Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) – The fan-ficciest of the Next Generation movies! Shall we count the ways?
- Picard’s got a clone!
- Data’s got yet another double, but we’re not even gonna allude to the fact that Lore ever existed while discussing it!
- Remans, the sister civilization to the Romulans that we’ve never heard of!
- Picard suddenly loves to dune-buggy!
- Deanna gets mind-raped again, for no reason! (I mean, I guess the screenwriter had a reason: It would give Deanna the ability to use the mind connection to suss him out in the final act. But it’s stupid to shoehorn in, and reduces her role in the cast to “victim” yet again.)
- Let’s destroy another Enterprise!
I can see that there were attempts to do something deep, as both Picard and Data with their doubles point to a thematic question of “How much do the circumstances of our lives make us who we are?” But it ended up being a bunch of fan-fic ideas thrown into a template cribbed from The Wrath of Khan, right down to “heroic sacrifice by a cast member who wants out.”
The most disappointing thing is… the was the end. The Next Generation movie franchise ended with a whimper instead of a bang. At least Star Trek 5, the acknowledged Worst Trek Movie, was followed by Star Trek 6 to bid goodbye to the original cast ensemble.
And what’s worse, the recent Picard series cemented several parts of Nemesis as necessary canon, which means I had to show it to my daughter to get her ready for Picard.
Casino Royale (2006) – That’s right, I’m only just now getting around to it. Don’t judge me.
The previous attempt to “rejuvenate” the 007 franchise came with License to Kill (1989), the Timothy Dalton outing that sent Bond on a personal vendetta against a drug lord. But in place of taking out one element (the idea that Bond is assigned on a mission by his higher-ups), they redouble other standard elements of the franchise to that time, including putting Desmond Llewellyn in the field as “Q.” Plus the multiple insta-romances, improbable gadgets.. it’s like they really didn’t want to change anything, or rather they did but they also wanted it to stay the same.
So finally with Casino Royale they did a soft reboot (“soft” because they kept Dame Judy Dench as “M”), jettisoned all of baggage which the movie franchise had picked up outside of the novels, updated the premise from post-war to 21st century, and let it rip. Bond is a “blunt instrument” who infuriates his superiors not because of his smarmy playfulness (which is what happens when Sean Connery originates a role and then Roger Moore runs with it), but because of his dedication to finish the mission without caring about the rules. And while the live stunts are as impressive as the heyday of the previous movies, they didn’t go for flamboyantly silly. (Also, Bond no longer ties with Worf as “supposed tough guy who gets knocked down the most.”)
There’s a major flaw here, though, and this is it:
- An uber-high-stakes poker player whose “tell” is that he presses a finger against his temple whenever he’s bluffing? Riiiiight. I think warnings against doing that are in the seldom-heard lost verse of Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler,” aren’t they?
I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story (2014) – The subtitle has a misleading connotation, as that’s normally the phrasing used for a juicy and salacious tell-all. There’s nothing salacious here, thank goodness; the life and times of the Muppeteer behind Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch (he was still performing, with an understudy, when this documentary was made in 2014; he retired finally in 2018, a year before he died on December 8, 2019) is one of a low-key guy who liked puppets in his youth, was invited by Jim Henson to work with the Muppets right before the beginning of Sesame Street in 1969, and ended up being the main on-set puppeteer for many years. He got out of an unhappy marriage and into an extremely happy one that lasted until his death. There are amusing behind-the-scenes stories, sobering recollections of Jim Henson’s sudden death, and an eerie brush when NASA originally wanted to send Spinney into orbit on the space shuttle, but they couldn’t accommodate the Big Bird suit as well, so they settled for a teacher named Christa McAuliffe…
I don’t know of anything that Americans of a certain age could enjoy more, in this era of constant brouhaha, than taking the time to get to know a childhood friend better.
Abandoned movies:
Robot Revolution (2015) – It might have had a good script — I had no complaints in the first five minutes — but then they started introducing supporting actors who couldn’t act. Plus the robot costume was embarrassingly clunky.
I can give three major problems with the movie.
1) The Picard/Shinzon connection seemed pulled entirely out of thin air. Shinzon didn’t look like Picard, he didn’t act like Picard, he didn’t seem to have any of Picard’s personality quirks. Heck, he didn’t even tell anyone, “Keep these #$@! children away from me!” If Shinzon hadn’t come right out and said, “I’m a clone of Picard,” I don’t think anyone would have guessed that was what the writers intended. Thus, it’s hard to see him as “How Picard might have been.”
2) The B-4 plot was so mindblowingly stupid that I’m surprised the entire crew wasn’t court martialed for it. “Let’s see, the last time we found another android of Data’s model, it turned out to be evil and nearly fed the ship to the Crystalline Entity. So, of course, we’re going to put this android together, get it functional, download into it a bunch of classified information from Data, then take it on a crucial diplomatic mission.”
Seriously, if they’d wanted to have Lore, they should have just brought back Lore. Having him as a member of Shinzon’s crew might have produced something interesting.
3) The weapon at the beginning that “destroys all organic matter at the quantum level.” It’s never a good sign when I’m facepalming before we even get to the opening credits.
1) From what I read, one of the earlier ideas was for Stewart to play both Picard and Shinzon. That idea was jettisoned, and instead they destroyed Tom Hardy’s career for a decade.
2) From what I infer from what I read elsewhere, part of the B4 plot was to allow a backdoor to bring Data back in case the series went further. (Yay, Marvel-style resurrections that negate the tragic death!)
3) Yup, I caught that. I said, “Quantum don’t know from organic!” Even if they had just said that it severs all carbon bonds, destroying normative organic compounds… But hey, “quantum” sounds more cooler, right?