YMMV / Star Trek: Nemesis

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is Shinzon a power-hungry maniac who wants to carve his own place in history, or is he an angry, resentful, and bitter man lashing out at a universe that gave him such a terrible, violent life? It's possible that, beneath all his talk of conquest and liberating the Remans, he secretly just wants to destroy both the Romulans and the Federation in revenge for forcing him to be a pawn in their long conflict.
  • Shinzon's long string of idiotic decisions throughout the film, could be due to his inferiority complex toward Picard due to being a clone leads him to subconsciously self-sabotage himself at every opportunity because he secretly wants to lose.
  • It could also be that Shinzon's time acceleration means he's mentally a teenager. Which explains just about every Idiot Ball decision he makes, to be completely honest.
• Awesome Music: Jerry Goldsmith is right in form in his final Star Trek film score, even if no one else is.
• Base-Breaking Character: Shinzon is either the most underrated villain in the Star Trek film series, or the absolute worst villain in the series, depending on who you ask; there's very little middle ground. His fans typically point to Tom Hardy's strong performance, his backstory having more depth than most of the prior Trek film villains, and the interesting themes brought up by his being a clone of Picard. His detractors, meanwhile, bring up his constant Stupid Evil moments, and the fact that many of the scenes that established his backstory and motives were left on the cutting room floor, turning his character in the finished product into something of a Generic Doomsday Villain.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The car chase scene on the desert planet. The apparently xenophobic natives chasing them are never mentioned again, nor is the flagrant violation of the Prime Directive incurred by firing on them with energy weapons and flying spaceships in plain view.
  • Shinzon literally Mind Raping Troi. An utterly tasteless moment that serves absolutely no purpose except Shinzon doing something villainous, like we couldn't tell he was the bad guy already. Add to it that the timing is particularly bizarre given that Shinzon only has literally hours left to live and is apparently only taking this break from curing himself in favor of being eeeeevil.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Was anyone surprised when Data turned out to be impersonating B-4 on the Scimitar? They didn't even bother disguising his voice!
• Critical Backlash: As with many other works from the latter years of the "Berman Era" of Star Trek, some viewers have been much more charitable to Nemesis in the decades since its first release, feeling it to be a perfectly serviceable film that mostly fell victim to franchise fatigue — a quick glance at the Rotten Tomatoes page for the film shows that the overwhelming majority of negative reviews fall into the category of It's the Same, Now It Sucks! — and whose reputation was further hurt by its massive box-office failure and the stigma of helping to temporarily put the franchise on ice.
• Fanon: Many fans (And detractors of Voyager) subscribe to the theory that Janeway was ''forced'' to become an admiral, after her last command got her ship stranded in strange and hostile space for years.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: A number of deleted scenes fleshed out the rest of the cast, as Beverly was also set to leave the Enterprise to head Starfleet Medical as well as a full scene with Wesley revealing he was to be chief engineer aboard the Titan (in the film proper he could be seen in the wedding party but has no dialogue).
• Fashion-Victim Villain: Shinzon and the Remans wear bright purple, shiny uniforms.
• Fight Scene Failure:
  • Ship to ship combat in Star Trek has often been a bit arbitrary in conveying critical damage. Looping through empty space throwing little droplets of light at each other, taking forever to break through the Deflector Shields and start setting off the Explosive Instrumentation and escalating Star Trek Shake. That's relatively realistic and the staging is fairly tight... but the percentage countdown on the shield strength was mocked by a number of people. It largely became a slugfest with little strategy other than repeated weapons fire and angle of approach. There was a reason Star Trek II removed the shields from the equation entirely in order to make every hit matter.
