Tag: Brent Spiner

Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

Playing like a double-length TV episode with some embarrassing humour, not enough special about Insurrection

Director: Jonathan Frakes

Cast: Patrick Stewart (Captain Jean-Luc Picard), Jonathan Frakes (Commander William Riker), Brent Spiner (Lt Commander Data), LeVar Burton (Lt Commander Geordi LaForge), Michael Dorn (Lt Commander Worf), Gates McFadden (Dr Beverly Crusher), Marina Sirtis (Counsellor Deanna Troi), F. Murray Abraham (Ru’afo), Donna Murphy (Anji), Anthony Zerbe (Admiral Doherty), Gregg Henry (Gallatin), Daniel Hugh Kelly (Sojef), Michael Welch (Artim)

After the smash-hit success of Star Trek: First Contact, the Next Generation franchise had a golden opportunity. Like never before, Paramount put the cash up (almost twice what it did for First Contact) and geared up to make Insurrection a smash-hit. But then it all went a little wrong. There’s nothing particularly offensive about Star Trek: Insurrection – apart from that fact that there is nothing particularly outstanding about it either.

The Enterprise crew are called to a secluded planet in the middle of a nebula after Data (Brent Spiner), on secondment to an undercover mission observing the peaceful pre-Warp Ba’ku people, suddenly goes berserk and holds the rest of the mission hostage. Picard (Patrick Stewart) and the crew recapture and repair Data – only to find that the android flipped out after being injured discovering a secret conspiracy. Misguided Starfleet Admiral Doherty (Anthony Zerbe) is working with the shady Son’a, led by the clearly maniacal Ru’afo (F. Murray Abraham), to force the Ba’ku to leave the planet so the Federation and Son’a can mine (aka steal) the planet’s atmospheric particles which can regenerate humanoid bodies (the whole planet is basically the fountain of youth). Outraged, Picard and his crew decide this will not stand and rebel to stop it.

Now I love Star Trek: The Next Generation. If I had seen Star Trek: Insurrection in two parts, with a year-long cliff-hanger in the middle after Picard chucked in his com badge and went rogue, I’d probably think this was one of the best episodes ever. But as a film? It feels like an episode unwisely moved to the big screen. I can totally see why this failed to be the same breakout hit First Contact was. That dialled the stakes up to the Nth degree and felt cinematic: Insurrection feels like it could have sat quite nicely in two 45 minute, 4:3 chunks.

Even worse, despite the money lavished upon it, it actually looks cheaper than First Contact. This is partly because a large chunk of the money was poured into location shooting. While it must have felt very different to the cast and crew – used to sound stages and the odd trip out to the Californian valleys for an exterior – to suddenly be out in Sierra Nevada, honestly it doesn’t look that different to a host of other planets the crew visited in the show. Neither does the Ba’ku village look that different from the homespun, pre-Warp villages the crew visited at least a few times a season.

It doesn’t help that the Ba’ku are exactly the sort of new-age windbags the franchise has always had an inexplicable fondness for. In their cream robes, mouthing new-age mantras about putting self-discovery first and the beauty of self-improvement, they come across like a gang of smug hippies, rubbing their perpetual youth in the viewer’s face. Throw in the fact that they contribute little to their own defence, other than patronising shakes-of-the-head towards the Son’a, and it’s rather hard not to feel they deserve to be taken down a peg or two. And really, hoarding these life-changing regenerative particles so that only an elite few (happy to expel dissenters from their world) benefit rather than the billions in the galaxy, is a harder-sell the more you think about it.

Mind you, it doesn’t help that the Son’a are a gang of less-than-compelling heavies, clinging to what’s left of their youth by constantly subjecting their bodies to a series of bang-on-the-nose cosmetic surgeries (nothing in Insurrection is remotely subtle). Blatantly untrustworthy villains from the start – it’s inexplicable to me why anyone would even consider working with these transparent gangsters from the get-go – their characterisation is one-note with Ru’afo, our villain, played in lip-smackingly precise tones by a slumming-it F. Murray Abraham. The more interesting by far villain is the deeply conflicted Admiral Doherty, a decent performance of “trying-to-do-the-right-thing” desperation that sees him edging towards damnation one tiny step at a time.

