I.A.M. Musing About…

Where did this one come from? No, seriously; where? Some back-of-the-drawer treatment that someone pitched in a desperate attempt to get something – anything – considered for the TV series?

Star Trek IX: Insurrection (1998)

The crew of the Enterprise (which became NCC-1701E a couple of films ago, by the way) are now charged with the initial bonding of a relationship with the peaceful Ba’ku peoples, who live in harmony with nature and reject any kind of technology. Thus, the notion of Data being both a robot and trustworthy is a bit much for them to deal with, but who can blame them when we all fear the on-coming Robot Apocalypse? …or maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, this distrust – nay, eschewing – of technology means there’s a very fine line to be travelled during negotiations to include the planet in the Federation. The long-unmentioned “Prime Directive” suddenly comes into play here, reminding the crew that no Starfleet expedition may interfere with the natural development of other civilizations. Merely having Data wander about and admit to what he is could be considered to be over-stepping the bounds of the rule.

Never the less, the real problem is with some ‘bad men’ who want to take advantage of other resources the planet has, which include all sorts of healing and restorative properties it possesses. We can tell they’re bad, because they have funny accents and have servant girls who never speak. Ooooohhhh! They’re eeeeeee–vil! Sadly, they also have some pull with Starfleet and the Federation, so in order to stop them, Picard and the crew are ‘going rogue’ as people seem to like saying these days, instead of “taking the law into their own hands” or “ignoring orders and doing what’s right instead”.

There’s some pretty damned good visuals here, especially the death of one of the bad guys near the end. Fun stuff.

The writing team seem to have decided to further expand the inter-connected-ness of the various TV shows running with the films. This is where it really starts sticking out a mile, as opposed to the last film where there’s merely a connection which is convenient to bring Mr. Warf back into the fold, yet the specifics don’t mar the enjoyment of the story itself. Here, however, there’s some sort of pre-existing romance between Counselor Deanna Troi and Commander William T. Riker, which for those not watching whatever show it began on comes as a bit of a shock. In other words: me. It works, and has valid use developing the characters and the plot here, but its starting-point is outside the story here, thus we become to be outsiders suddenly, which is not the way to make your audience feel, unless you have someone in the story with whom we can identify, and then they get the back-story explained to them. If we’ve never met the two characters before, it wouldn’t matter as much, but as this is the third film we’ve seen them in, and there wasn’t even a trace of anything in the last one to hang this on, it’s something that really ought to have been dealt with better.

The story in general feels a bit thin for a movie-length outing, and might even have felt the same for a two-part TV episode. I’d be willing to take a crack at editing the thing down to a 44-minute episode length, and suspect that the result would not feel as is much had been lost in the doing of it. There’s so little at stake at times that it’s tough to care about what happens to whom for most of the film. There’s a damned good story in there, had it been better developed or fleshed out properly.

Star Trek IX: Insurrection (1998)
Paramount Pictures presents

Directed by
Jonathan Frakes

Writing credits
Gene Roddenberry (creator: Star Trek)
story by Rick Berman & Michael Piller
screenplay by Michael Piller

This year, I’ve been watching DVDs from the library for a number of reasons, mostly to do with a combination of “filling in the gaps in my ‘pop culture’ knowledge”, as well as a concerted effort to better understand story editing by both watching a film and then re-watching listening to people who have studied that particular movie for years in order to better appreciate the themes, plot construction, symbolism, and so on.

The process would be nothing without the secondary audio tracks. Sometimes it’s like having actually been through the film-making process with the people involved.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 6th, 2011 at 3:15 pm and is filed under movies, Personal, Reviews, TV Series. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.