During the covid-19 pandemic, beginning August 2020, my wife Sarah and I amused ourselves (if that's the term) in an eccentric way. We watched all the Star Trek films and I tweeted her reactions.
The premise for this was that I had seen all of them, but Sarah, being (as I put it) less warped, had only seen a handful. And some of her responses were, um, strong.
Since Twitter is now X and also awful, I thought I'd recover the ensuing mega-thread and re-publish it on my own site.
The premise for this was that I had seen all of them, but Sarah, being (as I put it) less warped, had only seen a handful. And some of her responses were, um, strong.
Since Twitter is now X and also awful, I thought I'd recover the ensuing mega-thread and re-publish it on my own site.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
I worried about this one. Sarah has loved several slow-paced sci-fi films, notably Moon and Arrival, but she hated 2001 (“two hours of my life I’m never getting back”) and was variously bored and amused by Alien. I was right to worry.
She does like the overture music. Then she is startled to learn that the theme music for The Next Generation is actually the credits music from this film, repurposed. And then there are Klingons. She blames me for the fact she recognises the ships instantly.
“Great CG,” she says sarcastically, of the Great Big Wibbly Wobbly Swirly Thing in Space. I point out that the film is pre-CG and is all practical effects, and she shifts to grudging respect. This will not last.
We re-meet all the characters as they assemble, and Kirk spends a good few minutes eye-fucking the revamped Enterprise. Eye-fucking, we eventually decided, is a key element in this film.
Plus there are new characters! First: Decker, who was supposed to be the Enterprise captain until Kirk had him subbed out, creating Manly Conflict. Sarah says Decker looked like a Ken doll. Afterwards I found the actor’s career ended *horribly*.
And then there is Ilia, the navigator and Decker’s ex. Ilia is also Deltan, a new species for Star Trek, with a notable feature the film entirely fails to explain. Fortunately I have read the novelisation...
<insert gif of Homer Simpson screaming "NEEEEEEERRRRRRRDDDDDDDDD!">
Deltans have super-intense pheromones, so humans who have sex with them basically become addicted. Sarah says she can relate. This is why Ilia says she has taken an “oath of celibacy”: she’s not allowed to shag anyone in case they lose it. Sarah is bemused.
So I go a bit further and explain that this was the sort of vaguely sex-positive, but also rather male-gaze-y, stuff that Gene Roddenberry was coming up with at the time. He also wanted Troi in TNG to have three breasts. Sarah’s face is quite expressive now.
Ilia, by the way, was played by an Indian actress called Persis Khambatta, in what was meant to be her Hollywood breakthrough. It seems it didn’t pan out, as within a decade she was starring in She-Wolves of the Wasteland.
Anyway the Enterprise finally sets off, but when they try to go to warp it doesn’t work and they go into a wormhole, which distorts time and causes everything to become reeeeaaaalllyyyyyyyyyyy slooooooooooowwww. Sarah will later say this encapsulates the whole film.
To escape they have to fire a photon torpedo, and the slow-motion is now so extreme that Chekov says: “Phooooooootoooooooon toooooooorpeeeeeeeeeedoooooooooo.” Sarah laughs really, really hard. I sense the film is losing her. I am not wrong.
Spock arrives, and they finally get to the Wibbly Wibbly Swirly Thing, and after some mild kerfuffle fly inside. A lot of 2001-style special effects ensue. At this point we pause the film to get drinks etc...
When we get back Sarah asks if this is the finale. I check the DVD player and we’re at 1:06 of a 2-hour film. Sarah: “Are you shitting me?!” The film is paused on a shot of Nichelle Nichols looking fed up, which Sarah says expresses her feelings precisely.
It emerges that Sarah thinks the film is a single episode’s worth of plot stretched out to feature length. I explain this is literally the case (it was supposed to be the pilot for an aborted Star Trek Phase II TV series). “Uh-huh.”
More special effects and model work, and then a glowing beam of light trundles around the bridge and disappears Ilia. Then the Enterprise gets sucked into a Giant Metal Orifice, and a robot version of Ilia comes onboard to study the crew.
This is where the film briefly threatens to be interesting: the alien is a single huge machine, and doesn’t believe the humans are true life forms. This is a neat-ish twist on carbon chauvinism and prefigures films like Blade Runner.
But Sarah will have none of it. If the AI is advanced enough to have crossed the galaxy and made this whizzy machine, it should know biology and/or be able to imagine forms of life different to itself. We eventually agree that the alien robot is “basically racist”.
When we learn that the alien is called V’ger and that it’s transmitting a message in basic radio, Sarah quickly figures out that it’s an old NASA probe, one of the Voyagers, that’s been hugely upgraded by alien robots. The film reveals this 10-15 minutes later.
V’ger has unfulfilled needs and wants to meet its creator, to touch its creator. Sarah says this doesn’t make sense so I say it’s like Michelangelo’s painting of touching God’s finger. “I always think of it as Michelangelo’s pull my finger.” I become briefly hysterical.
Sarah realises that Decker could be the one to join with V’ger. “Oh is he about to become Captain Expendable?” Decker and Robot Ilia continue eye-fucking. “How much more eye-fucking are those two going to do?!”
Spielbergian special effects mark Decker’s fusion with both V’ger and Robot Ilia. There is a final eruption of 2001-style light show and V’ger et al are gone. Sarah: “They’ve spluffed their way into hyperspace.”
The film ends with a title card: “The human adventure is just beginning”. Sarah: “It’s only just beginning?! Fuck off!” She notices Isaac Asimov’s name in the credits and is impressed, then wonders aloud why the film was nevertheless so shit.
Final rating: one-half impulse power I assure her that the next few are better. She glares at me suspiciously. “It was a nice marriage while it lasted.” So this is going well.
I worried about this one. Sarah has loved several slow-paced sci-fi films, notably Moon and Arrival, but she hated 2001 (“two hours of my life I’m never getting back”) and was variously bored and amused by Alien. I was right to worry.
She does like the overture music. Then she is startled to learn that the theme music for The Next Generation is actually the credits music from this film, repurposed. And then there are Klingons. She blames me for the fact she recognises the ships instantly.
“Great CG,” she says sarcastically, of the Great Big Wibbly Wobbly Swirly Thing in Space. I point out that the film is pre-CG and is all practical effects, and she shifts to grudging respect. This will not last.
We re-meet all the characters as they assemble, and Kirk spends a good few minutes eye-fucking the revamped Enterprise. Eye-fucking, we eventually decided, is a key element in this film.
Plus there are new characters! First: Decker, who was supposed to be the Enterprise captain until Kirk had him subbed out, creating Manly Conflict. Sarah says Decker looked like a Ken doll. Afterwards I found the actor’s career ended *horribly*.
And then there is Ilia, the navigator and Decker’s ex. Ilia is also Deltan, a new species for Star Trek, with a notable feature the film entirely fails to explain. Fortunately I have read the novelisation...
<insert gif of Homer Simpson screaming "NEEEEEEERRRRRRRDDDDDDDDD!">
Deltans have super-intense pheromones, so humans who have sex with them basically become addicted. Sarah says she can relate. This is why Ilia says she has taken an “oath of celibacy”: she’s not allowed to shag anyone in case they lose it. Sarah is bemused.
So I go a bit further and explain that this was the sort of vaguely sex-positive, but also rather male-gaze-y, stuff that Gene Roddenberry was coming up with at the time. He also wanted Troi in TNG to have three breasts. Sarah’s face is quite expressive now.
Ilia, by the way, was played by an Indian actress called Persis Khambatta, in what was meant to be her Hollywood breakthrough. It seems it didn’t pan out, as within a decade she was starring in She-Wolves of the Wasteland.
Anyway the Enterprise finally sets off, but when they try to go to warp it doesn’t work and they go into a wormhole, which distorts time and causes everything to become reeeeaaaalllyyyyyyyyyyy slooooooooooowwww. Sarah will later say this encapsulates the whole film.
To escape they have to fire a photon torpedo, and the slow-motion is now so extreme that Chekov says: “Phooooooootoooooooon toooooooorpeeeeeeeeeedoooooooooo.” Sarah laughs really, really hard. I sense the film is losing her. I am not wrong.
Spock arrives, and they finally get to the Wibbly Wibbly Swirly Thing, and after some mild kerfuffle fly inside. A lot of 2001-style special effects ensue. At this point we pause the film to get drinks etc...
When we get back Sarah asks if this is the finale. I check the DVD player and we’re at 1:06 of a 2-hour film. Sarah: “Are you shitting me?!” The film is paused on a shot of Nichelle Nichols looking fed up, which Sarah says expresses her feelings precisely.
It emerges that Sarah thinks the film is a single episode’s worth of plot stretched out to feature length. I explain this is literally the case (it was supposed to be the pilot for an aborted Star Trek Phase II TV series). “Uh-huh.”
More special effects and model work, and then a glowing beam of light trundles around the bridge and disappears Ilia. Then the Enterprise gets sucked into a Giant Metal Orifice, and a robot version of Ilia comes onboard to study the crew.
This is where the film briefly threatens to be interesting: the alien is a single huge machine, and doesn’t believe the humans are true life forms. This is a neat-ish twist on carbon chauvinism and prefigures films like Blade Runner.
But Sarah will have none of it. If the AI is advanced enough to have crossed the galaxy and made this whizzy machine, it should know biology and/or be able to imagine forms of life different to itself. We eventually agree that the alien robot is “basically racist”.
When we learn that the alien is called V’ger and that it’s transmitting a message in basic radio, Sarah quickly figures out that it’s an old NASA probe, one of the Voyagers, that’s been hugely upgraded by alien robots. The film reveals this 10-15 minutes later.
V’ger has unfulfilled needs and wants to meet its creator, to touch its creator. Sarah says this doesn’t make sense so I say it’s like Michelangelo’s painting of touching God’s finger. “I always think of it as Michelangelo’s pull my finger.” I become briefly hysterical.
Sarah realises that Decker could be the one to join with V’ger. “Oh is he about to become Captain Expendable?” Decker and Robot Ilia continue eye-fucking. “How much more eye-fucking are those two going to do?!”
Spielbergian special effects mark Decker’s fusion with both V’ger and Robot Ilia. There is a final eruption of 2001-style light show and V’ger et al are gone. Sarah: “They’ve spluffed their way into hyperspace.”
The film ends with a title card: “The human adventure is just beginning”. Sarah: “It’s only just beginning?! Fuck off!” She notices Isaac Asimov’s name in the credits and is impressed, then wonders aloud why the film was nevertheless so shit.
Final rating: one-half impulse power I assure her that the next few are better. She glares at me suspiciously. “It was a nice marriage while it lasted.” So this is going well.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
I wasn’t worried about showing Sarah this film. I was right not to worry. She liked it. Our marriage is back on.
Sarah raises two key problems with WoK. The first is she knows Spock isn’t permanently dead, so his death didn’t really hit home - but she is notably silent and non-sarcastic for the actual scene, and says she can imagine how audiences must have reacted originally.
The second is a plot point. She thinks Khan and his crew shouldn’t have been able to take over a Federation starship, as they’re from the 1990s and wouldn’t even know how to unlock an iPhone. I disagree...
I point out they’re genetically engineered to be hyper-intelligent, plus they have the ship’s captain and first officer mind-controlled to help them. She counters that the previous film showed Kirk, “who’s a fucking admiral”, struggling with the new Enterprise. I give in.
Beyond that, she simply had a lot less to complain about and spent most of the film quite happily engrossed. She does say that Ricardo Montalban clearly went to the William Shatner School of Acting. He is monologuing at the time so I am unable to argue.
But interestingly she has nothing to say against the main crew’s performances, and one of Kirk’s jokes gets a genuine laugh (“Then this’ll be your big chance to get away from it all”). She doesn’t even find “KHAN!!” too silly. It’s very memed but makes sense in context.
She does think Khan’s crew look pretty stupid. In fact, with their ripped clothes and bouffant hair, she thinks they look like a 1980s hair metal band. This is annoyingly accurate. I can’t decide if Poison or The Scorpions are the best match.
Beyond that, Sarah only wishes to add one thing. “Are they fighting back? Does that mean they’re going to fire the phoooooootoooooon toooooorpeeeeeeeeedooooooo?” That one is apparently never getting old.
I wasn’t worried about showing Sarah this film. I was right not to worry. She liked it. Our marriage is back on.
Sarah raises two key problems with WoK. The first is she knows Spock isn’t permanently dead, so his death didn’t really hit home - but she is notably silent and non-sarcastic for the actual scene, and says she can imagine how audiences must have reacted originally.
The second is a plot point. She thinks Khan and his crew shouldn’t have been able to take over a Federation starship, as they’re from the 1990s and wouldn’t even know how to unlock an iPhone. I disagree...
I point out they’re genetically engineered to be hyper-intelligent, plus they have the ship’s captain and first officer mind-controlled to help them. She counters that the previous film showed Kirk, “who’s a fucking admiral”, struggling with the new Enterprise. I give in.
Beyond that, she simply had a lot less to complain about and spent most of the film quite happily engrossed. She does say that Ricardo Montalban clearly went to the William Shatner School of Acting. He is monologuing at the time so I am unable to argue.
But interestingly she has nothing to say against the main crew’s performances, and one of Kirk’s jokes gets a genuine laugh (“Then this’ll be your big chance to get away from it all”). She doesn’t even find “KHAN!!” too silly. It’s very memed but makes sense in context.
She does think Khan’s crew look pretty stupid. In fact, with their ripped clothes and bouffant hair, she thinks they look like a 1980s hair metal band. This is annoyingly accurate. I can’t decide if Poison or The Scorpions are the best match.
Beyond that, Sarah only wishes to add one thing. “Are they fighting back? Does that mean they’re going to fire the phoooooootoooooon toooooorpeeeeeeeeedooooooo?” That one is apparently never getting old.
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
It was all going so well. This film started quite promisingly and there was a good 20 minutes where Sarah was broadly happy, but then it went slowly and gradually off the rails before exploding in a fiery mess.
Sarah was pleased that the Enterprise was still visibly wrecked, inside and out, from the battles in the last film. The scars of Star Trek: Voyager run deep. She was less thrilled by Christopher Lloyd as the main Klingon: “I keep expecting him to yell ‘Great Scott’.”
I was expecting her to cry foul at the reveal that Vulcans have eternal souls, which is a godawful cheat, but she lets it slide. At that point she’s more pissed off that Kirstie Alley has been replaced as Saavik: it’s hardly a Terrence Howard / Don Cheadle trade-up.
There is also a phase where she becomes convinced the film is ripping off Star Wars. In fairness, there is in short order: a cantina, complete with backwards-talking alien; a Hoth-like snow environment; and a prison guard in a vaguely Imperial uniform.
But then Kirk et al “go rogue”, break McCoy out of prison and steal the Enterprise. The film has been building to this for a solid half-hour, and it evidently plays well because no complaints are aired.
And then we get “Mr Adventure”. As this junior officer patronises Uhura, telling her that her “career is winding down”, Sarah first demands Uhura punch him, dubs him “Chad”, and tells him to “fuck off”. Then Uhura pulls a phaser on him and locks him in a cupboard. “Love her. *Love* her.”
Sadly this will be the last unmitigated good bit. We find out that Genesis doesn’t really work. I have long hated this reveal because - like so much of this film - it walks back the interesting stuff from the last one. I air this, and Sarah agrees.
Then the reborn Spock goes into pon farr, aka Vulcan extreme horniness. At first Sarah says he could just take care of himself. I explain that it doesn’t work like that, and that he has to shag someone or he’ll die. She says this is more proof Gene Roddenberry was a perv.
