Insurrection (⭑⭑)

Unlike the situation with both Generations and First Contact, I am aligned with the majority of other critics and fans in my view of Insurrection: this is not a very good movie at all. Also unlike my feelings about the previous two movies (since I have strong feelings, positive or negative, about them both)…I mostly don’t really care about Insurrection or its badness. I don’t know if it’s mostly because First Contact had already killed too much of my enthusiasm for the TNG movies, or because Insurrection doesn’t actively trash or retcon existing characters or premises in the way that First Contact did, or because it’s, on the whole, frankly pretty bland (I mean, it’s all of these things; I’m just saying, I’m not sure of their relative weights), but more than anything, my overall feeling about this movie is that it’s forgettable and irrelevant. I’ve already said that, for me, the TNG that I knew and loved basically ends with Generations. My preexisting disillusionment with Trek at the point when this movie came out is not the fault of this movie, of course; still, Insurrection didn’t do anything to challenge that disillusionment, or to reinvigorate my engagement.

As with Generations, people often remark that Insurrection feels more like a glorified TV episode than a movie. With regard to the former, this critique never made any sense to me; here, though, it kind of does, even if it strikes me as a superficial diagnosis of problems that run deeper, and thus as only kind of hitting the mark. But to take this as a starting point: for sure, what we have in Insurrection is essentially a Planet of the Week type of story, without much in the way of stakes either for the larger Trek world (although, more on this later) or for any of the regular characters. Plenty of Trek episodes have been POTW stories, of course, and some of those have even been good, but the movies have usually featured stories that were a bit “bigger” in scope and/or stakes. Does this automatically make Insurrection a lackluster movie? My take on this question is that, on a plot level, for one Trek movie to feature a somewhat quieter story would not necessarily be an awful thing (even if I can also understand feeling at least a little disappointed about it). On a character and thematic level, though, I definitely want quite a bit more from any given Trek movie than what this one has to offer. And then, looking beyond the abstract question of whether an “episode-like” Trek movie would ever be acceptable, two much more relevant questions suggest themselves: First, was this a good time/context (within the larger Trek continuity) for such a movie? And second, was the particular “more episodic” movie that we got actually any good? Alas, the answers to these questions are both “no”

In really, really broad strokes, there’s nothing particularly wrong with the core story of the movie, wherein a group of heroic characters fights to protect the inhabitants of an isolated and powerless village from callous outsiders who seek to forcibly relocate them—and, accordingly, much of the movie is watchable enough, and even reasonably diverting. Perhaps because of this, many who have dismissed Insurrection as a sort of glorified TV episode have balanced that criticism by allowing that it would, at least, have made a good two-part episode. I can’t agree with this, though. On this re-watch, at least (and I should note, for the record, that this was probably only the second time I’d ever seen the movie), I found myself feeling—even during its best moments, when I was basically enjoying the story—like that story had been kind of shoehorned into a TNG movie, and didn’t really connect organically with anything about the established setting, characters, themes, or overarching narrative of either TNG or the Trek universe in general. I mean several things by this, but here’s a start: The basic conflict in this movie positions our main characters as heroic underdogs who “go rogue” and take a noble stand, in defiance of orders, against an atrocity in which their government is complicit. But Star Trek in general is not, fundamentally, about (or particularly conducive to) this type of storytelling, nor are our characters in particular the sorts of people who readily make these kinds of choices. Trek’s backdrop is a quasi-utopian future, and TNG’s main characters (Picard especially) are representatives of the enlightened values that the Federation, in general, professes. Now, I’m certainly not saying that a story that pits them against their own government could never work—but I am saying that making such a story work requires a lot more effort than this movie is willing to put in, and should also feel like a much bigger deal (with more lasting repercussions) than anything in this movie does. This is true on a large-scale, word-building type level (what does it mean for the Trek universe as a whole, and future storytelling in it, that the Federation was willing to condone a bad enough thing that our heroes felt compelled to rebel and oppose it?), and it’s also true on a smaller-scale, character level (what does it mean for our characters to make such choices, and how does it connect with their individual arcs?). Insurrection doesn’t care about these kinds of questions; it just indulges in “heroes taking a noble stand” as a cheap feel-good cliche. It does so partly by cheating pretty hard on the actual plot/conflict setup (which I’ll address more later), and also partly by allowing the main characters to defy orders without ever facing any consequences for doing so…but even worse, for me, is how unconnected the conflict in the movie feels from anything about the main characters themselves. In different ways (and with, for my money, varying degrees of success), each of the two prior TNG movies featured character stories, in which the “outer” conflict playing out via the plot mirrored and/or foregrounded some kind of inner conflict for one or more of the protagonists. Similarly, in the OG Trek movies, Kirk and company were usually battling their own demons as much as any external antagonists (including in The Search for Spock, which does feature “our heroes” going rogue in a way that I wonder if the writers might have wanted to replicate here—but which does this kind of story right). And even in most episodes of TNG (or at least, the ones that are any good), the plot at least confronts the characters with difficult choices (even if they don’t always relate to those characters’ deeper and/or ongoing inner struggles) in a way that feels missing from this movie.

