Star Trek

[Buster's Uncle]

46:57 (Picard in the ready room with a photo of Shinzon wearing a TNG Starfleet cadet's uniform - and Beverly)

It is a sad, sad thing when they can't even keep their own continuity straight - we've seen John Luke at that age or older, and he had hair and didn't look like Tom wassisname at all.  -He still had hair when Wesley was already born, in fact.  Shaved his head once as a cadet, you say?  Lame to make us come up with a handwave to make their mistake make sense...

You're. all. fired.

[Buster's Uncle]

(Also, that picture of wassisname as young John Luke contradicts the handwave they'd just flailed out.)

[Buster's Uncle]

48:30 (Riker and Troi begin making out on the bed)

I didn't need to see that.

[Buster's Uncle]

49:11 (which turns rapey w/ Shinzon-vision)

Okay - I take that back.  It was for a story reason.  Maybe not a good reason, as we already figured the bad guy was bad, but reason.

[Valka]

It's a mercy that I've forgotten which scenes you're talking about. But yeah, that thing about Picard's hair and age is just ridiculous.

Actually, the entire movie is ridiculous.

[Buster's Uncle]

Yyyyep.

---

1:02:59  (Picard and Data just escaped the Scimitar in an over-obvious action sequence)

You know - this so far isn't a terrible, terrible story -the extra little action movie bit I just sat through aside- the important failures are all ones of execution.  Sure, the script could have used some more polishing (read: been made less stupid and 25% shorter), but the real problems are all in FX, timing, over-gratuitous over-obviousness of the ACTION! scenes inserted, and a miscast guest villain actor who thinks acting Shinzon as if he was doing hacky Shakespeare is the right part-reading for a Picard clone who is supposed to resemble a young Picard - when he makes a drunken undead William Shatner playing dinner theater Richard the Third to a house of four (booing) in Hackensack look like Laurence Olivier playing Lear before the Queen at the Royal Albert Hall at the peak of his powers, not Stewart as Picard at all.  Timing is everything, especially in a flawed production.  And the movie slams into slow motion every second he's on the screen, and a professional director let him do it.  -Probably TOLD him to.

There are mistakes allowed to get onscreen left, right, and center here, but I went in expecting it to suck, and was not going to be easily impressed by ineptness.  It's a TNG movie.  But for all that I fired everyone back during Planet Overexposed Joshua Tree National Forrest -the sequence really was badly done- it's SHINZON who's driving a stake through the heart of this ugly, stupid monster.

[Buster's Uncle]

BTW - why is Worf even there on the Enterpriseship?  They didn't bother to work in a single sentence of handwave, and I'm finished doing their work for them.  If he's not serving on DS9 anymore, he really ought to have rank/experienced himself clear out of going back -he's ready for his own next command- and they should have bothered to handwave...


I hope everyone is enjoying hating this along with me on my first hating of Nemesis...

[Buster's Uncle]

1:04:21 (Crusher reveals Shinzon's genetic problem)

Not going to bother to trash bad science hackily mis-explained.  It is TNG...

[Buster's Uncle]

1:05:32  (Data activates retarded Data to explain that he's deactivating retarded Data)

Oh. My. GOD!

Close-ups of Data and BeefWhore, showing the heavy white-gold metallic base makeup smeared into their eyebrows.  The makeup people on this failed beginners class.  Everyone involved in shooting those shots and not noticing and seeing it fixed and reshot, failed too.  Fs all around.

---

Dr. Soong went to a crazy lot of trouble making his androids humaniform to begin with to have not bothered with skin tone - the fundamental mistake there being that there was ever a Dr. Soong - Data should have stayed a creation of aliens.  -He would have made more sense.

A HUMAN doing a sloppy job on the finishing touches after creating such good synthetic skin would have made him too pink or something, and his eyebrows would have looked drawn-on, being too regular and perfect and artificial - IF Data had eyebrows at all, given nobody bothered with his color.  (They should have just shaved Spiner's eybrows off from the beginning and combed his hair funny -leaving his skintone alone- saving him years in the makeup chair since the mid 80s and actually looking stranger to boot.)

We could have at least told ourselves he was unfinished if Dr. Soong was to be a thing - until Lore showed up looking identical, and now BeefWhore.  (-And don't bother to explain the existence of the latter, or how the not-Romulans got a hold of him.)  A botch, pretty much everything ever done with Data after the (horrible) first season...

[Dio]

The inner nerd of BUncle shows itself again. I can visualize the reactions, mental or physical, you must have towards bad movies.

[Buster's Uncle]

I just snort, scowl and reach for the Windows button to come back here and rant...

[Dio]

I saw the movie several years ago, and I remember certain negative aspects of the film. I do not remember all of the specific scenes. I think the loss of those scenes remains a postive in the case of this film.

[Buster's Uncle]

I'm in the habit of trying to not utterly spoiler when I review fanfilms, so timecodes and oblique phrasing.

You and Val remind me that I need not be so careful, since I'm the last person to see this turkey disaster who will ever bother.  I'll put brief description/prompts beside the time code at top for the rest, and may go back and edit those in for the previous posts...

[Buster's Uncle]

1:07:51 (escaped, heading back to federation, briefing scene Picard speech)

There's nothing wrong with the central idea of this story; it's a personal battle for Picard, which worked well when they did it in First Contact.  Here, Picard is set against the Player On The Other Side - Shinzon is supposed to be his perfect anti-Picard, his Moriarty.  Absolutely nothing wrong with the idea.  (Not a good well to go back to, a personal battle for Picard, only the second movie after First Contact, but nothing wrong in isolation.)

But a failure of promise (in execution) that makes Voyager look like the finest work of writing and cinematic craftsmanship ever in comparison.

[Buster's Uncle]

See, this is why instead of making Shinzon, it should have been that the Romulans found a clone backup Locutus w/ incomplete programming.  Then you could handwave to do everything this film tried to do (if failing utterly) plus all that rape survivor metaphor stuff from First Contact -just as well, when it worked so well- as a cherry on top.  Loc has history and iconic Borg power with the audience, and you have Patrick Stewart playing him, turning the WORST thing in this very bad picture -Picard clone just being terrible at it- into the BEST thing in a possibly only sort've bad film.