Here’s some pre viewing thoughts.  This movie has a pretty awful reputation.  Most people tend to rank it last of the four TNG movies.  Now I’m going to go all stupid and say something like it’s the best, because it clearly was not.  But I don’t think it’s the worst (that’s Insurrection).  My memory has this filed as “It’s OK with a few really good moments”.  I’ll be curious to see how this holds up.  The biggest problem I’ve always had with the movie is that the core plot is based around someone (Tom Hardy) who is supposed to be a clone of Picard.  Other than him being bald as well, he didn’t look anything like him, I never bought into that.  I also visibly said out loud on first viewing in 2002..  “B4? Another “pre-Data” Data android – really?”  Beyond that, my memory is that I mostly liked the film.  See if that opinion holds up.

This movie starts off with a bang.  The first 10 mins or so is an awesome scene that takes place on the Romulan home world (Romulus).  I always liked the Romulans, but they’ve never been given a real big amount of back story.  If you go way back in the original series, it was stated that there was a Romulan twin planet – Remus.  That was never brought up again until now.   But the opening scene takes place in the Romulan Senate.  We get an inkling of a political squabble between the Romans and Remans, and at the end of the scene in a VERY well done special effect, a pathogen is released which kills all of the Romulan council setting up a power vacuum which is part of the backstory here.  Visual effects there are quite well done.

There’s a direct change in tone because the next scene is a wedding reception.  The series finally had Riker & Troi married.  We don’t see the actual service, but we see a bunch of enjoyable character moments at the reception.  One of the highlights here is the appearance of Wesley Crusher.  Zero explanation is offered for his appearance vs the last time he was seen – running off to be a Traveler towards the end of the series.  He had more scenes, but they were cut, some of that is on deleted scenes on the Blu-Rays – in fact he doesn’t even speak in the theatrical cut of the movie.   The other big question about the wedding stuff is where Troi’s mother was – you’d think they’d have her there in the audience (although there is a reference to a future ceremony on Betazed).  This scene also is a plausible reason as to why Worf is here.  Deep Space Nine ended three years prior to this movie, so there’s no real need to force Worf into the TNG movie like there was in the others, but still, at least the reason he’s here is plausible.  Whoopi Goldberg’s Guinan is in this scene in the crowd (although she doesn’t say much), which was nice to see.  Worf with a hangover is amusing, as was Data’s singing.  Overall it’s a nice scene, and I’m glad it’s here even though it doesn’t drive the overall plot forward at all.

We get back to the ship, and as they’re on patrol (you assume that’s what’s happening), they run across a positronic signal on a planet .  The Enterprise goes to investigate, and I thought the drama of finding it was handled well.  Due to some technobabble, it was advised not to use the transporter, so they opted to search for the positronic parts using something we’ve never seen in Star Trek before, what effectively amounts to the Captain’s personal scooter (not sure what exact word to use).  They run across the planet side looking for the six parts they detected.  The cart/scooter has Data & Worf in it as well with Picard driving around – a bit maniacally if you ask me.  It’s another scene that could have easily been made shorter by the use of transporter, or even the more traditional shuttle.  My guess is Patrick Stewart wanted to give Picard something different to do, hence this way of doing things.  Before we get there, Picard teases Riker by calling him “Mr. Troi” which makes the rest of the bridge crew giggle.  None of them are faces we know, but it was nice to see this scene be here, it shows that the Enterprise isn’t manned by our seven lead actors alone.  Not much happens in this scene besides giving Picard something different to do, and finding the parts – but I enjoyed it just the same.  It was odd they found all the parts with NO conflict, you’d think there’d be a local trying to cause problems for them, but that didn’t happen – not until the end, when it didn’t really matter, IMO – although we did get a chase scene in the vehicle.

