A Brief Guide to Star Trek

Next Generation
films. Several of the cast members put this down to Stuart Baird’s unfamiliarity (and seeming wilful failure to engage) with the
Star Trek
mythos. ‘I’m not an aficionado’, admitted Baird to the BBC. ‘There were little hiccups here and there when some people were offended I didn’t quite understand the back story. It’s incredibly important to them, so some of them would think directing this one, you surely should know it all. But God almighty, I wasn’t going to look at 178 episodes.’
    Baird was an action editor and director who saw his job as simply being to produce a fast-paced space adventure movie. He didn’t concern himself with the details of the
Star Trek
universe – he felt that was the writers’ and actors’ job. Baird told the BBC: ‘It’s big entertainment, but I know the fans take it hugely seriously. I took it very seriously to give you two hours of entertainment, with as much bang for your buck, and thrills, spills, emotion, and humour. That was my task, and not to get too precious about it.’
    Logan, whether by his own design or the demands of others, had stuck too closely to
The Wrath of Khan
as a template for the new movie, producing a poor imitation of the original – just as Shinzon turns out to be a poor imitation of Picard. The feelingthat
Nemesis
could have been any old SF action movie pervaded the final product, and it seemed to
Star Trek
fans that the film somehow lacked that very hard to define
Star Trek
magic that Gene Roddenberry had always gone to great lengths to protect.
    The release of
Star Trek Nemesis
was a calamity, with a US box office take of only $18.5 million over the opening weekend in December 2002 – the film was up against the latest instalments in other franchises such as
Harry Potter
(
The Chamber of Secrets
),
James Bond
(
Die Another Day
) and
The Lord of the Rings
(
The Two Towers
), and was beaten to the number one spot by the Jennifer Lopez comedy
Maid in Manhattan
. Total US box office take was $43 million (less than
Star Trek V
, making
Nemesis
the lowest grossing
Star Trek
movie, although totalling $67 million worldwide) – a huge collapse from
Insurrection
’s $70 million and
First Contact
’s $92 million. Apart from the strong competition from other movies that Christmas season, Rick Berman had little to offer in the way of explanation for the dramatic failure of
Star Trek Nemesis
with audiences. ‘Everyone from the studio to me thought we’d crafted a really good movie. And nobody came to see it. It wasn’t even a question of not getting good reviews. Any
Star Trek
movie opened and it’d have a huge opening weekend, but this one didn’t. To this day, [I] have some difficulty understanding why it met with such a poor reception. The movie backfired and there’s certainly a lot of room for discussion of why. It was sad and a little baffling to me.’
    In an interview conducted at the Atlanta, Georgia fantasy convention DragonCon, in September 2005, both Marina Sirtis and LeVar Burton were very critical of the final two
The Next Generation
movies.
Nemesis
failed, said Burton, ‘because it sucked’, while Sirtis in response suggested, ‘It didn’t suck as much as
Insurrection
. I fell asleep at the premiere of
Insurrection
.’ Burton clearly blamed Baird, noting that for the first six weeks of production he’d referred to Burton as ‘Laverne’ instead of LeVar, while Sirtis claimed Baird ‘didn’t even watch a single episode of
Next Gen
. [
Star Trek: The Next Generation
]’.
    Baird’s defence of his film was simple, even if the actual movie had failed: ‘My intention since I was a virgin to it all, was I wanted to make a movie that stands alone and doesn’t rest on all the past history.’ Sirtis claimed that approach doesn’t work on
Star Trek
: ‘There is a history, there is a legend. There are [
The Next Generation
] characters that have been around for fifteen years and have relationships with each other. Gene always used to say it’s a people show, it was about the people on the ship. [Baird] didn’t really take that into account.’
    The
Star Trek
movie series, from the arrival of
The Motion Picture
to the 2009 reboot, received fourteen Academy Award nominations (albeit mainly in technical categories), but didn’t win any until J. J. Abrams’
Star Trek
(2009). The most successful and most popular of the films featuring the original television casts had been
The Wrath of Khan
,
The Voyage