Then she realises that Saavik is going to have to deal with this, and that her solution is going to involve “finger wanking”. Sarah, who is a teacher and has strong views about adult-teenage sexual consent, hits the roof. We pause the film to hash this out.
I argue Saavik is saving Spock’s life and doesn’t have any other options. Sarah argues that the sequence is simply unnecessary. The laws of biology are already upended in this situation, so Spock could just skip pon farr and only ardent Trekkies would know.
Our main takeaway is that all major 80s film franchises had questionable sexual content that fucked our generation up for life: Star Wars has Luke and Leia, Back to the Future has mother-son incest, Raiders of the Lost Ark implies Marion was underage, and then there’s this.
Now things spiral. After a rather short battle - very few phooooooootooooooon toooooooorpeeeeeeeeedoooooooooeeeeeees - the Klingons kill David. Sarah shrugs. He and Kirk had no screen time in this film, and not much last time, so who cares? Again, walking things back.
And then Kirk takes out most of the Klingons by blowing up the Enterprise. Sarah complains that the self-destruct codes are so easily cracked, “it’s like having your password be 1234”. I can only mumble that it was the 80s.
The film culminates with Kirk and Kruge having a fist fight as the planet erupts around them. The fight is so badly staged that Sarah is giggling hysterically throughout. I compare it to the fight with the Gorn in the TV series. She says it’s worse: it’s like 1960s Batman.
There is a lengthy epilogue on Vulcan where Spock gets his soul/memories back. Sarah thinks he must be very confused by how different Saavik looks. It’s telling that the film has lost her so much that McCoy’s “Helluva time to ask” doesn’t raise a smile.
Sarah’s takeaway is that the film should not exist. If they really wanted Spock to not die in ST2, they should have had him not die - not do it anyway then spend a film retconning the death, and deleting everything that film did to the status quo. Also, “finger wanking”.
It was all going so well. This film started quite promisingly and there was a good 20 minutes where Sarah was broadly happy, but then it went slowly and gradually off the rails before exploding in a fiery mess.
Sarah was pleased that the Enterprise was still visibly wrecked, inside and out, from the battles in the last film. The scars of Star Trek: Voyager run deep. She was less thrilled by Christopher Lloyd as the main Klingon: “I keep expecting him to yell ‘Great Scott’.”
I was expecting her to cry foul at the reveal that Vulcans have eternal souls, which is a godawful cheat, but she lets it slide. At that point she’s more pissed off that Kirstie Alley has been replaced as Saavik: it’s hardly a Terrence Howard / Don Cheadle trade-up.
There is also a phase where she becomes convinced the film is ripping off Star Wars. In fairness, there is in short order: a cantina, complete with backwards-talking alien; a Hoth-like snow environment; and a prison guard in a vaguely Imperial uniform.
But then Kirk et al “go rogue”, break McCoy out of prison and steal the Enterprise. The film has been building to this for a solid half-hour, and it evidently plays well because no complaints are aired.
And then we get “Mr Adventure”. As this junior officer patronises Uhura, telling her that her “career is winding down”, Sarah first demands Uhura punch him, dubs him “Chad”, and tells him to “fuck off”. Then Uhura pulls a phaser on him and locks him in a cupboard. “Love her. *Love* her.”
Sadly this will be the last unmitigated good bit. We find out that Genesis doesn’t really work. I have long hated this reveal because - like so much of this film - it walks back the interesting stuff from the last one. I air this, and Sarah agrees.
Then the reborn Spock goes into pon farr, aka Vulcan extreme horniness. At first Sarah says he could just take care of himself. I explain that it doesn’t work like that, and that he has to shag someone or he’ll die. She says this is more proof Gene Roddenberry was a perv.
Then she realises that Saavik is going to have to deal with this, and that her solution is going to involve “finger wanking”. Sarah, who is a teacher and has strong views about adult-teenage sexual consent, hits the roof. We pause the film to hash this out.
I argue Saavik is saving Spock’s life and doesn’t have any other options. Sarah argues that the sequence is simply unnecessary. The laws of biology are already upended in this situation, so Spock could just skip pon farr and only ardent Trekkies would know.
Our main takeaway is that all major 80s film franchises had questionable sexual content that fucked our generation up for life: Star Wars has Luke and Leia, Back to the Future has mother-son incest, Raiders of the Lost Ark implies Marion was underage, and then there’s this.
Now things spiral. After a rather short battle - very few phooooooootooooooon toooooooorpeeeeeeeeedoooooooooeeeeeees - the Klingons kill David. Sarah shrugs. He and Kirk had no screen time in this film, and not much last time, so who cares? Again, walking things back.
And then Kirk takes out most of the Klingons by blowing up the Enterprise. Sarah complains that the self-destruct codes are so easily cracked, “it’s like having your password be 1234”. I can only mumble that it was the 80s.
The film culminates with Kirk and Kruge having a fist fight as the planet erupts around them. The fight is so badly staged that Sarah is giggling hysterically throughout. I compare it to the fight with the Gorn in the TV series. She says it’s worse: it’s like 1960s Batman.
There is a lengthy epilogue on Vulcan where Spock gets his soul/memories back. Sarah thinks he must be very confused by how different Saavik looks. It’s telling that the film has lost her so much that McCoy’s “Helluva time to ask” doesn’t raise a smile.
Sarah’s takeaway is that the film should not exist. If they really wanted Spock to not die in ST2, they should have had him not die - not do it anyway then spend a film retconning the death, and deleting everything that film did to the status quo. Also, “finger wanking”.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
This will be uncharacteristically short, because Sarah really likes this film and had almost no major complaints or snark outbreaks. She says it’s the Fast Five of the franchise: it knows it’s a bit silly, and it *commits*.
Sarah does ask how it is that the probe is wrecking Earth. I say it’s because the signal is sending out is so powerful, that it’s effectively shouting. She nods but is then disappointed when Uhura, language genius, “caaan’t speeeeeaaaaak whaaaaaaaaale”.
She also wishes to know precisely why flying very fast around the Sun should lead to time travel. I don’t have a good answer for this, because there isn’t one, but I point out it’s what they did in “Tomorrow is Yesterday”. Apparently this is not a satisfactory response.
However the culture shock humour appeals to her. She particularly enjoys Chekov, in his thick Russian accent, politely and repeatedly asking a 1980s American policeman where he can find the “nuclear wessels”.
Later in the film she is delighted when McCoy bluffs his way into an operating room, past two guards, by claiming to have a patient with “severe post-prandial upper abdominal stitching”. (That’s cramps to you and me)
There is even a slapstick chase down a hospital corridor. I say this was probably a dry run for Three Men and a Baby and she is surprised to realise that Leonard Nimoy directed that. She has happy memories of that film - I worry it might be best left to nostalgia.
She does have concerns about the ending. First, she says it’s a problem that there are only two humpback whales in the world; they’ll get inbred. I say futuristic genetic engineering could probably handle it (given we’re already toying with this for northern white rhinos).
Then she objects that they couldn’t possibly have built a whole new Enterprise so quickly. I suggest their first sight of it might just be the superstructure, with the actual launch months later, but she’s having none of it. I feel I need to retreat.
Nitpicking aside, though, this film was a resounding success. “You won’t have a very long thread,” Sarah says. It’s fine, I say to myself. Star Trek V is coming up like a no-deal Brexit. The problem is going to be remembering everything she says.
This will be uncharacteristically short, because Sarah really likes this film and had almost no major complaints or snark outbreaks. She says it’s the Fast Five of the franchise: it knows it’s a bit silly, and it *commits*.
Sarah does ask how it is that the probe is wrecking Earth. I say it’s because the signal is sending out is so powerful, that it’s effectively shouting. She nods but is then disappointed when Uhura, language genius, “caaan’t speeeeeaaaaak whaaaaaaaaale”.
She also wishes to know precisely why flying very fast around the Sun should lead to time travel. I don’t have a good answer for this, because there isn’t one, but I point out it’s what they did in “Tomorrow is Yesterday”. Apparently this is not a satisfactory response.
However the culture shock humour appeals to her. She particularly enjoys Chekov, in his thick Russian accent, politely and repeatedly asking a 1980s American policeman where he can find the “nuclear wessels”.
Later in the film she is delighted when McCoy bluffs his way into an operating room, past two guards, by claiming to have a patient with “severe post-prandial upper abdominal stitching”. (That’s cramps to you and me)
There is even a slapstick chase down a hospital corridor. I say this was probably a dry run for Three Men and a Baby and she is surprised to realise that Leonard Nimoy directed that. She has happy memories of that film - I worry it might be best left to nostalgia.
She does have concerns about the ending. First, she says it’s a problem that there are only two humpback whales in the world; they’ll get inbred. I say futuristic genetic engineering could probably handle it (given we’re already toying with this for northern white rhinos).
Then she objects that they couldn’t possibly have built a whole new Enterprise so quickly. I suggest their first sight of it might just be the superstructure, with the actual launch months later, but she’s having none of it. I feel I need to retreat.
Nitpicking aside, though, this film was a resounding success. “You won’t have a very long thread,” Sarah says. It’s fine, I say to myself. Star Trek V is coming up like a no-deal Brexit. The problem is going to be remembering everything she says.
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
Well that was an absolute, total, unmitigated, comprehensive clusterfuck of a disaster. “It was awful,” says Sarah at the end. She is actually lost for words.
I prompt her to consider whether it’s worse than the first one. “Ooh that’s tough,” she says thoughtfully. “They’re about level.” I suggest that they’re shit in different ways. The first one is slow and boring. STV isn’t that - “No, it’s just bollocks.”
The film opens atmospherically on a desert landscape where a wretched man digging holes is surprised by a horseman arriving through the swirling dust. Sarah thinks it looks like the Nazgul are guest-starring in Mad Max. That’s a better idea than this film.
We meet Kirk, Spock and McCoy on holiday. Kirk is climbing El Capitan in Yosemite. Sarah complains that he isn’t using any futuristic climbing equipment. I say he’s doing it old-school for kicks. She accepts this. It’s the last successful justification I will offer.
Then Kirk falls off, forcing Spock (who is handily wearing rocket boots) to save him. The special effects are not great (this will be a recurring problem) and Sarah giggles throughout. The subsequent campfire bickering does get a laugh though.
We learn that the new Enterprise was built too fast and consequently nothing works. There is suddenly an attempt at sexual chemistry between Scotty and Uhura, which Sarah roundly ignores. She complains of excessive exposition.
All the shots of shuttles in flight raise snorts of laughter, and the Enterprise in front of the Moon actually elicits a groan. “It’s like they’ve taken a step back.” I had thought ILM were on strike and couldn’t do the film, but I was mistaken: they were just too busy.
David Warner is in the film. “He’s bad,” says Sarah instantly , reasoning that the character both has greasy hair and is played by David Warner, two infallible indicators of villainy. I stun her rigid by telling her that Warner’s character isn’t bad at all.
The main villain is a Vulcan cult leader called Sybok, who wants everyone to join his quest. “Is it for the Holy Grail? Only this time they’ve got the budget for horses.” A starship is required. “Yeah because Nimbus III swallows are non-migratory.”
Kirk and co have to rescue Sybok’s hostages. To do this they need to steal some horses, which means distracting the horses’ owners, so Uhura does a burlesque fan dance on top of a sand dune. “You’re not dreaming this,” I say...
Sarah is apoplectic. She has so many issues with this scene that we have to pause the film for her to articulate them all. But in brief, it’s both plainly misogynistic and a sad comedown for a character who’s been badass in the last few films. “Uhura needs to ring HR.”
Sybok turns the tables despite Kirk’s tactical genius and soon takes over the Enterprise. He is Spock’s secret half-brother. This reveal gets no reaction whatsoever. (It occurs to me that Sybok is absent from the flashback scenes in Discovery - probably on purpose.)
Kirk, Spock and McCoy are locked in the brig, but Scotty blows a hole in the wall after using Morse code to say “stand back”, leading to a “stand back?!” moment that causes Sarah to groan that the film is lapsing into self-parody.
Shortly afterwards Scotty says “I know this ship like the back of my hand” and immediately knocks himself out on a low ceiling strut. Sarah is viciously silent. Then Kirk et al use the rocket boots to hurtle up an elevator shaft while yelling. “For god’s sake...”
It’s revealed that Sybok is actually on a quest to meet god, at the centre of the galaxy, so Sarah’s Holy Grail guess was pretty close. The reveal is met with more stony silence. There is an actually OK flashback scene about McCoy’s dad.
Then it’s off to the galactic centre, which is a wibbly-wobbly swirly thing (and not a supermassive black hole). The Enterprise gets through unscathed because of faith, or something, and finds a planet. Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Sybok go down in a shuttle.
I forgot to mention the Klingons! They’ve been stalking the Enterprise but honestly who gives a shit. These Klingons are even less developed than the last lot, except for the dazzling twist that the first officer is a woman. Chekov will later praise her muscles.
The god planet looks remarkably like the Mojave Desert. Some stone pillars shoot out of the ground and then there’s a pillar of blue light with a bearded man in it. “For fuck’s sake.” Of course this isn’t the real god, because he needs the Enterprise to escape.
Realising that he’s fucked up massively, Sybok starts wrestling the god being, and Kirk has the Enterprise fire a photon torpedo, which temporarily incapacitates it. Sarah basically has her head in her hands. There is then a chase, except with minimal special effects.
The crisis is resolved when the Klingon ship arrives, Spock manages to take it over, and uses it to blast the god being. Kirk thought he was going to die, but Spock says that’s impossible because he wasn’t alone, thus paying off a stupid line of dialogue from earlier.
It turns out that god isn’t out there in space, and isn’t even the friends we made along the way, but is “in the human heart”. Sarah demands reassurance that things are going to get better. I promise that ST6 is good.
Her favourite bit of the film is the detail that the gritty little desert town is ironically called Paradise City, thus giving her an excuse to sing Guns n’ Roses throughout an early scene. No other redeeming features present themselves.
Well that was an absolute, total, unmitigated, comprehensive clusterfuck of a disaster. “It was awful,” says Sarah at the end. She is actually lost for words.
I prompt her to consider whether it’s worse than the first one. “Ooh that’s tough,” she says thoughtfully. “They’re about level.” I suggest that they’re shit in different ways. The first one is slow and boring. STV isn’t that - “No, it’s just bollocks.”
The film opens atmospherically on a desert landscape where a wretched man digging holes is surprised by a horseman arriving through the swirling dust. Sarah thinks it looks like the Nazgul are guest-starring in Mad Max. That’s a better idea than this film.
We meet Kirk, Spock and McCoy on holiday. Kirk is climbing El Capitan in Yosemite. Sarah complains that he isn’t using any futuristic climbing equipment. I say he’s doing it old-school for kicks. She accepts this. It’s the last successful justification I will offer.
Then Kirk falls off, forcing Spock (who is handily wearing rocket boots) to save him. The special effects are not great (this will be a recurring problem) and Sarah giggles throughout. The subsequent campfire bickering does get a laugh though.
We learn that the new Enterprise was built too fast and consequently nothing works. There is suddenly an attempt at sexual chemistry between Scotty and Uhura, which Sarah roundly ignores. She complains of excessive exposition.
All the shots of shuttles in flight raise snorts of laughter, and the Enterprise in front of the Moon actually elicits a groan. “It’s like they’ve taken a step back.” I had thought ILM were on strike and couldn’t do the film, but I was mistaken: they were just too busy.
