Star Trek: Insurrection (4K UHD)
|  Star Trek: Insurrection was the ninth installment in the Star Trek movie series and the third to feature The Next Generation cast originally introduced on television in 1986, but in many ways it is closer in spirit and tone to Gene Roddenberry’s original series than any of the other movies, with the exception of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). Like the television series, Insurrection uses the genre of science fiction to address explicit social and moral questions, which is both the film’s strength and its weakness. On the plus side, it is certainly admirable that screenwriter Michael Piller (working from a story he concocted with fellow Next Generation scribe and producer Rick Berman) would stay true to Roddenberry’s spirit and use the film as a pretext for exploring important issues. The idea of science fiction as a forum for the expression of liberal consciousness is hardly new, but as sci-fi movies in the 1980s and ’90s were becoming more and more about special effects and spectacle than ideas and ideology, such a move was very nearly radical. On the negative side, the ideas are, not surprisingly, handled without a modicum of subtlety, with the most explicit messages being stated in sometimes ham-handed fashion by various characters making grand speeches. Again, this is really just par for the course; it’s not that Star Trek: Insurrection handles its ideological material badly, but rather than it replicates a little too closely the obviousness of the television series, which was forced to explicate its message in a brief 45 minutes. The movie ends up feeling, then, like an elongated TV episode. Much of the story takes place on the planet Ba’ku, where a colony of 600 people have been peaceably living for ... well, a very long time. It turns out that the radiation from the rings that surround Ba’ku have regenerative properties, in essence turning the entire planet into a fountain of youth. As complex societies are wont to do, the first inclination is to turn Ba’ku into a commodity, under the guise, of course, that it will be used for the beneficial purposes of healing and medicine. Thus, the Federation teams up with the Son’a, a race of humanoids who have been unsuccessfully trying to defeat the ravages of time with constant skin stretching, which has resulted in them looking more like mummies than the pride of youth. Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and the rest of the Enterprise crew discover a secret plot to remove the inhabitants of Ba’ku so that the planet can be harvested for its regenerative powers, which will apparently destroy it in the process. Thus, Picard is faced with a moral quandary. He realizes that it is wrong to forcibly remove the planet’s inhabitants, especially since it goes against one of the Federation’s prime directives (the obvious allegorical implications here point to the U.S.’s forced removal of various Native American tribes from their lands throughout the 19th century). Yet, at the same time, the removal of the colony is by order of the Federation itself, thus to stop it Picard will have to lead an insurrection. Being the upstanding pillar of moral authority that he is, it isn’t surprising that Picard chooses moral right over bureaucratic decision making, but it is not without its consequences. Given its ideological implications, Star Trek: Insurrection contains more than its share of speechifying, some of which is admittedly powerful in its own way. In response to a Federation bureaucrat’s assertion that it’s “only 600 people” who are being moved, Picard’s piercing question about how many it takes before it’s wrong is a cogent and memorable summation of the ages-old quandary about balancing what’s right for a few with the needs of the many. Of course, when you step back and really think about it, it is fairly difficult to justify why the 600 Ba’ku shouldn’t move when it means great gains for the rest of the universe. The film attempts to sidestep some of these philosophical difficulties by casting the debate in black-and-white terms via the clearly self-interested Son’a and their “blood feud” against the Ba’ku, but it is a rather flimsy device that doesn’t hold up in the long run. The speechifying is balanced by a fair number of well-wrought action sequences, most of which are rendered with CGI that varies from excellent to almost embarrassingly cartoonish. Picard’s final showdown with Ru’afo (go-to baddie F. Murray Abraham), the Son’a’s embittered leader, is a suspenseful bit of action filmmaking, as is the chase sequence in which the Enterprise, led by Commander William T. Riker (Jonathan Frakes, who also directed), evades a pair of So’na ships. There is also a clear desire to sex up the Star Trek universe, as we are treated to not only a candle-lit bubble-bath scene with Riker and Commander Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis), but also a burgeoning romance between Picard and a lovely resident of Ba’ku (Donna Murphy). (There is also a gag about the women of the Enterprise crew noting the planet’s regenerative effects on the perkiness of their breasts, which surely marks the first time the word boobs has been uttered in a Star Trek show.) Star Trek: Insurrection was not one of the more well-received films in the series, especially as it followed on the heels of the more action- and melodrama-oriented Star Trek: First Contact (1996). Nevertheless, it is a well-mounted production that is never dull, and the simple fact that it engages its audience intellectually and asks them to mull over difficult philosophical questions while also delivering a fair share of sci-fi action would certainly, at the very least, make Gene Roddenberry proud.
Copyright © 2023 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © Paramount Home Entertainment | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Star Trek: Insurrection is available both individually and as part of the eight-disc “Star Trek: The Next Generation” box set, which includes both 4K UHD discs and Blu-rays, as well as Digital Copies.Overall Rating: 
(2.5)
