Star Trek: Nemesis

A coup has taken place on the Romulan homeworld, with the new ruler emerging from the ranks of the Reman underclass, a secondary race treated almost as slaves by the Romulans themselves. This curious chain of events attracts the attention of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, who is dispatched by the Federation to respond to a peace initiative by the Reman leader, Shinzon. However, Shinzon has lured Picard into a trap for his own purposes.

Released in 2002, Nemesis was the tenth feature film in the Star Trek franchise and the fourth to feature the crew from Star Trek: The Next Generation. In some respects it should have been a big hit: it had a new creative team, with hot writer-of-the-moment John Logan penning a script to be directed by the promising Stuart Baird. Paramount hoped to replicate the creative refresh that took place before Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which also tapped franchise newcomers (writer-producer Harve Bennett and director Nicholas Meyer in that case) to reinvigorate the series.

This move proved to be less successful when it comes to Nemesis. The film doesn't quite deserve the near-ludicrous critical kicking it's taken in the almost twenty years since release, though it is still a bitty and poorly-conceived movie that can't quite work out what it wants to be.

At its heart, the film seems to be trying to be a two-handed face-off between Patrick Stewart's Picard and Tom Hardy's Shinzon, who (spoiler alert!) turns out to be a clone of Picard. How the Romulans acquired Picard's DNA is never established. Hardy is, of course, now one of the biggest stars in the world thanks to multiple strong roles in numerous films and TV shows, but he was a virtual unknown when he made Nemesis and is a less confident performer, without the presence and gravitas required to go toe-to-toe with Stewart. However, he is not helped by the script, which even acknowledges that Shinzon taking so much time out from his plans to taunt Picard is ridiculous. His plans also seem somewhat vague, with it being unclear why he wants to attack Earth and how he was able to build such a huge, super-warship so easily.

The film also suffers from stodgy pacing. The film has - at least on paper - a reasonable build-up, with the discovery of the B4 android giving way to the political story with the Romulans, and a climactic, major space battle where the Enterprise-E shows what it can do in a fight. However, the middle of the film feels missing. Character-building scenes (including a subplot expanding on Troi's telepathic assault by Shinzon) were left on the cutting room floor in favour of dull set pieces like Picard running around on Shinzon's ship for no apparent reason. It's also less than clear why the vast and somewhat bigoted Romulan Empire, with a huge military and many worlds under its control, has allowed a human clone to take it over as a ruler.

All of that said, the film has some redeeming features. The early set-piece with Picard and Data getting into hijinks on a speedy buggy is random, but fun. Brent Spiner gives a good performance both as Data and the B4 android, and Patrick Stewart is also, as usual, outstanding. Marina Sirtis has a bit more to do as Counsellor Troi (who has not been well-served by these films so far), although again Gates McFadden might as well have not bothered showing up. There's some humorous exchanges that work well and Hardy, though inexperienced, gives a reasonably a promising performance. An unrecognisable Ron Perlman is also typically menacing as the Reman Viceroy, and it's good to finally see Jonathan Frakes' Commander Riker get his very long-delayed promotion to captain. The visual effects are pretty good and it's refreshing to see the Enterprise-E fighting an cloaked ship with more intelligent tactics (including just blanketing the area with phase fire to see where the cloaked ship is). There's also some great set pieces during the battles, such as the ramming scene.

Although these positive moments are welcome, they can't make up for the stodgy pacing, the floundering middle act and the pointlessness (admittedly more obvious in hindsight) of the B4 storyline. Nemesis had a hard time anyway, going up against The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets at the box office and with a four-year gap since the previous, underwhelming film in the franchise (not to mention Star Trek franchise fatigue, which was also impacting the Enterprise TV series), but these problems pretty much sank the film franchise until JJ Abrams came to the rescue seven years later.

Star Trek: Nemesis (**½) has some solid character beats and action scenes, but the film feels thematically and structurally unsound, with a villain who doesn't quite work and some really poor pacing. An underwhelming and forgettable entry to the franchise, and a disappointing bow-out for most of the TNG castmembers.

Star Trek at 50: Torpedoing the Box Office

With both Deep Space Nine and Voyager over and a new series in the planning stages, the custodians of the Star Trek franchise turned their attention to a new movie starring the Next Generation crew. They made the decision that they wanted a clean break with how things were done in the past, with a new behind-the-scenes crew to inject some new blood and excitement into the films.

This, it turned out, was not an altogether successful decision.

Released four years after the previous Star Trek film, Nemesis was going up against The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Die Another Day at the box office. In retrospect, moving it might have been a good idea.

To make the tenth Star Trek movie, Rick Berman and Paramount decided to bring on board a new writer and a new director with no previous Star Trek credentials. Berman in particular was aware of how this had worked splendidly well for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, when producer/writer Harve Bennett and director Nicholas Meyer came on board and saved the franchise from oblivion. His hope was that a similar creative approach could yield similar results.

