#without this spock thing i would not have defined a digital style

[greengrossers]

Another of my favorites from my Spock project :)

[thesoliloquyofastranger-blog]

Star Trek: Insurrection

Star Trek: Insurrection, the third movie to feature the crew of The Next Generation, is one of the least popular Star Trek movies. It’s hated by a large number of Star Trek fans, and a lot of the people who were in the movie itself dislike it as well. This strikes me as odd for a few reasons. 

Firstly, of the Next Generation movies, Insurrection is the movie which is the closest in tone to the show. While this is often one of the main points of contention against the movie--that it could have been a two-part episode of the show and it wouldn’t have mattered--I think this is one the things that really worked about the movie.

A lot of the Trek movies had plots that could have been two-part episodes, or at least elements that could have fit right in with the kind of plot you’d expect in one of the shows. For example, in The Undiscovered Country when Kirk and McCoy are being held captive at Rura Penthe, the story set on the Enterprise with Spock and the rest of the crew working out the issues regarding the radiation and the apparent firing of the torpedo could have been out of a television episode, or at best, a television movie.

And yet, The Undiscovered Country is one of the movies that are generally regarded as being the cream of the crop of Trek movies. While there was a lot more happening in that movie than the firing on the Klingon flagship, it still had moments that would have been right at home on a television show. It’s almost like these movies are--and bare with me here, I know this is going to be a shock--are based on a television show.

Secondly, there is a moral position taken in this movie--namely that the needs of the many do not necessarily outweigh the needs of the few. This is especially the case when the “needs of the many” are being defined as they are here in Insurrection as being the medical needs of several million people, many of whom won’t start feeling the effects of the planet’s rings for years; and when the “needs of the few”, as defined by Insurrection, are the right to self determination and to keep their culture.

This style of moral position is quite common in the Star Trek universe. We see Kirk taking a similar position in The Search for Spock, where the option he chose was to risk provoking a shooting war with the Klingon Empire in order to restore the life of his friend.

We also see Picard making similar kinds of moral choices in The Next Generation, where he’ll choose to ignore the Prime Directive when he finds it inconvenient in order to save a culture. One example of this is the episode Homeward, in which Picard elects to save the populace of one village rather than to sentence them to death with their planet.

“Ah,” you say, “but the difference here is that the Federation is at war during Insurrection and there were strong medical benefits to those rings.” To this I respond, look at the effects of those rings--their healing powers were quite potent when you were being exposed to them (after all, la Forge could see without the help of twenty-fourth century technology on the surface of the planet), but faded fairly soon afterwards (he was blind again in Nemesis).

Even if the Son’a plan to extract the rings using the metaphasic collector and find a way of artificially exposing people to the radiation had worked, there was no way to ensure that this effect would continue over the long term. After all, the reason why the Ba’ku had been able to essentially live forever was because they’d lived on the planet for hundreds of years.

This brings up one of the weaknesses that I believe exist in the anti-Insurrection vitriol. While there were definite medical benefits to the rings around the Ba’ku planet, even the people who wanted to extract the rings knew that there was no way to have the benefits take effect quickly enough without extracting them.

Had they artificially exposed people to the radiation via hypospray, they would have to find some way of continuing the exposure over the long term; either because people would keep needing the treatments to remain well, or simply because the demand for the substance would become so high because of the ongoing war with the Dominion. 

It was pretty clear that neither the Federation nor the Son’a had any way of doing this, because had they been able to artificially replicate the rings’ radiation, they would have done so already. 

Of course, on the flipside, there is a weakness apparent in the movie--the villains’ motivation doesn’t seem to hold up to scrutiny. While they sought an extended lifespan by injecting themselves with the radiation and to benefit their own respective peoples, it was quite clear that this wouldn’t work over the long term. 

By the same token, it seemed like a lot of the main powers within the Son’a ranks weren’t exactly mentally stable. And in the case of Admiral Dougherty, there really have been very few admirals presented in the Star Trek universe that haven’t been evil for some reason or another.

The fourth reason why I think this movie isn’t as bad as everyone thinks is that of the first ten Star Trek movies, Insurrection really is one of the best shot. This is very evident during the title sequence, which is the most engaging of any title sequence of any of the Star Trek movies.

This is really a peripheral point in my mind, but it does factor in for me. While the CGI in this movie hasn’t held up very well at all, the cinematography has.

Speaking of Insurrection’s CGI, if you ever wanted an example of why movies should probably use both practical and digital effects, this movie is a pretty good example of it. While the CGI in First Contact has generally aged pretty well, it didn’t really do so here.

This is really the biggest thing that dates the movie. The only other thing this movie could have really done that would have dated it more would have been to include a soundtrack of the biggest hits of 1998. Thankfully, this wasn’t really a huge possibility thanks to Star Trek’s genre and setting.

Overall, I did really like Star Trek: Insurrection. There were a few places where I think the movie fell short, but for the most part, this is a movie I really liked.