Nemesis (No Spoilers, I Hope!)

Well, it didn't suck. Mind you, it's not The Wrath of Khan (although it obviously wants very badly to be; more on that in a minute), but it's not Star Trek V, either. I think I'd rank it at more or less the same level as STVI: The Undiscovered Country, a movie that had a number of flaws and a few individual scenes that really annoyed me, but was overall worth watching, nevertheless. Here's the rundown.

The Good:

A bit of something for everybody: humor, character stuff, action, space battles...

An interesting premise with some fairly signficant dramatic potential.

Wonderful FX that serve the story rather than overshadowing it. Visually, the whole thing is very impressive.

An ending that would have been surprising and affecting, if god-damned TV Guide hadn't basically given it away to anyone with the barest modicum of ability to read between the lines. Bastards.

Romulans. It's good to see the Romulans again. I always thought they had a lot more potential than the Klingons, based on their appearances in the original series, but they've been woefully underused ever since.

The Bad:

There were a number of plot points that I found, let's say, somewhat suspect, and one or two things that were just kinda goofy.

The bad guy isn't nearly as incredibly cool and impressive as he's obviously meant to be. I don't think that's really anybody's fault, though. The actor is obviously doing his damnedest, and his dialog isn't bad. (OK, it does a get a little hokey now and then, but, hey, whose doesn't?) I think the problem is that Ricardo Montalban completely ruined the chances of every Trek bad guy who came after him by setting an impossible standard to follow. If you ask me, only General Chang of The Undiscovered Country comes within an order of magnitude of him, and he doesn't actually get all that much screen time.

The movie's obviously trying to do way, way, too many things at once. There's this weird and complicated premise/plot which involves a lot of backstory that has to be conveyed. There's a lot of highly signficant character stuff. There are major changes that are taking place on the Enterprise. And since all of this has to be crammed into the same movie, none of it gets quite the treatment that it deserves.

The pace is a bit uneven, and drags in a couple of places between the big action scenes.

And, yes, large parts of it do remind me very, very strongly of The Wrath of Khan, to the point where several times I seriously half-expected to hear them quoting lines of dialog from the earlier movie. OK, if you're going to steal, by all means, steal from the best. But I'm afraid that the overfamiliarity of a lot of the story elements really worked against the effect they were trying to achieve. (I'd love to go into specifics, here, but I promised myself I would post no spoilers until the movie's been out for a while, since I don't want to do to anybody else what TV Guide did to me.)

Again, my overall assessment is that, yes, it belongs with other even-numbered movies, but that it ranks low in the even-numbered heirarchy.

Oh, and just to prove I'm still the Trekkie Queen: There's an unanswered Trek trivia question buried somewhere in the movie, and, for the record, the answer is "Pop Goes the Weasel." Do I get a prize?