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Star Trek: Nemesis Movie Review

Star Trek: Nemesis is a 2002 science fiction film directed by Stuart Baird and starring Patrick Stewart and Tom Hardy. It’s an okay entry in the series that is far from terrible.

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“I will always be puzzled by the human predilection

for piloting vehicles at unsafe velocities“

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The Enterprise is diverted to Romulus where Shinzon, who lives on the slave planet Remus, wants peace with the Federation. They soon discover that Shinzon has some very sinister ulterior motives. In terms of the plot, it’s more of the same. You’ve got the regular tensions between races, conflicts and a dialogue-driven story.

But it’s all executed solidly in my opinion. Yes, the extensive dialogue threatened to overtake the narrative, but there are some action scenes introduced in the second half, and those are genuinely entertaining and well executed, which I did not expect. The visual effects are also splendid, certainly miles better than most of the previous entries as this was the time when they finally started to utilize CGI properly.

There was a lot of talk about this movie being overly villain-centric. That was a sentiment especially shared by the cast itself. And I wholeheartedly agree myself. Star Trek is best when focusing on its protagonists and not villains, which is a problem that most movies share, but the TV shows did not.

I did like this villain for sure, but the movie focused so heavily on him that others felt underutilized, even the main characters, which was very frustrating for me as a fan of these characters. Tom Hardy was pretty good in the role and it was great seeing him at such an early point in his career, but there was no need for this movie to be all his and nobody else’s.

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Well, at least Patrick Stewart got some moments to shine as the conversations that the two have are quite good, though overly abundant. Star Trek: Nemesis failed to utilize its other characters, though the introduction of another Data was interesting, but unfortunately they did not go anywhere with that subplot. The overall movie is very weakly structured, paced and directed, leaving a sour taste in my mouth after it ended. It had a potential for so much more, but ended up being just an okay conclusion for ‘The Next Generation’ crew.