Happy New Year! I put this off as long as I could, but now it's 2023 (or at least it will be by the time that anybody besides me is reading this) and I think it's time to finish up the Next Generation films. Luckily, we only have two left.
Unfortunately, they both suck. A lot.
Star Trek: Insurrection was brought to life by screenwriter Michael Piller, who was a showrunner for the later seasons of The Next Generation, the first two seasons of Deep Space Nine, and was a showrunner and creative consultant for Voyager. He was also the man who was directly responsible for penning both parts of "The Best of Both Worlds", considered by many to be the best episode of not only Next Generation, but of the entire Star Trek franchise. As much credit as Rick Berman gets for keeping the Trek franchise going from between the early 90s into the early 2000s, Piller was the man who made sure that the working parts of the machine kept running, building a strong writing team and working to make the stories more focused on developing characters than gimmicks like alien of the week stories. Given that pedigree, you would imagine that this would be the perfect person to write a Star Trek film.
I say this because, as I have not read Piller's book Fade In (which details the process behind the production), I don't know how much credit should go to him and how much should go to Rick Berman for this being an absolute horrendous load of a movie.
I also would be remiss if I did not mention that Michael Piller passed away in 2005. Despite this misfire, the man's legacy is more than solidified in Trek.
However, Piller did say that Picard should (and I quote): "be acting out of a moral and ethical mindset, and stand for principles that are important to [humanity]." We will be seeing how little sense that actually makes as we get into the meat and potatoes of this film.
 |
| There is a rendition of "A British Tar". It doesn't help. |
The film itself begins with Lieutenant Commander Data (Brent Spiner) having been reassigned to a survey mission observing a race called the Ba'ku, who are a race that might as well be human for how little effort was put into their design. There's also another race called the Son'a that are part of the Federation taskforce who are observing the Ba'ku. How are they doing this? Well, if you thought from the safety of one of their ships floating in orbit and using scanners so as to do the least amount of damage and have the lowest risk of being caught, then you're thinking way, way too much for this movie. No, they instead have a base and have several agents that are hidden by special cloaking devices.
I don't think I have to explain why that's stupid.
Anyway, Data malfunctions and reveals the hidden base to the Ba'ku. Starfleet Admiral #543 attempts to tell Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) that he and the crew of the Enterprise are not needed... so, naturally, Picard cowboys up and goes to rescue Data. This leads to the crew of the Enterprise stumbling onto a conspiracy that the admiral and the Son'a have to make use of the Ba'ku planet's healing properties. Simply being on the planet seems to regenerate organic tissue, doing things like giving Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) his eyesight back or making Riker (Jonathan Frakes) and Troi (Marina Sirtis) act like some horny teenagers.
Also, Worf (Michael Dorn) gets pimples. Because comedy.
Picard goes against the Admiral wanting to use the healing properties at the cost of the Ba'ku people, who will need to be either removed or killed. He claims this violates the Prime Directive, and while it probably does, there are two things to note. The first is that Picard in the movies and Picard in the series really aren't the same people when it comes to the Prime Directive. To TV Picard, the Prime Directive is a set of guidelines that are the best set of rules to follow in pretty much any given situation and should only be broken under very extreme circumstances (as he himself has done from time to time). To film Picard... the Prime Directive are a pair of words that he throws around and then basically does whatever he was wanting to do to begin with. The second is that an episode of TNG called "Journey's End" kind of already covered this sort of thing... and then, Picard was in favor of removing the people from the area. This isn't helped by the fact that those people were Native American while the Ba'ku appear to be mostly (if not entirely) made up of White people. I'm not usually one to call racism, but geez! If that wasn't intentional, then it's still astoundingly tone deaf.
 |
| I have no idea why they do this. There's really no point. ...kind of like most of this movie, in fact. |
Not that I would expect Mr. Piller to have remembered every episode of TNG... although one that was apparently proposed as an idea by his own son, Shawn, might have popped up somewhere. Just a passing thought of mine that I can't really ignore now that I know that. I imagine you won't be able to do so, either, now.
No bonus points for guessing that the Son'a have beef with the Ba'ku as well, and the two of them are big parts of why this concept doesn't work and it all comes down to their designs and the concepts. The Ba'ku, as I've mentioned, are for all intents and purposes human. They don't even have a rubber forehead to try and convince us that they're just humanoid, they're just human. Humans who have an agrarian society that claims they hate technology (but use technology, a lot) and runs around - to quote one Harry S. Plinkett - in "earth tones! Browns and beige!". They are amazingly lazily made. This isn't an episode of the TV Show, this was literally a movie with a seventy million dollar budget and you see almost none of that onscreen at any given time, particularly when the Ba'ku are around.
Also, in concept, they're stupid. They reject technology and claim to want a live a simple life. However, they're skilled enough with technology to be able to understand and repair Data's positronic net, because of course they are. They claim "what would technology give us, except a way away from here" as if their world is some kind of paradise planet and it may be. Unfortunately, they're in Star Trek, where one of the major themes is technology and how the use of it helps us to solve the problems in our lives in order to focus on improving ourselves as people and exploring the unknown mysteries of existence. The Ba'ku are literally the antithesis of that, and it's plain bad and not at all appropriate for this movie, especially since we're supposed to emphasize with them.
They are dressed like medieval peasants, they're shockingly pretentious, and they almost get me actively rooting for the villains.
Unfortunately, the villains are also stupid for other reasons. So, spoiler alert for a 25 year old movie, but the Son'a are the Ba'ku, just Ba'ku that were kicked off of their planet and thus didn't have access to the constant cellular regeneration. So, instead of living forever by being a bunch of troglodyte hippies, they went for the cold hand of science that gave them immortality... but left them horrifically disfigured. They basically look like humans with torn up and stretched skin. It kind of reminds me of that time in DC Comics when the Joker cut off his own face and stapled it back on.
 |
| L - A - Z - Y! You ain't got no alibi! |
You have Michael freaking Westmore doing makeup work, the man who gave us the original designs for the Ferengi and the Borg (among many others), and... this is the end result. Shameful.
That's actually a feeling for most of this film. I know everyone has been saying it since 1998, but this film really feels like a long, bad episode of the show. A bad episode of the show where the script once more apparently confuses Picard with Kirk. I don't know if I've said it before, but Jean-Luc Picard is not an action hero. The Next Generation films, however, seem to think he is and really, really want him to be. Picard is not John McClane. He should be giving a detailed speech to the Son'a Leader and convincing him to surrender, not trying to gun him down and then blowing him up. How much of that is Patrick Stewart's influence, I don't know, but I have a feeling it was a lot and we'll be seeing more of that when Nemesis comes around.
Insurrection is just a big, bad mess. It's disappointing, given how much talent was put into creating it. The design of the Ba'ku and the Son'a are lazy for different reasons, the heroes go against something that they were for when it was moving a bunch of Native Americans, the film tries to get a big showdown between Picard and the lead Son'a which doesn't work because Picard is not that type of hero, and there is so, so much idiocy on display all over.
Will things improve when we get to Nemesis? No. They're going to get worse!
Star Trek: Insurrection is brought to us by Paramount Pictures.
No comments:
Post a Comment