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Critics Pan Nemesis
Reader NCC1701E submitted a short write-up on the movie:
"First, the executive summary: wait for the video. Now, the Gory Details, in all their splendor. I somehow received an email invitation to an advance screening to the Paramount Theater in Times Square, here in NYC. I had to wait in line for 30 minutes, and there was some confusion in swapping my email print out for a pass. But they didn't even check names against a list; it was basically first-come, first served among those who had been inveigled there through various means. In the end, there were even some empty seats. The movie itself? Basically disappointing. IMHO, the weakest entry yet in the series. Production values and special effects were excellent. And it was great to see the movie in a big theater with Dolby sound. But NEMESIS is little more than a Western type "shoot out" movie. The bad guys attack. The good guys fight back, Then, there's more attacking and more fighting back. Then it happens again. And again. You get the idea. I'm a sucker for the hokey humanism that was the hallmark of Star Trek at its best. There was very little of that on display here. In fact, there was very little in the way of a plot. Just some mildly amusing cutesy scenes, plus some murky musings about the nature vs. nuture debate re: a Picard clone. So I didn't much care for the movie. And judging by the subdued response in the theater, neither did the audience. BTW, NY audiences can be cruel. This one snickered at corny lines that weren't supposed to be funny. The phrase "derisive laughter" leaps to mind. I predict NEMESIS will be a huge box office hit. But long-time fans may be as disappointed as I was."
. . . and how much is culture.
I think that the general public is kind of tired of Star Trek. Some of the reviews I saw sounded like the same negative comments made about the "First Gen" cast.
We've also had plenty of other sci-fi series to come around - Babylon 5, Farscape, X-files. Maybe Star Trek doesn't hold the same place in people's hearts.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
I am not sure what these reviewers are looking for in a Star Trek movie. It has good special effects and a lot of action and thats what I want to see on the big screen. If you want a bunch of character development you can watch the 10 years of back episodes they show every day on TV. These movies are supposed to be fun. If you would rather see a movie with more depth I am sure they will be churning out another 4 hour Jane Autin novel movie in the near future
Worst. Sig. Ever.
But anyways back to Star Trek, here's the thing people, there's one thing to being a fan and there's another to dedicate your lifestyle to it. Fans enjoy watching the films and know the characters and MIGHT own some memorabilia. HOWEVER, if you dress up in star trek outfits, and would consider yourself a Dorn Groupie, then you are no longer a fan, you are obsessed with it all. Fans won't correct if I'm right or wrong about Star Trek facts.
Star Trek may not follow the same plot/storyline as its previous movies, but for a series of movies and television shows this long, wouldn't it be absolutely boring if all they did was rescue disparaged refugees all the time??
I'm going to see it, probably two or three times because this one looks like a story builder where you can get more into the movie and there's not just unexplainable things (IE: Q) that can just make things unexplainable acceptable. New aliens, new weapons, and new characters will make this one a good edition to the Star Trek series.
Lastly, what the hell did you expect from a movie called Nemesis (enemy of equal power), them to go hug and kiss? NO! there gunna fight because that's what they do.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
here. For example,
Fearsome death rays strike the Enterprise, and what happens? Sparks fly out from the ceiling and the crew gets bounced around in their seats like passengers on the No. 36 bus. This far in the future they wouldn't have sparks because they wouldn't have electricity, because in a world where you can beam matter--beam it, mind you--from here to there, power obviously no longer lives in the wall and travels through wires.
It's the little things that you don't really realize (until someone points them out to you) that put you off a movie.
I think his cameo was shopped out because the film was over 3 hours, and that now he merely appears -- no lines.
;-) Although how much does an "extra" -- or whatever a star who doesn't talk is called -- get paid, anyway? I guess CleverNickName can tell us.
That, or they didn't want to pay him.
Well, reviews be damned, I'm seeing it tomorrow. However, it occurs to me they've opened up another continuity hole with Worf. At the end of DS9, Worf was appointed Federation ambassador to the Klingon Empire. Now he's back on board the Enterprise.
I saw a brief red-carpet interview with Michael Dorn (who plays Worf) who said, "You know, they never addressed that..."
Which makes me wonder...
