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Well we’ve reached an uneven installment in the Star Trek Franchise which means: bad movie! And Star Trek: Insurrection doesn’t break the curse over the uneven installments but enforces it by being one of the dullest movies from the series battling the first movie over which is the most boring. It’s going to be a photo finish.
In this movie Picard and his crew of merrily men are in the middle of a conflict between the Federation and the inhabitants of a paradise-like planet where people live like Hobbits.
The plot is rather uninvolving actually. It’s all about the Federation who are condoning F. Murray Abraham, who looks like a Hellraiser Cenobite reject, to observe the planet and its 600 inhabitants for some mysterious reason which will be revealed in the final segment of the movie. Of course there’s a double agenda but the open agenda is a rather stupid one: at first they are observing these humans who live rather primitively, but have chosen to live that way, and later they want to move them to a holographic copy of their environment. It doesn’t make much sense and it was kind of unbelievable that the federation would allow this. Apparently the planet holds a valuable secret, but with only 600 inhabitants on an entire planet they just couldn’t go to the other side of the planet now could they? Oh, no because than the double agenda would come in trouble. If your first agenda is acquiring a lot of suspension of disbelief only for the second one to be executable than I think they should go back to the drawing board and come up with a better first agenda.
One of the key-players in the movie is Data, as he sets a lot of the story in motion by ignoring Federation orders and protecting the primitives. Data is here as annoying as ever, trying to inject the movie with some humor but failing miserably at it. One scene is especially cringe-worthy; to get through to the so-called gone rogue Data, Picard and Worf sing “A British Tar” in which Data then joins them. I came real close to putting a gun to my head.
The movie also feels like viewers should be familiar with the TV-series, more than other movies from the series. I might be wrong but I can’t remember Riker and Troi having a relationship. And Geordi looks totally different without his glasses. I had the feeling I missed out on all kinds of things that happened between this movie and the previous one.
The movie is slow paced with only a handful of uninspiring action scenes and I almost dozed off during the movie as it just couldn’t grab my attention at all. There are some redeeming qualities though as the planet does look like a paradise and the space-ship with yellow wings looked pretty cool. Even the bad guys had some cool make up even it was ripping off the look of multiple Cenobites with all the folded skin segments. Only the hooks where missing.
Star Trek: Insurrection is a boring movie and feels more like an extra long episode rather than a movie.
