Star Trek: Nemesis (Paramount, Digital Image Associates, 2003)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I were at retreat sponsored by his church when they watched a movie. The stated goal was to pick a filkm that would be of interest to the children in attendance, but instead of the expected film from Dosney, Pixar or both they showed a 2002 science-fiction movie called Star Trek: Nemesis, This featured the cast of the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation rather than the original players and characters from the late-1960’s TV series that started it all. The principals in this version are captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), first mate William Riker (Jonathan Frakes), Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton from the original 1977 TV mini-series Roots) Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis), Worf (Michael Dorn) – a representative of the Klingons, arch-enemies of the Federation, who for some reason ended up as an officer on a Federation starship (I occasionally watched Star Trek: The Next Generation but I was never as big a fan of it as I’d been of the original) – and Data (Brent Spiner), whose chalk-white face makeup and Spock-like insistence that everything he says must be “logical” marks him as an android.

The plot deals with a distress signal the Enterprise receives from a planet near the Romulan Neutral Zone, only when Captain Picard’s landing party starts exploring the planet one of their members is grabbed by the leg by a disembodied arm that comes up from the ground. The arm is part of a series of body parts that belong to an exact duplicate of Data – or at least as far as its overall design and construction are concerned. It’s actually programmed quite differently, and it turns out to be a spy robot o a mission to steal the secrets of the Enterprise and all Starfleet, including the exact locations of every ship in the Starfleet command. Next Captain Picard receives a message from Starfleet Admiral Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) asking him to go to Romulus itself and negotiate a peace treaty between the Federation and the Romulans. Only it turns out the whole thing is a setup engineered by the villain of the plece, Praetor Shinzon (Tom Hardy), who is a clone of Captain Picard manufactured by the Romulan High Command as part of a plot the writing committee (the story is by John Logan & Rick Berman & Brent Spiner, though Logan got sole credit for the actual script) don’t really explain.

Shinzon was actually raised not on Romulus itself but on its twin planet, Remus, which because of its orbit around the Romulan sun and its peculiar lack of rotation always has one side directly facing its sun and the other side in permanent darkness. All the Remans live on the dark side – presumably they’ve figured out how to set up a community underground similar to the one in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress – only the Romulans keep the Remans as virtual slaves because they need them to mine dilithium crystals, which as any Star Trek devoté knows isi a crucial part of making the starships work. Shinzon is raised on Remus and is maturally embittered by his slave-like existence, until he somehow manages to gain a following and stage a rebellion against the Romulan authorities. The film actually begins in a meeting of the Romulan Senate, in which Shinzon is pushing for a formal alliance and the Romulans have already voted it down. So Shinzon turns on a green energy weapon that literally obliterates the entire Romulan Senate (though how and why he remains invulnerable to it isn’t explained), and with which he intends to obliterate all life – or at least all human life – on Earth. Only it turns out that Shinzon needs regular infusions of Picard’s blood in order to sustain his own life, so he has to capture Picard in order to tap his blood supply.

The film ends with a spectacular battle sequence in which some of the conceits violate the original premises of Star Trek as laid down lo those many years ago by the series’ creator, Gene Roddenberry. He never had shoot-outs with phasers take place on board a starship – indiscriminate phaser fire could have poked a hole in the walls of the ship, immediately sucking all the air out of it and leaving the characters to die inside the vacuum of space – and he certainly wouldn’t have had a Federation captain deilberately ram an enemy starship in space, as Picard orders here to stop the Romulan craft while it has its cloaking device, which renders it invisible, turned on. In fact, the first-season Star Trek episode “Balance of Terror,” which introduced the Romulans in the first place, established that the cloaking device took so much energy that a Romulan ship’s commander would have to turn it off and make his ship visible again to fire phasers or any other energy weapons. According to imdb.com’s “Trivia” page, Tom Hardy was hoping playing Shinzon would be his big break, but the film was a commercial flop and certainly didn’t give him the career boost he’d hoped for. It’s hard to see why this film flopped (it was the only Star Trek movie which did not lead the box-office grosses on its first weekend of release) because, though it’s hardly at the level of quality of the first Star Trek TV shows it’s clearly a capable space opera. Two imdb.com trivia poists give contradictory information about the amount the actors were paid; one post reported that Patrick Stewart reported that he made almost as much money off this one film than he’d made playing Captain Picard during the whole run of Star Trek: The Next Generation on TV. Another “trivia” post said both he and Jonathan Frakes agreed to take salary cuts to keep the film’s production costs reasonable.

And I loved the irony that both this film and the “Balance of Terror” TV episode that introduced the Romulans and established that they look like Vulcans start with a starship captain olfficiating at a wedding ceremony featuring two of h is crew members. In “Balance of Terror” Captain Kirk performs a wedding cerenomy between two members of his phaser crew, but the marriage ends almost immediately when the groom is killed by the Romulans during a space battle. In Star Trek: Nemesis both members of the couple survive and the groom, first officer Riker, leaves to captain a starship of his own, with the implication that his bride will join him. The film was directed by Stuart Baird, reasonably effectively, after at least three cast members – Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner and LeVar Burton – asked for the job and were turned down, which seems a pity, especially since both Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner got to direct films in the sequence featuring the original Star Trek TV cast.