sonofccn wrote:@Cocytus
While I'm not disagreeing the movie has plot holes or anything but to me, how I interepeted it, Shinzon hates Earth because its represented everything that should have been his but wasn't. Had he been born there instead of Romulus he'd have been a starship captain, or at least free to pursue his wants and wishes, rather than being enslaved in a dank pit with monsters. Similar to his hatred of Picard, whom is a reflection of what he could have been, and as for the Remans they likely were following their master's lead. Through it is likely that whatever culture they share with the Romulans wouldn't look favorably upon humanity.
I think your interpretation fits perfectly, and I really would like to have seen that onscreen. I would have liked to have met Shinzon early on, rather than having him foisted on the audience in the manner that he was. Seeing him anxious to meet Picard, wrestling throughout the film with the hatred he's been taught and the possibility of redemption represented by Picard would have made Shinzon a compelling villain.
But you bring up another point I want to touch on that's always bothered me about stories like these. Soran is alone. As a resourceful scientist, he could buy and trade his way to the technology he has, but he didn't have to convince anyone else to go along with an ideology. The construction of the Scimitar is handwaved as being "at a secret base." All right. But the other thing for me is that the Remans are completely one-dimensional monsters. One could simply draw a parallel to the Nazis or the Soviets, but in each case a powerful underlying ideology had to be developed and proselytized. We never see the formation of Shinzon into what he is aside from one brief shot of him in the mine, and we never see how he gets the other Remans to go along with the rest of his plan. Reducing the entire race to mindless zombies blindly following orders feels like another lazy stock plot.
I'm going to retrace what I said earlier. Insurrection has little going for it, but one place it feels refreshing is the character of Golna. Ru'Afo, like Shinzon and Nero, is hellbent on getting what he wants and, like Shinzon and Nero, he has a bunch of underlings following his orders. But Golna made the Son'a more than mindless monsters. He wrestles with the ethical and moral implications of what he's doing all throughout the film, and finally decides to put a stop to it. In this way, Insurrection felt a lot closer to the true morals and values of Trek than the other movies we're discussing. Trek is at its best when confronting and examining moral and ethical quandaries, and Golna does this.
I can excuse Nero, since I never got the sense that there were very many people on the Narada. It seemed mostly automated. Hell, from the scene of Spock.0 stealing the Jellyfish, it seemed to be mostly empty space. But thousands of people must have collaborated in building the Scimitar. I can rationalize by saying that Shinzon hand-picked his crew to get the most fanatically loyal Remans he could. But it would have been nice to have seen that.
Praeothmin wrote:Nero saw the love of his life die while being assured by a friend that she would be saved (story seen in the comic book prequel to the movie)...
This is a huge issue for me. A movie's plot should not require additional material to explain it. As for the rest, I agree with what you say, that madmen don't follow reason, and I can see that the movie does work so long as I don't expect much from the villain. I merely state that I find plain old mad men rather uninteresting. For me, feral animals with weapons are never as threatening as controlled, psychologically powerful villains who don't even need weapons to achieve their aims. Of course, not every villain can be Hannibal Lecter.
The real issue with these villains is that Trek repeatedly shows us conflicts being won through means other than strength of arms. There never seemed to be any possibility of that with Nero or Shinzon. Showing us a Shinzon wrestling with himself would have been interesting, especially since, if you watch the DVD features, the director repeatedly states he didn't want the Shinzon character to be "just a bad guy." Yet he was. Villains devoid of that sort of complexity are little more than rabid animals, and a rabid animal can't be redeemed, it can only be shot. Seeing it shot resolves the tension and the story, but always leaves me feeling a little empty. Whether they're redeemed or condemned, the possibility of both in the villain gives him a level of complexity Nero and Shinzon lack. Then again, Khan isn't all that complex either. But Khan has the other thing I look for in villains that Nero doesn't. He's controlled, and control mixed with the hatred bubbling just underneath allows us to see the hero's victory more completely. Breaking down the villain's control is a big part of that victory. We see Khan lose his cool many times, but he always regains his composure until the very end, when he's bloodied and crippled and spitting his last breaths at the Enterprise. The same is true of the Emperor in ROTJ. He's calm and collected, playing a mind game with Luke he very nearly wins. It's only at the end, after Luke has demonstrated he can't be corrupted, that the control falls away and the rabid animal breaks out. The look on the emperor's face as he's force-zapping Luke is spine chilling because it contrasts so well with the control he exhibited earlier. Nero doesn't have any of this. He's yelling savagely in the first scene he's in as he impales the Kelvin's captain. He does get progressively worse, but he didn't start off with much control to begin with.
Well, different strokes for different folks. I hope nobody feels that I'm arguing or picking fights. I do tend to go way in depth with these things, but that's just because I love good movies. That's about 50 quid worth of tuppence, I should think.
