I am one of the very few Trekkies who actually enjoyed Nemesis. Went to see it twice in the theaters. I like dark movies, and although Nemesis certainly isn't Gene Roddenberry's usual Trek, I'd watch it over Insurrection or Final Frontier any day. I felt the movie brought a nice sense of aesthetics that have always been lacking in The Next Generation. The Scimitar is easily one of my favorite ships in Trek. But that said, I have some floating objections to the film. The synthetic music was corny, Shinzon went out a bit too easily, the Enterprise's artificial gravity still worked after all that beating, and the opening credit type style looked like this:

WTF is this? This is a complete departure from anything resembling Trek and it just looks cheap. Stuart Baird, was this your idea? Because if it is, I'd have to drop credibility points right here. I understand you wanted to make a cool movie and not necessarily a Trek film, but you're inheriting a legacy here and there's only so much leeway fans are going to give you. You're more or less on most Trekkie's blacklist, and this font just inches me closer to doing the same.

The first half hour of the movie I thought went pretty smoothly, but when the Remans were first introduced to our gallant crew, the cosmetically-obvious antagonist refers to himself as a "viceroy." While there's nothing wrong with this title, it immediately reminded me of another film that was released a few years before Nemesis. You know, with this guy:

A while later, the Scimitar crew is performing a download from "B-4" and we see on one of the monitors something similar from another movie:

The Remans are apparently plugged into the Matrix. Astonishing coincidence, or blatant rip-off?

Here we have Red Shirt Syndrome with the bad guys. You'd think that the strict Reman military machine would produce extremely effective security teams who wouldn't let themselves be easy targets for the other side to shoot at:

If you guys want Picard and Data, just throw over a flash grenade and you're done. You do have one of those, right? Otherwise, you're as lame as Stormtroopers standing out in the open while Han and Luke pick them off in the Death Star's detention area. Not that this scene has any physical resemblance, ahem.

We don't see phaser rifles often. However, I really have to wonder the practicality of weapons that have chrome or brushed stainless fixtures on them which can be spotted by the enemy a sector away. These all scream, "Look, I'm big, bright, and shiny so you can shoot me easier!" Do people at Paramount consult with weapons specialists at all when coming up with these designs?

Don't you also love the fact that later on in the movie, the Remans board the Enterprise and just happen to meet up with Worf and Riker's team, even though there are probably a bunch of other security details spread out across the ship? Wow, such an amazing coincidence. Another Trek trademark hard at work.

I realize that I'm bagging on the Remans a lot, but I also have to hand it to Riker who 1) has a phaser rifle, 2) is an experienced Starfleet officer, and 3) is at a close range to his target. This proves how bad of a shot he is:

You're gettin' old, Will. He wasn't moving that fast. Spend some more time at the phaser range before you head over to the Titan.

Now here's my big gripe: the good guys should have lost big time in this movie. They've used up all their torpedoes, barely have enough phaser power to scrub graffiti off the hull, the Scimitar has almost three-quarters of her shields left, and somehow the Enterprise was able to ram into the warbird? Come on now, I'm not buying that. Shinzon could've easily moved the ship aside and patted the Enterprise on the back with a "good try" and drained her shields even more. Picard gets beamed over, the medical procedure between Shinzon and Picard is performed, and voilà - the Federation is no more. All Shinzon had to say was, "Full reverse" right then and there.

Oh sure, this looks dramatic, but for me it's just not believable.

The Enterprise is not a battlestar. Something should have exploded ... perhaps the whole ship.

So a few moments later while the Scimitar is reversing, we have Mr. Viceroy and Mr. Riker on a cross platform where due to the weight / stress / whatever one of the bolts holding it comes loose. Just like what happened with Kirk at the end of "Generations." Then we have Riker kicking the head of his opponent as he hangs on above some deep chamber. Just like Kirk and Kruge on the Genesis planet. The Viceroy finally falls like so:

Hmm, geez... This shot kind of reminds me of another scene from another science fiction saga. I just can't seem to put my finger on it...

BTW, how was Picard able to beam over to the Scimitar? Did the ship ramming take out the shields? Geordi's monitor clearly indicates a bubble still around the enemy ship.

So now Picard is running around the ship, managing to take out every single Reman he encounters. I guess there are no sensor alarms on the Scimitar when an unauthorized beam-in is made? Are both the ship disruptors and sensors out? And of course, once Picard makes it to the bridge he's able to take out every Reman there because the bad guys are always lousy shots, even though they're supposedly "bred for war."

Here we see the obligatory scary-looking, pointy-edged Thalaron firing claw with the nice shiny ring in the center. My precious....

So after a lame fight scene that is slightly better than the average Kirk-fu, Shinzon charges Picard with a dagger. Picard is able to bend free an apparently shoddily-constructed grab handle and uses it to plunge it into his opponent. Um, yeah. That was kind of a let-down.

Data arrives on the bridge just in time to slap a one-man transporter onto Picard. After the audience sighs with relief that the Captain will live to see another day, Data (unnecessarily slowly for dramatic poses, no doubt) raises his phaser and shoots the Thalaron core. The Scimitar blows up ... with an expanding ring that we've all become accustomed to seeing like in "The Undiscovered Country." I don't know if this would happen in real life, but I guess it's cool looking or something.

While I can understand cutting it from the final release perhaps due to pacing, I thought this deleted scene from the DVD would have been worth it to see finished on the big screen where Picard and Data talk about growing up and moving onto new worlds in life:

To wrap up, I liked Nemesis. It isn't my favorite Trek and I still have a lot of complaints about it, but it had qualities which were important to me enough to make up for other shortcomings which Gene probably wouldn't have signed off on. I think I can agree with everyone else though that Stuart Baird should never be given a job directing a Trek film again. You can't make a great Trek movie without understanding its history.