Here’s a game you can play with ‘Star Trek: Nemesis’. How many directors are there in front of the camera who are certifiably better than Stuart Baird, the one behind it? I make it five. That’s rather embarrassing, isn’t it?
That said, and contrary to popular fan myth, it’s not all Baird’s fault. Yes, he showed the cast insufficient respect, shot scenes with the average pace of derby race between elderly snails and couched a performance of cringe-making horror out of Tom Hardy**, but to be fair he’s working with a script that Orson Welles, working flat out in ‘Lady From Shanghai’ redemption mode, would have struggled to turn into an impressive, or even particularly watchable, feature.
The problems of ’Nemesis’ are many, but they all grow out of the bad script and the poorly chosen director. (Rick Berman, much derided by fans, wanted to hire LeVar Burton but was overruled by Paramount). That script – from John Logan who, yes, shared an Oscar from ‘Gladiator’ but also wrote the atrocious ‘The Time Machine’ – is essentially both a little bit too in love with itself and too self-consciously huge. Its big themes are banal and its structure full of longeurs. Its characters are caricatures, not the archetypes that ‘Star Trek’ requires.
Faced with the task of being a solid adventure story that needs to distil various elements of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ while providing a finale for its cast, the script for ‘Nemesis’ instead choose to be umpty nine hours long, with massive subplots and a clear desire to be ‘epic’.
People worry that Abrams’ ‘Star Trek’ will try too hard to be ‘Star Wars’. ‘Nemesis’ is what happens when ‘Star Trek’ tries too hard to be ‘The Lord of the Rings’ then gets cut down to TV movie length because the footage shot is too boring for words.
‘Nemesis’ isn’t even the best re-make of ‘The Wrath of Khan’ starring Patrick Stewart and with a cameo by Bryan Singer, released in 2002. If you can’t win a race with parameters that limited, you really shouldn’t be competing.
‘Star Trek: Nemesis’ has the wrong director and a bad script. It’s a bad movie and those are the very simple reasons why. It’s not rocket science. It’s not even reconfiguring the navigational deflector array to emit a tachyon pulse to re-set the enemy’s shield harmonics. And any idiot can do that.
** Hardy can be excellent, see the BBC’s 2007 ‘’Oliver Twist’’.