While some riffs land better than others, Insurrection unwisely plays the comedy card heavily. Picard, Worf and Data singing HMS Pinafore during their capture of the confused android is pretty droll (not least Michael Dorn’s excellent line in stunned reluctance), while Marina Sirtis and Jonathan Frakes actually manage to inject the re-discovered romantic spark between Riker and Troi with genuine playfulness that is rather sweet. But other stuff is the sort of gag-work that makes fans like me place fists in our mouths and hope no one catches us watching this. Beverly and Deanna talking about their boobs firming up anyone? Worf getting a pimple? Data playing in a haystack? Jesus Christ, no wonder I never told girls I liked Star Trek.

The comedy – and an awkwardly unconvincing romance between Picard and the frankly deeply annoying Anji, played with an irritating Earth-mother purity by Donna Murphy – often undermines the action and lowers the stakes. Although there is a noble attempt to engage with the moral complexities here – a classic “good of the many” situation – the film boils most of this down into a single crucial scene, which relies a lot on Patrick Stewart’s unmatched ability with a speech (Picard here is more like the character in the TV series then he is elsewhere in the film series) but the film isn’t deft enough to centre its moral dilemma. You end up wondering why the crew take such a radical stand. Its uncinematic stakes don’t help – it all feels similar to the sort of situation our heroes waded into exactly 175 times before over seven years. Why take it so much to heart now?

When action does kick-in, Jonathan Frakes does a decent job of directing it. Some of the Sierra Nevada-set action as Picard and his crew march the Ba’ku to the hills to prevent them being picked off the planet by the Son’a has a decent Western feel to it (including a Leone-homage series of frowning forehead shots). There is a decent space battle between the Enterprise – helmed by Riker – and the Son’a. I’ll even admit that the ridiculous “manual steering column” (essentially a joystick Riker uses to fly the Enterprise) is fairly entertaining. Like First Contact – and Nemesis would finally peak in this regard – the ending involves a Die Hard style smack-down between a trigger-happy, shirt-clad Picard and the villain on an utterly unconvincing set (which looks like they didn’t bother to finish the blue-screen work). But all this stuff never feels different from anything we’ve seen before.

So used, it seems, to making less stretch to more, I think the crew – and Frakes – didn’t know what to do when actually given more. They focused instead on all the wrong things: huge sets we almost never see, location shoots that don’t look that different from dozens of other films, more extras. Match that up with a bland story, unconvincing and plain irritating guest characters, and a tonal mess that slipstreams between half-hearted comments on ethnic cleansing to awkward pratfalls and Star Trek: Insurrection is the worst thing a Trek movie can be: a double-length episode which, if you missed, it wouldn’t really matter.

The Aviator (2004)

Leonardo DiCaprio excels as Howard Hughes in The Aviator

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Howard Hughes), Cate Blanchett (Katharine Hepburn), John C Reilly (Noah Dietrich), Kate Beckinsale (Ava Gardner), Alec Baldwin (Juan Trippe), Alan Alda (Senator Owen Brewster), Ian Holm (Professor Fitz), Danny Huston (Jack Frye), Gwen Stefani (Jean Harlow), Jude Law (Errol Flynn), Willem Dafoe (Roland Sweet), Adam Scott (Johnny Meyer), Matt Ross (Glen Odekrik), Kevin O’Rourke (Spencer Tracy), Kelli Garner (Faith Domergue), Frances Conroy (Katharine Houghton), Brent Spiner (Robert E Gross), Edward Herrmann (Joseph Breen)

Howard Hughes grew up wanting to make the biggest movies in the world, fly the greatest plans and be the richest man in the world. He achieved all of this. He ended his life a wild-haired long-nailed recluse, terrified of stepping outside his controlled zone, a victim to crippling OCD. Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator is a triumphant, brilliantly engrossing, sumptuous exploration of Hughes’ years of triumph, where everything seemed to go right publicly – even while everything was beginning to go wrong internally.

