The last battle has begun...
The Federation is about to encounter its greatest challenge - the Romulans want peace.
Conceived in the regal senate halls of Romulus and forged in the dilithium mines of Remus, comes a nemesis bent on destroying Picard and the Federation... exactly in that order.
Ordered by Starfleet to be the first line of diplomacy in ushering in a new era for the Federation, the crew of the USS Enterprise-E is dispatched to Romulus for an unexpected peace mission. Once in the shadow of the Romulan Empire, Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and the Enterprise crew are thrust into the centre of a plot that could lead to the destruction of Earth at the hands of a new and chilling nemesis.
Based on the TV series created by Gene Roddenberry
Special Agent Matti
It's good.
It isn't great, though.
Star trek: Nemesis is the result of some very hard thinking and a lot of blood and sweat. You can see the effort that the film's creators put into its making, and therein lies the problem. In order for the magic to work, you should not be able to see the mirrors. First contact was effortless: all you had to do was sit back and enjoy the ride. With Nemesis you can hear the gears grinding and that takes some of the pleasure away.
On the up-side, there are some truly awesome effects. The battle between the Enterprise and the Scimitar (with a little help from a couple of Romulan Warbirds) is way cool. The collision between the Enterprise and the Scimitar is just plain awesome. Plenty of people have threatened to ram another ship (just how fast is ramming speed, anyway?) but only Kathryn Janeway has actually done it (see Voyager's Year of hell II). Nemesis gives you an up-close, hundreds of un-named extras dead, hand me the can opener, rip it to shreds crash: yeehar!
As for the story, well, some parts are excellent, some are not. The Romulan Empire bits are as much information in this one movie as all the previous episodes put together: that's excellent. Ignoring things that happened in previous episodes is not. Why is Worf suddenly back on the Enterprise when the last we saw of him he was on his way to Qo'nos as the Federation Ambassador? If Geordi's eyes regenerated on the planet of the Ba'ku, why did they unregenerate? Why doesn't the Enterprise use a Tri-cobalt torpedo when the quantums have run out? Oh well, they never promised to be consistent.
Data dying? Well, this is Star trek and death is not the be all and end all that it is in the 21st century. Especially when the captain lets his new First Officer download all his memories into another android. How subtle was that? I've never been a fan of Data - perhaps because he was too powerful a character: immortal, impervious, intelligent - so his death meant little to me, but it was a good death, in keeping with the finest traditions of Starfleet.
Finally, it's good to see that the old gang is breaking up and going to new ships (or levels of existence); keeping them all together for so long has stretched the bounds of credibility somewhat. If there's a Star trek XI, it's going to be interesting, to say the least.
M (Moderate violence)
111 minutes (1:51 hours)
Film: 6 February 2003
DVD and VHS rental: 18 July 2003
DVD and VHS retail: 13 November 2003