Heh, here are a few that I stole from an unsuspecting fansite:
"I'm a Doctor, not a bricklayer" - The Devil in the Dark
"I'm a Doctor, not a moon shuttle conductor" - The Corbomite Maneuver
"I'm a Doctor, not a psychiatrist" - The City on the Edge of Forever
"I'm a Doctor, not a mechanic" - The Doomsday Machine & The Empath
"I'm a Doctor, not a scientist" - Metamorphosis
"I'm a Doctor, not a physicist" - Metamorphosis
"I'm a Doctor, not an escalator" - Friday's Child
"I'm a Doctor, not a magician" - The Deadly Years
"I'm a Doctor, not a flesh peddler" - Return to Tomorrow
"I'm a Doctor, not a coal miner" - The Empath
Bush should have died, not Reagan -- Morrissey
Morrissey rides a cockhorse -- The Warlock Pinchers
Someone who works as a critic for living is someone who failed in life and devotes his life in destroying those who did.
This story reminds me of a critic in the Toronto Star back in the seventies when I lived in Canada. I sent a letter to the editor thanking them for their great information on movies. I pointed out the movie of the Pink panther that was destroyed in the critic's column. If it hadn't been for the critic I might have missed a good movie. I usually looked at his critic in order to make my choice on a movie at the cinema. I would pick among the ones he hated the most. I don't rememver a bad choice of movie with this technique.
What really bugs me is that with hundreds of great SF (and fantasy) novels that have never been made into films, folks spend hundreds of millions making terrible scripts into films. Sure, making Lord of the Rings into a film is a no brainer -- we had to wait fifty years for that?!
Just off the top of my head (and everyone will have their own ideas):
Note: I'm picking big, generally violent, splashy stories that would turn into the kind of movies that Hollywood likes, and not subtle stuff. Most of the books have franchise potential (i.e. they're part of long series).
Isaac Asimov's "Foundation"
Iain Banks's "Excession"
Greg Bear's "Eon"
David Brin's "Startide Rising"
C.J. Cherryh's "Downbelow Station"
Arthur C. Clarke's "Earthlight"
Gordon R. Dickson's "Tactics of Mistake"
William Gibson's "Neuromancer"
Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Dispossessed"
Cordwainer Smith's "Norstrilia"
Neil Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" (or get Spielberg to do "Cryptonomicon" since he has this WWII bug)
Jack Vance's "To Live Forever"
Walter Jon Williams's "Aristoi"
I won't even bother listing fantasy series that could be made into movies once they've finished making every posthumous exhumation of Tolkein's crap into movies (I foresee five films based on the Silmarillion and then there's the volumes and volumes of junk published by his son...)
On a side note: why is it that Philip K. Dick's most obscure novels and short stories that are often boring or make no sense do get made into films? And generally they're stories about someone who is totally passive and runs away at every sign of trouble who ends up being played by Arnold Schwarzenegger... Maybe the screenwriters see a kindred spirit or something. Or maybe the rights were cheap.
If we're going to make Dick's books into movies, what about:
"Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said"
"A Scanner Darkly"
Maybe Pixar can make "Ubik"...
IMHO the worst was definitely Generations, for three reasons:
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The "plot dev^H^H^H nexus" was the most contrived thing I have ever seen. It was a construction whose sole purpose, it seems, was to allow the plot to unfold as it did.
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They gratuitously wrecked practically every feature of the Star Trek universe they could get their hands on:
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Data got emotions.
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Geordi got eyes.
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The Enterprise was destroyed.
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Kirk was killed.
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Lursa and Betor died.
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et cetera...
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Oh, and by the way, the plot sucked.
</SPOILERS>To go from that dreck to First Contact (IMHO the best movie of them all) was a triumph, and Jonathan Frakes deserves a lot of credit. (I think he also deserves credit for making the best odd-numbered movie, Insurrection. Yeah, it wasn't very good, but look at the other odd-numbered movies.)
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Well, at least for me.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
And no, a bomb threat isn't considered a lesser emergency; a bosun's call is sent over the standard PA, which has been used routinely since leaving harbour, and is therefore less likely to trigger the bomb than the general alarm which hasn't been used.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Let me get this straight .. you honestly believe that a statement like "At present rates of hunting, humpback whales will become extinct in the next 50 years" is an "over-the-top environmentalist message?" You're kidding, right? If you don't care about the whales, that's your business, but the whole humpback sub-plot was not about the crew of the Enterprise chaining themselves to trees or railing about the evil of "multinational corporate polluters." There's a world of difference between conservation and radical, over-the-top (as you say) environmentalism.