It’s Scorsese’s second teaming with Leonardo DiCaprio – and while DiCaprio’s boyish good looks don’t really relate to what the real Hughes looked like, his charismatic enthusiasm, passion and determination brings Hughes triumphantly to life. It’s a brilliant performance, which dominates the movie. DiCaprio seems to completely understand power of driving ambition, who will mortgage everything he has time and time again to achieve his dream – and also the force of personality needed to turn those dreams into success. But obsession drives both success and eventual personal disaster. There is always something slightly fragile about DiCaprio – maybe its those boyish good looks – and here he brilliantly captures the tragedy of a man clinging to his sense of self, struggling with the demons within him.

Scorsese’s film gloriously balances the epic with the personal. It so brilliantly relates to the irrational but very convincing fears of those suffering from OCD, that scenes featuring Hughes obsessively plucking tissues from boxes, or stuck in restrooms scared of touching the door carry a real sense of threat. The grandness of much of the rest of the film – and the sense we get have how much more Hughes could have achieved – means the demons he carries are even more affecting. Imagine what he could have done, if he wasn’t terrified of even the smallest germ, or was able to put aside his destructive urge to control every inch of his environment and the people in it.

All this tragedy works because the grandness is so impressive. Scorsese’s film looks beautiful. The filming was inspired by replicating the visual and colour styles of contemporary Hollywood. The early 1930s-set section of the film apes the toned look of early-colour (green appears blue, most strikingly at a golf course) with full colour only appearing when the film hits the years of technicolour. The 1940s sequences are inspired by touches of film noir, leaning into the early days of epic technicolour by the end. It looks striking and also amazing. The production design is similarly breathtaking, while the film is shot and assembled with a wonderfully vibrant energy.

It’s also got plenty of wit. John Logan’s fast-paced script captures the sense of a fun of a man who was determined to turn his dreams into reality. John C Reilly is a lot of a fun as the weary number 2, constantly performing financial gymnastics to keep his bosses dreams afloat. Compulsion and obsession makes Hughes the sort of guy who will rebuild an aeroplane from scratch because of a minor flaw, or will reshoot a film because it will work better with sound. During the shooting of Hell’s Angels he keeps a private fleet of planes on the ground while waiting for clouds that will make the scene work. Frequently thousands of dollars a day are spent keeping projects ticking over, while Hughes waits for perfection. He’s not a man to compromise – and you can see why an artist like Scorsese would relate to that. While the film never lets you forget this obsessive perfectionism cuts both ways – and is as much a symptom of OCD as obsessive handwashing.

Scorsese’s passion for classic Hollywood clearly informs much of the first half of the film, that covers the shooting of Hell’s Angels and Hughes’ relationship with Katharine Hepburn. There are delightful cameos from Hollywood icons like Errol Flynn and Louis B Mayer. Playful references abound. The film’s emotional heart is the bond between the two larger-than-life ambitious figures Hughes and Hepburn. Cate Blanchett (Oscar-winning) is fantastic as Hepburn, a pitch-perfect impersonation that also captures her gsharp, uncompromising intelligence and no-nonsense energy. The chemistry between the two is spot-on.

The film’s second half covers more the aviation of the title, with Hughes’ struggle to break the near-monopoly of the skies owned by PanAm, with his own airline TWA. With Hughes starting to teeter on the edge of OCD collapse, even while energetically setting records in the air and fighting battles in the senate, its perhaps even stronger. It also introduces nemesis in Alec Baldwin’s smoothly manipulative Pan Am chairman Juan Trippe and, most delightfully, an Oscar-nominated Alan Alda as a hypocritically corrupt Senator Brewster. The dinner and senate clashes between Alda and DiCaprio provide glorious energy to power the film’s final act.

It also serves as a last hurrah for Hughes. It’s DiCaprio that really makes the film work as this star burns itself out, finally succumbing to the compulsions that we know will see him end his days locked into a room at the top of a Las Vegas hotel. Moments carry a suggestion of fantasy – is Hughes imagining some of the shady figures he sees at the edges of frames? Are oddly toned late meetings with Ava Gardner (an underpowered Kate Beckinsale) an illusion? It’s all part of the the powerful sense of tragedy of seeing him end, wild-haired, peeing into milk bottles and stuck into loops of repeating phrases over and over again. Scorsese’s film superbly captures the immense sense of lost opportunities.

