Star Trek: Insurrection Review

Star Trek: Insurrection
1998

Data goes haywire during a covert op mission and attacks fellow Federation members while spying on the peaceful, primitive Ba’ku people. The Enterprise crew is called in to capture and repair Data, then ordered then depart immediately. But the crew decides to stay and solve the mysteries behind Data’s malfunction and why the Federation was spying on a seemingly innocent race in the first place. This one started off dull and confusing but eventually became an interesting mystery with some nice twists. The central theme was less clear in this one, which I liked. It urged you to come up with your own interpretation. I saw it as a film about sociology. It dealed with the customs, beliefs and rights of different cultures, which was all very cool. But then there’s F. Murray Abraham’s character. Don’t get me wrong, he’s an excellent actor, but here, he plays basically the same role he did in Amadeus: a vengeful villain with about ten pounds of wrinkly makeup on his face. Only here, he doesn’t have any memorable lines other than his two “NOOOOO!” scenes. That's right, two. Three, if you count his indecipherable, dying scream. The majority of the film had very little action yet the story still held my interest. In fact, the occasional bursts of action seemed forced and unnecessary, like they were just thrown in every thirty minutes to keep the immature audiences awake. Once the action picks up in the third act, the film sinks. The climax pits Picard and Salieri in a boring gunfight set in a room full of blue walls -- clearly bluescreens that were never filled in (whoops, maybe they shouldn’t have gone so over-budget on the C.G.I.). Insurrection took a while to get going, but when it did, man, it was going warp-speed. Sadly, it ran out of dylithium fuel before the end. 3.5/5 Stars.

Warp to my Star Trek: Nemesis Review