

Star Trek Insurrection

Director: Jonathan Frakes.

Starring: Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton,
Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis.

With any Star Trek movie, there comes a lot of baggage. Lots of people
stay away because they're not trekkies: they've never watched the
television show and they don't like Science Fiction. On the other
hand, fans expect so much, even becoming a tad proprietal about their
show. So who should go to see the latest instalment of the Next
Generation films? How does it hold up for the two extreme ends of the
viewing population?

I fear trekkies will be a bit disappointed. Just like First Contact,
the previous Star Trek movie, Insurrection doesn't have a lot of
plot. It's basically an extended television episode on a bigger
screen. All the standard characters are there, doing what you'd expect
of them, and it's an interesting enough plot but it's not a ground
breaking movie.

On top of that, the effects are pretty cheesy. When I go to a Star
Trek movie, I basically expect an extended television episode with
cool special effects: I got the former but was robbed of the
latter. The ships, docking and moving about in space looked like
models. Even worse were the less amazing scenes like when

Data (Brent Spiner), Picard (Patrick Stewart) and the love interest
were entering the water-craft they had discovered: the mountain
backdrop was clearly fake. I don't know how much money was spent on
special effects for Insurrection, but when I compare it to the great
crash scene from the first Next Generation movie, it comes up very
short.

There are, however, many pluses for Insurrection. While there will
never be any Best Actor Oscars being awarded to the cast of a Star
Trek film, all the performances are quite good. On top of that, there
is a lot of humour in this movie. Whilst there were humorous pieces in
First Contact, it had a very dark tone. There is no such tone in
Insurrection: we have goodies and baddies, people to save, lessons to
be learned but it is all done with a light-handedness that is very
funny. The ability of the cast to laugh at themselves makes the film
quite enjoyable.

The moral of the story, standard Star Trek, is also handled
well. Although it's fed to us via Picard pontificating about the
rights of people to self determination, watching Picard pontificate is
not an unpleasant thing. His mellifluous voice can make anything
palatable.

Overall, I think non-Science Fiction fans may enjoy Insurrection more
than the hard core fans. Like most Science Fiction, it's really a
morality play. In this case, however, Insurrection contains lots of
morality, heaps of play and very little Science Fiction.

Rating: CR

© Nikki Lesley 1998
[email-masked]
http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~nikki/m_r/Intro.html
ratings system:                          HD: High Distinction
                                                       D: Distinction
                                                         CR: Credit
                                                          P: Pass
                                                      CP: Conceded Pass
                                                          F: Fail