The Aviator is undeniably grand and triumphant film-making, that looks a million dollars. But it also manages – in thanks to a superb performance from DiCaprio – to capture a tragic sense of a man who burnt himself out at the height of fame and success. It tells two parallel stories without us realising it: a man achieving his dreams, even while his nightmares consume him. With Scorsese’s perfectly judged direction and some wonderful performances, this is both a sprawling epic and a very personal story of loss. While it seems very different from the films we might expect from the master, I think it might be one of his finest works.

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

Tom Hardy plays a clone of the young Patrick Stewart in Star Trek: Nemesis. You can tell he’s identical ‘cos he’s got no hair

Director: Stuart Baird

Cast: Patrick Stewart (Captain Jean-Luc Picard), Jonathan Frakes (Commander William Riker), Brent Spiner (Lt Commander Data), LeVar Burton (Lt Commander Geordi LaForge), Michael Dorn (Lt Commander Worf), Gates McFadden (Dr Beverley Crusher), Marina Sirtis (Deanna Troi), Tom Hardy (Shinzon), Ron Perlman (Viceroy), Dina Meyer (Commander Donatra), Kate Mulgrew (Admiral Janeway)

There are few things in the Star Trek franchise with as poor a reputation as Star Trek: Nemesis. It’s as close as the series got to a franchise-killer, a film that bombed so colossally (the first ever Star Trek film to lose money at the box office) that it seemed to end not only the movie series but all planned television projects. Since then, it has been remembered as an incoherent, poorly plotted mess, crammed with terrible writing and direction and shoddy action. Is this memory fair? Well yes and no.

Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Data (Brent Spiner) have their sense of self thrown: first by Data’s discovery of an identical, unadvanced prototype of himself called B-4 (also Spiner) and then by Picard discovering on a mission to Romulus that the new leader of the Romulan Empire is a clone of his younger self, going by the name Shinzon (Tom Hardy). Having assassinated the Romulan government, Shinzon plans to give freedom to his “Reman brothers”, the slave race that raised him from childhood. But he also has sinister aims for the Federation…

This is a horrendously compromised product, cut to ribbons by the studio to get as close as possible to two hours as possible, regardless of the impact on plot or characters. Why? Because it was released at the same time as Lord of the Rings: Two Towers and the plan was all the people who didn’t want to see that would choose Nemesis instead. I won’t start to explain here all the reasons this plan was stupid. Suffice it to say, it didn’t work and meant we ended up with a gutted mess that jumps as quickly as it can to action set-pieces, many inadequately filmed on the cheap.

It also doesn’t help that Stuart Baird was brought on board to direct: a self-proclaimed “non-fan” who proudly announced he hadn’t watched any Trek before. A fresh perspective is great – but come on, if it’s the fourth film with the cast, following 175 episodes, you’d think some respect for the past would be good, right? Instead, Baird seems contemptuous of the whole genre and has no tonal understanding of Star Trek. The actors constantly struggle to keep their characters as consistent as possible, while events and actions keep spinning wildly out of whack. I could start nit-picking Star Trek errors (why is Worf here? Why is Wesley back in Starfleet? What’s happened to Data’s emotion chip? Why does no-one mention Data’s evil brother Lore? Picard was not always bald. Etc. etc. etc.) but I’d be here all day.

Anyway, if they were going to bring a new face on board, could they not have found a better director than Baird? Some of the sequences of this film are so wonkily filmed they look cheaper than they probably were. Any scene involving hand-to-hand fighting is cursed with poor shots and bizarre slow motion straight out of 1970s TV. They all look absurdly slow and cheap. The Romulans are redesigned as ludicrously camp, partly green skinned, heavily made-up softies. Shinzon and the Remans sashay around in noisy rubber costumes like space gimps. Baird has no sense of comic timing and virtually all the overtly “funny” parts of the film fall on their arse. The wedding scene is one long sequence of slightly embarrassing faux-comedy – the sort of thing that will confirm to any sceptic that loving Star Trek is desperately sad.

