device, but it leads to one of the most
embarrassing scenes in all of Star Trek, in its only overt sex scene
ever. (Logan told Marina Sirtis that he had a “purely professional
crush” on Troi, but one wonders.)
In the end, even the core message (to be human is to strive to be better than you are) feels flat, probably because it was
stated but not really dramatized. Picard pleaded with Shinzon to be
better than he is, but Shinzon simply refused. In fact he did become
more than he’d been, rising from a slave child to an emperor, with
his own vision of greatness. The difference between what Picard and
Data saw as basically choosing to emphasize one side of human
nature—our “better angels” in the Lincoln formula made
contemporary by Barack Obama—and what Shinzon did with his life was
implied but not focused.
To further muddy that message, strict adherents of the selfish gene
theory would likely be on Shinzon’s side: survival (or conquest) at
all costs. This is a debate that goes back to Darwin and especially
T.H. Huxley, who introduced ethics into the human evolutionary
equation. But none of this is engaged by the references to the genes
shared by Picard and his nemesis. It just becomes another in too
many themes and currents. To be fair, the elements are there: nature,
nurture and human choice. They’re just jumbled up.
So the story, which unfolds logically, is nevertheless so crowded
that it erodes its own credibility while feeling rote and forced.
And then there is the production itself.
Nemesis went before the cameras in November 2001. Besides a new screenwriter in fanboy John Logan, the director was also new to
Star Trek, but Stuart Baird was not a fan. He knew little about Star
Trek and specifically the TNG episodes and movies, and apparently made no effort to change that. Baird was known
mostly as a film editor, notably for the great 1979 Richard Donner
film,
Superman.
At the time Berman said that he selected Baird because he was
impressed by his directorial feature, Executive Decision. But
years later Berman admitted (as revealed in the second volume of The
Fifty Year Mission by Altman and Gross) that he was instructed to
hire Baird by Sherry Lansing, head of Paramount.
Still, the idea of bringing “fresh blood” (Berman’s words) to a
Star Trek film was extended to the cinematographer. At first it
seemed it would be Dante Spinotti, Italian-born veteran and
innovator, that IMBD calls “one of the most appreciated
cinematographers in Hollywood.” But in the end the job went to
another Hollywood veteran, Jeffrey L. Kimball, known mostly for
action films, including Mission Impossible II, which included
Star Trek veterans Ronald Moore and Brannon Braga as two of the three
writers.
I recall at the time that I for one longed for a different visual
approach for this well-known Star Trek crew, so we could see them in
a new way—something akin to the creativity directors like John Ford
and Howard Hawks brought to their westerns, with cinematographers
like Gregg Toland, Winton C. Hoch and Joe McDonald.
Seeing Nemesis on DVD recently I did notice some different framing
and camera movements inside the Enterprise, but nothing really
striking. Others have complained of the visual darkness and murky imagery. Still, Ford and Hawks showed you can come up with memorable
images in a movie that emphasizes action.
Some fans fault aspects of the production (and I tend to agree that
the Romulan uniforms are comical) but for all the difficulties the
Enterprise cast had with the director, they all managed to come
through. For me the most discouraging aspect of production was what
we didn’t see in the final film.
It quickly became known that some 45 or 50 minutes of Nemesis had
been cut before theatrical showings. When the movie was released on
home video in 2003 and then in the Special Edition two-disk set in
2005—which is the one I own— at least some of the deleted scenes were included in the otherwise lackluster special features.
Some were trimmed scenes (and the DVD only included one part of the
wedding sequence that was cut—this time fortunately, for it was a
well-acted but misguided scene with Wesley Crusher) but some full
scenes are notable. The first is introduced by Patrick Stewart, who
calls it “an important scene” between Picard and Data that early
on set up major themes of the movie. (If memory serves, Stewart
talked about this scene in a pre-release talk show appearance as
well.)
There’s a useful scene in sick bay that gives the neglected Gates
McFadden another moment, and allows Picard to bookend something he
said to Shinzon when he asked if Picards were always warriors. “I
think of myself as an explorer,” Picard replied. In this scene he
recalls that when Charles Darwin went on his voyage of biological
exploration, his ship sailed “without a single musket.” “That
was another time,” Crusher says gently, pocketing a phaser. “How
far we’ve come,” Picard replies, ruefully and pointedly.
The final cut includes one scene of group mourning for Data. Deleted
was another scene—a very TNG scene-- in which Geordi and Worf are
in Data’s quarters, examining and packing up what he left
behind—and Data’s cat Spot adopts Worf.
