I hadn't been sure about the quality from the trailers that I'd seen and there
was precious little advertising ( Star Wars - Episode 1
will make up for that ) in advance.
Like The X-Files, Star Trek suffers from
having been, at times, an excellent television series and it can be difficult
to produce an awe inspiring, two hour, film, on a grand scale, when there's so
little left to be done.
The film started off with good promise; Data going ape-shit and running
amok during a secret observational mission of the people of Ba'ku, exposing
the Federation observations to those being spied upon.
Luckily, the Ba'ku turn out to be technological whiz-kids who have turned
their backs on technology so; no real damage done.
Picard flies in to investigate, discovers a terrible conspiracy between the
Federation and their allies, the Son'a, and the secret of the Ba'ku planet. He
falls in love, holds hands, makes the only morally justifiable decision he can
and takes half his crew down to save the day, leaving Riker to battle it out
in a typical hidden in a nebula scenario.
And, somewhere along the way, Geordi got his sight back whilst the Director
lost his vision, of whatever it was he was trying to do, and the film
deteriorated into a second rate episode of sickly, sentimental claptrap.
I've complained about big budget, hollywood films which are nothing more than
special effect vehicles ( Lost In Space
being a particularly sad case ); Insurrection shows how bad those films
could have been without such great special effects.
There were some effects which were good but with every explosion it looked like
the injured were being pulled into orbit by bits of string tied to their
backs; if they'd shot off in the right direction, or jumped at the right time,
it may have helped a little.
And, like Lost In Space, we had to have the computer animated pet;
some sort of Shrew thing. At least it wasn't a monkey.
The plot was perhaps pleasant enough overall, but nothing satisfied the desire
to be either mentally or visually entertained; the attempts at humour were
pretty weak and, indeed, it was very hard to remain, even slightly, absorbed as
the predictable ending approached.
I make a tolerable Star Trek fan ( except when it comes to Deep-Shit Seven ),
but, this film did very little for me. The only saving grace was that Wesley
Crusher ( dot die, dot die, dot die ) didn't make an appearance.
And the really important question was, again, left unanswered; why don't the
Federation fit seatbelts to their spaceships ?
A friend quoted Fat Ass Cartman as we left the cinema; "Tree hugging,
hippy c--p". I'm afraid I have to agree.
