Why you keep me tisk you keep me tasking? You keep on asking…
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Umm, no. The original effects company was Robert Abel and Associates and THEY were fired, due to the fact that they had produced no usable footage and time was ticking. The effects were completed by two companies, Trumbull’s and Dykstra’s, and if you want to call them second-rate, then go ahead, but I will disagree. 
They had to rush out the shots and some of them never should have made it out the door, that’s for sure, but they are not to blame. They turned out some spectacular work on a tight schedule.
ILM was involved in ST II.
/knows waaaaaay too much about this stuff 
Oh, man. If only someone had done this to George Lucas circa 1997. “Jar Jar who? George, put down the #2 pencil - you’re an advisor now.”
: daydreams happily :
I’m convinced that Trekkies hate Nemesis because of what happened at the end. Specifically, they hate the fact that
Data died.
Taken on its merits, Nemesis is at least as good as First Contact or Insurrection.
As for Star Trek TMP, no the OP isn’t missing anything. It’s boring as hell. As others have mentioned, it’s basically a one-hour episode with an extra hour of filler mixed in.
I’d have to strongly disagree there. The critical difference between Nemesis and First Contact is that “First Contact” brought out a well-honed villian (the Borg) while Nemesis trotted out a one-time-use villain, Shinzon, who was silly and boring and not the slightest bit threatening. He appears, he’s ruthless and kills people even though he’s charming, Picard and team kill him, and there you go. It’s been done.
“First Contact” benefits from bringing back the Borg because
A) They’re a legitimately challenging villian(s) and
B) They’re already a park of the Trekverse, as it were - even with the addition of the Queen, which fits their insect-like state anyway - whereas Shinzon was just pulled out of Random Hollywood Villian Generator for Windows XP.
To a large extent this is why “Wrath of Khan” works too; rather than coming up with a new and silly villian, Nicholas Meyer pulled out the villian from one of the show’s best episodes. It seems far less forced. By and large the best movies are the ones that draw from the history of the shows, like “Khan,” “First Contact” and to a lesser extent “Search for Spock” (Star Trek IV is really unlike any of the others.)
Where I disagree with the general consensus is on “The Undiscovered Country.” I’ve seen it severalk times just to make sure I didn’t miss something, and I’m sure I didn’t. It’s an absolutely horrible movie. Christopher Plummer’s great as the villian but, unfortunately, the story is hideously lame and careens from serious to idiotic and corny from scene to scene. It wasn’t as bad as Final Frontier, but it was bad.
Oh, there are plenty of reasons aside from the one you mentioned. I can think of at least five off the top of my head:
[list=#][li]B4. What the fuck? Another data-droid?[/li][li]Shinzon’s a clone of Picard? Why would the Romulans even bother? Not only is Shinzon decades younger than Picard, he wouldn’t have any of his specialized knowledge. The odds of successfully replacing Picard and no-one noticing… oh, let’s just say nil.[/li][li]Admiral Janeway (?!)[/li][li]Shinzon’s big plan is to attack Earth. Dare I ask what the fuck for? His true enemies are on Romulus.[/li][li]Shinzon has risen to lead the Remans? I find that offenseive in a sense; the implication that a Picard-clone would be a natural leader. It reminds me of Tarzan stories which implied a white man of noble breeding would naturally rise to the top of whatever society he found himself in.[/li][li]Picard’s complete paralysis at a moment of crisis, forcing Data to sacrifice himself.[/list][/li]
Okay, that’s six, but I was on a roll. 
Compared to any of those, Data’s death isn’t even all that problematic. After all, Brent Spiner had been playing the unaging character for about 15 years and it was starting to get ridiculous.
Since I disliked all of them, no argument there.
Actually what I hated about the end was that they didn’t have the guts to follow through with his death. If you bring in a double that has pretty much the same memories as the original then you don’t really have a death. It just pretty much proves that other than Spock’s death, and perhaps Tasha, the writers of Star Trek cannot write a decent death scene.
I’ll grant you that it might have been as good as Insurrection but that was a terrible movie in it’s own right. I can’t really think of any feature of Nemesis or Insurrection that were positive aside from the special effects. Both had rather weak stories though Insurrection had the weakest.
Agreed, it’s pretty dull.
Marc
You mean jerks like the guy who demanded everyone turn on their TV now {ie at 2 am} to confirm what he was seeing on MTV, got pissy when no-one complied, hijacked other threads to repeat his demand, got abusive, was admonished by Dex, was pitted for it, and then pitted Dex in turn? Oh, he was banned.
No, it’s definitely spelled “Saavik”, not “Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaavik”. That would be illogical.