David Warner is in the film. “He’s bad,” says Sarah instantly , reasoning that the character both has greasy hair and is played by David Warner, two infallible indicators of villainy. I stun her rigid by telling her that Warner’s character isn’t bad at all.
The main villain is a Vulcan cult leader called Sybok, who wants everyone to join his quest. “Is it for the Holy Grail? Only this time they’ve got the budget for horses.” A starship is required. “Yeah because Nimbus III swallows are non-migratory.”
Kirk and co have to rescue Sybok’s hostages. To do this they need to steal some horses, which means distracting the horses’ owners, so Uhura does a burlesque fan dance on top of a sand dune. “You’re not dreaming this,” I say...
Sarah is apoplectic. She has so many issues with this scene that we have to pause the film for her to articulate them all. But in brief, it’s both plainly misogynistic and a sad comedown for a character who’s been badass in the last few films. “Uhura needs to ring HR.”
Sybok turns the tables despite Kirk’s tactical genius and soon takes over the Enterprise. He is Spock’s secret half-brother. This reveal gets no reaction whatsoever. (It occurs to me that Sybok is absent from the flashback scenes in Discovery - probably on purpose.)
Kirk, Spock and McCoy are locked in the brig, but Scotty blows a hole in the wall after using Morse code to say “stand back”, leading to a “stand back?!” moment that causes Sarah to groan that the film is lapsing into self-parody.
Shortly afterwards Scotty says “I know this ship like the back of my hand” and immediately knocks himself out on a low ceiling strut. Sarah is viciously silent. Then Kirk et al use the rocket boots to hurtle up an elevator shaft while yelling. “For god’s sake...”
It’s revealed that Sybok is actually on a quest to meet god, at the centre of the galaxy, so Sarah’s Holy Grail guess was pretty close. The reveal is met with more stony silence. There is an actually OK flashback scene about McCoy’s dad.
Then it’s off to the galactic centre, which is a wibbly-wobbly swirly thing (and not a supermassive black hole). The Enterprise gets through unscathed because of faith, or something, and finds a planet. Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Sybok go down in a shuttle.
I forgot to mention the Klingons! They’ve been stalking the Enterprise but honestly who gives a shit. These Klingons are even less developed than the last lot, except for the dazzling twist that the first officer is a woman. Chekov will later praise her muscles.
The god planet looks remarkably like the Mojave Desert. Some stone pillars shoot out of the ground and then there’s a pillar of blue light with a bearded man in it. “For fuck’s sake.” Of course this isn’t the real god, because he needs the Enterprise to escape.
Realising that he’s fucked up massively, Sybok starts wrestling the god being, and Kirk has the Enterprise fire a photon torpedo, which temporarily incapacitates it. Sarah basically has her head in her hands. There is then a chase, except with minimal special effects.
The crisis is resolved when the Klingon ship arrives, Spock manages to take it over, and uses it to blast the god being. Kirk thought he was going to die, but Spock says that’s impossible because he wasn’t alone, thus paying off a stupid line of dialogue from earlier.
It turns out that god isn’t out there in space, and isn’t even the friends we made along the way, but is “in the human heart”. Sarah demands reassurance that things are going to get better. I promise that ST6 is good.
Her favourite bit of the film is the detail that the gritty little desert town is ironically called Paradise City, thus giving her an excuse to sing Guns n’ Roses throughout an early scene. No other redeeming features present themselves.
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
We were going to watch the new Emma. with Anya Taylor-Joy, but our stupid Sky box was taking forever to download it, so Sarah said “fuck it let’s do the next Star Trek”. She broadly approved of it, but with reservations.
The opening special effects bonanza evidently hasn’t aged well; Sarah notes my input that the film invented the “Praxis wave” effect, but says later versions were better. Then she mocks the scenes of the Excelsior bridge wobbling.
When Kirk et al show up, she is immediately annoyed by expository dialogue. The “let them die” exchange does seem to land though. Then Kim Cattrall shows up as new helmsman Valeris. “I keep expecting her to say something smutty.” I explain that this will not happen.
She is getting a bit restive, but then the Klingons arrive and she immediately begins second-guessing who’s going to be bad. She isn’t sure about their leader, Gorkon: he’s played by David Warner, which (again) implies baddy, but they have fooled us with that before...
However she’s very sure about Christopher Plummer’s General Chang, who she thinks looks like Ming the Merciless and is plainly a wrong ‘un. There is then a little scene with Valeris and two random crew who are racist against Klingons. Sarah feels there is something off.
Kirk’s “we must do this again sometime” gets a proper laugh and things seem to be on an upswing. She is properly intrigued when the Enterprise seemingly fires on the Klingon ship. Unfortunately the “bad” zero-gravity effects and CGI blood ruin the assassination scene.
Sarah ridicules McCoy’s attempt to save Gorkon (“You just said you don’t know his anatomy, why are you hitting him where you’re guessing his heart is?!”). But she is otherwise fairly absorbed - there’s a mystery and she likes those, and Kirk and McCoy are suitably fucked.
The Klingon court prompts a comparison with the Senate in the Star Wars prequels, and an accusation of plagiarism. I have to point out that those films were made several years later, so can’t have been the inspiration. “OK in that case Star Wars copied this.”
She is quite impressed when Kirk and McCoy are sentenced to spend the rest of their lives mining an asteroid. “That doesn’t sound nice.” The film then settles into Spock et al mystery-solving while Kirk and McCoy struggle to survive in prison, and this all seems fine.
Sarah does roll her eyes, hard, when William Shatner snogs Iman. I suggest it’s self-parody. She’s having none of that. Then Iman shapeshifts into a teenage girl (to get out of an ankle shackle), which prompts an “ew”.
The Enterprise comes to rescue them, which necessitates Uhura talking them past a border patrol by speaking Klingon very badly. Sarah is again enraged. “What happened to her speaking all the languages?!” I say that idea only came in with the reboot films and that OG Uhura was presented more as an expert in communications technology. But I nevertheless agree this scene is stupid. She can’t speak *any* Klingon? Allied soldiers in WWII often spoke a bit of German in case they needed it. You learn these things!
Apart from that, we largely roll along quite happily from here on. Sarah approves of the Valeris reveal, as she had been getting suspicious, and she’s delighted to have twigged that the Romulan ambassador would be in on the plan.
The effects in the final battle don’t prompt any laughs, which is a first. She does roar at Kirk’s over-dramatic “Fire!” though. And she is amused that “they basically MacGyvered a phoooootooooon toooorpeeeeeeeeedooooooo to be heat-seeking”. But overall it ends well.
Sarah concludes that it was one of the better ones: “a bit predictable”, as she figured out a lot of the conspirators and their purpose early on, but lots of fun.
I ask if she’d like to attempt a ranking of the first six films, and she obliges:
She does have a caveat though, which is that she saw 2 knowing Spock would return, which robbed the ending of its impact. But she says 2 is clearly a really solid piece of drama, so if she’d gone in blind it might have had more weight, prompting her to put it above 4.
We were going to watch the new Emma. with Anya Taylor-Joy, but our stupid Sky box was taking forever to download it, so Sarah said “fuck it let’s do the next Star Trek”. She broadly approved of it, but with reservations.
The opening special effects bonanza evidently hasn’t aged well; Sarah notes my input that the film invented the “Praxis wave” effect, but says later versions were better. Then she mocks the scenes of the Excelsior bridge wobbling.
When Kirk et al show up, she is immediately annoyed by expository dialogue. The “let them die” exchange does seem to land though. Then Kim Cattrall shows up as new helmsman Valeris. “I keep expecting her to say something smutty.” I explain that this will not happen.
She is getting a bit restive, but then the Klingons arrive and she immediately begins second-guessing who’s going to be bad. She isn’t sure about their leader, Gorkon: he’s played by David Warner, which (again) implies baddy, but they have fooled us with that before...
However she’s very sure about Christopher Plummer’s General Chang, who she thinks looks like Ming the Merciless and is plainly a wrong ‘un. There is then a little scene with Valeris and two random crew who are racist against Klingons. Sarah feels there is something off.
Kirk’s “we must do this again sometime” gets a proper laugh and things seem to be on an upswing. She is properly intrigued when the Enterprise seemingly fires on the Klingon ship. Unfortunately the “bad” zero-gravity effects and CGI blood ruin the assassination scene.
Sarah ridicules McCoy’s attempt to save Gorkon (“You just said you don’t know his anatomy, why are you hitting him where you’re guessing his heart is?!”). But she is otherwise fairly absorbed - there’s a mystery and she likes those, and Kirk and McCoy are suitably fucked.
The Klingon court prompts a comparison with the Senate in the Star Wars prequels, and an accusation of plagiarism. I have to point out that those films were made several years later, so can’t have been the inspiration. “OK in that case Star Wars copied this.”
She is quite impressed when Kirk and McCoy are sentenced to spend the rest of their lives mining an asteroid. “That doesn’t sound nice.” The film then settles into Spock et al mystery-solving while Kirk and McCoy struggle to survive in prison, and this all seems fine.
Sarah does roll her eyes, hard, when William Shatner snogs Iman. I suggest it’s self-parody. She’s having none of that. Then Iman shapeshifts into a teenage girl (to get out of an ankle shackle), which prompts an “ew”.
The Enterprise comes to rescue them, which necessitates Uhura talking them past a border patrol by speaking Klingon very badly. Sarah is again enraged. “What happened to her speaking all the languages?!” I say that idea only came in with the reboot films and that OG Uhura was presented more as an expert in communications technology. But I nevertheless agree this scene is stupid. She can’t speak *any* Klingon? Allied soldiers in WWII often spoke a bit of German in case they needed it. You learn these things!
Apart from that, we largely roll along quite happily from here on. Sarah approves of the Valeris reveal, as she had been getting suspicious, and she’s delighted to have twigged that the Romulan ambassador would be in on the plan.
The effects in the final battle don’t prompt any laughs, which is a first. She does roar at Kirk’s over-dramatic “Fire!” though. And she is amused that “they basically MacGyvered a phoooootooooon toooorpeeeeeeeeedooooooo to be heat-seeking”. But overall it ends well.
Sarah concludes that it was one of the better ones: “a bit predictable”, as she figured out a lot of the conspirators and their purpose early on, but lots of fun.
I ask if she’d like to attempt a ranking of the first six films, and she obliges:
- 4
- 2
- 6 (close to 2)
- 3 (significantly further down)
- 1/5 (way down, and she still can’t decide which is worse)
She does have a caveat though, which is that she saw 2 knowing Spock would return, which robbed the ending of its impact. But she says 2 is clearly a really solid piece of drama, so if she’d gone in blind it might have had more weight, prompting her to put it above 4.
Star Trek: Generations
As the credits roll on this film, the cat does a large and stinky shit in her litter tray that I have to go and clean up. That about sums it up for Sarah. It makes her so irate she makes a mistake in her knitting and has to unravel.
The opening shots of the champagne bottle drifting through space and then smashing on the hull of the Enterprise-B prompt immediate complaints. Sarah points out that the bottle would have to be huge to be visible, and that it’s very Eurocentric for 300 years in the future.
The Enterprise-B bridge crew is a cast of ringers. It’s the mum from Titanic who reads to her kids about Tír na nÓg! It’s Tuvok! It’s that guy from 24! And it’s Alan Ruck as the Captain. “Is he going to take the day off and piss off with his mate?”
The helmswoman is Sulu’s daughter. Sarah calls bullshit on this as we have never seen any indication of Sulu having any kind of family life. Then she wonders if this is going to be another David situation and she’s going to be killed off for effect.
There is a distress call, and it rapidly transpires that the Enterprise-B is on its maiden voyage without a tractor beam, medical staff or phooootoooooon toooorpeeeedooooooeeeeees. This absolutely infuriates Sarah, who has relatives in the navy and related fields...
“You don’t do that! You float it when it’s just the hull, sure, but then you actually build the damn thing and do sea trials before you do a proper maiden voyage! This is so stupid!”
Then she sees an alarming parallel with current events. “Oh my God, is Starfleet run by BoJo and Matt fucking Hancock and Gavin What’s-his-tits? And they’re applying their pandemic response approach to starship construction? No wonder it’s an omnishambles. Jesus Christ.”
<at this point I retweeted Boris Johnson's tweet from 2 January 2020 that "This is going to be a fantastic year for Britain.">
This is all prompted by a Wibbly-Wobbly Swirly Thing, which destroys two ships - although Scotty manages to beam some of the crew aboard. These include Malcolm McDowell, who Sarah immediately IDs as the villain because, well, obviously. And Guinan, which prompts a cheer.
The Enterprise gets sucked in too, but they escape after Kirk jury-rigs a blue ray of light, and then part of the ship gets ripped open and Kirk is apparently killed. Sarah is nonplussed and concludes that there’s going to be “timey-wimey”.
We cut to the Next Generation crew, who are on the holodeck pretending to be 19th-century (??) sailors. There is a lot of alleged humour. “This is really silly.” Thankfully a distress call intervenes and the plot restarts.
On a trashed space station we’re reintroduced to Malcolm McDowell’s Dr Soran. It seems the Romulans attacked it for reasons unknown.
Meanwhile the crew are dealing with some personal issues in a frankly self-involved way. Picard is sad and withdrawn. And Data, having failed to perform a practical joke, decides that *now*, the aftermath of a Romulan attack, is the right time to have Geordi perform brain surgery on him to implant an emotion chip. (We are also meant to remember from the TV series that the chip exists.)
For about a minute, Data-with-emotions amuses Sarah. The “I hate this” bit gets a proper laugh. But then it rapidly becomes grating. “Is Data going to be a dick all the way through?” I have to confirm that yes he is.
There is a moving scene where Picard explains to Troi that his brother and nephew have died in a house fire, breaks down in tears, and reflects that his long family line is now possibly at an end. Patrick Stewart sells the hell out of it...
Sarah complains afterwards, though, that the scene is *relying* on PS. We don’t know the deceased relatives, unless we remember the one episode they were in, and we don’t see their deaths, so it’s a little forced.
Then the star explodes, and a Klingon Bird of Prey decloaks off the starboard bow. ”Theeeeeere’s Klingons off the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow... Sorry.” Soran captures Geordi and they’re beamed aboard the Klingon ship, which escapes.
We now get another decent scene, when Picard talks to Guinan about her old pal Soran and she explains that the Wibbly-Wobbly Swirly Thing is a doorway to the Nexus, wherein you feel perfect and eternal joy. Soran is obsessed with going back there.
Picard and Data figure out that Soran is destroying stars to change the course of the Nexus Ribbon. This annoys me, because the mass of the star would still be there so the gravitational fields wouldn’t be changed...
Soran wants the Ribbon to fly through a planet so he can be safely taken inside, because flying a ship into it would be too dangerous (even though it worked before and he wouldn’t care about the ship being destroyed). Argh this is contrived.
His aim is to blow up the Veridian star, pushing the Ribbon through the third planet - where Soran will be standing. The Enterprise heads off to stop him. They get into a standoff with the Klingons, who are headed by Lursa and B’Etor. Who?
Yes the film is dragging in two villains from the TV series and entirely under-using them. Sarah complains that their outfits show a ridiculous amount of boob, like so many films with women in armour, and I have no counter-argument because she’s right.
The Klingons bug Geordi’s VISOR so they can see how the Enterprise’s shields work, and proceed to start blasting the hell out of it. Sarah laughs hysterically at the extras flinging themselves around the bridge, especially the slow-motion bit.
The Enterprise pwns the Klingon ship, but the damage is done. The engines are going to explode so they have to separate the saucer section. “Ooh they don’t often do that. Exciting!” In the evacuation a child movingly drops a teddy bear. Sarah is disdainful.