Once they retrieve all the parts, it’s put together and find out it’s another Soong android – also played by Brent Spiner. There is some talk about Lore, who was deactivated and disassembled in the season premiere of the final season of TNG.  It was my first thought on original viewing – has Lore come back somehow?  But no, it’s a THIRD “Data” which is why I had the reaction I mentioned above.  Really?  Another one guys?  Haven’t we done this already?  I did like however that they took the time to specifically state it was not Lore.  The android was different than Lore in that he could communicate when he was just a head.  Lore couldn’t do that, although I suspect that had something to do with real life advances in special effects vs what they could do in the series back in the day.  This android’s name is “B4” which he self identifies as.  There’s dialog talking about how B4 doesn’t have as much positronic development; Geordi assumes he was a prototype.  We never actually find out how B4 came to be there, which is something I would have liked an answer for.   It’s obvious right from the start that B4 is inferior, because he asks questions like “Why does the tall man have a furry face?” (referring to Riker’s beard).  There’s scenes with trying to get B4’s systems to be like Data’s scattered through the rest of the movie.  I’m not going to keep bouncing back and forth with them as I got irritated at that when I did a review of First Contact.  In short, they try to give B4 Data’s memories, to see if it will make him smarter, because you could easy call B4 “dumb Data”.  It never actually works, and B4 remains at the level he was at for the rest of the movie.  There’s a few scenes where they try to make this work here and there, but ultimately nothing happens there.  To be fair, if you removed 100% of the B4 scenes from the movie, it wouldn’t impact the ultimate outcome.  B4 survives the movie, but he’s in the same state he’s in when we first meet him (after being assembled).  We never actually see B4 again after this movie.  However, many MANY years later in Season 3 of Star Trek Picard, we do get a reference back to B4.  When they reconstitute Data, I did really love that Picard (the show) took the time to pick up all the plot points of any existing Soong android plot points into a new Data.  But the B4 that we see in this film is never actually seen again.  There’s one more B4 point I want to make, but since it happens at the end of this movie, I’ll table it till then.

At about 20 mins into the movie we finally get to the main plot.  Admiral Janeway (!!) appears on a video conferences with Picard and says he’s to go to the the Romulan homeworld by invitation of a new Preator, Shinzon.  This plays to stuff in the first scene in the movie and finally starts to move everything forward.  Oddly by the time we finally get to MEET the Romulans it’s 28 minutes into the movie, so this movie doesn’t actually move along at a brisk pace to this point.  Tom Hardy finally makes an appearance as Shinzon the new Romulan Preator.  It was said early on in the film that he had suggested an alliance with Romulans.  The traditional establishment rejected that, so he had them all killed (see the first scene in the movie).  What makes the character interesting to me (at least at this point) is that Shinzon is a human, leading the Romulans.  Shinzon is a bit weird, asking things like touching Troi’s hair.  He oddly deflects queries as to why the Enterprise and its crew were invited here.

Shinzon tells his life story, and it involves being connected to Picard and having a disease.  It’s a creepy scene because you have no idea where he’s going with the story, and I do like the tension here between Hardy & Stewart as they play it out.  In the end he says that he knows everything Picard does, because they’re the same.  He doesn’t explicitly state he’s a clone, but you pick that up from context.  He cuts his own hand and gives the knife to them knowing they’d want to run genetics on it.  Which they do (in one of the few bits of anything Crusher is given to do here).   Beverly confirms it – states quite clearly “He’s a clone”.  Which brings me to my biggest problem with this movie.