  • The climactic fight between Picard and Shinzon ends with the latter getting impaled on a metal pole that Picard tears off the wall. While the intention was presumably that Shinzon didn't have time to dodge the pole, the way it's filmed and edited makes it look like he's just too dumb to figure out that running into sharp bits of metal is a bad idea.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The movie ends hinting at more positive relations between the Federation and the Romulans in the near future. But it never happens because the Romulus of this universe was canonically vaporized by a supernova eight years later (as depicted in Star Trek (2009)). And then, Star Trek: Picard establishes that Starfleet did not help the Romulans at all, (also meaning Nero's hatred for the Federation is perfectly valid) which left Picard so heartbroken that he retired from Starfleet. It also reveals that Data's attempt to upload his memories into B-4 failed.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Brent Spiner wrote Data's death into the film because he thought that he was getting too old to play an ageless android. Since Nemesis, Digital De-Aging's been developed and become a helpful piece of VFX in allowing older performers to appear as younger versions of themselves. Thus, Star Trek: Picard has Spiner playing Data again.
• He's Just Hiding: Data again. This is pretty much canon now, with his resurrection being a plot point in the Backstory for Star Trek (2009) — until Star Trek: Picard establishes that the download failed and B-4 crashed.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Tom Hardy plays a bald villain who was born in the darkness, didn't see the sun until he was already a man, sees himself as the instrument of liberation and wants to reduce the planet Earth to ashes.
    • Heck, these days the movie is basically seen as "Bane vs. Professor X".
  • The Mad Max-esque car chase sequence has gotten funnier since Tom Hardy eventually played Max in Mad Max: Fury Road.
    • The car chase was derided for being out of place in a Star Trek film. Fourteen years later, and the trailer for Star Trek Beyond is pounded for - among other things - having Captain Kirk ride a 20th century dirt bike around on an alien planet.
  • This won't be the last time the Enterprise crew fights against a group of aliens who look like Orlok and want to use a mutagenic weapon against the Federation.
  • Picard teasing Worf about his reluctance to appear naked and asking him what he could possibly be hiding becomes truly snicker-worthy when Star Trek: Discovery reveals an interesting detail about Klingon genitalia.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: This was by far and away the most common complaint about the film at the time of its release, with critics complaining that it did little to innovate on previous entries in the franchise. Even nowadays, when Rick Berman's "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mantra is generally regarded more favorably than it was at the time, most fans tend to agree that it followed the plot structure of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan a little too closely for its own good.
• Jerkass Woobie: Shinzon is hardly a pleasant fellow, though there's no denying that his life has sucked.
• Memetic Mutation: In an unusual example, this happened to a line that never actually made it to the final movie. When Riker kicked the Viceroy to his death, he was scripted to quip "Don't worry, hell is dark!" The script was leaked on to the internet however, and the line was mercilessly lampooned by Trekkies, which — along with Jonathan Frakes objecting on the basis that it looked like Riker was killing the Viceroy for the fun of it - resulted in the line being quietly dropped. It's somewhat strange, considering in actual context he's getting revenge on his wife's rapist, so it probably would've been well-received if it had been left out of the trailer.
• Misblamed:
  • To an extent. The film is generally considered to be a (temporary) Franchise Killer for Star Trek, but the truth is that the franchise had been in decline for several years before hand; though not nearly as bad, Insurrection was also poorly received (for that matter, on the TV side, both Voyager and Enterprise were equally polarizing; even the franchise's biggest supporters were starting to feel like it needed a rest.) Of course, this movie's unpopularity certainly didn't help things. Plus it's widely thought that it would have at least earned back its budget like Insurrection had, if not for the fact that it was released in the same week as The Two Towers.
  • This takes us to another case of this trope. Many, including Berman himself, have tended to blame this film's massive financial failure on The Two Towers. While this did not help, and it's true that the two films share some overlap in demographics the fact remains that a strong movie will be able to withstand another big release the following week. Other Star Trek movies have had to face some extremely stiff competition but all did much better than this one; The Wrath of Khan for instance was released the week before the mega-hit E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and yet still was a box-office success. What Berman and co. tend to gloss over is that this movie also lost to the Jennifer Lopez comedy Maid in Manhattan and then dropped 76.2% on its second week to ninth place (one of the largest drops ever for a major release, and at the time the largest for a film to have opened on over 2,000 screens). Stiff competition, as well as bad word of mouth and lack of interest is what ultimately sealed this movie's fate.
  • For years it was assumed that the infamous "car chase" sequence was the result of a Wag the Director moment on the part of Patrick Stewart, who is known to be a big fan of driving. Stewart later clarified that the scene was actually director Stuart Baird's idea, and that his only contribution was suggesting that Picard be the one behind the wheel instead of Riker, as was originally scripted.