To write the movie, Paramount called on the services of John Logan. Logan was hot property in Hollywood, having just come off the tremendously well-received Gladiator and Any Given Sunday. His later movies would include the well-received The Aviator, Hugo and Skyfall, so clearly he was a talented screenwriter. He was also a major fan of Star Trek and was a friend of Brent Spiner's, who got him up to speed with the rest of the cast. Logan was keen to explore the Romulans, feeling that for such a classic Star Trek race they'd been grossly overlooked by the franchise, and there was a feeling that they could make both an epic action story and a more personal story about the characters and their fates (Picard's relationship with his young clone and Data's relationship with his android predecessor, B4). All of the pieces were in place for a strong movie. Paramount just needed to choose a good director.

 Tom Hardy was generally praised for his role as Shinzon, and has gone on to become a Hollywood superstar.

For reasons that are still a bit fuzzy, they went with Stuart Baird. Baird was a highly experienced and acclaimed editor who had recently moved into directing, helming the moderately well-received Kurt Russell/Steven Seagal vehicle Executive Decision and the so-so U.S. Marshals. Paramount could have gone with Jonathan Frakes, who had helmed First Contact and Insurrection, but Frakes was finishing up another movie (Clockstoppers) and Paramount chose not to wait, even though it was down to a matter of a couple of weeks on the schedule. It was hoped that Baird would, like Meyer twenty years earlier, bring a fresh and new perspective to the franchise. This was undone by the fact that, unlike Meyer, Baird refused to watch any of the TV episodes, was allegedly derogatory about the franchise to other people and jarred badly with the castmembers, getting LeVar Burton's name repeatedly wrong and making quips about his character being an alien. In more recent years the castmembers have called the director an "idiot". Paramount also insisted that the Voyager character Seven of Nine be inserted into the movie against the writer's wishes, an insistence that only went away when Jeri Ryan herself turned the proposal down, calling it idiotic. Kate Mulgrew was instead hastily written in with a cameo appearance as Admiral Janeway on a viewscreen.

Still, the movie that resulted wasn't too bad, at least if reports of the assembly cut are to be believed. There were impressive action sequences between the Enterprise-E and the Reman battlecruiser Scimitar, some interesting scenes musing on life, death and rebirth and the casting department knocked it out of the park when they turned up a young, hard-hitting and intense British actor named Tom Hardy to play the main villain, Shinzon. The effects team did great work and the script struck a nice balance between action, comedy, drama, tragedy and pathos. Baird's direction ranged from poor to mediocre, but the script and certainly the performances could have turned things around if Paramount hadn't received the cut of the movie and taken a chainsaw to it.

 The space battle between the Enterprise-E and the Scimitar wasn't too bad, but did miss the point from The Wrath of Khan that having two evenly-matched ships is more interesting than some super-vessel we know is going to get beaten anyway (Into Darkness makes this mistake as well).

Star Trek: Nemesis's initial cut was close to three hours long. This was, clearly, far too long for a Star Trek movie and there was scope for some of the scenes to be deleted. But Paramount had devised a - highly questionable - strategy for the film. They were going to launch it directly opposite the second Lord of the Rings movie, The Two Towers, and use its much shorter running time to pack in more performances and pick up more viewers from people who couldn't get in to see The Two Towers. As a result they hacked Nemesis down to barely 115 minutes, removing numerous scenes of character development or reflection in favour of action, explosions and violence.

This strategy was an unmitigated failure. As it turned out, The Two Towers wasn't the only game in town. There was also the new James Bond movie, Die Another Day, and the second Harry Potter movie, The Chamber of Secrets, to contend with. Released in December 2002, Nemesis simply couldn't stand up to that level of competition and retired from the cinema having taken a catastrophically low worldwide box office of $68 million against a budget of $60 million. With marketing costs factored in, the movie was an abject failure, the first Star Trek movie to actively lose money at the box office. The film's critical reception was also horrible, with the movie getting the worst reviews since at least Generations, if not The Final Frontier.

Wil Wheaton was to make a cameo appearance as Wesley Crusher, but his material was all cut from the final edit of the movie. Fortunately, a few years later Wheaton would reinvent himself as a cult geek figure by appearing on web series The Guild and on sitcom The Big Bang Theory.

Fortunately, the film was saved by the DVD release. The movie shifted over 1.1 million DVDs in its week of release, with strong sales for several weeks afterwards. Like most of the Star Trek franchise it developed a very long tail. Thanks to the DVD release, the film was pushed firmly into profitability, but it was far too close for Paramount's comfort.

The film's reception resulted in several things happening. A sequel script, which would have been the last Next Generation movie designed to send off the TNG crew altogether, was cancelled.  All further development of the Star Trek franchise in the cinema was halted. A proposed reboot projected helmed by Rick Berman was politely rejected. Paramount had a new buzzword floating around and that word was "franchise fatigue." Star Trek had reached the point of burn-out and it was time to put it on ice.