But the most conspicuous loss is the scene that was supposed to end
the movie. Its the last few moments on the Enterprise bridge for
Riker, now leaving to become Captain of the Titan, and the
introduction of the new First Officer with a Riker prank. Captain
Picard gets a new command chair—with seatbelts. “It’s about
time,” he says, and so say we all.
Then we see the movie end the way Star Trek films properly end: with
the Enterprise warping into space, bound for where no one has gone
before. Instead Nemesis ends with a shot of the Enterprise still in
space dock, an unfortunate metaphor for the impact of this film.
J.M. Dillard’s novelization of Nemesis includes these deleted
scenes in her narrative. The result is a more satisfying Star Trek
story, especially since it exposes fewer of the story’s problems.
But my response to the scenes as filmed and cut was that, not only
would it have been a better movie with most of them included, but as
scenes they were better than some that made the final cut.
All of these possible reasons for less than enthusiastic responses
to Nemesis are responses to the movie itself, and so require that the
movie be seen first. None of them explains the conspicuous mystery of
the film’s relative failure to attract the usual proportion of fans
to the opening weekend, so Nemesis was in some ways a failure before
anyone had actually seen it.
When I began this series of posts on the first ten Star Trek movies
(The Trekalog) way too long ago, I described a little of what it was
like to see
Star Trek: The Motion Picture in a movie theatre
in 1979 with an early audience (as I did): the anticipation, the
cheers as each major character was first seen—including the
Enterprise. This set a pattern of long lines and enthusiastic fans to
greet each new film’s first showings.
In December 2002, I saw the very first showing of Star Trek
Nemesis at my local theatre in a far northern California college
town. It was in the afternoon—not the midnight show that Harry
Potter and the Chamber of Secrets got in some places in November,
or that The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers would have the
very next weekend after Nemesis.
Besides me, there were all of four people in the seats when Nemesis
began that afternoon, and when it ended. I knew two of them from
seeing them around and exchanging greetings when we passed. One had a
disability that isolated him (for awhile he had to wear something
that made him look like that 22nd century soldier in the
TNG pilot, “Encounter at Farpoint,” which he no doubt realized.)
The other was the most conspicuous cross-dresser in town. I note this
not to disrespect them (quite the opposite), but to recognize that
from first to last, Star Trek found some of its most fervently
committed fans among such outsiders. But on that afternoon, we were alone.
In terms of numbers in the seats,
Star Trek Nemesis didn’t start out quite that badly across the
country, but it was the first Star Trek movie not to win its opening
weekend, and its direct competition wasn’t formidable. Eventually
it would be one of the least popular of the Trekalog, and least liked
by critics. But it was also somewhat mysteriously ignored even before
anyone saw the actual movie.
“...
nobody came to see it,” producer Rick Berman is quoted
as saying in the second volume of
The Fifty Year Mission by
Altman and Gross. “It wasn’t even a question of not getting good
reviews. Any Star Trek movie opened and it would have a huge opening
weekend, but this one didn’t. Now, why? I understand and
appreciate the criticism of the production or script, but to this
day, I have some difficulty understanding why it met with such a poor
reception.”
At the time, the most repeated reasons involved the competition from
Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, and the “franchise fatigue”
that seemed to contribute to the early demise of the “Star Trek:
Enterprise” series on television a few years later. There was also
a sense that Paramount essentially subverted this film with weak
marketing and perhaps deliberately fateful placement in the release
schedule. But by the time Nemesis got to the international market,
that direct scheduling competition didn’t exist (as Berman also
acknowledged), and the film didn’t do well there either.
All of that pertains mostly to the general public. Why didn’t the
fans show up? A lot of the diehard fans probably did that first
weekend, there just weren’t as many of them. Many who might have
been Star Trek fans had perhaps moved on to other sagas. But there
was also a new factor in fandom in 2002: the Star Trek fan sites and
their “bulletin boards” (or BBS.)
The two big ones then were Star Trek Today (which went online in
1999) and TrekWeb (around the same time.) I was reading both of them
in the pre-Nemesis period, and I was a BBS participant. Looking
back, I’d say at least two trends still noticeable in fandom today
more or less began then.
The first was increasingly fan attention to “the biz” aspects:
movie and TV budgets, studio politics, etc. There were still threads
in which participants discussed the deeper meaning of individual
episodes or movies, both current and past, and why Star Trek spoke to
them—something that I find is rare these days, if not quaint. But
there was more and more talk of promotion budgets, movie grosses and
TV ratings.
