Ranking the "Star Trek" Movies: #9 - Star Trek: Insurrection

Next on our Trek-tacular (trademark) countdown is the second-worst Star Trek movie in my opinion and the absolute worst that's come out of the Next Generation camp. Star Trek: Insurrection is the ninth of the original ten movies and by the late 90s, you couldn't look anywhere without seeing Star Trek. It was in the theaters as well as on TV with not one, but two concurrent hit shows airing, Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. With this one, Star Trek: Insurrection, the storytellers thought about taking a lot of their own ideas, both from early production meetings for this movie as well as ideas for The Next Generation TV series that they had established, and just totally undoing or rewriting everything while also incorporating pseudo-political agendas and nonchalant historical references to major American events that caused great heartache and tragedy.

The movie starts, oddly enough, on an alien planet within what the Federation labels "The Briar Patch". Here, we see the Federation in coordination with a race of alien beings known as the "Son'a". Together with the Son'a, the Federation monitors the village of beings on the planet known as the B'aku. The B'aku are the envy of those involved because their planet has rejuvenation radiation that allows the inhabitants to practically live forever. Their cells regenerate and stay young at well above the ability of an average human's, causing many inhabitants to live for a thousand years. On this installation is our trusty goof-bot, Data. He malfunctions, going apeshit with a hand phaser and exposing the Federation-Son'a installation. When Data's schematics are requested by Admiral Dougherty (Anthony Zerbe), Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) ignores his orders to remain away and investigates the matter himself, moving to capture Data before the Federation can seize him. Working with Admiral Dougherty are members of the Son'a, including one played surprisingly enough by F. Murray Abraham, of all people. You know... Salieri from Amadeus. That guy.

During the crew's visit to the Briar Patch planet of the B'aku, they each begin to experience the rejuvenating effects of the planet's rings. Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) has his ocular implants removed as his eyes heal themselves, while Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes) and Deanne Troi (Marina Sirtis) rekindle their love relationship. It is during this time that Picard confronts Admiral Dougherty about a cloaked Federation vessel they discover with a holodeck used to recreate the village, and Dougherty confirms that top Federation officials are working with the Son'a regime to forcibly and deceptively remove the B'aku from the planet and relocate them to a different planet, allowing the decrepit Son'a to inhabit their planet and use its rejuvenation abilities to heal their race, but poison the planet in the process. Picard throws a fit and decides to warn the Federation, informing them of Admiral Dougherty's intention to violate the Prime Directive, the Federation's number one law that no one must break. Ever.

So right now you're probably getting quite a "Trail of Tears" vibe, aren't you? Well, if you are, you're not the only one. Which is weird because there's at least two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the whole "forced relocation" of a race of beings was made perfectly fine and even justified to allow the survival of millions of people, so it's a little strange that the Federation, Picard mainly, would disallow this sort of forced relocation. He did it twice already in the original show, so why does not work here? Oh, is it because he's in love with one of the B'aku villagers? Perhaps it is! Way to think with your prick, Picard. No wonder this time around this story doesn't make any sense. On top of that, let's discuss the B'aku. I failed to mention thus far that the reason that the B'aku receive their regenerative abilities from their planet is because they have opted to reject the use of advanced technology in their lives, in order to simply them. As they say "We believe when you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from that man". Even though they have advanced irrigation and farming systems that surely cut down on the amount of manpower needed to operate their farms. So something is amiss there. I think the B'aku are just stuck up, ignorant jackasses that gloat, rant and rave simply because their planet keeps them alive and sustains them while the S'ona, we come to find out, are formerly B'aku villagers that chose to embrace advanced technology in their lives and utilize it on a daily basis. Hence why the planet does not sustain them and their appearance is that of a mummy, with folded skin flaps and surgically reconstructed faces in an attempt to remain and appear young. WOAH! Mind blown. Okay, not really, but you know. On top of all that, the B'aku are shown to have sort of superhuman abilities when the lead woman, Anij is shown to be able to freeze a waterfall and a dandelion blowing away. When Picard asks her how she can do this, she replies "No more questions". See? Guess you don't get to know anyway. Kind ridiculous for a woman who not an hour ago you found out couldn't even fucking swim.

