neljapäev, 29. november 2012

What went wrong with Star Trek: Nemesis

This is in reply to a post on IMDb's Stuart Baird forum thread regarding what his input was to "Star Trek: Nemesis". The advantage to this post here is that threads on IMDb get sometimes deleted as a matter of cleanup, and I can also edit this one here for further comment.

It is soon almost ten years since the film was released, well past the 2009 "Star Trek" movie directed by J.J. Abrams, and I am making my review only now.

The post herein lists some of the things I thought went wrong with making Star Trek: Nemesis and contains an opinion about the stuff that I would have made.

Indeed, it is yet another and one of many posts that list the things that were and went wrong with Nemesis. Many people, of course, do vouch to be the expert storymaker and director after a flop, yet hindsight also gives us the opportunity not to repeat the mistakes and do things better.

So, for starters, I noted a poster there was actally correct in terms of who actually ran the show, and I made a conclusion:


All in all, it was a confluence of bad calls and decisions:

* John Logan is an awesome team writer. With him doing a solo job on Nemesis, the studio should have assigned someone to take a critical look at the script before it was put into production.

The Reman storyline was ok, though fairly one-sided, as it is. I would have never allowed such a terrible name as "Shinzon". Pieces of "B4" on another planet was also a great idea, but I would have certainly scrapped the car chase for better VFX, and perhaps given the non-space-faring planet a greater role in the dispute over Scimitar the ship and weapon of mass destruction.

* Tom Hardy is a really nice actor and played his bit with vengeance. I can't really see how the appearance of his face is in any way similar to that of Patrick Stewart. Hardy also has really luscious lips :-9

* Stuart Baird is an accomplished film editor, but his directorial effort is something right out of "An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn".

The more I thought of it, the more I realized that the Nemesis directing situation was almost exactly out of Burn Hollywood, where an editor by trade becomes the director (I admit I haven't seen Burn Hollywood properly, but I'm sure the situation described has happened aplenty in this industry) and is hostage to the whims of the producer, in addition getting into conflict with the actors and everyone else involved. btw, Burn, Hollywood has Whoopi Goldberg in it <:

And one more thing: "Skyfall" has John Logan as one of the writers and Stuart Baird as the editor. Skyfall has raked in a gross of almost $800 million dollars worldwide.

I believe the TNG cast still deserves another movie, one that has a polished script for starters, and preferably with Denise Crosby in it as the wily Sela. But the clock is ticking.