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I didn’t think it was possible, but apparently it is. After the disaster that was the first Star Trek movie comes another one going for the throne of sheer badness in this franchise. I’m shocked of the height of the rating on the IMDB as this was truly one boring and annoying movie to sit through. To boldly go where ever bad Star Trek movies go…
Where to start on this one now… a quick synopsis: A new Enterprise-B has been taken in use and for ceremonial purposes part of the original crew, Kirk, Scotty and Chekov are guests on the maiden voyage. A distress call during this voyage calls for the ship to spring into action. During the rescue of a handful of people Kirk gets supposedly blasted into pieces and the movie skips 70+ years into the future where we meet the crew of The Next Generation. They also have to deal with a distress call this one coming from the Amargosa solar observatory. There they find a scientist named Soran (Malcolm McDowell) while the rest of the people have been killed by scientists. To shorten the story: Kirk hasn’t been killed but is in the Nexus, a sort of energy wave floating through the galaxy and Soran wants to get into the Nexus but has to destroy a star in order to do so which will result in lost of casualties. So the Next Generation Crew has to stop this from happening.
Basically your average Star Trek plot, but what a badly executed one this is. Let’s start of with Data. Data is a droid/cyborg/whatever and devoid of human emotions. In order to experience them he has an emotion chip installed and thus the frolics start. Really, this guy is so annoying he makes Jar Jar Binks look like a suitable character to position a sitcom around. It’s unnecessary to the plot, it’s just a useless subplot and annoying as hell. It’s supposed to be funny but really made me do the well known Picard facepalm every time he and his antics were onscreen.
The movie was boring. It was too long, and nothing much actually happened most of the time. The plot was mildly interesting but in the end it just didn’t make much sense. The whole Nexus element felt like a cheat once it came into play. Assuming you’ve already seen the movie there will be spoilers ahead. As Soran succeeds with blowing up the star Picard and Soran end up in the Nexus. This Nexus is somewhat of a dreamworld tailor made to each individual residing in it. Picard meets his family that was killed in a fire, this was mentioned earlier on. He chooses to look up Kirk who is in his own Nexus world living on a country side ranch. They both come to conclusion that in the end this dreamworld is fake and then just go into a light and go back in time just before Soran is about to blow up the star that would have him and Picard end up in the Nexus in the first place.
This was the moment that I yelled: They can do that?
First they mention how hard it is going to be to get to Soran and stop him and then all it takes is one flash of light? And if you can time-travel in the Nexus why not have Picard go back to save his nephew from the fire? Why not have Kirk go back to the moment he entered the Nexus and return to his friends and stop Soran in that time? From that point on he had 70 years to stop him instead of the sheer minutes he now has. Those Picard facepalms; I did them a lot during this movie.
Did I fell cheated, and not only because of that.
They have parts of the original crew and they only have 15 minutes of screen time before they disappear without being seen again. Kirk does return but only for the movie’s climax. I had hoped for the two crews joining through some time-travel-device and fighting together to defeat some dangerous villain. Not so much luck though. This movie fails on more levels than there are on the Enterprise. The only good thing was the first 15 minutes with the original crew and seeing how two different captains act completely the opposite of each other: Picard is being played with a straight face while Shatner’s Kirk always seems to realize in what kind of movie he is in and hams it up in a delicious way.
