Best parts of the ill-received Star Trek films

Cafe Society
21

Generations had the saucer crash, which looked absolutely amazing. And Cameron grows up to be the captain of the Enterprise-B. I loved that Excelsior-variant, although I wonder why there’s only one of them in all of Starfleet for the next hundred years. I also liked that the helm died and Data was driving from Ops when the ship crashed. The Nexus ribbon hitting the planet looked amazing, especially in the theater.

Insurrection was the absolute essence of TNG. I don’t know why this movie attracts so much criticism. There were a few clunky lines (Data talking about his boobs) and silly bits (Worf’s pimple, the kid’s pet nutsack running off) but I thought the movie was pretty solid overall. I loved the holoship hidden in the lake, the chase at the beginning, the shuttle sequence, the Gilbert and Sullivan song resetting Data, the civilian clothes the crew wears, the Briar Patch itself, the Baku village, Ru’afo getting so angry he starts bleeding, “Admiral Dougherty won’t be joining us for dinner”, the stealth transport of the Son’a and Picard’s casual “I’m too old for this shit” shrug after lecturing Ru’afo and leaving him to blow up on the collector. Insurrection didn’t have the scale of First Contact but it was a lot more fun.

Nemesis had lots of little visual tweaks that I liked. The ship was streamlined to look more predatory and I like the tweaks. Weapons fire like a boss, as you’d expect from such vessels. I loved that the shipwide annoucements echoed. Swapping Data for B-4 and then having Data bust Picard out was a great scene. The reaction of the crew when Data didn’t make it back was good.

22

Insurrection was everything bad about TNG: sanctimonious and preachy; concerned with a “serious” issue that was anything but; lame attempts at humor (the line about boobs you mentioned); the crew yet again violating Starfleet’s orders; and “alien” locations that are obviously California wine estates. Insurrection turned out to be a good reminder of what TNG turned into after its peak period between seasons 3-5.

23

TMP: The production design on the Enterprise is great.

TSFS: It introduced the Klingon Bird of Prey to Trek.

TFF: It involved Romulans even if they had a bit part. It also had a great Trailer that made me excited to see it (how could I have known?).

Generations: The Crash.

Insurrection: The Stealth Suit and that they mention the Dominion.

Nemesis: I actually like Nemesis. I think it is underrated and First Contact is overrated.

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Well, plus the central premise was astonishingly stupid and small-minded. So the planet makes you young, huh? Then why destroy it? The ugly aliens should just set up a homestead on the opposite side of the planet as the existing settlement and that’s it - there’s no need for conflict or kidnappings or anything. Why would they care what someone 20,000 km away is doing?

Why is Starfleet even involved in the first place, and why does the planet’s rejuvenating effect come as a surprise when there have been scientists there for months quietly observing the population? Shouldn’t the scientists themselves have experienced the effects?

Well, plus it started with a truly awful MacGuffin: Data has suffered damage and his “ethical subroutine” takes over, which means right off the bad we know (indeed cannot conclude otherwise) that Data’s actions against the observing scientists and the Enterprise must be for the greater good. It’s akin to a Twilight-ish “She looked into Edward’s eyes and knew instantly that not only would she love him infinitely and forever, but that despite any seeming ambiguity in his actions, he would absolutely love her in return and never ever ever ever do anything bad to her, like, ever.” This isn’t presented as a character’s beliefs, which might be incorrect, but inescapable narrative fact.

We were still on the first reel and the Insurrection was announcing that this was going to be a black-and-white tale of good guys and bad guys. Jettison now any possibility of thought-provoking adult drama - just dump those ideas on to the sticky theater floor like so many discarded popcorn bags.

25

An unfortunate trait shared by all the TNG Trek movies: ambitious plots so full of holes they’re basically nonsensical.

(Not that the better Trek movies didn’t have their share. Why did that eel flop out of Chekhov’s ear without killing him?)

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I seem to recall the novelization made his survival out to be some kind of fluke (though it’s pretty silly to introduce a concept and then break its rules), but I think the larger plothole is often overlooked: when Chekov and Terrell are discovered at the Regula station, Chekov specifically says “he put creatures in our bodies” with the implication that this led to some sort of mind control, etc. McCoy was right there - did it not occur to him to use his trusty tricorder to investigate this rather unusual claim? Wouldn’t he have discovered the presence of the Ceti eels right away, possibly found a way to remove them?