The second was a kind of negativity, a virtual competition for
attention-getting nastiness and outrageous assertions. There was also
a growing sector of far right fandom on the boards, very different
from the fandom that attended conventions and still championed the
Roddenberry ideals. (Star Wars also had such fans, who rooted for the
Empire to win.)
The Internet had already become a source of early information about
the films still in production, including posting the entire script of
Star Trek: Insurrection before its release. But these new
sites made such information and speculation even more widespread, so
there were debates about scenes, characters and plot points expected
in Nemesis well before anyone had seen a frame of the finished film.
Rumors about Nemesis— known at first as Star Trek X—began on this
sites some three years before release. At various times the director
was said to be Josh Whedon, Jonathan Frakes and LeVar Burton.
Outlines of the actual Nemesis plot were known more than a year
ahead.
There was a lot of sustained and insistent negativity not only about
Nemesis but about
Star Trek: Enterprise, and those in charge
of Star Trek—Paramount as well as Rick Berman. Perhaps this
somewhat represented the views of a more general public, or of many
Star Trek fans. Or perhaps it represented the views of only certain
fans—and certain kinds of fans—that found an outlet and identity
on the BBS.
It wasn’t all negative. Though the negativity was my enduring
impression, I actually kept some pages about Nemesis from these
sites, and there was also positive sentiment—including a lot of
anticipation for the film’s release. Still, the debates and the
expectations—both positive and negative—went on for months before
that release. Did the movie itself become irrelevant?
In any case, the tepid box office and general grousing response to
Nemesis was part of a larger dissatisfaction. By 2004, Star Trek:
Enterprise was getting a lot of grief on the fan sites, and
UPN—Paramount’s ill-fated attempt to start a cable channel—moved
it to Friday nights, the well-known graveyard of the original series
Star Trek, in what would predictably turn out to be its final season.
I visited the
Star Trek: Enterprise set that summer of 2004 as
part of my New York Times
article about the ongoing Farewell to
Scotty convention and the talk that Star Trek was dying. At one
point I was in the shotgun seat of one of the electric carts studio
people used to travel across the Paramount lot. Manny Coto, that
year’s new showrunner for Enterprise, was in the back seat. Our
driver was careening around and had to make a sudden stop to avoid a
collision. “I have never understood the human predilection,” said
I, “for piloting vehicles at unsafe velocities.”
Manny Coto laughed. “So you’re a fan,” he said. I’d
paraphrased Data’s line from Nemesis, as Captain Picard sped his ATV across an alien desert.
Now I realize this is the only line I even half-remember from this
movie. Unlike just about any other Star Trek movie you can name, I
can think of no memorable lines associated with memorable moments.
And as DeForrest Kelley once sagely pointed out, Star Trek movies are
made of special moments.
Coto was upbeat about Star Trek’s future that day. But for my article I spoke with Leonard Nimoy, LeVar Burton, Denise
Crosby (whose second “Trekkies” film had just come out) and
others, including writer Nick Sagan and the president of a large Star
Trek fan organization, and they all said more or less the same thing:
maybe it’s time to give Star Trek a rest. There had been two and
sometime three series running simultaneously for years, and new
movies every few years. There was a sense that both creators and
audiences were exhausted and, if not oversaturated, at least no
longer hungry for Star Trek stories.
My article quoted UPN’s president denying he would do what he soon
did: cancel “Enterprise” after four seasons. Even afterwards
Rick Berman was still insisting plans for the next movie were being
discussed—not John Logan’s proposed story bringing the captains
of the Roddenberry-Berman era together, but the approach Paramount
had wanted before Nemesis: a brand new crew unrelated to the prior
ones.
Soon that project was abandoned as well, Berman disappeared (as did
UPN), and the people who had been making every aspect of Star Treks
for a generation were scattered. The original Roddenberry lineage was
effectively broken.
For years, fans mourned the loss of a better exit for the TNG crew
than Nemesis. And then, nearly 20 years later it miraculously
happened. The
third season of the limited series
Star Trek: Picard
(ten episodes in the new world of streaming) reunited the crew—and
the Enterprise D—in a new adventure. The magnificent seven all got
their stories—including at long last Doctor Crusher. Since there
were also links to a future (like the next generation of the Next
Generation), fans were left wanting more. But if--as seems very
likely-- it is the last we’ll see of the Next Generation, these
episodes are a fitting end.
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