This is not to say that the movie has no aspirations at all with regard to character depth or thematic relevance, but its gestures in the direction of any such depth or relevance are, at best, shallow and incoherent, as well as being largely disconnected from the main plot conflict. For instance, undeniably, the movie in some sense wants to say something about the virtues of slowing down and appreciating small moments. This emerges mainly in character moments between Picard and Anij, the Ba’ku woman who serves as the main representative for this point of view. Also, it seems as though the moment very early in the film when Picard, chafing at the demands of duties with which he doesn’t want to be bothered, asks “Can anyone remember when we used to be explorers?” is meant as setup to establish the appeal of the Ba’ku lifestyle for him, and the reason why he later says to Anij that “there are days” when he yearns for a “slower-paced” life himself. But this attempt at a thematic thread has so many problems that I think the movie would actually be better without it. To begin with, this is not remotely a “lesson” that Jean-Luc Picard, the reserved, bookish intellectual and appreciator of solitude and reflection, needs reminding of—and that early scene, with the line about being explorers, strikes me as manufactured and disingenuous. He’s complaining about having to mediate a dispute, which has always been a very common type of mission for the Enterprise (how many TNG episodes revolved around this sort of thing?), so it’s hard to understand what simpler time he thinks he’s waxing nostalgic about; also, the line occurs in the context of an absurd sequence in which the other characters are frantically fussing about him and prepping him to deliver a simple diplomatic greeting, in a way that does not typify how they normally interact (he’s normally good at this sort of thing, for one; for another, Crusher seems to be dressing him!?); also, in a continuation of something that we saw in the early part of First Contact, he’s being whiny about his role and his duties in a way that seems very out of character for him, to me. Plus, the fact that the dialog connects his supposed feeling of being inundated with undesirable duties to the Dominion war implicitly equates his disappointment at having to delay some archeological mission with the suffering of those actually fighting the war (for example, everyone on TNG’s spinoff/sister show DS9, which was in the thick of it when this movie came out), making him look even more self-indulgent and out of touch. (This relates to my feeling that, if the Trek writers wanted to do a “quieter, less epic” movie, they picked an awfully weird time for it.) But also, PIcard is saying here that he longs to “explore strange new worlds” and “boldly go” and all that— not that he wants to retire! Connecting this (manufactured) moment of world-weariness to Anij’s ability to appreciate “perfect moments” seems pretty tenuous to me, and Anij herself contrasts Picard’s “explorer” nature with the stillness and contentment (and, frankly, isolation) that she prefers. Stepping back, though, the bigger problem that I have with the “slowing down” motif is that it’s connected to the rest of the movie pretty much only by having the Ba’ku symbolize its allure, and not by making the conflicts that drive the plot revolve around it in any meaningful way. The Son’a, I guess, rebelled against this ethos centuries ago, but in the present they’re mainly driven by vengeance and by not wanting to die (and the plot arranges for them not to have enough time left to take a more patient and cooperative approach to solving their problems); plus, they’re boring one-dimensional thug villains, so who really cares about them? And as for Admiral Dougherty, he’s basically a big-picture, ends-justify-means guy, and the big argument between him and Picard revolves around the ethics of relocating the Ba’ku, not about (say) patience. So, the movie’s main stab at thematic relevance is entirely tangential to its actual plot. And yes, this remains true despite the extremely lame attempt to connect them at the end via Picard’s lines about how he can’t retire to Ba’ku (!) because “these are perilous times,” and he is needed among his own people, “if only to slow things down at the Federation Council.” I mean, this is a pretty weak attempt at connecting events to the movie’s half-assed thematic motif any way you look at it—but worse, it’s also a wholly meaningless gesture. Because, if this movie had been used to introduce some big ongoing narrative arc about Federation corruption, which had then been followed up on elsewhere (on DS9, to be sure, but also in a future story featuring Picard trying to do something about it, as is implied by his lines here), that would have been something. But of course…it wasn’t.