So to assist the B'aku from being abducted and removed by the Son'a and Admiral Dougherty, Picard, Worf, Data and Crusher escort the B'aku villagers away so that the Son'a ship cannot remove them. During this ordeal, which literally even borrows from pictures of the "Trail of Tears" incident in American history in showcasing the forced relocation of the B'aku people (yikes), F. Murray Son'a-ham demands that the crooked Admiral Dougherty allow the Son'a to dispatch to starships to attack and destroy the Enterprise. A short but fierce space battle takes place where Riker eventually does-in the Son'a ships by operating the entire USS Enterprise-E with a fucking joystick from the bridge. I'm not talking a large command console that happens to have a joystick on it, or a joystick with a lot of buttons and technical readouts; NO a fucking two-button'd joystick you're used to seeing used for an Atari 2600. This powers and operates a large Federation space battle cruiser and destroys two S'ona ships.

Eventually, Picard masterminds a ruse to transport F. Murray Abraham and his bridge crew to the secret Federation holoship and shutdown the harvester. Abraham discovers the deception and transports to the radiation harvester ship to manually restart it. Picard comes in hot pursuit and sets the harvester to self-destruct, which kills Abraham just as Picard is rescued by the Enterprise-E. The remaining Son'a are forgiven and welcomed back by the Ba'ku as Picard and the Enterprise crew take a moment to enjoy their rejuvenated selves before returning to their previous mission.

Star Trek: Insurrection tells an interesting enough story, yes, but it feels moreso like an episode of the show that could've ran for two or three parts rather than a feature motion picture. It drags at times, has some conflicting anecdotes that negate things we were taught in The Next Generation, and tackles way too big of a political agenda with the whole "forced relocation of a species of people" thing. The acting can get a little hokey, some of the dialogue doesn't make any sense, character elements are totally baffling when they're compared to the surroundings in which they live, and on top of it all, the whole movie just feels a little recycled. Granted the idea is an interesting one, but not when you have to borrow from the Next Generation TV series. I like the Son'a as villains, the Briar Patch battle is decent if it didn't end with a freakin' joystick, and Anthony Zerbe is pretty great as Admiral Dougherty. There's a lot of holes, it leaves a lot of questions, doesn't explain a whole lot, and negates a lot of pre-established material. Watch it at your own risk.

Ranking the "Star Trek" Movies: #10 - Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Now, hold the phone. Wait a minute. Stop the presses. Hold the mayonnaise. I believe Star Trek is the first major motion picture franchise that ever existed or that has ever existed where the first dang picture in the franchise is the worst? Is it true? Am I just shitting? No, I'm not. Star Trek: The Motion Picture is probably the single greatest folly Star Trek ever partook in, and this includes Star Trek Discovery.

At the time of its pre-production, Star Wars as tearing theater competition apart and winning Oscars, pretty much making it the biggest film of the time at that time. Paramount Pictures did not want their big-screen Star Trek debut to be seen as "cashing in", so they most likely decreed to director Robert Wise to not make the film feel similar to Star Wars in any way, shape or form. Unfortunately, it bit them in the ass. Star Trek: The Motion Picture is not fun, exciting, thrilling, enthralling or even remotely fast-paced. It's often referred to as "The Slow-Motion Picture" because of the lack of action, events, cuts, or even scenery changes for much of the movie. It's basically like if speed regulations mandated that Space Mountain couldn't go any more than five miles an hour. Sure, you'd finish the ride, but it's going to feel like you're in there an eternity. But honestly, the movie is just over two hours in length, and there are no ship-battles, ship-to-ship confrontations; there are cool spaceship shots, though. They just go on forever and ever with seldom cuts to relieve the lack of fluid motion in an otherwise interesting story narrative.