The engine explosion is so big it sends the saucer plummeting towards the planet. Data says “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh shit”. This is the first thing he’s done that she’s liked in about an hour.
The ship crashes. Sarah decides that nobody in their right mind would accept a posting on a starship called Enterprise because they all get blown up or crashed. “Like, nobody ever called another boat ‘Titanic’.”
Meanwhile Picard is confronting Soran at his missile launch site in the Californian desert. We get a little speech from Soran about how the Borg killed his family, then he destroys the star and he and Picard are sucked into the Nexus just as the planet is torn apart.
Sarah is restive. She complains that Soran is under-developed and says we needed to see his family die to properly get him. She also thinks Picard isn’t in the film enough, and she wants to know if the Data/emotions thread is going to pay off. I say it won’t. She growls.
In the Nexus Picard is married with kids and it’s Christmas. The chintz level is off the charts. Sarah objects to the wife being a random when it so plainly ought to be Dr Crusher. There’s no arguing with that. Mind you the film forgot to remind us that Picard loves Crusher.
Guinan is also in the Nexus from before, because time has no meaning there (a concept we’re starting to appreciate). She sends Picard to go recruit Kirk to help him, and *finally* the two captains meet. We both agree the scene is bullshit...
Kirk is reliving an episode from 9 years earlier (in his timeline), when he dumped his girlfriend Antonia and went back to Starfleet. “Who the hell is Antonia?” I reassure Sarah that she’s not confused and Antonia has never been mentioned before. “Just... what?”
I suggest that this really ought to be Carol Marcus, because if the Nexus gives you the path not taken, then for Kirk that is marrying Carol. “YES. Why didn’t they do that?” I have no answer. This scene has annoyed me for over 20 years, and now it annoys Sarah too.
Picard talks Kirk into leaving his ersatz lovenest and they go back to the California desert to fight Soran. Fisticuffs and stunt work ensue, and Sarah is underwhelmed. “I thought it’d be awesome having Kirk and Picard together. It’s not.”
Soran gets blown up and the day is saved, but a metal bridge falls on Kirk and after a brief bit of acting he dies. Sarah is again underwhelmed. I suggest the sailing-off-into-the sunset bit from Star Trek VI is a better ending for him and she agrees immediately.
Data recovers his cat and cries with happiness. Sarah is now so fed up that even this does nothing for her, and when Troi says “another family reunited” she harrumphs. Picard and Riker have a talk about mortality and then the film ends. “Well that was definitely a film.”
I suggest to Sarah that this film is bad in a new way, because while previous stinkers like 5 had fundamentally bad core ideas, this actually has quite a good one - but the execution is awful. Specifically, I think the Nexus is quite a good concept. It forces Picard to really face mortality by tempting him with a kind of heaven, just when he’s most vulnerable - and it highlights how Picard and Kirk are both rather lonely because they’re so career-focused. This is good stuff!
But then that death-anxiety theme gets lost in a hopelessly complicated plot, the villain is underwritten so we don’t feel the weight of his grief and longing, and the Data stuff is just shoehorned. I wonder if Sarah will think this is special pleading, but she agrees.
She is staggered that it was co-written by Ronald D. Moore. “What, Battlestar Galactica?!” I say even he’s written the odd stinker. “Like what?” “Outlander.” “What’s he got to do with Shitlander?” “He’s showrunner.” “Jesus Christ. Mind you, the source material’s crap...”
In conclusion, Star Trek: Generations shows us what it would have been like if, after all the buildup, The Avengers had been a bit crap.
As the credits roll on this film, the cat does a large and stinky shit in her litter tray that I have to go and clean up. That about sums it up for Sarah. It makes her so irate she makes a mistake in her knitting and has to unravel.
The opening shots of the champagne bottle drifting through space and then smashing on the hull of the Enterprise-B prompt immediate complaints. Sarah points out that the bottle would have to be huge to be visible, and that it’s very Eurocentric for 300 years in the future.
The Enterprise-B bridge crew is a cast of ringers. It’s the mum from Titanic who reads to her kids about Tír na nÓg! It’s Tuvok! It’s that guy from 24! And it’s Alan Ruck as the Captain. “Is he going to take the day off and piss off with his mate?”
The helmswoman is Sulu’s daughter. Sarah calls bullshit on this as we have never seen any indication of Sulu having any kind of family life. Then she wonders if this is going to be another David situation and she’s going to be killed off for effect.
There is a distress call, and it rapidly transpires that the Enterprise-B is on its maiden voyage without a tractor beam, medical staff or phooootoooooon toooorpeeeedooooooeeeeees. This absolutely infuriates Sarah, who has relatives in the navy and related fields...
“You don’t do that! You float it when it’s just the hull, sure, but then you actually build the damn thing and do sea trials before you do a proper maiden voyage! This is so stupid!”
Then she sees an alarming parallel with current events. “Oh my God, is Starfleet run by BoJo and Matt fucking Hancock and Gavin What’s-his-tits? And they’re applying their pandemic response approach to starship construction? No wonder it’s an omnishambles. Jesus Christ.”
<at this point I retweeted Boris Johnson's tweet from 2 January 2020 that "This is going to be a fantastic year for Britain.">
This is all prompted by a Wibbly-Wobbly Swirly Thing, which destroys two ships - although Scotty manages to beam some of the crew aboard. These include Malcolm McDowell, who Sarah immediately IDs as the villain because, well, obviously. And Guinan, which prompts a cheer.
The Enterprise gets sucked in too, but they escape after Kirk jury-rigs a blue ray of light, and then part of the ship gets ripped open and Kirk is apparently killed. Sarah is nonplussed and concludes that there’s going to be “timey-wimey”.
We cut to the Next Generation crew, who are on the holodeck pretending to be 19th-century (??) sailors. There is a lot of alleged humour. “This is really silly.” Thankfully a distress call intervenes and the plot restarts.
On a trashed space station we’re reintroduced to Malcolm McDowell’s Dr Soran. It seems the Romulans attacked it for reasons unknown.
Meanwhile the crew are dealing with some personal issues in a frankly self-involved way. Picard is sad and withdrawn. And Data, having failed to perform a practical joke, decides that *now*, the aftermath of a Romulan attack, is the right time to have Geordi perform brain surgery on him to implant an emotion chip. (We are also meant to remember from the TV series that the chip exists.)
For about a minute, Data-with-emotions amuses Sarah. The “I hate this” bit gets a proper laugh. But then it rapidly becomes grating. “Is Data going to be a dick all the way through?” I have to confirm that yes he is.
There is a moving scene where Picard explains to Troi that his brother and nephew have died in a house fire, breaks down in tears, and reflects that his long family line is now possibly at an end. Patrick Stewart sells the hell out of it...
Sarah complains afterwards, though, that the scene is *relying* on PS. We don’t know the deceased relatives, unless we remember the one episode they were in, and we don’t see their deaths, so it’s a little forced.
Then the star explodes, and a Klingon Bird of Prey decloaks off the starboard bow. ”Theeeeeere’s Klingons off the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow... Sorry.” Soran captures Geordi and they’re beamed aboard the Klingon ship, which escapes.
We now get another decent scene, when Picard talks to Guinan about her old pal Soran and she explains that the Wibbly-Wobbly Swirly Thing is a doorway to the Nexus, wherein you feel perfect and eternal joy. Soran is obsessed with going back there.
Picard and Data figure out that Soran is destroying stars to change the course of the Nexus Ribbon. This annoys me, because the mass of the star would still be there so the gravitational fields wouldn’t be changed...
Soran wants the Ribbon to fly through a planet so he can be safely taken inside, because flying a ship into it would be too dangerous (even though it worked before and he wouldn’t care about the ship being destroyed). Argh this is contrived.
His aim is to blow up the Veridian star, pushing the Ribbon through the third planet - where Soran will be standing. The Enterprise heads off to stop him. They get into a standoff with the Klingons, who are headed by Lursa and B’Etor. Who?
Yes the film is dragging in two villains from the TV series and entirely under-using them. Sarah complains that their outfits show a ridiculous amount of boob, like so many films with women in armour, and I have no counter-argument because she’s right.
The Klingons bug Geordi’s VISOR so they can see how the Enterprise’s shields work, and proceed to start blasting the hell out of it. Sarah laughs hysterically at the extras flinging themselves around the bridge, especially the slow-motion bit.
The Enterprise pwns the Klingon ship, but the damage is done. The engines are going to explode so they have to separate the saucer section. “Ooh they don’t often do that. Exciting!” In the evacuation a child movingly drops a teddy bear. Sarah is disdainful.
The engine explosion is so big it sends the saucer plummeting towards the planet. Data says “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh shit”. This is the first thing he’s done that she’s liked in about an hour.
The ship crashes. Sarah decides that nobody in their right mind would accept a posting on a starship called Enterprise because they all get blown up or crashed. “Like, nobody ever called another boat ‘Titanic’.”
Meanwhile Picard is confronting Soran at his missile launch site in the Californian desert. We get a little speech from Soran about how the Borg killed his family, then he destroys the star and he and Picard are sucked into the Nexus just as the planet is torn apart.
Sarah is restive. She complains that Soran is under-developed and says we needed to see his family die to properly get him. She also thinks Picard isn’t in the film enough, and she wants to know if the Data/emotions thread is going to pay off. I say it won’t. She growls.
In the Nexus Picard is married with kids and it’s Christmas. The chintz level is off the charts. Sarah objects to the wife being a random when it so plainly ought to be Dr Crusher. There’s no arguing with that. Mind you the film forgot to remind us that Picard loves Crusher.
Guinan is also in the Nexus from before, because time has no meaning there (a concept we’re starting to appreciate). She sends Picard to go recruit Kirk to help him, and *finally* the two captains meet. We both agree the scene is bullshit...
Kirk is reliving an episode from 9 years earlier (in his timeline), when he dumped his girlfriend Antonia and went back to Starfleet. “Who the hell is Antonia?” I reassure Sarah that she’s not confused and Antonia has never been mentioned before. “Just... what?”
I suggest that this really ought to be Carol Marcus, because if the Nexus gives you the path not taken, then for Kirk that is marrying Carol. “YES. Why didn’t they do that?” I have no answer. This scene has annoyed me for over 20 years, and now it annoys Sarah too.
Picard talks Kirk into leaving his ersatz lovenest and they go back to the California desert to fight Soran. Fisticuffs and stunt work ensue, and Sarah is underwhelmed. “I thought it’d be awesome having Kirk and Picard together. It’s not.”
Soran gets blown up and the day is saved, but a metal bridge falls on Kirk and after a brief bit of acting he dies. Sarah is again underwhelmed. I suggest the sailing-off-into-the sunset bit from Star Trek VI is a better ending for him and she agrees immediately.
Data recovers his cat and cries with happiness. Sarah is now so fed up that even this does nothing for her, and when Troi says “another family reunited” she harrumphs. Picard and Riker have a talk about mortality and then the film ends. “Well that was definitely a film.”
I suggest to Sarah that this film is bad in a new way, because while previous stinkers like 5 had fundamentally bad core ideas, this actually has quite a good one - but the execution is awful. Specifically, I think the Nexus is quite a good concept. It forces Picard to really face mortality by tempting him with a kind of heaven, just when he’s most vulnerable - and it highlights how Picard and Kirk are both rather lonely because they’re so career-focused. This is good stuff!
But then that death-anxiety theme gets lost in a hopelessly complicated plot, the villain is underwritten so we don’t feel the weight of his grief and longing, and the Data stuff is just shoehorned. I wonder if Sarah will think this is special pleading, but she agrees.
She is staggered that it was co-written by Ronald D. Moore. “What, Battlestar Galactica?!” I say even he’s written the odd stinker. “Like what?” “Outlander.” “What’s he got to do with Shitlander?” “He’s showrunner.” “Jesus Christ. Mind you, the source material’s crap...”
In conclusion, Star Trek: Generations shows us what it would have been like if, after all the buildup, The Avengers had been a bit crap.
Star Trek: First Contact
This is by some distance the best-reviewed of the Next Generation films, so it doesn’t bode well that Sarah isn’t terribly impressed by it and has an extensive list of complaints. She doesn’t hate it, but she’s underwhelmed.
It’s better than Generations, she concedes, and there are some effective sequences as the Borg gradually take over the Enterprise. But the planet-side B-plot leaves her cold. Worse, she thinks the entire time-travel premise is fundamentally broken and stupid.
It opens well enough. The dream where the Borg tech springs out of Picard’s cheek makes her jump, and she quite likes the new Enterprise. But she objects vociferously to Crusher going blonde (or “Black Widow” as she calls it). Geordi’s artificial eyes are also not a hit.
There is a full-tilt space battle against a Borg ship, which ends disconcertingly fast when Picard suddenly knows how to blow it up. But a smaller ship escapes and time-travels into the past, with the Enterprise in tow. This all seems OK?
We’re now in the 21st century, not long “after the Third World War”. Sarah enquires if that means 2021. I wince. Now things get complicated. The Borg are here to stop a man called Zefram Cochrane from launching the first faster-than-light spaceship, because when he does so he’ll draw the attention of aliens (actually the Vulcans but nobody says that), who will make first contact with Earth. This is a pivotal moment in human history, and in the history of the galaxy.
Sarah accepts this in grudging silence. Later she will flay the whole concept. We’ll get to that. Anyway some of the crew are on the surface helping Cochrane fix his ship, which the Borg have damaged. But things are not well on the Enterprise.
Geordi mentions that “it’s getting a little warm”, which Sarah identifies as the least subtle bit of foreshadowing ever. In short order we learn that the Borg are aboard. Now we have two plots: Picard, Data, Worf and Crusher on the ship - Riker, Geordi and Troi on Earth.
Troi has found Cochrane but this has necessitated getting drunk with him. Marina Sirtis has a lot of fun as Drunk Troi and Sarah chuckles. But then she says it’s jarring. The Borg plot is meant to be creepy and intense, and this goofiness doesn’t fit.
The film keeps weakening the tension by cutting to “comedy” scenes in the planet. This is doubly annoying because there’s plenty of story-appropriate humour, like the bit where Data starts experiencing anxiety as he walks into the Borg nest.
Sarah is quite impressed with the Borg stuff. There’s a moment where Data snaps a drone’s neck that elicits a “Data’s a badass”, and a scene where half a dozen drones emerge from a dark room so at first you only see their red eye beams is “properly creepy”.
But the tension never properly builds. A sequence where Picard lures some Borg onto the holodeck elicits major grumbles. Sarah also finds Alfre Woodard’s Lily quite annoying at this point, as she’s doing a lot of shrieking and shouting (this at least will improve).
And then there’s the Borg Queen. I’ve always hated the whole idea because it gives the Borg a personality, when the thing that’s scary about the Borg is they’re utterly dehumanised.
Sarah is mostly just taken aback by the sexual undertones: The Queen has human skin grafted onto Data’s arm, then blows on it to give him goosebumps and asks if that was good for him. “Well this is 18-rated!” Then she seduces him. When Data says he hasn’t shagged for 8 years Sarah wants to know who. “Tasha,” I say. “Oh yeah!”
Sarah says she can see the appeal. Given how much sex toys have improved just in the last few decades, it seems likely that Data would have all the mod cons, as it were, and would “know all the tricks”. She decides he will now be known as “Data Unstoppable Sex Machine”.
We get another action sequence in which Picard, Worf and a redshirt have to walk in spacesuits over the ship’s outer hull. This is pretty suspenseful and holds Sarah’s attention, and Worf’s weary “What are you suggesting” gets a proper laugh.