Another aspect of what I mean in saying that the storyline of Insurrection feels artificially shoehorned into a TNG movie concerns the deeply underbaked premise/plot logic behind the Ba’ku relocation conflict and the “fountain of youth” properties of their planet, as well as just how full of shit the Ba’ku actually are. If you read other reviews (or, say, the comments section under Jammer’s review), you’ll find takes on this that are all over the board, but include plenty of people saying, in one place or another, most of what I will have to say here (and as usual, I find William B’s lengthy comment particularly thorough and insightful). But, to attempt to summarize what I see as the main issues relatively succinctly: First, I (in common with plenty of others) find the trope of the scientifically advanced culture that has chosen to abandon technology rather trite and silly, as well as particularly out of place in Star Trek. More to the point, though, the Ba’ku’s whole pose of peaceful contentment with the simple life, and Anij’s line questioning “where can warp drive take us, except aware from here,” turns out to be nothing but smug hypocrisy once we learn that they founded their idyllic little commune on a fucking magical planet that renders them immortal—not to mention that they found this planet (after abandoning an original one that they ruined) by using advanced technology. (When Anij voices her doubts about there being many “offworlders” who wouldn’t be “tempted by the promise of eternal youth,” is there any acknowledgement from her that she, and her people, are no different, except in having had the good luck of being the first to discover it?) Anyway, then we come to the whole problem where, yes, of course it’s wrong to abduct people and secretly relocate them from their home—but also, are these 600 people really uniquely entitled to the benefits of this place simply because they stumbled across it before anyone else? Even though they’re only using one tiny part of the planet, and in spite of the planet’s vast potential to yield incredible medical advances and alleviate suffering on a massive scale? The movie entirely sidesteps these questions, to its massive detriment. (The Son’a, we are told, can only reverse their condition by doing a thing that will destroy the planet, so there’s not much space for compromise there—but the Son’a also aren’t really our people’s problem, and they also squander any chance of winning our sympathies by being Obviously Evil murderous assholes. The Federation’s interest in the planet, though, as represented by the mad Admiral, could have been pursued separately and in a non-evil way! But the movie clearly didn’t want to go there.) So, the Federation discovers a mostly uninhabited planet that effectively makes immortality possible, and…they pretty much just shrug, leave its one tiny village to enjoy it, and move on? And the movie in which this happens makes no effort to explore the concept of a planetary fountain of youth thematically, but instead opts to portray the few lucky bastards who live there as somehow wiser and more enlightened than the rest of us for their embrace of a “slow-placed” lifestyle and ability to “enjoy the moment”…which are literally the result of their getting to live centuries-long lives on an isolated planet that’s free from the ravages of aging and disease? This is total bullshit. It sure seems like what happened here was that the writers wanted to cook up a scenario wherein our heroes could take a noble stand in opposition to the powers that be, and Picard could have a dalliance with a serene, sage-like woman, so they slapped something together half-assedly that provided for these things without putting any thought at all into whether that something made actual sense, or fit into the larger narrative of the Trek universe, or might even lend itself better to some wholly different sort of movie from the one that they apparently wanted to make.

There’s other stuff that one could say about Insurrection. For instance, it does try halfheartedly to do some stuff with some of the other main characters (besides Picard, I mean). Having the magical radiation planet influence Riker and Troi to rekindle their romance (after how many years?) was an interesting idea, but a) it’s not obvious why it would have this effect, and b) it’s also kind of not enough, on a character level; if these two were going to finally get (back) together, I’d like for it to have felt less out of the blue, and as though it were happening as result of something relatable arising from what’s going on with them as characters. I do kind of appreciate Worf’s line at the end, when he tells Riker “Your feelings about her have not changed since the day I met you, Commander,” though. However, this brings up the whole subject of Worf in this movie, which… You know, I totally get why the writers wanted to keep including Worf in the TNG movies, and in their place, I would have wanted to do the same. But having made the decision to bring him onto DS9, I’m afraid it ends up being my view that they just needed to let go of this. When they finagled him onto the Enterprise in First Contact, it was a stretch; this time, they don’t even bother to come up with an actual explanation, and have the audacity to make a joke of this by having him get interrupted in the midst of relating why he has shown up! And then, for no reason at all, Picard decides to ask him to stick around while they go check out what’s up on Ba’ku…? It’s super-dumb. And for what payoff, exactly? The effects of the planet regenerate Geordi’s eyes (!), and stimulate romantic feelings in Troi and Riker, but poor Worf just becomes the butt of some lame Klingon puberty humor. Really?? Overall, the whole thread of the planet’s effects on the characters feels like it’s mostly just there to provide the clues that lead Picard to realize it’s a fountain of youth (and secondarily as fodder for terrible humor; need I mention Data for some reason mimicking Troi’s line to Crusher about her boobs firming up?), rather than to do any actually interesting character stuff. In the early part of the movie, the whole bit with Data seeming to have gone rogue, and then the explanation about how his ethical program was basically flying him blind, without the benefit of his higher brain functions, is hard to know quite what to make of. It serves no obvious narrative purpose, unless you count providing a pretext for the scene where Picard districts him by getting him to sing some GIlbert and Sullivan (which I confess to finding funny, somewhat in spite of myself), and it gives me some misgivings about one too many instances of having him go rogue in one way or another (even if this one proves to be basically benign), but it’s not inherently terrible or anything, I guess. Mostly, this movie makes it seem like the writers were just out of good ideas for Data beyond using him for comic relief (and the reference to his having “left his emotion chip behind” when he initially went to Ba’ku certainly earns the movie no fucking points). As for Crusher…as usual, she gets essentially nothing in the way of character material.

I could also try to talk about how the final twenty minutes or so of the movie suddenly kicks its heretofore relatively low-key plot into overdrive, throwing twists (the Son’a are actually Ba’ku!), escalations (Ru’afo decides to murder everyone, and starts with Admiral Dougherty!), changing loyalties (Picard intuits that Gallatin, the Son’a second in command, has a conscience, and persuades him to betray Ru’afo!), plot gimmicks (Picard and Gallatin somehow beam the other Son’a onto the holo-ship!), and big action sequences at us so fast that it becomes hard to keep up (let alone work out whether or not it all actually makes sense)… But honestly, what’s the point? It was already a bad movie before this, and in some ways the chaotic, too-quick resolution section is a blessing. Enough said.