  • StarDestroyer.net's synopsis of the film is sometimes blamed as being responsible for the film's poor reputation, and occasionally even its flopping at the box-office. A quick look at the date on the synopsis quickly disproves the idea that it had any role in the film's flopping, as it was written in November 2003 — nearly a year after the film's release.^note (In fact, SD.net's webmaster, Mike Wong admitted that he didn't even bother seeing Nemesis in the cinemas due to his general disillusionment with the franchise by that point and, perhaps more tellingly, because his wife and sons wanted to see The Two Towers instead) And while the synopsis did lay bare the film's most glaring faults, many of them had been known about even before the film's release thanks to the script being leaked, which likely killed enthusiasm for the film from the get-go.
• Moral Event Horizon: See here.
• Protection from Editors: One of the main reasons why the film turned out the way it did. Screenwriter John Logan was given a "no rewrites" clause in his contract, something that writers frequently insist upon but are almost never granted, and director Stuart Baird's unfamiliarity with the franchise meant that he wasn't inclined to ask Logan to tweak the script. Notably, one of the key changes to the script — the Scimitar initially having its warp core on the bridge, which was changed in the final version to the Thalaron generator being located in a small chamber behind it — was done at the insistence of technical consultant Rick Sternbach, rather than Baird or producer Rick Berman.
• Questionable Casting:
  • Not to rank on Tom Hardy who gave an okay performance, but for someone who's supposed to be a clone of Picard, he and Patrick Stewart look nothing alike! In fact, more than one critic joked that if anything, Shinzon looked and even acted more like Dr. Evil than Picard.
  • Slightly handwaved in the dinner scene and the novelization, where Shinzon explains that his face is different from Picard's due to being beaten in the dilithium mines many, many times. Essentially, he experienced a childhood of abuse, where Picard didn't. (Doesn't account for the thick, voluptuous lips of Hardy, however. Or the photo of Hardy as young Picard which retcons a popular TNG episode.)
• Retroactive Recognition: Ironically, one of the least-watched Star Trek films of all time is also the movie that introduced most of the United States to Tom Hardy, who would ultimately become one of the most recognizable actors of The New '10s. (Not that this film helped any, if anything Hardy would have been a household name much earlier than 2010 had this film not flopped the way it did.)
• Sequelitis: The financial failure of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier previously threatened to put an end to the Trek films, but Nemesis made good upon that threat (at least for the TNG cast). In general, it tends to be one of three Trek films — the other two being The Final Frontier and Star Trek: Insurrection — that are considered the worst in the franchise.
• Special Effect Failure: The overall standard of special effects is better than in the previous movie, but some of the CGI (especially the model texturing) is awful, especially if you're watching on Blu-ray. The portable Thaleron device that Tal'aura uses to wipe out the Romulan Senate stands out, looking hardly any better than what you might have seen on a contemporary episode of Star Trek: Enterprise.
• Tainted by the Preview: The screenplay was mercilessly mocked on the Internet when it was leaked before the film's release. The film's trailers, while not terrible by themselves, just helped make things worse, as they confirmed that the script had survived mostly unaltered to the final product.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • It has to be admitted that the core concept of Shinzon as a character is awesome. A dark mirror of Captain Picard who grew up in the slave mines of Romulus instead of the utopian Federation, and has become his every equal in command and experience but his opposite in terms of morality? And who's become the heroic leader of a group of oppressed aliens, who has freed them from slavery and is seeking revenge against a government that's newly allied with the Federation? That sounds like the admirable, sympathetic villain with understandable goals that the franchise has been chasing ever since The Wrath of Khan. Except...Shinzon wins freedom for his people and gets his revenge on the Romulan government in the opening scene of the movie, and then spends the rest of the movie wasting Tom Hardy's talent on striding around dimly lit bridges in purple leather, trying to destroy Starfleet for, uh, reasons, and most disgusting of all, trying to rape Troi when he literally has only hours to live.
