A Brief Guide to Star Trek (27 page)

Stewart – credited as an associate producer on the film – had some other ideas for the movie. He agreed with Piller’s desire to produce a lighter film that would show the crew having more fun, but he also felt that the stalled romance Picard had enjoyed with Alfre Woodard’s Lily in
First Contact
had not gone far enough. Stewart was also keen on the discarded fountain of youth idea, perhaps feeling that Picard should face the same ageing issues as Kirk had previously. ‘The script ended up having input from Patrick Stewart, from the studio, from me, and slowly the story started changing’, remembered Berman. ‘I think maybe it’s a little like that old story about a camel being a horse made by committee. Instead of setting it aside and coming up with another story, we took that story and started bending it, twisting it, changing it and making it more upbeat. I don’t think the script ever quite solidified.’

Piller worked on a new script, confining Data’s rebellion to the opening of the film only (and excusing his actions by having him really on an undercover mission on behalf of Starfleet, investigating a rebel faction), while the villains became the Son’i, a race persecuting the child-like Ba’ku and in league with renegade Federation officers to steal the power of rejuvenation their planet seems to provide. Final changes saw the Son’i become the Son’a; the Ba’ku turned into adults; the addition of a love-interest figure for Picard in the Ba’ku woman Anji (filling the Alfre Woodard romance role); and the action quotient was increased dramatically.

Jonathan Frakes returned to direct the film, although he was later to express concerns about what he saw as weaknesses in the screenplay. As the villainous Son’a leader, Frakes cast F. Murray Abraham as Ru’afo, the latest in a series of
Star Trek
movie villains who would live in the shadow of
Star Trek II
’s Khan. Starfleet renegade Admiral Dougherty was played by Anthony Zerbe, while ‘love interest’ Anji was Donna Murphy. Despite a budget in the region of $58 million,
Star Trek: Insurrection
(as the film was dubbed after the titles
Prime Directive
and
Nemesis
were rejected) managed to look like a very cheap film, or – in the view of many critics – an overextended television episode.

Rick Berman later admitted that
Star Trek: Insurrection
was ‘a less-than-stellar follow-up to
First Contact
, which had been so up and so exciting’. Critics agreed, with the
Chicago Sun-Times
’ Roger Ebert dubbing the movie ‘Inert and unconvincing. The plot grinds through the usual conversations and crisis . . . there’s a certain lacklustre feeling.’ Ebert’s more serious criticism concerned the basic premise of the movie: that the rights of 600 indigenous people should outweigh the potential of immortality for all, the ‘greatest good for the greatest number of people. The filmmakers have hitched their wagon to the wrong cause’.
Variety
agreed, comparing the film unfavourably with the previous, action-packed movie: ‘a distinct comedown after its immediate predecessor, the smashingly exciting
First Contact
.
[It] plays less like a stand-alone sci-fi adventure than like an expanded episode of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
.’ It had long been a struggle for those behind the
Star Trek
movie to find stories ‘big enough’ for cinema, compared to the often low-key (but nonetheless fascinating) moral dilemmas faced by the various
Enterprise
crews on television. It had been an issue that had plagued Paramount executives in the ten-year development of
The Motion Picture
and it would be an issue that would trouble director J. J. Abrams in the creation of his second
Star Trek
film. Many fans would regard
Star Trek: Insurrection
as the movie that was ‘truest’ to the television series that spawned it precisely because it came across as a television-scale instalment, rather than an action movie like
First Contact
. The
San Francisco Chronicle
review was a little more upbeat, describing the film as a ‘tight, highly-entertaining spectacle’ with ‘fascinating ideas, mind-blowing visuals’, but the
Los Angeles Times
thought the film was let down by a lack of ‘adrenalized oomph’. Even without much ‘oomph’,
Star Trek: Insurrection
claimed $70 million at the US box office (a $22-million drop from
First Contact
) and $112 million worldwide (a whopping $34 million less than the previous film).