If Shinzon is supposed to be a clone of Jean-Luc Picard, he doesn’t look like him.  They’re both bald, and I know Hardy took some effort to make some of his performance seem like Patrick Stewart, but I never ONCE bought into him being a clone of Picard.  The entire movie from this point forward is predicated on you buying into that one single fact.  I always thought they should have just had Patick Stewart play both roles.  It would have worked so much better for me.  Now Tom Hardy is fine.  He’s a great actor, but he’s NOT Patrick Stewart.  I’ve spoken to some fans over the years where they say this either isn’t a problem for them, or they sort of thing they look the same, but I do not.   From this point forward the movie loses some stuff for me.  But again, it’s not acting.  Stewart’s fine.  Hardy is fine.  I just never bought they were supposed to be identical.  Now if you read that as “genetically identical” then yeah, but they make so much into saying he’s a clone, to me that means they should look the same.  They do not, beyond them being bald.  There was a dinner scene with just the two of them where you get the impression that Shinzon was telling the truth – they did seem to share some connection – but it still felt really odd, like something wasn’t right.

The incidental music in this movie was done by Trek stalwart, Jerry Goldsmith (in one of his final jobs before his death two years after.  I loved some of his musical cues for things around the Romulans.  It was a nice change vs the same old music cues we’d heard over the last several films.

They also had Ron Pearlman in this movie as Shinzon’s uh, “assistant” (Viceroy) – he’s a good actor, but like the last couple of Trek movies, they pretty much waste him.  His character is given some backstory, so I get why he was there, but from an acting standpoint there wasn’t a ton for Perlman to do here.

One thing that bugged me about the middle of this movie is why would Shinzon a known human be allowed to lead the Romulan Empire as its Preator?  I thought the Romulan stuff at the start was great – that opening scene was awesome, but was also the highlight of the Romulan subplot for me.  There is some dialogue in a scene where Shinzon & Picard are having dinner and talking about all this stuff, but it never stuck for me.  Even after a scene that was acted well between Hardy & Stewart, the basic plot felt a bit “what?”  We spend a lot of time with hints being dropped that things are wrong (B4 accessing computer on his own, Shinzon talking to his underlings about a plot and wasting time).   But the ultimate goal ends up being mostly the same – destroy the Federation.

It isn’t until about 50 mins into the movie that we get to a scene with Riker & Troi on their own.  AS the series finally married off the characters, they don’t spend a lot of time with that.  That is rectified later on in the Star Trek: Picard series, but for here, they don’t spend a lot of time on it.  Thing is it’s not what you think – it starts off with Riker & Troi getting busy, but it ends up a weird nightmare thing.  Right in the middle of them getting busy, her mental state is attacked by Shinzon who appears to us (and her) as being on top of Troi.  It’s a bit creepier than the times Troi had to deal with mental assault in the series – so I liked that part of it.  They probably couldn’t do it THIS way in the series.   It was an odd scene to throw in, as it was acted well, you wonder what Shinzon is up to by this mental assault on Troi.   This does come back in the middle of the space battle as a way to find Shinzon, but it still feels like an odd scene.

It’s about here that stuff starts happening – we find out that B4 was a plant by Shinzon, dealing with fallout of Troi’s “mental rape”, an the kidnap of Picard by Shinzon.  The entire plot can pretty much be summed up by one line of dialogue by Shinzon.  “My life is meaningless while you are still alive”.   He intends on killing Picard and waging war.   This is about halfway through the movie when we stop with setup and start moving the main plot forward, IMO. From here the rest of the movie is them trying to stop Shinzon from blowing up everything – and becomes a more traditional action movie with a Star Trek wrapper.  This part moves a bit better, when people are in their more traditional roles.  I will say this – once this happens, the Shinzon is a clone if Picard stuff becomes mostly a non issue.  The setup to here was a bit odd, but I did enjoy the back half of the movie more than the first half.   Some of my favorite parts of this part of the movie are:

• Picard flying a shutting inside the Romulan ship
• Data having to deactivate B4
• The Enterprise firing weapons in multiple directions simultaneously (great visual)
• Picard being Picard trying to get Shinzon to change his tune and “do the right thing”.
• The Reman attempt to kidnap Picard by boarding the ship (didn’t we have shields?)

