So...I promise I'm not going to get on the bandwagon bashing this movie. Really, I'm not. I'm just going to talk about what's on the DVD.

The first Star Trek movie to feature a real live director's commentary (not an audio track of spliced-together interviews) on its first DVD release, Nemesis - the disc - spends a lot of time massaging director Stuart Baird's ego. Baird is at the center of most of the featurettes on the DVD, and his stage-whispered commentary manages to be both informative and slightly amusing, just because of the almost sinsiter intensity of his voice! Stu, buddy, we're not in the theater. You could've spoken up. If we're listening to your audio track, it's because we want to hear you talk - really.

One of the featurettes focuses on the cast, heightening what may be increasingly accurate hype about this being the Next Generation crew's final film voyage, at least where the entire cast sharing the same movie is concerned. It's interesting to watch this in light of Patrick Stewart's recent decision to hang up Picard's uniform for good. Everyone seems real jazzed about John Logan scripting the film (uhhh...maybe it's just me, but Oscar or no, I didn't think Gladiator was all that and a bag of isolinear chips), and most are equally enthused about Baird taking over the director's chair, though I cringed when Frakes flatly said that everyone was "glad to have a new set of eyes directing the film." Say it ain't so, Jonathan - this movie might have fared better, in a storytelling and character sense, under Frakes' expert guidance.

Probably the most fascinating bonus is the Deleted Scenes collection, which begins with one criminally omitted scene - a discussion between Data and Picard about humans, change, and mortality - which is a linchpin for the whole emotional core of the movie! Imagine leaving the birthday gift/"get back your command" scene out of Star Trek II, you'll get the idea.

Another pivotal deleted scene/montage-of-scenes would have closed the movie on a humorous note rather than its bittersweet/hopeful coda, and I absolutely agree with the director on nixing it. From Riker's less-than-professional hand-off to the Enterprise's new first officer, to Picard saying "it's about time" upon learning that the newly-repaired captain's chair has seatbelts, to stopping just short of winking at the camera when he says "It's...where no one has gone before!", everything in the original ending rings hollow and cheap, more like a skit from Patrick Stewart's Saturday Night Live appearance than anything that actually belongs in a real Star Trek movie. The ending we did get, with the Enterprise in spacedock over Earth, is a great one if this is, in fact, the last Trek flick. By giving us our last glimpse of the Enterprise-E in much the same place that we first saw the new Enterprise in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, it gives the ten movies a nice, cyclical feeling.

And is this, in fact, the last Star Trek movie?

God, let's hope so. Okay, promise broken. Got to say a few words about the movie itself. I had really been resisting the idea out of deference to an excellent review already published on this site by Rob Heyman, but with so much time being spent in the featurettes lavishing Nemesis with praise, I have to balance things out. I'll give Nemesis this: it had a nice look, some well-executed action sequences, and a few nice character moments that weren't left on the cutting room floor. But much of the appeal where our main characters are concerned had little to do with the script, and everything to do with the performances - really a line of credit the actors have built up with the viewers over the years. The central villain of the piece, and his reasoning for seeking vengeance against Picard and then, by extension, Earth and the Federation...well, it made Insurrection look taut and tightly plotted. And as for the changes in the crew, finally going their separate ways after fifteen years...that bloody well should've happened after Generations, where it at least would've made sense. Here, we're given no explanation at all for Worf once again being a member of the Enterprise crew, Wesley Crusher attending a wedding party in Starfleet uniform, or Kathryn Janeway ascending to the admiralty a year after getting Voyager home. The Admiral Janeway line where she describes the Borg as one of the Enterprise's "easy assignments" made me cringe - especially when, if anyone in Starfleet should know better than to say such a thing to a former Borg victim, it's Janeway.

Let's face facts: the Star Trek TV spinoffs have learned well the lessons of the original crew's films, and have made Star Trek II's penchant for character development part of the TV series' mandate. We've come to expect so much from the shows - even Voyager - that trying to shoehorn the casts of any of the modern Treks (with the possible exception of the one that's still currently on the air) into a flashy-but-mindless action blockbuster is doing them a disservice. So maybe the lesson of Star Trek: Nemesis is: leave Star Trek where it belongs - on the small screen.

Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com webmaster / editor-in-chief