One of the rejected early ideas for
Star Trek: Insurrection
was a riff on
The Prisoner of Zenda
, which would have seen a doppelganger of Picard threaten to take over his role as commander of the
Enterprise
. The idea was revisited for
Star Trek Nemesis
, even though Rick Berman had initially (under the studio’s direction) begun to explore the possibility of the tenth
Star Trek
movie not featuring
The Next Generation
cast at all. ‘There was an attitude that I should go out and find a new Tom Cruise’, Berman told startrek.com of the drive to find a younger crew for the
Enterprise
in response to the relative failure of
Star Trek: Insurrection
. ‘I felt strongly against that for two reasons. One reason was that when we were developing this movie, the
Enterprise
[TV] series was coming out. So the
Star Trek
audience was about to get introduced to a whole new cast of young characters on television.
For us to simultaneously introduce them to a whole new cast of young characters in a movie seemed to be insane to me. The other reason was I felt that after a four-year absence from the screen, the fans really wanted to see Patrick, Brent, Jonathan and company again.’

It was Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner who brought screen-writer John Logan to Berman’s attention. Logan had been Oscar-nominated for his work on
Gladiator
(2000) and was a very much in-demand screenwriter – but crucially he was also a big fan of
Star Trek
. ‘I thought this was exciting’, said Berman. ‘Rather than going with people who’d been involved with
Trek
television for so many years, here we had a fresh, A-list, Hollywood writer who happened to be a gigantic fan of
The Next Generation
.’ The only strong stipulation from the studio that Berman had to adhere to was to use acclaimed film editor and director Stuart Baird (
Executive Decision
,
U.S. Marshals
) to direct the film, further taking the movie away from the creative involvement of those who knew
Star Trek
intimately (Frakes later directed children’s movies
Clockstoppers
(2002) and
Thunderbirds
(2004)).
The Prisoner of Zenda
idea resurfaced, according to Berman, in ‘the whole idea of a Picard clone. It went from Picard’s son to a Picard clone that was the same age as Picard, where Patrick would play both characters. Finally, it ended up being the Tom Hardy character that was a clone of Picard, but not a look-alike. There was a lot of suspension of disbelief in the choice of actor.’

Hardy – then known for the TV mini-series
Band of Brothers
, but later better known for movies such as
Bronson
(2008) and
Inception
(2010) – was cast as the movie’s villain, Shinzon. He’s a Reman clone of Picard, plotting to take over the Romulan Star Empire and take his revenge on Picard and the Federation for their perceived abandonment of him. In this motivation, the confrontation between two equally matched protagonists and in the submarine-like space battle scenes,
Nemesis
was heavily modelled on
The Wrath of Khan
, but somehow failed to be anywhere near as engaging.

The movie’s sub-plot built on
Insurrection
with its focus on Data, and originated from actor Brent Spiner (who gained a story credit on the film). The discovery of a prototype version of Data (dubbed B-4) set the scene for the Spock-like self-sacrifice of Data to save Picard and the
Enterprise-E
at the movie’s climax. Data variants had appeared before on
The Next Generation
, including evil ‘brother’ Lore (‘Datalore’, ‘Brothers’, ‘Descent’, ‘Descent Part II’) and his ‘daughter’ Lal (‘The Offspring’, ‘Inheritance’). The introduction of B-4 was probably intended as a safety-net way of reviving Data (through a download of his pre-
Nemesis
cortex) in any future
The Next Generation
films, in the same way that Spock was brought back after depositing his consciousness within McCoy’s brain.

The production of
Star Trek Nemesis
did not go as smoothly as that of the other
The Next Generation
films. Several of the cast members put this down to Stuart Baird’s unfamiliarity (and seeming wilful failure to engage) with the
Star Trek
mythos. ‘I’m not an aficionado’, admitted Baird to the BBC. ‘There were little hiccups here and there when some people were offended I didn’t quite understand the back story. It’s incredibly important to them, so some of them would think directing this one, you surely should know it all. But God almighty, I wasn’t going to look at 178 episodes.’