The battle involves two Romulan ships assisting the Enterprise against Shinzon’s ship, which made for an interesting dynamic.  The battle expands to the point where the two Romulan ships are disabled, and they have to locate Shinzon with the help of Troi (with the return of that rape scene).  The battle involves them firing on the bridge, and some of the non speaking crew members are spaced – something you don’t usually see in Star Trek.

This brings up one of my favorite moments in the entire movie when the Enterprise rams Shinzon’s ship – it’s quite a good effect.  It’s also the second movie in four where Troi crashes an Enterprise. haha.  But seriously the effect of the Enterprise crashing into Shinzon’s ship was quite well realized.  Loved it then, loved it now.  I did think the fight between Riker & Shinzon’s aide was a bit tacked on to fill out what’s going on – it’s scattered through the fight towards the end of the movie.

Picard tries to self destruct the ship, but that system was offline, so it requires a more manual sort of intervention.  When Shinzon decides to deploy the weapon he was going to use against Earth (at least we assume that his full plan wasn’t ever fully spelled out) on the Enterprise..  Picard beams over there, and the transporter shorts out stranding him there.  Data & Geordi go off to try and figure out a way to save Picard.  At least that’s what you think is happening.  Turns out they go to a front most part of the ship that’s open to space due to the crash.  In a scene with almost no dialogue, Data leaps into the void of space and flies over to Shinzon’s ship.  It’s the kind of thing you never really saw in Star Trek, so I liked that. I do like that this is Data & Geordi given that the two of them in the series were stated many times to be best friends.  For it being the “end of Data” it was good to me that Geordi was involved – I got it instantly.  The entire sequence has echoes to me of Spock knowing what he has to do to save the Enterprise at the cost of his own life – that’s kind of what Data is doing here.  The “silent hero” that saves the Enterprise.  At the time this movie was out, it was billed as the “final journey” of the TNG crew, so you never really knew who would survive.  At least I didn’t on first viewing.  I figured someone or a few people would die.  Picard dispatches Shinzon by impaling him on a spike in their fight on his ship.  In one last final moment in the fight, Shinzon doesn’t extricate himself from the spike – he FURTHER imaples himself just to get to point blank range to Picard to look him in the eye right before he dies – in Picard’s arms.   With one minute to go, Data arrives, gets Picard back to the Enterprise with a site to site transporter he had hidden in his arm (that was shown earlier in the movie) and then destroys the weapon by firing directly into it’s power source with a phaser at point blank range.  This of course stops the weapon, saves everyone on the Enterprise, but he himself dies when Shinzon’s ship explodes.

This happened because Brent Spiner had grown tired of playing Data, and wanted him to die.  In some regards I get it – the character had pretty much done all they could do, so death was the only thing left.   This is reversed decades later in Star Trek Picard, but for now, this was a heavy emotional moment, and given this was thought to be the end of the characters story, I thought it was played well.

The movie after that is a short memorial service for Data (“to absent friends’) where Riker tells a funny story Data which harkens back to the pilot episode.  While it’s not stated on screen, one would assume there was some passage of time as we see the Enterprise in space dock for repairs, which it needed plenty of.  During this scene we get a nice musical queue harkening back to the first movie showing the ship in space dock.  As a fan that loves self referential stuff, I loved that.  Riker & Picard talk about Riker taking command of the USS Titan.  This scene was very well played by Jonathan Frakes as it was the culmination of the Riker / Picard relationship.  There was actually more filmed here, there’s some deleted bits talking about other crew members and the Titan which I would have seen.

It brings us to the final scene in the movie, it’s Picard sitting at a table talking to B4.  We weren’t really given an explanation as to why someone (Picard?) decided to reactivate B4, but his sudden inclusion at the absolute end of the movie gave this viewer (and several others I imagine) the tease that Data wasn’t totally GONE gone.  Earlier in the movie Data tried to copy his memories into B4, and it didn’t work, but B4’s appearance here made me infer that had there been another movie, it might have been a way to bring Data back – that they’d figure out a way to activate all that.  It never happened.  As I understand it, when this movie was made it wasn’t made with the intent of being the final TNG movie – that it was marketed that way, but not created that way.  I always viewed the inclusion of the last scene with B4 being a way to bring Data back, that his “Katra” was inside B4 so to speak, mimicking the third Star Trek movie.  I always felt this scene should have been BEFORE the scene with Riker & the Titan – that the RIker/Titan scene should have been the last one in the movie as it felt better placed there.

