I wanted to lead off this review with a statement I’m making before watching any of it.  I’ve always had this movie filed in my brain as “this is too small – this is a boring movie”.  I’ve never really cared for it.  There’s nothing explicitly awful about it (well, almost nothing).  The problem this movie has is it’s too bland.  It also suffered from reshoots of the ending (which Generations did to some extent as well).  I always also had this filed as another movie with a great actor (F Murray Abraham) who is completely wasted.  After the home run that the previous movie was, this should been an easy layup, but instead they fumbled the followup, and we got this movie.  I’m going to go into this with an open mind, and hope it’s better than I remember, but I’m not confident in that.  Additionally, I wrote this intro paragraph on March 23rd, because of the four Next Gen films, it’s the one I wanted to rewatch the least, and I was stalling knocking this one out.

Given I really had to push myself to watch this one, I think I’m gonna do something different with this review.  I’m just going to list bits I like and ones I really don’t – mostly in list form, since the idea of writing 5,000 plus words about this movie in the format I did the previous eight Star Trek films before this has kept me from doing this one for a week.

Things I liked

• Jonathan Frakes – Great Trek director.  Just wish he had a better project here.  I’d also wager Frakes is the reason why we had a good use of the opening titles. Generally Trek titles didn’t have anything going as we were running down the cast list leading to the directorial credit.  But in this one we had things going on – was the setting of the Baku village, so that was a nice choice.
• The overall look of the film.  A lot of this was filmed outside, or at least it was supposed to be that way.  Either way the exterior scenes of this movie looked great.  Something that should have been done more.
• F Murray Abraham – at least until after I saw the film.  I was super excited that he was going to be in here, as he’s an excellent actor, and thought he could really do something with the role.
• It’s a short sequence, but the bit where Data was walking at the bottom of a lake I rather enjoyed.
• The planet they’re all on has a healing effect on them, I like the way that was portrayed with Geordi being able to see for the first time in his life, Picard being able to detect misaligned coils by sound – that was great.  Likewise the comedy of Crusher & Troi talking about how their “boobs were firming up again” – that got a big laugh in the theatre.
• That they gave Picard a romance that I didn’t feel was shoehorned in like some of the TV plot women they tried to get him involved with.  Granted this was a movie, so there was a little more space to work with, but I liked Anij here more than the typical fling Picard had. Speaking of that, Donna Murphy was quite good as Anij.
• Oddly I had planned to put the malfunctioning Data plot line into the “didn’t like” part, because it always felt like “Oh Jeez, Data breaks down again?” to me – but I found in this viewing it worked for me.  The sequence when they had to go after him in a shuttle with Patrick Stewart & Michael Dorn singing “A British Tar” was quite amusing.
• Troi & Riker are tasked here with becoming experts on the local culture.  This put them in close quarters and we got the old romance between the two of them back again.  That was nice to see as they really should have been together IMO.  This did lead to an amusing line about Troi saying she’s never kissed Riker with a beard. That’s technically correct, but in the TNG episode “Second Chances” the transporter duplicated Riker kisses Troi.  Riker without a beard definitely looks weird, I prefer him with a beard.
• I did like seeing the new formal uniforms – I thought they were a vast improvement over the old “long dress” versions we had from the TV series.

Things I didn’t like

• The fact that we have yet another Starfleet Admiral who has gone rogue.  Really sick and tired of that trope – it’s to the point now that if you see a Starfleet Admiral, you expect them to be the bad guy – waiting to be revealed.  He’s played by Anthony Zerbe who is a well respected actor, but given I just flat out didn’t care for his character, any acting he might have done in the role was a non issue for me.
• The basic core point of the movie.  The entire point here is Picard and crew going against a Starfleet Admiral to save a handful of people on a planet.  It just didn’t feel like a movie level plot.  It really felt like a TV sized plot.  Once again, the TNG finale would have been a better movie than this, which is sadly the case in three of the four TNG movies.
• A lot of the early parts of this movie reminded me of the TNG episode “Who Watches the Watchers?” where a Federation base spies on a culture somewhere.  When I watched this for the first time, my thought was “Haven’t we done this already?”
• The attempts to integrate Data with children.  I suspect this was something that was done from a “Well, what haven’t we done with Data yet?” standpoint.  It wasn’t awful, but I could have done without it.
• F Murray Abraham – He’s in both of my likes & dislikes list.  Totally wasted here.
• The Sona race (of which Abraham’s character is the lead one of) seem like a generic background villain.  They have no real depth to me.  I don’t care about them – they just seem like the bad guys who want to do away with the the Ba’ku people.
• The way they shoehorned Worf over here from Deep Space Nine again was kind of weak, in my opinion – in fact, they barely referenced him not being a regular here at all.
• The “manual control” of the Enterprise – basically the ship’s joystick.  As an old Atari game player it really felt odd to me.
• The CGI on the drones that would tag people looked very 1998, which is odd as the special effects in this movie are generally pretty good – this was pretty noticeable.   The kind of thing that would look seamless these days.
• The ending where Abraham’s character is dispatched didn’t seen terribly tense.  At no point did I think Picard would lose – there was no real threat here.   Even the on screen direct conflict between Picard and Ru’Afo was pretty devoid of real threat.  That was one of the primary reshoots.

References / Misc:

• This is the shortest of the theatrical Star Trek films, coming in at 103 minutes (just beating out Star Trek III) by a couple of minutes.
• There’s a reference to the Dominion War on Deep Space Nine here.  As this movie went out, DS9 was in the middle of its seventh and final season when the Dominion War storyline was reaching its peak and conclusion.
• The set that was the inside of Ru’Afo’s ship was later used in a Star Trek Voyager episode “Living Witness” as the primary set of a museum.
• Troi is shown to be sitting in the captain’s chair when Picard comes onto the bridge, but there was no actual dialogue stating she was in command of the ship. It would fit into the past history of Troi’s development however.
• During one scene where Worf whacked a drone with his out of energy phaser, we hear a brief musical queue back to the Klingon fight music from the first Star Trek movie.  This isn’t a huge surprise, as Jerry Goldsmith did both movies (as well as other Trek films).
• Anthony Zerbe who plays Admiral Dougherty here also played Milton Krest in the 1989 James Bond film “License to Kill”.  I bring that up because in both films his character was dispatched in similar methods.  In this film his head is just stretched out, and in the 007 film his entire body exploded, although not before his head being stretched out there, too.
• The caves in this film were the same cave set used for Deep Space Nine.  For this film they were expanded upon, and in the Deep Space Nine finale, the fire caves on Bajor used the Insurrection modified set.
• Several of the sets for the Son’a ships becaame ship sets for the Suliban in Star Trek: Enterprise.
• There was a deleted scene with Armin Shimerman as Quark on the Ba’ku planet – it has never been released on any DVD or Blu-Ray of the movie.

My Summary

• Biggest Problem: Most of the film was just boring, I didn’t care about most of the events.
• Biggest Strength: It looked good.
• Overall Rating: C

In watching it today, as a whole I probably enjoyed it more from the individual character moments, but larger plot just did nothing for me.  I suppose that’s this films’ biggest offense – it was boring.  I wasn’t compelled by anything (even the Son’a trying to take the Ba’ku off the planet) and I frequently paused my watching of it – it wasn’t’ a continuous view from start to end – and it was as a struggle to finish it, honestly.  If I wasn’t compelled to watch everything as part of my overall Star Trek Marathon I would have definitely either skipped it completely, or skipped over parts of it.

I’d probably have rated it a lot lower if it weren’t for Jonathan Frakes as a director.

Original Trailer