It’s by far my favourite Trek movie (and comfortably one of my favourites for all genres) but surely a more elegant and less problematic way for Khan to seize the Reliant could have been written. Keep Marla McGivers alive and she uses some Starfleet protocol distress signal to lure in the Reliant, claiming her ship crashed and she and her “crew” get beamed up to the Reliant, where they seize control of it, etc.

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My first thought as well. I’ve loved her since PASSION.

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They want to grind up and snort the radiation rather than wait for the time-release capsule to work. It’s mentioned in dialog that the Son’a are too far gone and a stay on the planet’s surface will not help them. Concentrating the radiation was their only solution.

The planet is in Federation space. “We have the planet, they have the technology.” As for why the Enterprise crew notices youthful regeneration immediately and the duck blind crew doesn’t? It’s not addressed in the movie but who questions why they are healthy and happy?

29

IIRC, they weren’t aliens but disaffected youth come home to roost and they were too far gone to just hang out, they had to mainline the fairy dust.

30

I just realized in Generations, that in the space of a couple of days, Picard lost his brother and nephew, his ship, and witnessed the death of a legend. Talk about a bad week.

Generations should have ended with Picard sitting in that home by his brothers vineyard having assumed the mantle of head of the estate.

31

Just rewatched TSFS the other night. I did enjoy the acting in this one. My favorite parts:
[ul]
[li]Kirk falling next to his captain’s chair when told of David’s death [/li][li]Jim…your name…is Jim" at the end. Gets me every time! [/li][li]Klingon: “I do not deserve to live.” Kirk: “Ok, I’ll kill you later” [/li][li]Kirk fighting the Klingon commander on the Genesis planet was pretty cool.[/li][/ul]
Wasn’t Generations where Data sings the “Lifeforms” song? Or is that First Contact? I do love that part.

It really is difficult to find favorite parts of FF. Uhura’s feather dance, maybe?

32

Then they’re dumb. Even if they hated their parents with the burning fury of a million seething teenagers, they should have periodically returned to the planet, set up a camp thousands of miles from the existing settlement, rejuvenated, and then gone about their business of, I guess, trading in pseudofeline mani-pedi slave girls or whatever.

33

For Star Trek: The Motion Picture: The torture of the malfunctioning transporter was really well done, esp. with the limited tech of the day. It’s also the rare time they acknowledge there might be any real “no backsies” risk to what they’re all out there doing. And I’ll put “Enterprise… what we got back didn’t live long. Fortunately.” as perhaps one of the most emotionally tinged lines in the entire run of the show. It’s also frankly one of the few things that actually HAPPENS in this movie.

Also, I think Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan is enhanced because of the (admittedly plodding) conflict between Decker and Kirk. The probe whisking away Ilia and Decker responding “THIS is how I define unwarranted!” after having criticized Kirk for taking the “unwarranted” risk of charging into face the unknown.

Ultimately, Kirk was right… get to where the problem is, then trust in yourself and your crew to figure out the solution. But Decker wasn’t wrong either — Kirk’s cavalier approach puts people at risk of being killed. It’s the Kobayashi Maru question before it’s raised in the next one.

34

Star Trek 1: Obviously, the opening scene with the Klingon battle cruisers.

Star Trek 3: Really, this movie is a perfectly good little adventure with much to recommend it, and Christopher Lloyd is terrific. Lots of good lines, Shatner is really very good.

Star Trek 5: Has its acting moments, I guess, especially Kirk explaining that his pain is a part of who he is.

Star Trek 6: (Note: I think this movie sucked.) Nice to see Michael Dorn. Christopher Plummer is good.

Generations: I can’t really think of much that was memorable about this or, really, any of the Next Generation films.

I thought, to be honest, that the Next Gen films were horribly planned and executed from the get go, and the failure to have either Wesley Crusher or Q in any of them was very ill advised. Yes, Wesley. I’m right on this. The films had no arc as a whole.

