lucasw's Journal: Star Trek: Nemesis

(spoilers)

There first two thirds of the movie aren't that interesting. The whole movie seems to be incomplete, and pointless. There's a failure to embed itself much at into the TNG context.

From the previews, I believed the Data like robot was Lor (?) from the series. I'm guessing he died at some point, but a mention of his existence (and fate) would have been appropriate.

Where did this Remus planet and the Remans come from? Where they mentioned in episodes, or made up for the movie? I may look it up later, but as I was watching the movie, I was wondering how I could have heard so much about the Romulans and never of their counterparts.

The early scenes with the wedding are annoying, as are any exchange on the Enterprise where the two characters try to say something clever- or an order is given and the other responds 'Yes sir' and grins in a way that suggests they are practically reading minds. Yes, they have all been serving with each other for ever and know each other's mannerisms and have all sorts of inside jokes- it's painfully obvious.

The washed out color regrading on the first planet landed on is very un-Treklike. It's obvious that now this effect has established itself, it will be frequently overused in the same way morphing was or fancy fonts (in the completely different venue of desktop publishing) were when they were novel. Eventually, most films will opt for a more subtle approach (or already are). It's possible the more obvious color grading comes from a luminance mapping approach, rather than remapping all possible r,g,b or luminance, chrominance, etc. combinations.

The end ship battle seemed clunky initially. I would have edited it down to make the initial exchanges happen much more quickly, so it would not appear the Enterprise was surviving much longer than it should be.

(major spoiler)
The Enterprise colliding with the other ship was the moneyshot, and my favorite part of the film. Even if the rest of the movie is throwaway, this sequence is worth it. It's interesting how a relatively lower-budget Trek film does something so visually novel like this, while the Star Wars prequels suffer from a tremendous poverty of imagination.

To critisize Star Wars further, the prequels only offering is to have more, rather than something different that enormously prohibitive or impossible with earlier technology. More lightsabers, spaceships, explosions, and so on, but nothing really new or exciting as far as I'm concerned. More is better, but it shouldn't be all there is.

There's a certain correspondence to other Trek movies - the Enterprise crashing into the ground, and some sort of weapon ripping a hole through the main part of the ship in another. The attention to detail, and the amount of debris on screen is what impresses me most.

We still get plenty of lame explosions that simply engulf the ship in question. There's nothing more boring than an anonymous explosion that relates no information about about the source of the explosion. Better to have the ship get whole sections torn off, leak gas and chunks of debris and crew into space, spin slowly out of control, and die a tortured death than to be erased cleanly and instantaneously.

The slugfest between the ships was impressive, and the gruesome end of the main villain. The fight between Riker and the Reman guy wasn't that engaging.

I was thinking the last scene would be something with all the crew tastefully naked (from a distance, blurred out, or Austin Powers like) on whatever planet they were originally heading towards celebrating the wedding, but thankfully the filmmakers thought better of that.