Random references

• There’s a reference to the Tholians – a race I loved that first appeared in the TOS episode “The Tholian Web“.
• The conference room of the Enterprise-E has been redesigned, but the models of prior Enterprises that Picard smashed some of two movies ago are here again.  I did like that the windows of this conference room looked visually like the conference room of the Enteprise-D from the TV series.
• There’s a list of Federation ships shown to be at a battle, one of them is the “USS Archer” a reference to Jonathan Archer from Star Trek: Enterprise.
• During a battle, Riker calls for evasive maneuvers “Kirk Epsilon”.  That reference should be obvious.  :)
• The Romulan Commander Donatra was played by Dina Meyer.  Someone I knew well from the movie Starship Troopers.
• We get to see a few bottles of Chateau Picard at the end of the movie.
• One of the replacement crewmen is Bryan Singer who directed the first two X-Men movies (which also starred Patrick Stewart).
• In one of the deleted scenes filmed at the end for the crew hangover when Riker was leaving, the Enterprise’s new first officer was Commander Madden.  He wasp played b y Steven Culp who would go not to have a recurring role was “Major Hayes” in Season 3 of Star Trek: Enterprise.
• While it was intended to have B4 become Data again had there been another movie, that never happened.  Star Trek Picard’s pilot episode (“Remembrance“) stated that B4’s memory never took to Data’s engrams and he was eventually deactivated again and also disassembled – with his parts being shown to be stored at the Daystrom Intitude.
• Computer terminals on Shinzon’s bridge were reused Cardassian consoles from Deep Space Nine.  Likewise the terminals used on the Romulan ship bridge were Klingon consoles used at various points in the overall franchise.
• The Reman costumes were later re-used in Enterprise Season 3 as Xindi-Reptilian costumes.
• In a conference scene with Picard, he speaks with Admiral Janeway.  At this point in real life Voyager had been off the air for about six months or so.  Given Janeway is referred to as an Admiral, it’s obvious she’s been given a promotion, but no on screen dialog gives any detail on that.  This remains Janeway’s last on screen appearance in canonical Star Trek in real life.  Janeway does appear in a number of Star Trek Prodigy episodes that are canon – but those are animated.   This is the last time we see Kate Mulgrew on screen as Janeway.

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

Quite a few of the cast weren’t fans of this movie either, a lot of them blamed the writer for this.  I remember at the time the movie was new he said he’d never actually seen Star Trek before.  I know that raised concerns for some, but I thought it was a good idea – a fresh perspective.  Not that there was anything wrong with what we got before, but this was the tenth Star Trek film overall, and a new set of eyeballs can be a good thing.

Overall the film is frustrating.  There’s quite a few bits I liked.  Several scenes were fun. Well acted, and I enjoyed them.  However, the entire film overall is kind of ‘eh’.  It’s like the sum of the parts has a lower rating than the overall package.  It’s an odd feeling, as I really wanted to like the film.  In fact, this viewing (which was the first in MANY years) I quite enjoyed.  Yet at the same time, it didn’t seem to fit correctly – like there should have been something different going on to make it all work better.  Probably has to do with my overall feeling about the “Shinzon is a Picard clone” stuff.  I wanted to like this.  I really did – but I can’t bring myself to give it more than a C, despite many parts looking like they’d be in a much higher rated film.

Shame it went out this way, although the TNG crew got a much better sendoff a few decades later in Star Trek Picard Season 3.

Original Trailer