You had to have been there. Aside from the Animated Series, there hadn’t been a Star Trek since 1969, ten years earlier. There had been movies spun off from TV shows before (Dragnet, Man from U.N.C.L.E., McHale’s Navy), but nothing this big budget. When they made the original trailer for it, they got orson Welles to narrate it. It was imopressive as all hell. Then they got Robert Wise — assistant to Welles, Day-the-Earth-Stood-Still, The-Andromeda-Strain directing (not to mention West Side Story and The Sound of Music) as director, and even dredged Isaac Asimov out of his unwillingness to be associated with movies as an advisor. And Alan Dean Foster to do the screenplay. They gopt the entire original cast back, right down to Nimoy (and even Grace Lee Whitney, fer cryin’ out loud) and got Star Wars-quality effects. It was Trekkie heaven.
The first look was excellent. Klingons that really looked alien, if inexplicably different from the TV show. Nifty FX. Some of the acting seemed curiously bad, but I later learned of the high ratio of fans to actors in the flick. If you see really bad acting (“Carbon -based Life Forms?”) , it’s a fan.
What really disappoointed was the very obvious way they’d basically cut and stitched three episodes together to make the movie. Chiefly The Immunity Syndrome (with the giant space Amoeba inside the black cloud) and the one with NOMAD. Their audience was rabid episode-quoting FANS! Did they think they wouldn’t notice? hat was easily the biggest disappointment.
Nevertheless, they did a good job. I was suitably taken by the mood and unanswered questions. But it was still a disappopintment. I liked II a lot better, and evidently so did just about everyone else.
Yeah, I admit I hate B4, too. If I got a chance to direct a Star Trek movie, it would damn-sure involve B4 dying, with no replacement android. At the very least, his outer appearance would be changed, and someone other than Brent Spinner would play him.
As for Admiral Janeway, well, I have a saying for situations like this.
“Cream may rise to the top, but so do turds.”
Hey, I was there, I was glad to have the movie and I did a lot of Oohing and Ahhing but it was vaguely disappointing. The Video Re-edit was a little better but Wrath of Khan was so good, it showed how poor a job they did on TMP.
Khan & Voyage Home along with Tribbles, Amok Time, The City on the Edge of Forever and Mirror, Mirror are the highlights of the entire extended series of series and movies. Star Trek at its best.
Jim
Not to mention a bunch of miners manage to build a gigantic warship with an undetectable cloaking device.
Nobody else has been able to do it, except a bunch of poorly educated guys who dig out the astroid all day. Sure, whatever.
Not to completely hijack the thread, but I didn’t think Nemesis was all that bad. As an action movie, it was definitely superior to Insurrection; the final act was very tense and well done. And while the whole idea of Shinzon and his scheme were ridiculous, at least it didn’t half-assedly try to present some “moral dilemma” like the previous film did.
Line up Balance of Terror along with those. Yes, it’s just a reworking of a WW2 sub-hunting movie, but it’s extremely well done and it’s impossible not to like and admire the Romulan Commander by the time he goes down with his ship. “In a different reality, I could have called you friend” – what an exit line. (Then again, what a choice of actor to play that part. Marc Lenard was the daddy of all guest stars.)
I don’t think I’ve see TMP all the way through - I was quite young when I watched it and I think I just got bored and confused.
And as for Admiral Janeway… I quite like Voyager, but if I were Jean-Luc, Captain of the fleet’s flagship for Og knows how many years, been turned into a Borg and back, going where no one has gone before, and importantly coming back with most of his crew… Well, I’d probably get some kind of nervous tick everytime I heard the name Admiral Janeway.
Of course, I’m not Jean-Luc, so that would never happen. As you were.
I will happily include it and I will put in a good word for the Doomsday Machine. High Tension, well done, though it hasn’t aged as well. I get the feeling it was inspired by Saberhagen the way Tribbles was inspired by the Heinlein novel “The Rolling Stones”.
Jim
Ah yes, the Doomsday Machine. Commodore Decker (father of Decker head in TMP) is asked where is crew is and he replies that they escaped to the fourth (whatever #) planet. Told there is no 4th planet, his pained look speaks more than his line: “Don’t you think I know that!?”
TWOK also paid some homage to to the submarine battle TOS ep. In the scene in the nebula, Spock notices that Khan is employing two dimensional strategy. Kirk takes advantage of this mistake and rips Khan a new one.
TVH was a fun trip. It put us in the movie by showing the crew in our time. How would we react to the HMS Bounty, to the new kidney pill, to the retarded Ruskie? And it gave us one of the best follow up stories in novel form that just begs to get a visual treatment.
But, in watching the cable TV show of How Shatner Changed the World, we received some expected but still sad news. Kirk himself gave us the word that Paramount has said Trek is over. Period. Nothing new ever to come. Well, nothing new from Paramount anyways. Hopefully (as my insider old friend in Hollywoodland has told me is actually likely) Paramount will some day sell the franchise to someone who gives a damn and has the talent/vision/intelligence needed to create new Trek that is good, and not ENT or VOY type shit.
Till that happens, Peace. And long life. (to which you reply…?)
Live Long and Prosper