On Par With Watching Paint Dry
14 December 2002
Warning: Spoilers
*WARNING - POSSIBLE SPOILERS* If this film had been only an

hour long with commercials and I had watched it at home, it may

have been good. Here we have a film that has a great and

intriguing opening on Romulus. It then cuts to the main cast of

TNG which was the logical progression. That would have been

fine, but they decided to speak and it was from that point onward

that inanity after inanity would spew forth to the end of the film! Picard discovers the film's threat to be his clone. Data discovers a

version of himself made before his time. In the several minutes to

follow we are repeatedly hit over the head with, "I'm your mirror! No

I'm YOUR mirror! No, it's ME!" and "He may be me, but he's not me

because I'M a better me than HE is!" and "How can I be so sure

that I'm the me I should be and not him?" These dances of

supposed depth and inner reflection are revisited so many times

with no furtherance to the storyline that they go beyond cerebral

stimulus and go straight to evoking ennui. These constant bouts of

what the writers may have thought as "clever" and "deep" reflection

could have been completely cut knocking the running time down by

at least a half hour. Finally, it would be refreshing someday to see a villain who is

determined to carry out his greater goal to the exclusion of

everything else. Shinzon's (Picard's clone) personal goal is to get

a complete blood transfusion from Picard and, ultimately, kill him

so that he, Shinzon, would be the only Jean Luc in existence. His

greater goal, the one he shares with his compatriots, the Remans,

is to destroy the Earth with a weapon he's carrying on his ship.

Now, this ship is so formidable that it could either a) whiz by any

and all Starfleet vessels or b) destroy them outright in order to lay

waste to the Earth with the push of a few buttons and a seven

minute countdown. Of course, Shinzon's cronies are blown off and

the ship never makes it to Earth because Shinzon is too busy

trying to smash his "mirror image"! Feh! The ending was anticlimactic and the death of Data was as

poignant as a tumbleweed blowing through town! Who cares if

Data's dead since his predecessor's walking around with Data's

memories and experiences floating around in his data banks

somewhere? If they decide to make another TNG movie, I'm sure

Geordi will come up with some widget that'll make B4 as good as,

if not better, than Data.
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