Star Trek Nemesis, While Not Great, Is Better Than People Give It Credit

So, for the second time, I'm on a full franchise re-watch. I did this about a decade back, when Discovery was first announced/greenlit. But at the time, I wasn't really watching closely by the time I got to Nemesis and didn't recall much about it. And the only other time I saw it was in theaters when it came out. So this sort of fell like a first-watch to me. (FYI, still working up to Picard, which I've only seen Seasons 1 and 2, so please no Season 3 spoilers!)

Honestly, I'd rank Nemesis second among the TNG-era movies. It was lacking in character depth, but it had some solid action, particularly the battle with the Scimitar, and Tom Hardy did a fantastic job with what little the writing gave him to work with. It just lacks the character depth and nuance of better films like First Contact.

I feel like they really missed an opportunity with Tom Hardy and Shinzon. What I really wanted was a tortured villain whose convinced he's incapable of good and, out of rage, is determined to prove that the good and noble Picard is just as capable of the same kind of monstrosities, while Picard struggles with his own nature and questions whether he's truly as inherently good as he's always thought. What we got was a bad guy who never tries to be anything else and a good guy who never really questions himself on any level. We get some cheap lip-service about how they hold up a mirror to each other and that's it. The closest we got to something more was a great moment when Shinzon (as a hologram) shows up in Picard's ready room after the Enterprise is crippled, to discuss terms of surrender, and Picard gives his whole pitch about how it's not too late to make the right choices. And there's a moment while Shinzon is listening that he smiles, like he's imagining the kind of better man he might be capable of being, before he dismisses everything Picard says. Tom Hardy deserves a lot of credit, I think, for moments like that.

As equally disappointing was their handling of Data. I wouldn't have minded them killing him off, if they had at least set it up to have some real emotional impact. Honestly, it felt like they didn't even really give him much to do for the film. He had minimal dialogue, and virtually no character building moments. Before killing him off, we needed the sort of depth we got in scenes like First Contact, where Picard risks his life to save Data not out of duty but because he cares so much for his friend.

Still, I didn't hate it. I perked up during the space battle when they mentioned "dorsal shields" (aka the shields on top of the ship), as that's something virtually never mentioned in the franchise. Even better was when Riker explicitly tells them to roll the ship because dorsal shields are down; it's exceedingly rare that the franchise EVER shows starships not flying oriented upright to one another, despite there not truly being an "up" or "down" in space. I was also tickled by the fact that Troi took to the helm for the second time in her career (that we know of), and for the second time she crashed an Enterprise. At least this time she didn't completely destroy it, I guess?