If you didn't like The Voyage Home, then that's fine, but try to keep your criticism credible.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
ST1 - $370m
ST2 - $194m
ST3 - $159m
ST4 - $225m
ST5 - $104m
ST6 - $127m
ST7 - $147m
ST8 - $174m
ST9 - $131m
(all figures in adjusted 2002 dollars, worldwide gross)
Yes it did, but you missed it. :-)
The next time you watch the movie, realized that it was Excelsior returning from a mission exploring gaseous nebulas when the Kronos moon exploded. Then when you reach the climax of the movie, ask yourself, "Why does the Enterprise have the equipment from Excelsior on board?"
I seem the be the only person who noticed this in the theater when it first came out. Nobody else ever notices until I mention it. Then they see it. It scares me.
I am not a resource! I am a free man!
Are there are reviews by NON-fans of the whole Trek thing? The only thing that attracts me about Nemesis is that I hear that it is about as non-Trek as you can get in the franchise. I'd like to know what someone who doesn't want to see Yet Another Trek Movie thinks. I'm sick of the preachiness of Star Trek and would like some Sci Fi that is a little bit innovative.
Does anyone remember a sci-fi short story from the 70s called "Common Denominator" or something like that? It had excellent descriptions of ship-to-ship combat in space, used rocket propelled missles, some sort of nasty beetle creatures were the enemies. I can't remember exactly what the story was called or who wrote it, but I think it would make an excellent flick. There is just something very tired and "blah" about the whole Star Trek thing that makes me crave something new...
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
You can't make a Star Trek movie that you guys will like. Nothing will ever live up to the stuff you saw as a kid.
No, but I'd settle for something that lived up to what I saw in 1996 when First Contact came out. And I assure you, I was not a kid.
There has barely been a single year since the premiere of TNG in the late 80s when Star Trek has NOT been on television or the big screen in some form or another. Indeed, there was a time, not so many years ago, when there were two Trek series AND a movie available all at the same time! So it isn't as if good Trek is some kind of distant memory that's had 25 years to accumulate unrealistic expectations, like Star Wars has.
Trek is capable of being good, and it has been capable of being good quite recently, by comparison -- at least to my mind. I have not been "building up" any image of Trek -- it's always been there, from TNG up on to Voyager and Enterprise. And if I feel it's declined in quality, that isn't necessarily nostalgia talking.
I recently purchased a couple seasons of TNG on DVD, and while it's not perfect, it's every bit as good as I remember. And if Enterprise had the same caliber of writing, I would not be panning it. Instead I'm just not watching it.
So, I'm sorry, but I don't think the "oh you were but a wee lad when you liked Star Trek" argument holds water. Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out when I was a kid, and I thought it was junk even then. And I think First Contact is right up there with Wrath of Khan -- they're both excellent.
Time has no meaning with Trek -- either it's good, or it isn't. I don't know a single person who liked Trek V because they happened to be young when they saw it.
Why was the kid so pissed at earth anyway? It would seem he should be pissed at Romulus for sending him to work in the mines and such... What the hell did Earth ever do to him?
What was his hangup at being touched by a female?
Why did the green guys follow him when he was a prickly scrawny human and they were big and bad?
They were bred for war. Why were they such bad shots?
Why couldnt warf hit the barn?
That seemed to be some pretty decent method for tracking andriod parts from pretty far away. Why couldnt have that been used before to track Data?
Why was Warf whinging like a little girl at his hange over? Why wasnt he busy being pissed at Riker for taking his woman?
What the hell is it to Picard if his officers dont want to get publicly naked, at what could only be described as a personal event? (maybe he has some other issues....)
Why all the anoying closup shots?
When Troy tells Picard she has 'been violated' why didnt he look with suspision to Riker like anyone else would have reacted?
Picard tried to kill everyone with self destruct becouse the situation just got really bad, they all live. Instead of having a party and celebrating life, they go on about a peice of hardware(Data) that was lost.
These people just are not normal damnit! They all need help.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Star Trek: Nemesis is like Mission Impossible 2... It's a decent movie. They just gave it the wrong name. Other than the fact that they used characters from STNG... the feel of the movie is completely different from the TV show. And if you pay attention to the technology...it's more akin to what we have now..than any future. A 4-Wheel Offroad vehicle. The tools Crusher uses in sick bay... The pop up computer panel in Picard's office...
It's all 20th/21st Century Tech. Even the computer displays look like stuff out of the recent Star Trek video games. Maybe it's just me...but it doesn't feel like "Star Trek." The mood is dark, and the main characters seem way to jovial...
Decent story. Wrong name.
The dichotomy really is that TOS, TOS, and Voyager are all PLOT-driven. DS9 is CHARACTER-driven. This makes them appeal to completely different audiences, both of whom generally think that the other's guy's taste sucks.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?