Uncanny Antman said:
The blue walls are not a bluescreen, and there are no missing effects. My reasoning: 1. You can see the blue-light color scheme elsewhere on the Son'a ship. 2. The scene was shot with a greenscreen for set extensions. The blue walls were shot without tracking markers, a must-have for the roving camera in the '90s.
Yes you are almost certainly right. I did notice that the Son'a ship bridge had some blue lit panels but thought they'd been missed too.
I guess the production meeting went like this:
Set Designer - "Here is my design for the Son'a ship:
Producer - "But it looks exactly like a pile of cr*p???"
Set Designer - "No, it's
supposed to look like a pile of cr*p."
Producer - "Ohhh, I see. Here's some money then."
You'd think somebody on the experienced production team would've said "Hang on guys, isn't that the same shade of blue as bluescreen? won't that look unfinished? Can't we use a different shade of blue, or a lighter/darker blue?". I was wrong to blame massive incompetence, when it was just regular strength incompetence
.
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I wish bluescreen concerns were all that was wrong with the next one...
Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)
As far as I'm concerned, this goes off the rails immediately with the choice of a heavily serifed font for all the opening titles. As far as I know,
'Nemesis' is still the only
Star Trek TV show or film in the franchise's 53-year history to use a strongly serifed font for it's titles... madness! This movie is set in the future, not the middle ages!!
After the titles there is a horrifying scene showing Romulans being melted alive. Then a total change of gears over to a sequence where Picard is laughing and joking, breaking his crew's balls and then getting into some extreme-sports dune-buggy driving. Later he insists on having a joyride in an alien shuttle (despite not understanding the controls and Data having explained that he does), then duel-wielding phaser-rifles like he's Rambo. I started to wonder if this film and it's direct sequel, the new
'Star Trek: Picard' series are about an alternate universe Picard? Much like that series, I reckon a lot of the faults with 'Nemesis' are down to Patrick Stewart having too much creative control and too big an ego by this point. I don't put as much blame on co-story-writer/star
Brent Spiner, as he probably had some nice rough ideas in concept. I don't put all the blame on Director
Stuart Baird like some of the cast have. The film is directed just fine and it looks quite nice but he's never worked as a Director again.
Having Picard's clone Shinzon played by
Tom Hardy, who looks nothing like Stewart, was a ridiculous idea. If Stewart couldn't be bothered to perform both roles, they should've abandoned the script right there. It's made worse with the decision to have Shinzon act like, sound like and be made up to look exactly like Dr. Evil. There had been 2-3
Austin Powers films before 'Nemesis', so I don't know how the production team didn't realise, I'm sure every audience member did. The mind-rape scene by Shinzon on Troi is as distasteful as it always was. Thankfully Picard is kidnapped/beamed-away before he could complete his bit of dialogue ordering a crying Troi to get mind-raped a few more times, just so he can get some intel to use against Shinzon. There is a deleted scene of her getting violated a second time, so it could have been even worse I suppose. Worf's character has finally been reduced to a plot device. A dumb, irrational, hot-headed Klingon who is there to make the other crew seem more rational, or to act as irritable comic-relief. At the point when I was thinking
"Oh, the story is nearly over" I checked and the movie still had 45-minutes left to go. This last section is mostly one big, loud, boring space battle.
Is there anything positive? I'd forgotten how good some of the FX look (this was my first HD viewing), the long opening shot flying through space and then sweeping down onto the Romulan senate is still impressive. The Data/B4 plot-twist is really well executed, resisting the temptation to tip the audience off. It's nice to see Riker and Troi finally get hitched. I liked the little reprise
Jerry Goldsmith does of his epic space-dock music, although it's indicative of how far the ambitions of this franchise had declined that he's only allowed 23-seconds of footage to score, instead of the 4.5-minute canvas he was given in
'The Motion Picture'. I watched the acres of deleted material on the blu-ray, which are mostly character scenes (I believe they are only a fraction of what was trimmed). I think the film is fundamentally flawed but I'm sure a much better cut could've been achieved if they hadn't sacrificed many of these scenes to fit in more overblown action. It's just a shame they are so low-resolution and unfinished. 'Nemesis' is the equivalent of the Bond movie
'Die Another Day' (also from 2002, along with
'Attack of the Clones'). Films so bad that they killed off their respective franchises for a number of years... except the TV show
'Enterprise' had managed to slip out the year before the coffin was nailed shut.
Note to future self: Do not be tempted to watch this ever again... it won't get better. Re-watch the first three NextGen movies instead, you really like those ones.
^ Having said that I'd be curious to see a "workprint" fanedit, that swapped much of the space battles for all the deleted scenes, in whatever visual state they could be presented in.
With the 'Nemesis' nightmare over, I'm going back to my "happy place"... Season 2 of Voyager on Netflix.