What is this narrative that carries this stiff-motion tortoise through its journey? There is a quite large alien force descending toward Earth and the crew of the newly refit USS Enterprise are dispatched to stop it. Seems like your typical episode of the original show. The original cast even returns, looking mildly older and pudgier than we remember them from the series finale ten years prior: Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy), Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy (DeForest Kelley), Lt. Hikaru Sulu (George Takei), Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig), Lt. Cmdr. Montgomery Scott "Scotty" (James Doohan) and Lt. Nyota Uhura (Nichelle Nichols). They're joined by two new crew members, Capt. Willard Decker (Stephen Collins) and Ilia (Persis Khambatta). FUN FACT: Movie trivia for Star Trek: The Motion Picture says that Ilia is "Deltan", meaning she comes from the Delta quadrant...I guess. What's funny about that? Well, her race is supposedly incredibly toxic with pheromones and mating hormones, meaning she can make anyone super horny and ready to boink just by looking at her. Supposedly, humans can't survive one round of sexual intercourse with a Deltan. Random tangent, I know, but...weird.

So Decker is in charge of the newly refit USS Enterprise until Kirk comes aboard and usurps him for no reason, other than "I'm the star and it's in my contact." After Kirk takes over commanding an almost totally different Enterprise than the one he commanded in the show, he kills two people in a matter of two minutes. This'll average out to about a death a minute if we keep going at this rate. The Vulcan replacement for Spock is fried in a transporter malfunction, along with a new officer beaming on board with him. Soon after the launch of the Enterprise to intercept the anomaly, an off-balance warp-whatever causes the ship to enter a wormhole. This slows time down, a cool distortion affect that causes laughably delivered slow dialogue. Kirk tries to do something with the phasers to clear an asteroid out of their path to save the ship, but former Captain Decker belays the order to save the ship, later explaining that whatever caused the warp drive mishap rendered the phasers useless for some reason. So that means that just after taking command of the mission, Kirk's killed two people and endangered the entire ship once already. Fun stuff.

The slow pace of the entire movie causes the illusion that the dialogue scenes don't go anywhere. There's important things being discussed in most scenes, but because it feels like that that's all going on, it just feels slow. The Enterprise eventually meets up with and picks up Spock, who was on Vulcan getting his remaining emotions wiped out so that he can become 100% pure Vulcan (I guess). I don't know, isn't this the third time he's tried to have all remaining emotions purged? I feel like that's a regular occurrence. I'm no Trekkie after all, so I guess that's my lack of Trek knowledge poking through. Eventually, the crew comes across the entity, and after a painfully slow process of entering its confines and trying to find the center of the anomaly, called "V'Ger", Ilia is captured as the entity boards the ship and takes her away. She later reappears as V'Ger itself, a probe using Ilia's body as a recreated mechanism to "observe and record the carbon-based units". She demands to know the secret of V'Ger's creation, but Kirk only promises to give the secret to the center of V'Ger herself. With that, the Ilia probe allows the USS Enterprise to the center of V'Ger. Inside the center of V'Ger, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Decker find that V'Ger is actually Voyager 6, the old drone sent into deep space by Earth many years ago, returning to Earth to find its creator. The machines upgraded the probe to fulfill its mission, and on its journey the probe gathered so much knowledge that it achieved consciousness. Spock realizes that V'Ger lacks the ability to give itself a focus other than its original mission; having learned what it could on its journey home, it finds its existence empty and without purpose. Before transmitting all its information, V'Ger insists that the Creator come in person to finish the sequence. Realizing that the machine wants to merge with its creator, Decker offers himself to V'Ger. As Decker merges with V'Ger, the trio escapes back to the Enterprise and leaves as V'Ger, Decker and Ilia probe merge together to create a new form of life that disappears into another dimension. Kirk and the others then direct Enterprise back toward Earth for her next adventures.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is an abysmal start to an otherwise legendary movie franchise. The Motion Picture fails across the board. This movie tried to capitalize on the success of one of the biggest science-fiction/fantasy films of all time in Star Wars and ended up mimicking 2001: A Space Odyssey. The uniforms look cheap, the acting is dry, Shatner is at his Shatner-est with his deliveries and hammy acting, the dialogue scenes go on forever, the non-dialogue scenes go on forever, there's very little action and the action there is, you could blink and miss it. The special effects are pretty good, can't say they aren't. There's just a lot of time to enjoy the visual effects shots. The refit Enterprise is so cool because they give you a near four minute mundane scene of Kirk and Scotty boarding the ship to do final preparations. The movie's pacing is horrible. There are some scenes that are so soft and quietly spoken that you wonder if there was a mic issue in the shot. The movie is boring, mundane, slow, yes, but at least it tries to have a decent ending. The techno-babble that Star Trek is known for can be lost on the average viewer who drifts in and out on their smartphones while the movie is going on. To this average viewer that isn't a Trekkie, like myself, if anything steals your attention during crucial dialogue scenes, you're going to miss something important that won't make the movie make sense later, and because the movie is so long and drags out constantly, you're not going to feel like rewinding it to find out what you missed. Oddly enough, I say skip this one. Blow it off. Forget about it. There's nothing that doesn't happen that isn't important in later films. There's not a whole lot of story content, very little action, and many of its production and story elements are totally omitted from future installments. There's no mention of the V'Ger crisis ever again in the rest of the films. Skip this one and get started right with Star Trek II.