Now the film gets properly good. The Borg take over almost all the ship, and a row breaks out when Worf proposes using the self-destruct while Picard wants to stay and fight. We see that Picard isn’t thinking straight because he’s traumatised by his experience with them.
This leads to the film’s best scene, where Lily chews Picard out for his obsession and compares him to Captain Ahab, so he loses his shit... and realises she’s right. It’s terrific, and Sarah announces that she now likes Lily.
We then pause the film to discuss the excessive referencing of classic literature in Star Trek. Sarah says the Moby Dick use here “absolutely works”, but it’s a crutch the films lean on to seem sophisticated, and the choices are often blandly Eurocentric.
Sarah enjoys the action finale in the simplest way possible: Patrick Stewart is stripped to his vest, becoming “the thinking woman’s John McClane”. Data’s altered face reminds her of Buffalo Bill. And the shots of the Borg Queen’s flesh liquefying get an “urgh”.
But as the film ends she says the story is bad. You get the goofy Cochrane stuff alongside the hard-as-nails Borg plot and they undermine each other. The Borg are the wrong baddies for this story, I suggest; it needs someone anti-progress. Belligerent Klingons?
Sarah also thinks interfering with history isn’t a Borg thing to do: it’s too creative and they’re supposed to be zombie-like. And if they can time-travel, why not just go back and assimilate Earth in 1472 or something? “It’s all very contrived.”
Sarah’s final critique is that the film underuses its cast - especially Troi and Crusher. “Troi basically gets pissed and that’s it,” she says, and neither of us can think of anything Crusher does. Sarah says this is a fail, and I can’t disagree. TL:DR; this went poorly.
This is by some distance the best-reviewed of the Next Generation films, so it doesn’t bode well that Sarah isn’t terribly impressed by it and has an extensive list of complaints. She doesn’t hate it, but she’s underwhelmed.
It’s better than Generations, she concedes, and there are some effective sequences as the Borg gradually take over the Enterprise. But the planet-side B-plot leaves her cold. Worse, she thinks the entire time-travel premise is fundamentally broken and stupid.
It opens well enough. The dream where the Borg tech springs out of Picard’s cheek makes her jump, and she quite likes the new Enterprise. But she objects vociferously to Crusher going blonde (or “Black Widow” as she calls it). Geordi’s artificial eyes are also not a hit.
There is a full-tilt space battle against a Borg ship, which ends disconcertingly fast when Picard suddenly knows how to blow it up. But a smaller ship escapes and time-travels into the past, with the Enterprise in tow. This all seems OK?
We’re now in the 21st century, not long “after the Third World War”. Sarah enquires if that means 2021. I wince. Now things get complicated. The Borg are here to stop a man called Zefram Cochrane from launching the first faster-than-light spaceship, because when he does so he’ll draw the attention of aliens (actually the Vulcans but nobody says that), who will make first contact with Earth. This is a pivotal moment in human history, and in the history of the galaxy.
Sarah accepts this in grudging silence. Later she will flay the whole concept. We’ll get to that. Anyway some of the crew are on the surface helping Cochrane fix his ship, which the Borg have damaged. But things are not well on the Enterprise.
Geordi mentions that “it’s getting a little warm”, which Sarah identifies as the least subtle bit of foreshadowing ever. In short order we learn that the Borg are aboard. Now we have two plots: Picard, Data, Worf and Crusher on the ship - Riker, Geordi and Troi on Earth.
Troi has found Cochrane but this has necessitated getting drunk with him. Marina Sirtis has a lot of fun as Drunk Troi and Sarah chuckles. But then she says it’s jarring. The Borg plot is meant to be creepy and intense, and this goofiness doesn’t fit.
The film keeps weakening the tension by cutting to “comedy” scenes in the planet. This is doubly annoying because there’s plenty of story-appropriate humour, like the bit where Data starts experiencing anxiety as he walks into the Borg nest.
Sarah is quite impressed with the Borg stuff. There’s a moment where Data snaps a drone’s neck that elicits a “Data’s a badass”, and a scene where half a dozen drones emerge from a dark room so at first you only see their red eye beams is “properly creepy”.
But the tension never properly builds. A sequence where Picard lures some Borg onto the holodeck elicits major grumbles. Sarah also finds Alfre Woodard’s Lily quite annoying at this point, as she’s doing a lot of shrieking and shouting (this at least will improve).
And then there’s the Borg Queen. I’ve always hated the whole idea because it gives the Borg a personality, when the thing that’s scary about the Borg is they’re utterly dehumanised.
Sarah is mostly just taken aback by the sexual undertones: The Queen has human skin grafted onto Data’s arm, then blows on it to give him goosebumps and asks if that was good for him. “Well this is 18-rated!” Then she seduces him. When Data says he hasn’t shagged for 8 years Sarah wants to know who. “Tasha,” I say. “Oh yeah!”
Sarah says she can see the appeal. Given how much sex toys have improved just in the last few decades, it seems likely that Data would have all the mod cons, as it were, and would “know all the tricks”. She decides he will now be known as “Data Unstoppable Sex Machine”.
We get another action sequence in which Picard, Worf and a redshirt have to walk in spacesuits over the ship’s outer hull. This is pretty suspenseful and holds Sarah’s attention, and Worf’s weary “What are you suggesting” gets a proper laugh.
Now the film gets properly good. The Borg take over almost all the ship, and a row breaks out when Worf proposes using the self-destruct while Picard wants to stay and fight. We see that Picard isn’t thinking straight because he’s traumatised by his experience with them.
This leads to the film’s best scene, where Lily chews Picard out for his obsession and compares him to Captain Ahab, so he loses his shit... and realises she’s right. It’s terrific, and Sarah announces that she now likes Lily.
We then pause the film to discuss the excessive referencing of classic literature in Star Trek. Sarah says the Moby Dick use here “absolutely works”, but it’s a crutch the films lean on to seem sophisticated, and the choices are often blandly Eurocentric.
Sarah enjoys the action finale in the simplest way possible: Patrick Stewart is stripped to his vest, becoming “the thinking woman’s John McClane”. Data’s altered face reminds her of Buffalo Bill. And the shots of the Borg Queen’s flesh liquefying get an “urgh”.
But as the film ends she says the story is bad. You get the goofy Cochrane stuff alongside the hard-as-nails Borg plot and they undermine each other. The Borg are the wrong baddies for this story, I suggest; it needs someone anti-progress. Belligerent Klingons?
Sarah also thinks interfering with history isn’t a Borg thing to do: it’s too creative and they’re supposed to be zombie-like. And if they can time-travel, why not just go back and assimilate Earth in 1472 or something? “It’s all very contrived.”
Sarah’s final critique is that the film underuses its cast - especially Troi and Crusher. “Troi basically gets pissed and that’s it,” she says, and neither of us can think of anything Crusher does. Sarah says this is a fail, and I can’t disagree. TL:DR; this went poorly.
<posted 9 September 2020>
Sarah decided that since today is #StarTrekDay we should crack on with the rewatch, and unfortunately that means:
Star Trek: Insurrection
I thought Sarah might take against this film, and I was right. Elements of it impressed her, but for the most part it collapsed in a heap. There will be ranting.
We open in media res with a bucolic village, which Sarah immediately identifies as about to have some shit go down. Data is there and he goes rogue, exposing a hidden Starfleet base.
Alongside the Starfleet officers there are some new aliens with stretchy, peeling skin. They are called the Son’a, but Sarah diligently refuses to learn that and instead calls them the Bollock People throughout.
The Enterprise arrives to try and capture Data and find out why he’s gone rogue. This involves entering a dodgy region of space with lots of weird gas clouds and stuff. Sarah says the CGI is terrible, which will become a standing complaint throughout.
Picard and Worf chase Data in a shuttle, and try to distract him with a rousing chorus of “A British Tar” from HMS Pinafore, which he was rehearsing before he left. Sarah says this is “ridiculous” and I cannot disagree. I hate this stupid goofy sequence.
However this does get a big laugh: “Mr Worf, do you know Gilbert and Sullivan?” “No sir, I have not had the chance to meet all the new crew members since I have been back.”
The film then goes into mystery-solving mode, as Picard etc try to figure out what happened to Data, while at the same time weird things start happening like Geordi’s eyes growing back (a development that elicits a yawn from Sarah).
However we interrupt this for the Riker-Troi Reconsummation Event. This has the disastrous consequence of Troi shaving off Riker’s beard, which Sarah says makes him look like a 1960s Republican politician called Chad, with a put-upon wife possibly called Betty.
Picard is also getting his motor running: with Anij, who lives in the village. Sarah says she can well understand why Anij would be having “fanny flutters” at the sight of Patrick Stewart, but is annoyed that Crusher-Picard is off the table.
Anyway the crew discovers a cloaked ship with a holodeck of the village inside, and Picard twigs that the planet is a fountain of youth. Anij and the others are centuries old. This is why Geordi’s eyes grew back, and it’s why Picard is dancing the mambo.
It seems the Bollock People are working with Starfleet to move Anij’s people off the fountain-of-youth planet so they can take it for themselves.
Picard has a stand-up row with the local admiral, Dougherty, about this. This is the best scene of the film and holds Sarah’s attention easily. Properly harnessing the planet’s life-giving effects means harvesting special radiation from its rings, but this means setting off a reaction that will leave the planet uninhabitable. So for millions of people to benefit, Anij’s people must be removed from their home. Picard will have none of this. It’s “forced relocation”, he says, and it destroys cultures.
Dougherty offers increasingly weaselly defences. Sarah says he reminds her of a lot of politicians, who say that it’s necessary to break some rules for the greater good and we should trust them. After all, they’re only breaking the Prime Directive in a specific and limited way. #SpecificAndLimited
Sarah also draws parallels with Israel-Palestine, and with Europe’s carving up of Africa. All in all she is fascinated and engaged with the politics and ethics of the scenario, and I begin to hope that despite its goofy bits this film might be a highlight. This won’t last.
For starters Sarah points out a huge plot hole. Why not just harvest the material from the rings (maybe with the ramscoop that we’ll later see the Enterprise use) and do the dangerous reaction somewhere else, so the planet won’t get wrecked?
This has never occurred to me, and it evidently didn’t occur to anyone in-universe either. Sarah says this is because the people in charge are all men. She also suspects the Bollock People of having personal reasons to kill Anij’s people, as their plan is so OTT.
The second half of the film is mostly a series of running battles, as the Bollock People try to beam everyone off the planet while Picard et al try to stop them, and the Enterprise tries to get far enough out to send a message but is pursued by Bollock People ships.
This is interspersed with “humorous” bits as the planet keeps having its effects. Worf is experiencing Klingon puberty, so he has spots and “aggressive tendencies”. Sarah questions the logic of this (“puberty isn’t regrowing anything!”) and also gets impatient with it all.
Then Troi says to Crusher “And have you noticed how your boobs have started to firm up?”
Some brief excerpts from the ensuing rant: “This was written by a fucking man, wasn’t it?” “... sexist, misogynist, patriarchal, body-shaming BULLSHIT...” “You know what they might really want, given their age? Not to be fucking peri-menopausal. Or maybe Crusher might like her pre-baby brain back. Perkier boobs is just something some sexist male writer imagined they’d want because that’s what he fancied.”
This one stupid conversation kills off whatever appeal the film had left. There is some cheesy crap with Picard and Anij, a mildly clever trick involving the holoship, and then a very underwhelming action climax. But basically the film lost Sarah at “boobs”.
In summary Sarah says there’s some good political allegory stuff in Insurrection, but the endless goofy humour is awful. She also says the stunt work is particularly bad in this film, and I can confirm that once you notice it you can’t unsee it.
Sarah decided that since today is #StarTrekDay we should crack on with the rewatch, and unfortunately that means:
Star Trek: Insurrection
I thought Sarah might take against this film, and I was right. Elements of it impressed her, but for the most part it collapsed in a heap. There will be ranting.
We open in media res with a bucolic village, which Sarah immediately identifies as about to have some shit go down. Data is there and he goes rogue, exposing a hidden Starfleet base.
Alongside the Starfleet officers there are some new aliens with stretchy, peeling skin. They are called the Son’a, but Sarah diligently refuses to learn that and instead calls them the Bollock People throughout.
The Enterprise arrives to try and capture Data and find out why he’s gone rogue. This involves entering a dodgy region of space with lots of weird gas clouds and stuff. Sarah says the CGI is terrible, which will become a standing complaint throughout.
Picard and Worf chase Data in a shuttle, and try to distract him with a rousing chorus of “A British Tar” from HMS Pinafore, which he was rehearsing before he left. Sarah says this is “ridiculous” and I cannot disagree. I hate this stupid goofy sequence.
However this does get a big laugh: “Mr Worf, do you know Gilbert and Sullivan?” “No sir, I have not had the chance to meet all the new crew members since I have been back.”
The film then goes into mystery-solving mode, as Picard etc try to figure out what happened to Data, while at the same time weird things start happening like Geordi’s eyes growing back (a development that elicits a yawn from Sarah).
However we interrupt this for the Riker-Troi Reconsummation Event. This has the disastrous consequence of Troi shaving off Riker’s beard, which Sarah says makes him look like a 1960s Republican politician called Chad, with a put-upon wife possibly called Betty.
Picard is also getting his motor running: with Anij, who lives in the village. Sarah says she can well understand why Anij would be having “fanny flutters” at the sight of Patrick Stewart, but is annoyed that Crusher-Picard is off the table.
Anyway the crew discovers a cloaked ship with a holodeck of the village inside, and Picard twigs that the planet is a fountain of youth. Anij and the others are centuries old. This is why Geordi’s eyes grew back, and it’s why Picard is dancing the mambo.
It seems the Bollock People are working with Starfleet to move Anij’s people off the fountain-of-youth planet so they can take it for themselves.
Picard has a stand-up row with the local admiral, Dougherty, about this. This is the best scene of the film and holds Sarah’s attention easily. Properly harnessing the planet’s life-giving effects means harvesting special radiation from its rings, but this means setting off a reaction that will leave the planet uninhabitable. So for millions of people to benefit, Anij’s people must be removed from their home. Picard will have none of this. It’s “forced relocation”, he says, and it destroys cultures.
Dougherty offers increasingly weaselly defences. Sarah says he reminds her of a lot of politicians, who say that it’s necessary to break some rules for the greater good and we should trust them. After all, they’re only breaking the Prime Directive in a specific and limited way. #SpecificAndLimited
Sarah also draws parallels with Israel-Palestine, and with Europe’s carving up of Africa. All in all she is fascinated and engaged with the politics and ethics of the scenario, and I begin to hope that despite its goofy bits this film might be a highlight. This won’t last.
For starters Sarah points out a huge plot hole. Why not just harvest the material from the rings (maybe with the ramscoop that we’ll later see the Enterprise use) and do the dangerous reaction somewhere else, so the planet won’t get wrecked?
This has never occurred to me, and it evidently didn’t occur to anyone in-universe either. Sarah says this is because the people in charge are all men. She also suspects the Bollock People of having personal reasons to kill Anij’s people, as their plan is so OTT.
The second half of the film is mostly a series of running battles, as the Bollock People try to beam everyone off the planet while Picard et al try to stop them, and the Enterprise tries to get far enough out to send a message but is pursued by Bollock People ships.
This is interspersed with “humorous” bits as the planet keeps having its effects. Worf is experiencing Klingon puberty, so he has spots and “aggressive tendencies”. Sarah questions the logic of this (“puberty isn’t regrowing anything!”) and also gets impatient with it all.