But the main problem is the plot. Shinzon is a character who should be really interesting: for starters, he’s played by the excellent Tom Hardy. He should be casting a dark light on Picard, with a feeling that these are men only a few degrees apart, or that Shinzon is a kind of renegade son pushing to find his own place in the universe. All lost in the edit. Shinzon’s back story and aims make no sense, and by the end his character degenerates into a motiveless nutter. If he’s all about freeing the Remans (a goal achieved at the start of the film) why does he want to destroy Earth? If his focus is on Picard why does he constantly delay capturing him? What would have worked was if the Enterprise were trying to stop Shinzon destroying Romulus, or if Shinzon’s focus was exclusively on Picard and we had more of a sense of Shinzon being a “dark Picard”. Instead he’s just a nutter with a homicidal plan for Earth which comes out of nowhere.

Badly structured as the Shinzon plot is, at least this has some decent scenes between Hardy and Stewart. However the B-4 plot makes little sense at all, while also providing an unfortunate opportunity for Spiner to play “simple Data”, like an android Rain Man. In terms of where he fits into Shinzon’s plan or the rest of the plot, B-4 makes no sense and provides no real contrast to Data or comment on the Picard/Shinzon relations. He should, of course, be another repeat of the theme of Picard seeing a disagreeable version of himself. But this never comes together. It just gets used for jokes or for Spiner to show-off. Neither option is that appealing.

This thematic material keeps getting constantly lost. It’s cut so badly that it often makes the film empty and unsatisfying. You keep wanting thematic juice: our heroes confronting dark versions of themselves, or the struggle of dealing with your lack of uniqueness in the galaxy. But the film only wants to sketch these in roughly in order to keep moving forward to action scenes. The worst of these is a prolonged car buggy chase on a primitive planet that not only takes ages, it’s desperately dully and makes no real sense at all when you think about (for starters, if the baddies wanted B-4 to be found, why break him up and sprinkle the bits all over a dangerous planet?).

This means that, despite the title, we never get the sense of there being an actual nemesis in this film. Shinzon never really feels like a reflection of Picard. The film just tells us he’s a baddy, because, hell he just is. You can practically tick off the standard list of villain quirks. Lack of patience? Check. A creepy attitude to women? Check. Killing a subordinate for failing? Check. Any prospect of making him an interesting, different type of character gets pushed out in favour of the simple.

That’s many paragraphs saying what’s wrong. But it’s not all bad. Honestly it isn’t. In fact, there are some nice moments in there. There are some good character beats, and the cast are working hard to make these moments land. In particular, there are some lovely exchanges between Picard and Data, while Geordi gets more to do in this film than most of the last few (including some actual moments exploring his friendship with Data, often lost in the films). Picard feels more like the enlightened explorer and intellectual character from the TV show here than he did in any of the other films. When we are allowed to relax and breathe, the film touches on an elegiac, end-of-an-era quality (see scenes like that below).

Also, as awful as the buggy chase sequence is, the final space battle (while a clear lift from Star Trek II) is exciting and well filmed, and also showcases our characters’ professionalism. The hand-to-hand combat bits are hopeless, and Picard’s final “man on a mission” assault strains credibility. But Data’s final sacrifice is quite moving – especially the quiet moments afterwards where the rest of the cast respond to it. It’s sad because you know more of this warm interplay is on the cutting room floor with the thematic material of the film – leaving this neutered disappointment instead. Which is a shame because there is some decent material here – and some enjoyable moments. There is also a terrific score.

Star Trek: Nemesis is not as bad as you may remember. I mean, it’s a long way short of the best Star Trek films – but it’s got its moments. It’s made by a director who doesn’t understand (or care) about the franchise, but the cast do their best to hold it together. It’s a thoroughly compromised film, ruined by too many people trying to make a film that did too much, and it was clearly intended as a jumping off point for the next film (which never happened), but for all this, there is just about enough to keep a fan entertained – although probably not a non-fan. And if nothing else, this is the last chance to see the cast of one of the best sci-fi shows ever made.