Star Trek Insurrection
Director: Jonathan Frakes.
Starring: Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis.
With any Star Trek movie, there comes a lot of baggage. Lots of people stay away because they're not trekkies: they've never watched the television show and they don't like Science Fiction. On the other hand, fans expect so much, even becoming a tad proprietal about their show. So who should go to see the latest instalment of the Next Generation films? How does it hold up for the two extreme ends of the viewing population?
I fear trekkies will be a bit disappointed. Just like First Contact, the previous Star Trek movie, Insurrection doesn't have a lot of plot. It's basically an extended television episode on a bigger screen. All the standard characters are there, doing what you'd expect of them, and it's an interesting enough plot but it's not a ground breaking movie.
On top of that, the effects are pretty cheesy. When I go to a Star Trek movie, I basically expect an extended television episode with cool special effects: I got the former but was robbed of the latter. The ships, docking and moving about in space looked like models. Even worse were the less amazing scenes like when
Data (Brent Spiner), Picard (Patrick Stewart) and the love interest were entering the water-craft they had discovered: the mountain backdrop was clearly fake. I don't know how much money was spent on special effects for Insurrection, but when I compare it to the great crash scene from the first Next Generation movie, it comes up very short.
There are, however, many pluses for Insurrection. While there will never be any Best Actor Oscars being awarded to the cast of a Star Trek film, all the performances are quite good. On top of that, there is a lot of humour in this movie. Whilst there were humorous pieces in First Contact, it had a very dark tone. There is no such tone in Insurrection: we have goodies and baddies, people to save, lessons to be learned but it is all done with a light-handedness that is very funny. The ability of the cast to laugh at themselves makes the film quite enjoyable.
The moral of the story, standard Star Trek, is also handled well. Although it's fed to us via Picard pontificating about the rights of people to self determination, watching Picard pontificate is not an unpleasant thing. His mellifluous voice can make anything palatable.
Overall, I think non-Science Fiction fans may enjoy Insurrection more than the hard core fans. Like most Science Fiction, it's really a morality play. In this case, however, Insurrection contains lots of morality, heaps of play and very little Science Fiction.
Rating: CR
© Nikki Lesley 1998
nikki@cs.usyd.edu.au
http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~nikki/m_r/Intro.html
ratings system: HD: High Distinction
D: Distinction
CR: Credit
P: Pass
CP: Conceded Pass
F: Fail
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