Then Troi says to Crusher “And have you noticed how your boobs have started to firm up?”
Some brief excerpts from the ensuing rant: “This was written by a fucking man, wasn’t it?” “... sexist, misogynist, patriarchal, body-shaming BULLSHIT...” “You know what they might really want, given their age? Not to be fucking peri-menopausal. Or maybe Crusher might like her pre-baby brain back. Perkier boobs is just something some sexist male writer imagined they’d want because that’s what he fancied.”
This one stupid conversation kills off whatever appeal the film had left. There is some cheesy crap with Picard and Anij, a mildly clever trick involving the holoship, and then a very underwhelming action climax. But basically the film lost Sarah at “boobs”.
In summary Sarah says there’s some good political allegory stuff in Insurrection, but the endless goofy humour is awful. She also says the stunt work is particularly bad in this film, and I can confirm that once you notice it you can’t unsee it.
It was inevitable. We all knew it was coming. Sooner or later, I was going to have to show Sarah:
Star Trek: Nemesis
She hates it, obviously. But precisely *why* does she hate it?
The opening scene, wherein the Romulan Senate is assassinated en masse by means of a cloud of green glowing dust, has no especial merit other than that one of the Senators is played by “Alan from Neighbours”. Then we cut to Riker and Troi’s wedding. “Finally!”
Sarah laughs delightedly at Guinan’s reason for not remarrying (“23 was my limit”). Then a hungover Worf says Romulan ale should be illegal, Sarah pipes up “it is” before Geordi does. Next she swears at me for the fact she knows that. “What have you done?!”
Data’s performance of “Blue Skies” elicits only a weary “why?” And, when Worf groans, a sympathetic “I feel you, Worf”. Soon some plot happens and they divert to a desert planet to drive around in a dune buggy and pick up an android who looks *just like* Data.
There is a wholly gratuitous car chase in which the Prime Directive is comprehensively violated by firing phasers at a primitive society then flying off into space right in front of them. Sarah sits in stony silence.
The android is called B-4, which elicits another groan, and he’s a prototype of Data. He’s simple-minded (“Why do you have a shiny head?”) and Sarah says he’s sweet. She semi-randomly wonders how Data’s genitals work and if they’re attachments like Kryten in Red Dwarf.
Now the plot starts in earnest, as the Enterprise is sent to Romulus to meet the new leader, Shinzon. He’s from Remus, a twin planet never before mentioned, which is home to an enslaved species. Shinzon has a massive ship with shedloads of weapons and a cloaking device.
<In fact the original series episode "Balance of Terror" briefly mentions Remus, but I'd forgotten that>
Shinzon is a clone of Picard. He is played by a young Tom Hardy, whose performance is... unique. Sarah says the voice he’s doing combines Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, Dr Evil and Eddie Izzard. She is also reminded of Eddie Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending - a nuclear insult.
Shinzon is accompanied by a bunch of Remans, who are meant to be creepy, but Sarah can’t take them seriously because they look so much like Nosferatu, and this reminds her irresistibly of the “monster monster monster” sketches from The Fast Show.
Shinzon is supposedly trying to liberate the Remans from slavery, but his ship has a special weapon that can shoot the green dust from the opening. It could wipe out all life on a planet. Sarah treats this threat with precisely no gravity.
We now get a bit where Riker and Troi are having sex. Sarah is just querying why this needs to exist when the scene turns very nasty indeed, as Shinzon uses his Reman friend’s telepathic abilities to attempt to telepathically rape Troi. Sarah is decidedly taken aback.
But her reaction turns to fury when Troi asks to be relieved of duty and Picard says no, and says that if she “can tolerate more of these assaults” he needs her help. “What?!” Later she will argue that this bit is gratuitous anyway: we know Shinzon is bad at this point!
Picard gets zapped away to Shinzon’s ship, but Data gets aboard and rescues him. There is a ray gun fight that Sarah says could come straight out of Star Wars, and then a flying vehicle bit that is frankly Fast and Furious.
The Enterprise now legs it. They deduce that Shinzon is going to destroy Earth, which makes little sense as his grudge really ought to be against the Romulans, but I guess we need Stakes. He catches up with them near a green space cloud, and battle is joined.
Sarah announces at this point that Nemesis feels like a parody of a Star Trek film, not the real thing. The comedy aliens are a factor, as is the way Shinzon has been written as basically a Bond villain rather than given the nuance a character like this really needs.
The battle is unusually brutal, culminating with the Enterprise ramming Shinzon’s ship. I remember finding this fairly effective when I saw it in a cinema in 2002, but since then we’ve had Battlestar Galactica, and Sarah says that in comparison this is still lame.
Shinzon decides to use his green dust weapon to kill everyone on the Enterprise. Sarah is trying to work out why she’s bored. I suggest that it’s unoriginal, as it’s ripping off ST2 and ST6, except the weapon isn’t interesting like in 2. She agrees with that...
She also thinks the film really isn’t Star Trek. It’s far too dark and nasty, like Battlestar. “Star Trek’s like a nice comfy pair of slippers,” she says. Even DS9, the darkest of Treks, has a broadly happy ending (unless you’re Cardassian...). And there’s no humour.
Picard beans aboard Shinzon’s ship to stop the weapon. Then the transporters fail, so Data jumps across the gap between the ships. Sarah thinks this is stupid in a Fast and Furious 8 way. I actually disagree - although it’d surely be easier with a fire extinguisher.
Picard and Shinzon fight, and Shinzon impales himself on a spike like Ming the Merciless. Then Data beams Picard back using a gizmo we saw earlier, and blows up Shinzon’s ship. “Wait is Data dead? I unlike this!” I remind her he was dead in Star Trek: Picard. “Oh yeah...”
Sarah’s final view is that Nemesis isn’t a proper Star Trek film. “It could be any outer space film,” she says. Once again the ensemble cast is neglected, and dumb 90s-style action is prioritised over the thoughtfulness and character work of the TV show. “It was awful.”
I ask for her ranking of the Next Generation films, and she obliges:
We agree that Insurrection is frustrating because there’s the germ of an idea there.
She attempts an overall ranking:
Sarah says she preferred the original series films, “which I never thought I’d say, because I love Next Generation and Patrick Stewart”.
I suggest that the TNG films were hamstrung by the demands of 90s blockbusters, and lost the show’s thoughtfulness. A *real* TNG movie would play more like Arrival. Sarah agrees. Sadly, she says, Nemesis merely shows us what will happen if Fast 9 really does go to space.
<The following year, Fast 9 went to space and it was terrible>
Star Trek: Nemesis
She hates it, obviously. But precisely *why* does she hate it?
The opening scene, wherein the Romulan Senate is assassinated en masse by means of a cloud of green glowing dust, has no especial merit other than that one of the Senators is played by “Alan from Neighbours”. Then we cut to Riker and Troi’s wedding. “Finally!”
Sarah laughs delightedly at Guinan’s reason for not remarrying (“23 was my limit”). Then a hungover Worf says Romulan ale should be illegal, Sarah pipes up “it is” before Geordi does. Next she swears at me for the fact she knows that. “What have you done?!”
Data’s performance of “Blue Skies” elicits only a weary “why?” And, when Worf groans, a sympathetic “I feel you, Worf”. Soon some plot happens and they divert to a desert planet to drive around in a dune buggy and pick up an android who looks *just like* Data.
There is a wholly gratuitous car chase in which the Prime Directive is comprehensively violated by firing phasers at a primitive society then flying off into space right in front of them. Sarah sits in stony silence.
The android is called B-4, which elicits another groan, and he’s a prototype of Data. He’s simple-minded (“Why do you have a shiny head?”) and Sarah says he’s sweet. She semi-randomly wonders how Data’s genitals work and if they’re attachments like Kryten in Red Dwarf.
Now the plot starts in earnest, as the Enterprise is sent to Romulus to meet the new leader, Shinzon. He’s from Remus, a twin planet never before mentioned, which is home to an enslaved species. Shinzon has a massive ship with shedloads of weapons and a cloaking device.
<In fact the original series episode "Balance of Terror" briefly mentions Remus, but I'd forgotten that>
Shinzon is a clone of Picard. He is played by a young Tom Hardy, whose performance is... unique. Sarah says the voice he’s doing combines Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, Dr Evil and Eddie Izzard. She is also reminded of Eddie Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending - a nuclear insult.
Shinzon is accompanied by a bunch of Remans, who are meant to be creepy, but Sarah can’t take them seriously because they look so much like Nosferatu, and this reminds her irresistibly of the “monster monster monster” sketches from The Fast Show.
Shinzon is supposedly trying to liberate the Remans from slavery, but his ship has a special weapon that can shoot the green dust from the opening. It could wipe out all life on a planet. Sarah treats this threat with precisely no gravity.
We now get a bit where Riker and Troi are having sex. Sarah is just querying why this needs to exist when the scene turns very nasty indeed, as Shinzon uses his Reman friend’s telepathic abilities to attempt to telepathically rape Troi. Sarah is decidedly taken aback.
But her reaction turns to fury when Troi asks to be relieved of duty and Picard says no, and says that if she “can tolerate more of these assaults” he needs her help. “What?!” Later she will argue that this bit is gratuitous anyway: we know Shinzon is bad at this point!
Picard gets zapped away to Shinzon’s ship, but Data gets aboard and rescues him. There is a ray gun fight that Sarah says could come straight out of Star Wars, and then a flying vehicle bit that is frankly Fast and Furious.
The Enterprise now legs it. They deduce that Shinzon is going to destroy Earth, which makes little sense as his grudge really ought to be against the Romulans, but I guess we need Stakes. He catches up with them near a green space cloud, and battle is joined.
Sarah announces at this point that Nemesis feels like a parody of a Star Trek film, not the real thing. The comedy aliens are a factor, as is the way Shinzon has been written as basically a Bond villain rather than given the nuance a character like this really needs.
The battle is unusually brutal, culminating with the Enterprise ramming Shinzon’s ship. I remember finding this fairly effective when I saw it in a cinema in 2002, but since then we’ve had Battlestar Galactica, and Sarah says that in comparison this is still lame.
Shinzon decides to use his green dust weapon to kill everyone on the Enterprise. Sarah is trying to work out why she’s bored. I suggest that it’s unoriginal, as it’s ripping off ST2 and ST6, except the weapon isn’t interesting like in 2. She agrees with that...
She also thinks the film really isn’t Star Trek. It’s far too dark and nasty, like Battlestar. “Star Trek’s like a nice comfy pair of slippers,” she says. Even DS9, the darkest of Treks, has a broadly happy ending (unless you’re Cardassian...). And there’s no humour.
Picard beans aboard Shinzon’s ship to stop the weapon. Then the transporters fail, so Data jumps across the gap between the ships. Sarah thinks this is stupid in a Fast and Furious 8 way. I actually disagree - although it’d surely be easier with a fire extinguisher.
Picard and Shinzon fight, and Shinzon impales himself on a spike like Ming the Merciless. Then Data beams Picard back using a gizmo we saw earlier, and blows up Shinzon’s ship. “Wait is Data dead? I unlike this!” I remind her he was dead in Star Trek: Picard. “Oh yeah...”
Sarah’s final view is that Nemesis isn’t a proper Star Trek film. “It could be any outer space film,” she says. Once again the ensemble cast is neglected, and dumb 90s-style action is prioritised over the thoughtfulness and character work of the TV show. “It was awful.”
I ask for her ranking of the Next Generation films, and she obliges:
- First Contact
- Insurrection (considerably worse)
- Generations/Nemesis (abyssal - she can’t decide which she likes less)
We agree that Insurrection is frustrating because there’s the germ of an idea there.
She attempts an overall ranking:
- 4
- 2/6/First Contact
- 3/Insurrection
- 1/5/Generations/Nemesis
Sarah says she preferred the original series films, “which I never thought I’d say, because I love Next Generation and Patrick Stewart”.
I suggest that the TNG films were hamstrung by the demands of 90s blockbusters, and lost the show’s thoughtfulness. A *real* TNG movie would play more like Arrival. Sarah agrees. Sadly, she says, Nemesis merely shows us what will happen if Fast 9 really does go to space.
<The following year, Fast 9 went to space and it was terrible>
It’s been a while since Sarah and I watched a Star Trek film: the experience of Nemesis will do that But time heals all wounds (unless they’re infected or you have haemophilia) So we have now rewatched:
Star Trek (2009)
This was the first ST film we saw together at a cinema. At the time Sarah loved it. She has revised that opinion. She still enjoyed it a fair bit, but says it doesn’t make sense, and is disappointingly non-progressive. “Also I now know there are better Star Trek films.”
It starts with Sarah mostly just recognising actors: the baddy from Iron Man, Thor from Thor, and Emma Swann from Once Upon a Time. She complains that Kirk’s dad being killed is “a bit of a trope”. And then we cut to Iowa and oh boy.
The phone call from Kirk’s stepdad prompts Sarah to complain that “they still have toxic masculinity in the 23rd century”. We then pause the film to have a mutual rant about this film’s failure as a piece of sociological imagination. Its attitudes look regressive *now*.
The bar scene makes it worse, with Starfleet cadets acting like football hooligans. “I see society hasn’t moved forward in 300 years.” Sarah says modern British society would be unrecognisable even to Victorians so 23rd-century society will be even more different, so why does this film imagine attitudes being fossilised in this way? I point out that the original show was daring just by having a black woman in a professional role at all. These films do nothing so forward-thinking. Why are there no trans or disabled characters?
Anyway, we cut to Vulcan and Sarah says she rather likes “baby Spock” because the bully he beat up had it coming. She also appreciates that Vulcan children bully in such a restrained, logical way.
Spock’s dad Sarek does some parenting and Sarah explodes in rage. Why is Sarek insisting that Spock choose between being Vulcan and human, she wants to know. He’s both! He needs to embrace his full identity, or he’ll need years of therapy.
I say it’s long-established that Sarek is a shit dad, but Sarah points out we’re 300 years in the future, in a culture that’s keen on logic and evidence. Sarek should know basic parenting skills (and anyway his original disagreement with Spock was about Starfleet).
McCoy turns up and Sarah says Karl Urban is perfectly cast. I agree - the casting throughout is great. Rachel Nichols pops up for a scene so as an aside: she was the star of Continuum, an under-rated show that did wild interweaving time travel plots long before Dark did.
Sarah has thoughts about Nero and his gang of Romulan baddies. First, like Shinzon in the last film, their motivations are nonsense. Why does blowing up Vulcan protect Romulus from a supernova 150 years in the future? Anything could happen!
Sarah also wonders why all baddy ships have such poor lighting, and so many cables and tubes dangling everywhere. “Do they not have cable tidies?” I suggest that refusal to use cable tidies is the first step on the slippery slope to genocidal megalomania. “Bastards.”
Nero’s plan is to destroy Vulcan by using red matter, which is evidently super-unstable and will collapse into a black hole as soon as it’s out of its protective container.
For some reason this necessitates drilling to the planet’s core with a weaponised space elevator. I wonder why they can’t just drop the red matter on the surface. Sarah says it’s because the Romulans are all men and must flaunt their virility with their huge phallic drill. I suggest instead the screenwriters failed to think their plot device through. “That too.”
Spock loses his shit with Kirk and maroons him on a random planet called Delta Vega. I object to this because Delta Vega is in the pilot of the original series (“Where No Man Has Gone Before”) and it’s established as being on the edge of the galaxy, so it shouldn’t be anywhere near Vulcan. Sarah says only hard-core Trekkies would know that, which I concede, but I point out that there is a wiki of Star Trek facts called Memory Alpha that the writers could have consulted. “It worries me that you know that.”
