It’s been quite a ride, but our Star Trek film franchise retrospective has finally arrived at the first post-Ground Zero Trek movie.
After the crowd-pleasing tour de force of Star Trek: First Contact, fans were looking forward to the TNG crew’s second solo feature.
Expectations ran high. And why shouldn’t they have? Up to that point, moviegoers could reasonably expect a sequel to give them more of what they liked from its predecessor. Perhaps not of the same quality, but at least in bigger portions.
While not an outright insulting disaster of the sort that infest theaters these days, Star Trek: Insurrection served as a warning sign that something had gone wrong.
As I said in our last review, TNG movies come in two basic types: Star Wars-imitating actioners and two-hour TV episodes.
Insurrection stands as the epitome of the latter type.
Again, it’s not that STI is bad. If they’d aired it as the two-part finale/premiere bookends of two Star Trek: The Next Generation seasons, I’d have watched part 1 with interest and marked my calendar to catch the conclusion that fall.
On the whole, it’s rather sturdy Trek storytelling. You have a Prime Directive-adjacent conflict (red meat for Picard), a Data-goes-berserk subplot (always fun), and characters solving problems with technobabble.
All of which makes for pretty solid sci-fi television.
Which is the problem, because this is supposed to be a movie.
Media scholar Marshall McLuhan explained the fundamental difference between movies and TV. A television show is not just a shorter version of a movie watched at home. In contrast to film, which is a hot medium, TV is a cool medium that requires much more engagement on the viewer’s part.
The nature of the medium means that TV viewers will be more engaged with their screens than moviegoers. That means you can get away with slower, more cerebral content on TV more easily than in movies.
To put it even simpler, if you’ve ever heard someone praise a film as something you can “just turn off your brain and enjoy,” you know the hot medium effect.
That is Insurrection‘s main flaw in a nutshell: It’s too cool for its own good.
But I’ll let you decide. Here’s the rundown …
Data blows the lid off a covert Federation surveillance mission during one of his patented android chimp-outs. In the aftermath, Picard learns that Starfleet has been spying on a simple agrarian society. The twist is that even though these people live simply, they’re far from primitive. In fact, they have technology that rivals the Federation’s; they just choose not to use it.
Since the Prime Directive doesn’t apply, Picard struggles to find legal grounds for helping the space luddites. The stakes rise when it turns out they’re also de facto immortals thanks to the regenerative properties of their planet’s rings. Starfleet has pulled a “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” and mobbed up with a faction of plastic surgery addicts to monopolize the fountain of youth.
There’s just one wrinkle: Picard has fallen hard for a luddite space cougar. In defiance of the admiral who’s running the land grab, Picard takes off his badge and takes up arms in his love interest’s defense.
And that’s a perfectly serviceable plot setup. Where Insurrection falls short is in its big screen execution.
First, the plot structure feels like a series of events stitched together with “and then” transitions. The writers needed more “but” or “therefore”.
Second, the movie can’t seem to decide what it wants to be. The Hollywood style space battles and gunplay feel shoehorned into the more deliberate, intimate TV plot.
Speaking of the action set pieces, not only do they feel like they belong in a different production, they’re somewhat choppy and lack satisfying resolutions.
One bright spot is the main villain, Ru’afo. Portrayed by the great F. Murray Abraham, this tragic yet ruthless antagonist had the makings of a Chang or even Kruge-caliber bad guy. But neither the script nor the production values give him enough to work with.
To be honest, this movie would have been greatly improved had they come up with some method of killing the villains besides unceremoniously blowing them up every time.
All in all, Star Trek Insurrection avoided succumbing in full to the effects of Cultural Ground Zero.
But it did offer a subtle warning of the degradation to come.
For a successful adaptation of TV style tropes into another medium – this time print – read my hit mecha/mil-SF novel:
This was when Patrick Stewart’s ego and stupidity came into full flower.
I had a strong suspicion that was the case.
I only come back to this movie for Data and Picard doing a Gilbert and Sullivan duet.
Useless trivia: It’s the same song John Rhys-Davies sings in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Ah, I’ve vaguely heard of this one, albeit through reviewers getting excessively wound up over the supposed stupidity of the Space Luddites. Not having seen the film, I can’t comment on whether such claims are exaggerated, missing the point, both, or neither, but nonetheless, interesting. I dread what awaits us in future instalments…
Fear not. I haven’t watched Star Trek: Nemesis in ages, nor do I intend to anytime soon.
Picard was a hypocrite here. During the last season of TNG (S7E20 Journey’s End), Starfleet ordered Picard to forcibly relocate the population of a Federation colony to satisfy a terrible treaty with the Cardassians, and he went along with it. Wesley Crusher walked out on Picard over that (one of the best moments in the series). But here, Picard turns against Starfleet, even though in this instance Starfleet had a better rationale than the last time. Why? Did he do it for the booty?
Patrick Stewart has said in interviews that if he were in command of the Enterprise instead of Picard, he would have gone along with the relocation plan.
I saw this maybe a year or two after it came out, when I must’ve been about twelve or so. Even back then, I thought this movie was really boring. TV Show Episode is about right, it just felt like a rather mundane setup for a film.
The stakes were too low – especially after First Contact.