It’s been quite a ride, but our Star Trek film franchise retrospective has finally arrived at the first post-Ground Zero Trek movie.
After the crowd-pleasing tour de force of Star Trek: First Contact, fans were looking forward to the TNG crew’s second solo feature.
Expectations ran high. And why shouldn’t they have? Up to that point, moviegoers could reasonably expect a sequel to give them more of what they liked from its predecessor. Perhaps not of the same quality, but at least in bigger portions.
While not an outright insulting disaster of the sort that infest theaters these days, Star Trek: Insurrection served as a warning sign that something had gone wrong.
As I said in our last review, TNG movies come in two basic types: Star Wars-imitating actioners and two-hour TV episodes.
Insurrection stands as the epitome of the latter type.
Again, it’s not that STI is bad. If they’d aired it as the two-part finale/premiere bookends of two Star Trek: The Next Generation seasons, I’d have watched part 1 with interest and marked my calendar to catch the conclusion that fall.
On the whole, it’s rather sturdy Trek storytelling. You have a Prime Directive-adjacent conflict (red meat for Picard), a Data-goes-berserk subplot (always fun), and characters solving problems with technobabble.
All of which makes for pretty solid sci-fi television.
Which is the problem, because this is supposed to be a movie.
Media scholar Marshall McLuhan explained the fundamental difference between movies and TV. A television show is not just a shorter version of a movie watched at home. In contrast to film, which is a hot medium, TV is a cool medium that requires much more engagement on the viewer’s part.
The nature of the medium means that TV viewers will be more engaged with their screens than moviegoers. That means you can get away with slower, more cerebral content on TV more easily than in movies.
To put it even simpler, if you’ve ever heard someone praise a film as something you can “just turn off your brain and enjoy,” you know the hot medium effect.
That is Insurrection‘s main flaw in a nutshell: It’s too cool for its own good.
But I’ll let you decide. Here’s the rundown …
Data blows the lid off a covert Federation surveillance mission during one of his patented android chimp-outs. In the aftermath, Picard learns that Starfleet has been spying on a simple agrarian society. The twist is that even though these people live simply, they’re far from primitive. In fact, they have technology that rivals the Federation’s; they just choose not to use it.
Since the Prime Directive doesn’t apply, Picard struggles to find legal grounds for helping the space luddites. The stakes rise when it turns out they’re also de facto immortals thanks to the regenerative properties of their planet’s rings. Starfleet has pulled a “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” and mobbed up with a faction of plastic surgery addicts to monopolize the fountain of youth.
There’s just one wrinkle: Picard has fallen hard for a luddite space cougar. In defiance of the admiral who’s running the land grab, Picard takes off his badge and takes up arms in his love interest’s defense.
And that’s a perfectly serviceable plot setup. Where Insurrection falls short is in its big screen execution.
First, the plot structure feels like a series of events stitched together with “and then” transitions. The writers needed more “but” or “therefore”.
Second, the movie can’t seem to decide what it wants to be. The Hollywood style space battles and gunplay feel shoehorned into the more deliberate, intimate TV plot.
Speaking of the action set pieces, not only do they feel like they belong in a different production, they’re somewhat choppy and lack satisfying resolutions.
One bright spot is the main villain, Ru’afo. Portrayed by the great F. Murray Abraham, this tragic yet ruthless antagonist had the makings of a Chang or even Kruge-caliber bad guy. But neither the script nor the production values give him enough to work with.
To be honest, this movie would have been greatly improved had they come up with some method of killing the villains besides unceremoniously blowing them up every time.
All in all, Star Trek Insurrection avoided succumbing in full to the effects of Cultural Ground Zero.
But it did offer a subtle warning of the degradation to come.
For a successful adaptation of TV style tropes into another medium – this time print – read my hit mecha/mil-SF novel:
