By BWilliams / 07:10, 3 June 2005 / Reviews - Products

After the critical and commercial success of STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT in 1996, it seemed that the future of the STAR TREK film franchise would safely be in the hands of the NEXT GENERATION cast and crew. DEEP SPACE NINE was already moving into high gear with its series-impacting storyline of the Dominion War, and VOYAGER was beginning to pick up steam. At the time, it seemed nothing could go wrong with the STAR TREK franchise. We were wrong.

Once Paramount Pictures commissioned a ninth STAR TREK feature film into production, executive producer Rick Berman had a tough job on his hands: find a worthy successor to create STAR TREK: INSURRECTION, the third NEXT GENERATION feature film, and bring it to life. To bring the latest installment to the screen, Berman turned to one of his long-time TREK collaborators, Michael Piller, who had been an integral part of the franchise since the third season of NEXT GENERATION and who had, along with Berman, co-created DEEP SPACE NINE and VOYAGER, to draft the film's screenplay. And to make sure that the script passed muster with the main cast, Patrick Stewart pulled double duty both on-screen and behind the scenes as an associate producer. As with FIRST CONTACT, Jonathan Frakes stepped behind the camera to direct the new film, and with guest stars such as Oscar-winning actor F. Murray Abraham, Anthony Zerbe, and Tony-award winning actress Donna Murphy on board, nothing, it seemed, could go wrong.

The film's story held a number of interesting elements to it. Picard and the Enterprise crew are drawn to a mysterious world in an area of space known as the Briar Patch, a world where the very effects of radiation hold with it the promise of eternal life. For the 600 colonists of this world, the Ba'ku find it an idyllic paradise. But in comes a secret mission from the Federation, who has allied itself with an equally mysterious race called the Son'a: to mine and harness the planet's radiation for all to use. At the heart of the operation are the two co-collaborators, Ahdar Ru'afo (Abraham) and Starfleet admiral Matthew Dougherty (Zerbe), both of whom have turned away from their beliefs and pursued their own selfish vendettas of profit. Picard arrives to initially investigate the malfunction of Data (Brent Spiner), who has been damaged in the undercover mission. What Picard uncovers is a sinister plot to break the Prime Directive and the threat to his own identity: if he goes along with Dougherty's plan, he risks breaking the Prime Directive by forcibly removing the Ba'ku colonists. If Picard refuses, his life and career are at stake. Picard, of course, makes the only decision he can. But the planet's effects are gripping the crew of the Enterprise in other ways. Will Riker (Frakes) and Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) renew their on-again, off-again relationship, Worf (Michael Dorn) experiences the agressive tendencies of Klingon adolescence, and Geordi LaForge (LeVar Burton) experiences life for the first time with normal eyesight.

You'd think that a story with lofty ideals would do well. So what went wrong? Everything. Instead of strong, compelling villains such as Khan or the Borg Queen, we are given sub-par villains with any lack of interesting appeal to their characters. Neither Ru'afo nor Dougherty have the commanding presence that Khan or the Borg Queen possessed; both Abraham and Zerbe act as if phoning in their performances wouldn't have mattered to them and their careers. For that matter, the film resorted to a number of off-key sophomoric jokes that detracted from the main story itself - no one's interested in Worf's reversion to Klingon puberty complete with pimples, or, for that matter, Deanna Troi's discussion with Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) about "boob jobs". Add to it the fact that the original final confrontation between Picard and Ru'afo wound up being reshot prior to the film's release in theaters. With a running time of 103 minutes, INSURRECTION wound up with the shortest running time of all the TREK feature films.

STAR TREK: INSURRECTION wound up grossing $70.2 million in its domestic theatrical release, barely earning back its production budget. Some viewed it as a modest success, and had this film been released back in the early 1980's, it would have still been a modest success. As opposed to FIRST CONTACT, though, it was considered a failure, given the weak story and lack of a strong, interesting villain this time around. INSURRECTION further cemented STAR TREK's "odd-numbered curse", as fans and critics alike cited the film's weak script as one of the key reasons for its problems. Visually, it looked, and still looks, nice, with progressed growth in CGI visual effects. Overall, at 103 minutes it played out like a decent two-part episode of THE NEXT GENERATION rather than a film in its own right. It still does. (For more insight into the development of the film and some of the problems encountered during production, track down a copy of Pocket Books' THE MAKING OF STAR TREK: INSURRECTION.)

The descent into mediocrity is perhaps what signaled the start of the downfall of the modern era of STAR TREK, both in film and on television. Weak, rehashed scripts and the lack of development of interesting characters, both main cast and supporting, began to contribute to modern TREK's downward spiral, and as with VOYAGER and later with ENTERPRISE, many people began to point the finger - sometimes the middle finger - at Rick Berman. On the film front, we had only one more film to go, and if it couldn't get any worse than INSURRECTION, many people would soon be in for a shock.

Continued...

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