Sarah asserts that there are multiple Acacia Avenues in London, differentiated by postcodes, and it could be the same for planets. “Maybe this is Delta Vega NW1.” I grumble that in any case Delta Vega is a star name, not a planet name, and am told to shut up.
A huge red monster chases Kirk. “What is it with JJ Abrams and the colour red?!” The thing crashes down a steep slope, which given its bulk ought to have shattered its bones, but no - it takes Old Spock with a flaming torch to make it leave.
Obviously Leonard Nimoy is a joy here, his gentle yet gravelly tones giving the film a gravity it has so far largely failed to earn. Some more stuff happens, Kirk gets back to the Enterprise and takes command, and we’re off to the action-packed finale.
After some sustained weapons fire, the red matter gets set off and suddenly Nero’s ship is being torn apart by a new black hole. Kirk chooses this moment to take the Enterprise close to it and open fire. “Why?!” I yell.
Kirk becomes captain and all’s well, apart from Vulcans now being, as Spock says, “an endangered species”. The later films will ignore this because of course they do. Sarah says this is hardly the worst Trek film, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny the way, say, 2 does.
What gets us most is the failure to imagine a better future society. All the parents (except Amanda) are awful or absent - in contrast to TNG or DS9 where great parenting is constantly showcased. And instead of a society without money, we get a Nokia ringtone.
Star Trek (2009)
This was the first ST film we saw together at a cinema. At the time Sarah loved it. She has revised that opinion. She still enjoyed it a fair bit, but says it doesn’t make sense, and is disappointingly non-progressive. “Also I now know there are better Star Trek films.”
It starts with Sarah mostly just recognising actors: the baddy from Iron Man, Thor from Thor, and Emma Swann from Once Upon a Time. She complains that Kirk’s dad being killed is “a bit of a trope”. And then we cut to Iowa and oh boy.
The phone call from Kirk’s stepdad prompts Sarah to complain that “they still have toxic masculinity in the 23rd century”. We then pause the film to have a mutual rant about this film’s failure as a piece of sociological imagination. Its attitudes look regressive *now*.
The bar scene makes it worse, with Starfleet cadets acting like football hooligans. “I see society hasn’t moved forward in 300 years.” Sarah says modern British society would be unrecognisable even to Victorians so 23rd-century society will be even more different, so why does this film imagine attitudes being fossilised in this way? I point out that the original show was daring just by having a black woman in a professional role at all. These films do nothing so forward-thinking. Why are there no trans or disabled characters?
Anyway, we cut to Vulcan and Sarah says she rather likes “baby Spock” because the bully he beat up had it coming. She also appreciates that Vulcan children bully in such a restrained, logical way.
Spock’s dad Sarek does some parenting and Sarah explodes in rage. Why is Sarek insisting that Spock choose between being Vulcan and human, she wants to know. He’s both! He needs to embrace his full identity, or he’ll need years of therapy.
I say it’s long-established that Sarek is a shit dad, but Sarah points out we’re 300 years in the future, in a culture that’s keen on logic and evidence. Sarek should know basic parenting skills (and anyway his original disagreement with Spock was about Starfleet).
McCoy turns up and Sarah says Karl Urban is perfectly cast. I agree - the casting throughout is great. Rachel Nichols pops up for a scene so as an aside: she was the star of Continuum, an under-rated show that did wild interweaving time travel plots long before Dark did.
Sarah has thoughts about Nero and his gang of Romulan baddies. First, like Shinzon in the last film, their motivations are nonsense. Why does blowing up Vulcan protect Romulus from a supernova 150 years in the future? Anything could happen!
Sarah also wonders why all baddy ships have such poor lighting, and so many cables and tubes dangling everywhere. “Do they not have cable tidies?” I suggest that refusal to use cable tidies is the first step on the slippery slope to genocidal megalomania. “Bastards.”
Nero’s plan is to destroy Vulcan by using red matter, which is evidently super-unstable and will collapse into a black hole as soon as it’s out of its protective container.
For some reason this necessitates drilling to the planet’s core with a weaponised space elevator. I wonder why they can’t just drop the red matter on the surface. Sarah says it’s because the Romulans are all men and must flaunt their virility with their huge phallic drill. I suggest instead the screenwriters failed to think their plot device through. “That too.”
Spock loses his shit with Kirk and maroons him on a random planet called Delta Vega. I object to this because Delta Vega is in the pilot of the original series (“Where No Man Has Gone Before”) and it’s established as being on the edge of the galaxy, so it shouldn’t be anywhere near Vulcan. Sarah says only hard-core Trekkies would know that, which I concede, but I point out that there is a wiki of Star Trek facts called Memory Alpha that the writers could have consulted. “It worries me that you know that.”
Sarah asserts that there are multiple Acacia Avenues in London, differentiated by postcodes, and it could be the same for planets. “Maybe this is Delta Vega NW1.” I grumble that in any case Delta Vega is a star name, not a planet name, and am told to shut up.
A huge red monster chases Kirk. “What is it with JJ Abrams and the colour red?!” The thing crashes down a steep slope, which given its bulk ought to have shattered its bones, but no - it takes Old Spock with a flaming torch to make it leave.
Obviously Leonard Nimoy is a joy here, his gentle yet gravelly tones giving the film a gravity it has so far largely failed to earn. Some more stuff happens, Kirk gets back to the Enterprise and takes command, and we’re off to the action-packed finale.
After some sustained weapons fire, the red matter gets set off and suddenly Nero’s ship is being torn apart by a new black hole. Kirk chooses this moment to take the Enterprise close to it and open fire. “Why?!” I yell.
Kirk becomes captain and all’s well, apart from Vulcans now being, as Spock says, “an endangered species”. The later films will ignore this because of course they do. Sarah says this is hardly the worst Trek film, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny the way, say, 2 does.
What gets us most is the failure to imagine a better future society. All the parents (except Amanda) are awful or absent - in contrast to TNG or DS9 where great parenting is constantly showcased. And instead of a society without money, we get a Nokia ringtone.
It’s been a busy few weeks but this evening Sarah decided she was game for another Star Trek, so it’s time for:
Star Trek Into Darkness
This is going to be interesting. When this film came out I was one of the many who took against it. Whereas Sarah thought it was fine, albeit not up to the previous one. Will she come round to my way of thinking?
We open on a planet of Stone Age-y people. It seems a volcano is about to erupt and this will somehow kill everyone on the planet. So Kirk and McCoy are luring the people away while Spock is lowered into the volcano with a device that will stop it going off.
Not sure why they did the luring if Spock could stop the eruption, and if his failure would doom the planet anyhow.
+ the Enterprise is underwater. Sarah asks why. I suggest it might be because someone said it’d look cool when it came out of the water. “Sounds right”
Sarah demands to know how this all fits with the Prime Directive, a rule she is fairly firmly behind. I say they make exceptions if the alternative is a planetwide extinction event - although even then they’re supposed to be subtle about it. The issue is that a volcano just isn’t going to be cataclysmic enough to count - except the script says it is. “Is it me,” says Sarah, “or is this all a bit contrived?” “It’s bollocks,” I say. “Just so we’re clear.”
They go back to Earth and Kirk is stripped of command for about five minutes. Then Mickey from Doctor Who is sad that his daughter is ill, until Benedict Cumberbatch shows up and says he can cure her - for a price. Sarah adores BC, who resembles “a sexy otter”.
BC's price is blowing up a Starfleet building. Then when a bunch of admirals gather to plan the response in an exposed room in a skyscraper (and not in a bunker, or heavily armoured starship), BC flies a ship at them and shoots the room up, killing Pike.
BC is “John Harrison”, a rogue Starfleet officer - except he’s not, he’s Khan, but we won’t learn that until halfway through the film, thus eliminating any possibility of doing anything meaningful with the character. Instead BC just enunciates a lot.
The Enterprise heads off to catch Khan, armed with 72 special phoooooootoooooooon toooooorpeeeeeeedooooooooooes.
Also on board: Alice Eve’s Carol Marcus. Under-developed would be putting it kindly. I object to Carol suddenly being a “weapons specialist”, but I object more, and Sarah agrees, to her relationship with Kirk being reduced to him ogling her tits. This is the love of Kirk’s life and the mother of his child. I’m sure he *does* like her breasts but there’s no sense of them bonding as people.
So it turns out that Carol’s dad, Admiral Marcus, is the real villain. He wants to start a war with the Klingons, on the grounds that war is inevitable anyway so they might as well take the initiative. Sarah thinks that’s pretty stupid.
But also, his strategy is to have Khan bomb a building in London, then flee to the Klingon homeworld, so that the Enterprise can go after him and either shoot at the Klingon planet, or be sabotaged in Klingon space (who by??), and thus provoke a war. Sarah complains that this doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Also, Marcus has a gigantic warship that he’s secretly built near Jupiter. “Right, no,” says Sarah. She has family involved with the armed forces and knows a little about defence procurement, and you can’t secretly build a warship. There’s bureaucracy and people have to sign off, precisely to stop this sort of shit.
“Unless Marcus is like Dominic Cummings and does what he wants, at least until he disses the President’s girlfriend?” Sarah suggests, before enquiring whether Marcus drove his warship to Jupiter to test his eyesight.
Sarah also compares his plan to faking the Moon landings: too many people would have to be in on it. This film, she concludes, is stupid.
A lot more plot ensues, Khan kills Marcus, and the Enterprise is crippled and is free falling towards Earth. This is never explained: they were off by the Moon in the previous scene so I’m unclear how they got so close to Earth. But we’re beyond caring now.
Kirk saves the ship by going into the warp core and fixing it, but gets a lethal dose of radiation and dies. Enraged, Spock yells “KHAAAAAAAAAAN!” I’m unclear why, as this is all Marcus’s doing and Khan was just a pawn.
We pause the film to discuss the way this bit mirrors the end of Wrath of Khan. “It’s sort of clever,” says Sarah unenthusiastically. I ask if it has any emotional impact. “Oh God no. None at all. Star Trek II packs a wallop, remember we had to pause the film?”
I suggest they’ve done this story too early so the Kirk-Spock relationship hasn’t acquired its full weight - they’ve only known each other about six months at this point. Sarah agrees but she says there’s a deeper problem, which is that the relationship isn’t subtle enough. This Kirk is a jock, and this Spock veers between ice-cold and rage-beast - whereas OG Kirk is thoughtful, and OG Spock lets you see all the emotions under the surface with tiny facial gestures, without losing control.
“It makes you appreciate,” says Sarah, “just how good an actor Leonard Nimoy was.” There’s a depth to his Spock, and thus the Kirk-Spock dynamic, that means the end of ST2 is a gut-punch. This is just a half-witted imitation.
Anyway then McCoy saves Kirk by injecting him with Khan’s blood, which never worked that way before but what the hell. Sarah suggests he got the covid and it gave him superpowers, and sure, fuck it, let’s go with that. Sarah has come round to my thinking on this film.
Star Trek Into Darkness
This is going to be interesting. When this film came out I was one of the many who took against it. Whereas Sarah thought it was fine, albeit not up to the previous one. Will she come round to my way of thinking?
We open on a planet of Stone Age-y people. It seems a volcano is about to erupt and this will somehow kill everyone on the planet. So Kirk and McCoy are luring the people away while Spock is lowered into the volcano with a device that will stop it going off.
Not sure why they did the luring if Spock could stop the eruption, and if his failure would doom the planet anyhow.
+ the Enterprise is underwater. Sarah asks why. I suggest it might be because someone said it’d look cool when it came out of the water. “Sounds right”
Sarah demands to know how this all fits with the Prime Directive, a rule she is fairly firmly behind. I say they make exceptions if the alternative is a planetwide extinction event - although even then they’re supposed to be subtle about it. The issue is that a volcano just isn’t going to be cataclysmic enough to count - except the script says it is. “Is it me,” says Sarah, “or is this all a bit contrived?” “It’s bollocks,” I say. “Just so we’re clear.”
They go back to Earth and Kirk is stripped of command for about five minutes. Then Mickey from Doctor Who is sad that his daughter is ill, until Benedict Cumberbatch shows up and says he can cure her - for a price. Sarah adores BC, who resembles “a sexy otter”.
BC's price is blowing up a Starfleet building. Then when a bunch of admirals gather to plan the response in an exposed room in a skyscraper (and not in a bunker, or heavily armoured starship), BC flies a ship at them and shoots the room up, killing Pike.
BC is “John Harrison”, a rogue Starfleet officer - except he’s not, he’s Khan, but we won’t learn that until halfway through the film, thus eliminating any possibility of doing anything meaningful with the character. Instead BC just enunciates a lot.
The Enterprise heads off to catch Khan, armed with 72 special phoooooootoooooooon toooooorpeeeeeeedooooooooooes.
Also on board: Alice Eve’s Carol Marcus. Under-developed would be putting it kindly. I object to Carol suddenly being a “weapons specialist”, but I object more, and Sarah agrees, to her relationship with Kirk being reduced to him ogling her tits. This is the love of Kirk’s life and the mother of his child. I’m sure he *does* like her breasts but there’s no sense of them bonding as people.
So it turns out that Carol’s dad, Admiral Marcus, is the real villain. He wants to start a war with the Klingons, on the grounds that war is inevitable anyway so they might as well take the initiative. Sarah thinks that’s pretty stupid.
But also, his strategy is to have Khan bomb a building in London, then flee to the Klingon homeworld, so that the Enterprise can go after him and either shoot at the Klingon planet, or be sabotaged in Klingon space (who by??), and thus provoke a war. Sarah complains that this doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Also, Marcus has a gigantic warship that he’s secretly built near Jupiter. “Right, no,” says Sarah. She has family involved with the armed forces and knows a little about defence procurement, and you can’t secretly build a warship. There’s bureaucracy and people have to sign off, precisely to stop this sort of shit.
“Unless Marcus is like Dominic Cummings and does what he wants, at least until he disses the President’s girlfriend?” Sarah suggests, before enquiring whether Marcus drove his warship to Jupiter to test his eyesight.
Sarah also compares his plan to faking the Moon landings: too many people would have to be in on it. This film, she concludes, is stupid.
A lot more plot ensues, Khan kills Marcus, and the Enterprise is crippled and is free falling towards Earth. This is never explained: they were off by the Moon in the previous scene so I’m unclear how they got so close to Earth. But we’re beyond caring now.
Kirk saves the ship by going into the warp core and fixing it, but gets a lethal dose of radiation and dies. Enraged, Spock yells “KHAAAAAAAAAAN!” I’m unclear why, as this is all Marcus’s doing and Khan was just a pawn.
We pause the film to discuss the way this bit mirrors the end of Wrath of Khan. “It’s sort of clever,” says Sarah unenthusiastically. I ask if it has any emotional impact. “Oh God no. None at all. Star Trek II packs a wallop, remember we had to pause the film?”
I suggest they’ve done this story too early so the Kirk-Spock relationship hasn’t acquired its full weight - they’ve only known each other about six months at this point. Sarah agrees but she says there’s a deeper problem, which is that the relationship isn’t subtle enough. This Kirk is a jock, and this Spock veers between ice-cold and rage-beast - whereas OG Kirk is thoughtful, and OG Spock lets you see all the emotions under the surface with tiny facial gestures, without losing control.
“It makes you appreciate,” says Sarah, “just how good an actor Leonard Nimoy was.” There’s a depth to his Spock, and thus the Kirk-Spock dynamic, that means the end of ST2 is a gut-punch. This is just a half-witted imitation.