35

In ST:The Motion Sickness, the best part is the invert-spin tracking shot of the Klingon Kruisers investigating V’Ger, the “click click” music cue for them, and the BOOOOONNNNGG cue for V’ger.

The rest pretty much sucked, sad to say. We were so excited! It promised so much, and delivered so little. But it made TWoK possible. Third best Star Trek movie, behind Forbidden Planet and Captain Horatio Hornblower.:slight_smile:

36

That is a really good scene and well played by an actor who is best known for his hammy tendencies.

I though I read somewhere that he had misjudged the distance and actually stumbled or someone (Nimoy?) had gotten him off his mark for it or something. The only thing I found close to that is in the trivia section on IMDB:

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[quote=“Nonsuch, post:22, topic:714696”]

Insurrection was everything bad about TNG: sanctimonious and preachy;

Ah, code words for “anything that doesn’t involve neato-cool space battles.” :rolleyes:

Yeah, how horrible. People taking a stand when the government shreds the core foundations of the principle we’re supposed to live by, merely for the sake of convenience.

A huge part of the So’na plot was not merely taking the metaphasic material for themselves; it had to do with revenge. Ru’afo was on the edge of madness in his desire for payback.

They didn’t want to live on a planet that required two days’ travel at one-quarter impulse to get there. It’s the equivalent of living five hours away from even the nearest convenience store. Not exactly conducive to impulse buys.

38

Methinks those arguing about “Insurrection” (both for and against) doth protest too much. :slight_smile:

Watching it again recently for the first time in more than a decade, I found it to be, essentially, a decent TNG episode - a solid thematic core (aging crew encounters the Fountain of Youth!) bogged down by a mediocre script and a shoehorned-in action plot. It’s no “Inner Light” or “Tapestry,” to be sure, but it’s not as bad as “Nemesis,” either. If it had aired on a weeknight in the early 90s, I think we’d all remember it as “one of those middle season episodes that was all right.”

(Michael Piller actually wrote a pretty fascinating, but sadly unpublished, book about the production of “Insurrection,” and everything that went wrong with it. In short, bad things happen when you try to cram three different story ideas together with no guidance from someone up top with a strong vision for the film.)

I’m sort of astonished, by the way, that the thread has gone this long without anyone mentioning what I think is possibly the worst of the Trek films, non-“Final Frontier” category… which is, of course, the horrendously ill-conceived “Star Trek: Into Darkness.” ST:ID doubles down on everything Abrams got wrong about Trek in his first outing, omits the stuff he managed to get right, and throws on top of all of that his obsession with Mystery Box plots, which culminates in one of the stupidest dramatic reveals I’ve ever seen in a movie theater.

*Benedict Cumberbatch: “My name… is KHAAAAANNNNN.”

Kirk (or at least, the version in my head): “That’s a nice name. Doesn’t ring a bell. Okay, well, off to take you back to Starfleet to stand trial!”*

(Let’s not even go into the frankly embarrassing remix of the Wrath of Khan Greatest Hits that is the last half-hour of that ill-begotten movie.)

That being said, this is the “best parts of the ill-received Star Trek films” thread sooooo… I do like the concept of the Spock/Uhura romance. And the lead actors are all great. If only they’d gotten better material…

39

TNG did a lot of episodes that explored real ethical and moral dilemmas without resorting to preachiness. “Who Watches the Watchers,” “The Drumhead,” “The High Ground,” “Inner Light.” Insurrection peddles a bunch of sentimental twaddle about a post-technological society that’s little more than a hippie commune in space.

The whole thing was a contrivance to allow Picard et al to appear like rebellious mavericks, because the creators think movie audiences go for that kind of shit. On the series, disobeying orders, while sometimes necessary, was treated as a matter of grave seriousness (“The Offspring,” “Reunion,” to name a few). It’s not an opportunity for cliché action-movie posturing (Data: “Lock and load!”) aimed at getting the audience to pump their fists into the air. Insurrection runs completely counter to the tone and worldview of the series in this regard.

40

Star Trek III is my personal favorite. But, I would say the FX, particularly the space dock scenes.

For V, I’d say the relationships between the characters still work very well. I liked the visuals in Yosemite as well.

I can’t find anything good about TMP, except I gave a huge sigh when Bones lost that ghastly beard.