  • Not to mention the Reman Viceroy. Ron Perlman, one of the most skilled prosthetic makeup actors on the planet, plays Shinzon's most trusted friend, advisor, mentor, and father figure, who rescued him from the Romulan guards when he was a boy and is perhaps largely responsible for training him into what he is. And you can't give him anything more interesting to do than assist Shinzon in the aforementioned Mind Rape of Troi and then die in a fight with Riker? The character literally doesn't even get a name.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • You know, even with the Ass Pull involved in the Remans being Nosferatu knockoffs (though even a "Romulan/Reman split" isn't a terrible idea in and of itself and people had actually asked about Remans going all the way back to "Balance of Terror", it's just the makeup that is spectacularly goofy) and Shinzon and Picard being related, there were still seeds of a neat plot in there (that dinner scene isn't half bad, and just in general you have a young Tom Hardy to work with on top of Ron Perlman being present as discussed above). And the concept behind B4 isn't actually completely out there, since Dr. Soong did say prototypes existed prior to Data & Lore. And hey, the starship fights are great and are some of the finest ship choreography in the entire franchise (and easily the best movie ship choreography since Wrath of Khan). But mash them together nonsensically, and throw in random car chases, and... well...
  • Not to mention that this was supposed to be the first Trek film to truly feature the Romulans, after being in the background through previous films (they almost were the Big Bad of Star Trek III). But they're barely in it. Fortunately, the next Trek movie would show how badass the Romulans are.
  • Imagine if the final TNG film had focused on resolving the Romulan cold war which had simmered in the background of all seven seasons of the show?
    • Not to mention it would make a nice mirror to the final TOS film, which saw the end of the Klingon/Federation conflict.
  • Possibly overlapping with Questionable Casting, but many believe Commander Sela from TNG would have been a better character choice than Commander Donatra — or possibly even Shinzon — providing closure to another recurring character. And, given the tagline "A Generation's final journey," bringing back Denise Crosby would have been very fitting.
    • Commander Tomalak was another character Trekkies wished could showed up, too. This one hurts even more in retrospect because Andreas Katsulas was alive at the time of filming, but would die barely half a decade later. This was the last shot anyone would ever have of getting Tomalak in a Trek production with his original actor (who by Nemesis had rocketed to fame thanks to G'Kar), and the opportunity was completely squandered.
  • Not more really needs to be said about the Scorpion attack fighters other than why even introduce them if you have no plans to actually use them? And what makes this worse is that they had two perfect opportunities for a dog fight what with the Romulans coming to their aid and the Federation fleet being just outside of the nebula.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: Tom Hardy is actually pretty decent; he and Patrick Stewart make the one-on-one scenes between Shinzon and Picard watchable, at least.
  • In an interview given years after the film came out, Hardy said that he took the film role very seriously, as it was intended to be his big break. The commercial failure of the film and the response from longtime fans apparently led to his relationship dissolving, his turning to alcohol, and considering suicide. It was only when he pulled himself together and starred in Bronson that he got over the film (and we all know the rest).
• Vindicated by History: The film isn't considered particularly good and is still often ranked as among the weakest of the franchise. However, it has seen an unexpected re-evaluation over the years as the film was a major conflict between trying to tell cerebral sci-fi and appeal to mainstream audiences through slam-bam action and is assisted by the growing popularity of Tom Hardy, as well as an increasing appreciation for just how tight the ship combat choreography and effects are.
  • For two decades, Nemesis held the dubious distinction of being an absolute dud of a sendoff for the Next Generation cast. With the final season of Picard in 2023 firmly planting itself as a well-received Grand Finale for TNG, Nemesis now can be looked back somewhat more favorably in the context of a middling sequel rather than also carrying the weight of a disastrous finale around its neck
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The ramming of the two ships was actually done with physical models, not CGI.
  • As noted, the ship choreography is among some of the absolute best in the entire franchise, and was a step up from some of the previous movies and some of the set-pieces in the shows (where the action on screen sometimes didn't match up with the script and dialogue, whereas here everything is pitch-perfect throughout). This is something science fiction and action shows twenty-plus-years on, even the film's own Trekmates, can still struggle to do as well. The depiction of the combat in this movie had a huge influence on later Trek game works, especially Star Trek Online.

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