Anyway then McCoy saves Kirk by injecting him with Khan’s blood, which never worked that way before but what the hell. Sarah suggests he got the covid and it gave him superpowers, and sure, fuck it, let’s go with that. Sarah has come round to my thinking on this film.
Star Trek Beyond
We’re finally here: the capstone of the series, released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the franchise (not that you’d have known that from the marketing) It’s all right, we guess, but we can’t muster much enthusiasm.
There are definite pluses here Sarah likes that Kirk is more mature this time, and Spock “has slightly less of a stick up his bum”. But she has decided that Zoe Saldana’s Uhura is subjected to too much regressive behaviour by the men in her life.
She is surprised that this film isn’t particularly funny, given it was co-written by Simon Pegg. Although she does appreciate that the opening scene rips Kirk’s shirt off, and we then get a carefully-framed topless shot showing his nipples. “Someone put thought into that.”
The plot starts when the Enterprise visits Yorktown, a ginormous space station that McCoy says looks like a snowglobe. Sarah feels the whole thing is an excuse to show off CGI, which, it is, but I suggest that it’s more imaginative than anything in the last two films.
Anyway they have to go through this “nebula” that is actually a dense asteroid field (unless it’s meant to be a solar nebula, but then why is there a mature planet in it?) to rescue a supposedly stranded ship. Except surprise it’s a trap.
This swarm of tiny spaceships totally kicks the Enterprise’s arse: cutting off the nacelles, then cutting the central spine, leading the saucer to crash on the planet. Sarah says Reboot Kirk has fucked the ship in three films out of three and ought to get fired.
Everyone is stranded on the planet. Kirk and Chekov go to the saucer to scan for everyone but there’s baddies and a fight ensues. Sarah complains the action is incomprehensible: the camera’s so mobile and the spatial relationships unclear. It’s not Justin Lin’s finest hour.
<Insert gif of the car chase with the safe from Fast Five>
Scotty meets Jaylah, who has been stranded there for years and combines violence with fractured English. Sarah says she reminds her of Neytiri in Avatar. I can see that, but the Jaylah’s tangled syntax reminds me more of the Starfire. She’s good fun anyway.
So, the baddies. Their leader is called Krall, and Sarah cannot take him seriously because he reminds her of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, where Matthew McConaughey demands that Kate Hudson call his penis Krall the Warrior, so she gets a chihuahua and calls it Krall.
Krall is after an ancient weapon from the planet that had ended up on the Enterprise, and it’s mighty convenient that was the case because otherwise the plot couldn’t happen. This is the first of two gaping holes in this film’s logic.
The other concerns Jaylah’s “house”, which is an old crashed Starfleet ship. She has hidden it using a holographic field thing. Except we learn later that Krall is ex-Starfleet and it’s his ship, so how the hell does he not know where it is? “You’d remember, right?” Sarah says. “It’s not like you’re in a car park trying to remember which Corsa’s yours. Wouldn’t he just go beep-beep with his keys?” I agree and say my phone has Find My iPhone. “Right? His communicator would have Find My Starship.”
Anyway Jaylah helps Kirk and the other main characters rescue the crew, partly because she has a random motorbike that Kirk drives around Krall’s base causing havoc. But Krall has the weapon and is off to trash Yorktown, so they have to make the old ship fly and chase him.
This leads to the best bit of the film, where they decide to bring down Krall’s swarm of little ships by disrupting the signals controlling them - so they blast the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” at full volume on the relevant frequency. They beat the arseholes with *art*!
<I'm pretty sure Charlie Jane Anders first made this point but I can't find the piece>
Sarah concurs but questions whether the Beastie Boys will still be listened to in 300 years. “Like, are they Beethoven? Really?” I suggest they were influential in their use of sampling and fusion of genres, so maybe. It’s more plausible than anyone remembering Oasis.
Anyway there’s some more action and Krall dies, and the film ends with a new Enterprise. “I feel like I’ve seen it before,” Sarah says. She argues this has the same premise as Into Darkness: old Earth person gets enhanced abilities and has a grudge against the Federation
I ask for her ranking of the reboot films:
She can’t choose which is worse. I suggest Beyond makes a bit more sense (“marginally”) and has a better handle on Kirk and Spock, but she’s unconvinced.
Overall the reboots sit in the middle of her rankings: well below 4 and 2, but not in the abyssal reaches of 1, 5, Generations or Nemesis. Sarah finds them oddly regressive and angry films, and rather unimaginative (apart from visually).
Sarah had assumed there wasn’t now going to be a fourth reboot film, especially after Anton Yelchin died, and I say that seems likely. We both feel it’d be better to just move on and do new things rather than reboot again.
Anyway that’s the last of the mainline Star Trek films, so I guess that ought to be the end of this mega-thread right?
We’re finally here: the capstone of the series, released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the franchise (not that you’d have known that from the marketing) It’s all right, we guess, but we can’t muster much enthusiasm.
There are definite pluses here Sarah likes that Kirk is more mature this time, and Spock “has slightly less of a stick up his bum”. But she has decided that Zoe Saldana’s Uhura is subjected to too much regressive behaviour by the men in her life.
She is surprised that this film isn’t particularly funny, given it was co-written by Simon Pegg. Although she does appreciate that the opening scene rips Kirk’s shirt off, and we then get a carefully-framed topless shot showing his nipples. “Someone put thought into that.”
The plot starts when the Enterprise visits Yorktown, a ginormous space station that McCoy says looks like a snowglobe. Sarah feels the whole thing is an excuse to show off CGI, which, it is, but I suggest that it’s more imaginative than anything in the last two films.
Anyway they have to go through this “nebula” that is actually a dense asteroid field (unless it’s meant to be a solar nebula, but then why is there a mature planet in it?) to rescue a supposedly stranded ship. Except surprise it’s a trap.
This swarm of tiny spaceships totally kicks the Enterprise’s arse: cutting off the nacelles, then cutting the central spine, leading the saucer to crash on the planet. Sarah says Reboot Kirk has fucked the ship in three films out of three and ought to get fired.
Everyone is stranded on the planet. Kirk and Chekov go to the saucer to scan for everyone but there’s baddies and a fight ensues. Sarah complains the action is incomprehensible: the camera’s so mobile and the spatial relationships unclear. It’s not Justin Lin’s finest hour.
<Insert gif of the car chase with the safe from Fast Five>
Scotty meets Jaylah, who has been stranded there for years and combines violence with fractured English. Sarah says she reminds her of Neytiri in Avatar. I can see that, but the Jaylah’s tangled syntax reminds me more of the Starfire. She’s good fun anyway.
So, the baddies. Their leader is called Krall, and Sarah cannot take him seriously because he reminds her of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, where Matthew McConaughey demands that Kate Hudson call his penis Krall the Warrior, so she gets a chihuahua and calls it Krall.
Krall is after an ancient weapon from the planet that had ended up on the Enterprise, and it’s mighty convenient that was the case because otherwise the plot couldn’t happen. This is the first of two gaping holes in this film’s logic.
The other concerns Jaylah’s “house”, which is an old crashed Starfleet ship. She has hidden it using a holographic field thing. Except we learn later that Krall is ex-Starfleet and it’s his ship, so how the hell does he not know where it is? “You’d remember, right?” Sarah says. “It’s not like you’re in a car park trying to remember which Corsa’s yours. Wouldn’t he just go beep-beep with his keys?” I agree and say my phone has Find My iPhone. “Right? His communicator would have Find My Starship.”
Anyway Jaylah helps Kirk and the other main characters rescue the crew, partly because she has a random motorbike that Kirk drives around Krall’s base causing havoc. But Krall has the weapon and is off to trash Yorktown, so they have to make the old ship fly and chase him.
This leads to the best bit of the film, where they decide to bring down Krall’s swarm of little ships by disrupting the signals controlling them - so they blast the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” at full volume on the relevant frequency. They beat the arseholes with *art*!
<I'm pretty sure Charlie Jane Anders first made this point but I can't find the piece>
Sarah concurs but questions whether the Beastie Boys will still be listened to in 300 years. “Like, are they Beethoven? Really?” I suggest they were influential in their use of sampling and fusion of genres, so maybe. It’s more plausible than anyone remembering Oasis.
Anyway there’s some more action and Krall dies, and the film ends with a new Enterprise. “I feel like I’ve seen it before,” Sarah says. She argues this has the same premise as Into Darkness: old Earth person gets enhanced abilities and has a grudge against the Federation
I ask for her ranking of the reboot films:
- Star Trek
- Into Darkness/Beyond
She can’t choose which is worse. I suggest Beyond makes a bit more sense (“marginally”) and has a better handle on Kirk and Spock, but she’s unconvinced.
Overall the reboots sit in the middle of her rankings: well below 4 and 2, but not in the abyssal reaches of 1, 5, Generations or Nemesis. Sarah finds them oddly regressive and angry films, and rather unimaginative (apart from visually).
Sarah had assumed there wasn’t now going to be a fourth reboot film, especially after Anton Yelchin died, and I say that seems likely. We both feel it’d be better to just move on and do new things rather than reboot again.
Anyway that’s the last of the mainline Star Trek films, so I guess that ought to be the end of this mega-thread right?
Come on, we couldn’t do a rewatch of all the Star Trek films without tackling arguably the best of them all:
Galaxy Quest
I honestly find myself at a bit of a loss for what to say about this, because it’s Just. So. Perfect. So much of it is in the little details: the quick reference to “Klaatu” in an early scene, the ludicrousness of having a child piloting the spaceship...
Maybe some Sarah reactions?
“Christ, he’s more Shatner than Shatner.” (This is repeated several times)
“Oh my God it’s Veronica Mars’s dad!” (He’s the leader of the aliens - incidentally also the crime boss in Person of Interest - the guy has Range)
Sarah falls about when the “crew” gets their first look at their real ship: “oh god it’s just like in every Star Trek film where they stare at the ship!” She also cheers when we first see the baddies’ ship, and it’s both green and has poor interior lighting.
Probably the film’s biggest laugh comes when they have to pilot the ship out of space dock, steer too far left, and slowly, agonisingly, scrape their way along the left wall for the longest possible time, every squeal of wounded metal somehow more cringey than the last.
But Sarah is also particularly amused by the main characters’ escalating states of undress as the film goes on, with Tim Allen frequently shirtless or at least in a ripped top, and Sigourney Weaver’s top also artfully damaged to show maximum cleavage.
There’s not a weak link in the cast, but come on: Alan Rickman steals this film. It’s just line after reaction shot after reaction shot after line after line after line after line.
Sarah and I wind up having a brief debate over whether this is in fact Rickman’s greatest performance. She thinks it might be, with Snape as a close contender - I have a sneaking admiration for his Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility. The man was a god.
It’s particularly the bit where he tries to guide Tim Allen through his fight with the rock monster and goes full actor: “You’re just going to have to figure out what it wants. What is its motivation?” “You were never serious about the craft!”
Sarah notes only one implausibility: the fact the spaceship lands on Earth at the end, in a city: “You can tell this was pre-9/11, these days it’d be shot down.” She also notes the late 90s CGI - which I think kind of adds to the parodic effect by looking vaguely shit.
Anyway this film is glorious and we have no regrets whatsoever about dedicating our evening to it. Sarah says it’s the best Trek film, or rather (on close questioning) that it’s on a par with 4: she can’t choose between them.
Galaxy Quest reminds me of the importance of notionally silly pop culture like Star Trek. Yes, of course you shouldn’t take it too seriously, but there’s life lessons and wisdom to be taken from these things, despite their silliness.
Looking back, I think that a huge chunk of my outlook on life and even my political stances are basically shaped by the pop culture I devoured as a kid - which includes a lot of Star Trek and (much later) the Culture novels.
This is why it rings so true in the final act of Galaxy Quest when Dane again says his hated catchphrase, only this time he finds he really, really means it. It’s acquired deep significance despite its superficial stupidity.
What I got out of Trek was a deep-seated belief that people are people the world over, and that despite all our differences and cultural peculiarities, communication and cooperation are (almost) always possible.
This of course is why so many of the *films* are disappointing: they degenerate into bog-standard shoot-em-ups. And it’s why films like 4 - an adventure to save the world in which not a single weapon is fired - stand up despite their quirks.
I’m not sure Sarah agrees that all this Star Trek was a good use of 28 hours of our lives, but I did enjoy seeing it through her (mildly jaundiced) eyes.
Galaxy Quest
I honestly find myself at a bit of a loss for what to say about this, because it’s Just. So. Perfect. So much of it is in the little details: the quick reference to “Klaatu” in an early scene, the ludicrousness of having a child piloting the spaceship...
Maybe some Sarah reactions?
“Christ, he’s more Shatner than Shatner.” (This is repeated several times)
“Oh my God it’s Veronica Mars’s dad!” (He’s the leader of the aliens - incidentally also the crime boss in Person of Interest - the guy has Range)
Sarah falls about when the “crew” gets their first look at their real ship: “oh god it’s just like in every Star Trek film where they stare at the ship!” She also cheers when we first see the baddies’ ship, and it’s both green and has poor interior lighting.
Probably the film’s biggest laugh comes when they have to pilot the ship out of space dock, steer too far left, and slowly, agonisingly, scrape their way along the left wall for the longest possible time, every squeal of wounded metal somehow more cringey than the last.
But Sarah is also particularly amused by the main characters’ escalating states of undress as the film goes on, with Tim Allen frequently shirtless or at least in a ripped top, and Sigourney Weaver’s top also artfully damaged to show maximum cleavage.
There’s not a weak link in the cast, but come on: Alan Rickman steals this film. It’s just line after reaction shot after reaction shot after line after line after line after line.
Sarah and I wind up having a brief debate over whether this is in fact Rickman’s greatest performance. She thinks it might be, with Snape as a close contender - I have a sneaking admiration for his Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility. The man was a god.
It’s particularly the bit where he tries to guide Tim Allen through his fight with the rock monster and goes full actor: “You’re just going to have to figure out what it wants. What is its motivation?” “You were never serious about the craft!”
Sarah notes only one implausibility: the fact the spaceship lands on Earth at the end, in a city: “You can tell this was pre-9/11, these days it’d be shot down.” She also notes the late 90s CGI - which I think kind of adds to the parodic effect by looking vaguely shit.
Anyway this film is glorious and we have no regrets whatsoever about dedicating our evening to it. Sarah says it’s the best Trek film, or rather (on close questioning) that it’s on a par with 4: she can’t choose between them.
Galaxy Quest reminds me of the importance of notionally silly pop culture like Star Trek. Yes, of course you shouldn’t take it too seriously, but there’s life lessons and wisdom to be taken from these things, despite their silliness.
Looking back, I think that a huge chunk of my outlook on life and even my political stances are basically shaped by the pop culture I devoured as a kid - which includes a lot of Star Trek and (much later) the Culture novels.
This is why it rings so true in the final act of Galaxy Quest when Dane again says his hated catchphrase, only this time he finds he really, really means it. It’s acquired deep significance despite its superficial stupidity.
What I got out of Trek was a deep-seated belief that people are people the world over, and that despite all our differences and cultural peculiarities, communication and cooperation are (almost) always possible.
This of course is why so many of the *films* are disappointing: they degenerate into bog-standard shoot-em-ups. And it’s why films like 4 - an adventure to save the world in which not a single weapon is fired - stand up despite their quirks.
I’m not sure Sarah agrees that all this Star Trek was a good use of 28 hours of our lives, but I did enjoy seeing it through her (mildly jaundiced) eyes.
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