Coming Soon! - Ranking the "Star Trek" Movies

Aren't I just weird? I got burnt out doing my Top 30 favorite movies countdown, so I decided to review some random movies, then I got bored with that so I guess it's time to do another time-consuming ranking! I'm going to be a ranking genius after this. This'll be my third ranking of a franchise's movies that follow either one principal story or a principal character, the first being "Ranking the Batman Movies" and "Ranking the Halloween Movies", both in 2016. Now I give you, for the summer of 2018, "Ranking the Star Trek Movies". That's right, now I get to rub my nerddom all up in your faces. Unlike the Halloween movies, in my opinion the Star Trek films aren't quite split right down the middle of the original ten in terms of quality. There are more good ones (six) than bad ones (four), so at least there'll be some consistency.

Some ground rules first. Number one, first and foremost: My cutoff is going to be Star Trek: Nemesis. That's right, I'm leaving the rebootquels out of this. Why, I hear you cry? Well, because Top 13 isn't a very marketable (nor is it a lucky) number. Besides, those are the ones I've seen the least. Number two, I won't follow a set schedule. I set a schedule for Halloween so that I could get them all out in October and I about wanted to give up on the blog and find a new hobby. So now, it'll be business as usual "whenever I get around to it". You might give five in a week or two in a month. Who the hell knows.

So, that means our criteria for ranking is as follows. Star Trek made its big-screen debut in 1979 hot off the heels of Star Wars's success, with Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Yes, that is the full title. Not Star Trek, not Star Trek I, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I guess Star Trek: The Movie sounded a little hokey, so it's "The Motion Picture". We'll get to it, but I'm going to tell you right now there's not very much "motion" in it.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was three years later in '82, and a serious improvement over the previous one. Often considered one of the best by Trekkies and non-Trekkies alike. It was also the start of a housed "trilogy" of films that followed one solid plot outline about a torpedo of life called "The Genesis Device". The second part is Star Trek III: The Search for Spock in '84 and the Genesis story concludes in '86 with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. So far we're following a solid numbering outline, wouldn't you say? Then we have 1989's Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, our first standalone story since the first one. Like the first one, it's notorious for...reasons. That's all we'll say for now.

The original TV show cast gets a magnificent send-off with 1991's Star Trek VI; The Undiscovered Country. They're all noticeably old but it fits the movie and story well and has a fantastic send-off. The torch is the passed to the cast of the hit TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation which had just concluded on television. Hot off the heels of its conclusion is 1994's Star Trek Generations, the seventh film. Notice how the numbers quit coming? Now we're getting out of hand. Generations also was marketed as being the first Trek film to showcase a high-profile team-up of captains, namely Kirk and Picard, but we'll get into that later. The Next Generation cast returned for 1996's Star Trek: First Contact, the movie that made the Borg freaky scary. They probably would've been scarier in The Next Generation if they had a budget to not make them look like discount Halloween costumes. 1998 gave us the ninth of the original ten Trek films, Star Trek: Insurrection and the third to be based around the Next Generation crew. Unlike the original TV series cast, the Next Generation cast didn't get quite a good send-off with 2002's Star Trek Nemesis. For reasons we will very much get into once the ranking starts.

So that was just a preview, hope I already didn't spoil what order I'm going to put them in. Stay tuned...unless you're not a Trekkie and therefore don't give a shit. In which case, sorry.