Baird was an action editor and director who saw his job as simply being to produce a fast-paced space adventure movie. He didn’t concern himself with the details of the
Star Trek
universe – he felt that was the writers’ and actors’ job. Baird told the BBC: ‘It’s big entertainment, but I know the fans take it hugely seriously. I took it very seriously to give you two hours of entertainment, with as much bang for your buck, and thrills, spills, emotion, and humour. That was my task, and not to get too precious about it.’

Logan, whether by his own design or the demands of others, had stuck too closely to
The Wrath of Khan
as a template for the new movie, producing a poor imitation of the original – just as Shinzon turns out to be a poor imitation of Picard. The feeling
that
Nemesis
could have been any old SF action movie pervaded the final product, and it seemed to
Star Trek
fans that the film somehow lacked that very hard to define
Star Trek
magic that Gene Roddenberry had always gone to great lengths to protect.

The release of
Star Trek Nemesis
was a calamity, with a US box office take of only $18.5 million over the opening weekend in December 2002 – the film was up against the latest instalments in other franchises such as
Harry Potter
(
The Chamber of Secrets
),
James Bond
(
Die Another Day
) and
The Lord of the Rings
(
The Two Towers
), and was beaten to the number one spot by the Jennifer Lopez comedy
Maid in Manhattan
. Total US box office take was $43 million (less than
Star Trek V
, making
Nemesis
the lowest grossing
Star Trek
movie, although totalling $67 million worldwide) – a huge collapse from
Insurrection
’s $70 million and
First Contact
’s $92 million. Apart from the strong competition from other movies that Christmas season, Rick Berman had little to offer in the way of explanation for the dramatic failure of
Star Trek Nemesis
with audiences. ‘Everyone from the studio to me thought we’d crafted a really good movie. And nobody came to see it. It wasn’t even a question of not getting good reviews. Any
Star Trek
movie opened and it’d have a huge opening weekend, but this one didn’t. To this day, [I] have some difficulty understanding why it met with such a poor reception. The movie backfired and there’s certainly a lot of room for discussion of why. It was sad and a little baffling to me.’

In an interview conducted at the Atlanta, Georgia fantasy convention DragonCon, in September 2005, both Marina Sirtis and LeVar Burton were very critical of the final two
The Next Generation
movies.
Nemesis
failed, said Burton, ‘because it sucked’, while Sirtis in response suggested, ‘It didn’t suck as much as
Insurrection
. I fell asleep at the premiere of
Insurrection
.’ Burton clearly blamed Baird, noting that for the first six weeks of production he’d referred to Burton as ‘Laverne’ instead of LeVar, while Sirtis claimed Baird ‘didn’t even watch a single episode of
Next Gen
. [
Star Trek: The Next Generation
]’.

Baird’s defence of his film was simple, even if the actual movie had failed: ‘My intention since I was a virgin to it all, was I wanted to make a movie that stands alone and doesn’t rest on all the past history.’ Sirtis claimed that approach doesn’t work on
Star Trek
: ‘There is a history, there is a legend. There are [
The Next Generation
] characters that have been around for fifteen years and have relationships with each other. Gene always used to say it’s a people show, it was about the people on the ship. [Baird] didn’t really take that into account.’

The
Star Trek
movie series, from the arrival of
The Motion Picture
to the 2009 reboot, received fourteen Academy Award nominations (albeit mainly in technical categories), but didn’t win any until J. J. Abrams’
Star Trek
(2009). The most successful and most popular of the films featuring the original television casts had been
The Wrath of Khan
,
The Voyage Home
,
The Undiscovered Country
and
First Contact
. The first three had Nicholas Meyer in common (as either writer or director), while
First Contact
went down the populist action movie route with the Borg as dynamic and destructive villains. They all brought characterisation to the fore and featured ideas mixed with action, sticking faithfully to Gene Roddenberry’s initial prescription for
Star Trek
. It was to be a lesson learned by J. J. Abrams when the time came to reinvent
Star Trek
once again for a twenty-first-century mainstream movie audience.