I’m going to come right out and say it: Star Trek: The Next Generation is a better show than the original series. This isn’t to say TOS is without its charms, or that it isn’t hugely important to the franchise, but judged as a whole, it’s tough to argue that TNG isn’t superior; it’s more emotionally complex, more fully realized, and the caliber of acting (if only from the captain’s chair) is stronger. And yet Kirk’s Trek gave us Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, one of the best science fiction adventure movies ever made, along with the very credible Star Treks IV and VI, and even the worst entries in the TOS movie franchise have a certain crazed ambition to them, whether its meeting god, resurrecting a fallen friend, or copying 2001. When it came time for the original Trek to make the jump to the big screen, the writers, directors, and cast went for it, for good and for bad. The results weren’t always perfect, but there was never any doubt that these characters, and this world, belonged in the movies.
Sadly, I can’t really say the same for the TNG cast, and it wasn’t until watching Insurrection that I finally realized why. This isn’t any great discovery on my part, but it’s a question that’s nagged at me for years. For a while, I blamed the actors; Patrick Stewart is tremendous (although I never realized how tremendous until I watched this whole series), but Spiner, Frakes, and the rest of them? Pfft. A bunch of bland, charisma-vacuums. Now, having re-watched the movies and seen the series at its best and its worst, I admit I was off-base. Stewart is great, Spiner can be amazing when given the right direction, and everyone else in the cast is personable and charming, and really, that’s all you need for a movie with an ensemble this deep. It’s not like the original Trek was neck deep in Oliviers. Both shows were cast with professionals, and the only real difference between those professionals is that some of them could rise above bad material, and some of them couldn’t. But even with that distinction, I think the TNG cast comes out ahead. They’d almost have to; where TOS only had three seasons to expand from (and most of those three seasons were spent focused on Kirk, Spock, and McCoy), TNG was around for seven, and thought not every episode was perfect, there’s enough material there to give us a good sense of everyone on that bridge.
So it’s not the cast’s fault. But whose fault is it? Because this isn’t just a string of bad luck; there’s an underlying philosophy behind all four TNG movies that dooms them to, at best, forgettable entertainment, an approach that effectively neuters the strengths of the source material. Insurrection isn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Most people who’ve seen it probably don’t have any strong opinion about it one way or the other. At just over an hour and forty minutes, it’s the shortest Trek movie ever made, and it’s also, I think, the most forgettable. It’s competently directed—nobody does competently directed like my man Frakes (and lest you think I’m dismissing him, his work both on screen and off is one of the reasons this goes down so easily)—and it’s the only TNG movie that gives Picard a love interest. That’s basically it. If you knew nothing about Trek, and happened to catch this on TBS one Sunday afternoon, well, it wouldn’t change your life, but you wouldn’t weep blood or anything.
I kind of hate this movie, though, because I’m a TNG fan, and you have to be a TNG fan to get why all of this is so very wrong. Partly, it’s the premise: there’s a magical planet that makes everyone on it immortal. And not just immortal; anyone who stays there for any length of time also de-ages until they hit their point of greatest physical maturity, and then just sort of stays there. Forever. It cures wounds and illnesses (Geordi’s eyes are fixed), passions are re-ignited (Riker and Troi hook up again), and Worf goes through puberty again. I give that one its own category because it is stupid. Everyone else gets to be all excited and young and bad-ass; Worf gets a big zit, which is a crap joke, and also makes no sense. Why is he going through puberty again? The whole point of The Eternal Lands’ End Catalog Planet is that the inhabitants regress to their most perfect age. Nobody else is suffering from bad skin or “aggressive tendencies.” But hey, why miss a chance to make fun of the Klingon?
Sorry, I got distracted there. Anyway, given its life-giving properties, it’s not surprising that ELECP has attracted some attention. Notably, it’s attracted the attention of the Son’a, who are determined to leech the magical radiation out of the planet’s rings, and use it for their own fell purposes. They’ve got some help from Starfleet on this, because let’s face it, the curative potential of that radiation, if properly harnassed, could save millions of lives. Unfortunately, getting the radiation out of the rings means rendering the planet below uninhabitable. But it’s cool; while the Federation at large doesn’t know what’s going on, the head of the Son’a, Ahdar Ru’afo (F. Murray Abraham, who you should never trust, since he killed Mozart) is working with Admiral Dougherty (Anthony Zerbe) to transport the locals off the planet without them realizing it. Before they can pull off this trick (undoubtedly stolen from the Enterprise’s logs), Data discovers the holoship Ru’afo intends to use to spirit the Ba’ku away. He gets shot, the injury throws off his positronic net, and the movie starts with him intentionally revealing himself to the native population, who didn’t realize they were being observed, and then destroying the shield that keeps the Son’a/Federation outpost on the planet invisible.
That’s when Picard and the others are called in, and that’s how we get the meat, so to speak, of the plot. Once Picard discovers what’s happening, he’s pissed, and he and the rest of the crew take up arms in defence of the Ba’ku, who all turn out to be incredibly advanced but disdain from using technology because ick and gross and “We’re too evolved for that.” So that gives us our title, because clearly, our heroes are engaging in a kind of insurrection, except given the fact that no one at Star Fleet really knows what’s going on, and also given the fact that one of the movie’s big sub-plots has Ru’afo sending ships after Riker and the Enterprise to stop them from getting the truth out, I’m not sure who is supposed to be insurrecting whom. As far as I can tell, only two people die in the whole movie, and they’re both baddies (well, one of them’s a baddie, the other one is “morally compromised”), so that’s not all that exciting. The logic behind why Picard and the others make their stand is a little fuzzy as well. As Dougherty himself points out, the Ba’ku aren’t native to the planet; they stumbled across the life-sustaining power of the rings while fleeing from their own civil wars, and while it’s great they spent the centuries since then getting really, really good at quilt making, their “right” to immortality isn’t anymore sacred than anyone else’s. Picard does some speechifying about moral imperatives, and he’s apparently still guilty over all that Indian moving, but the issue is complicated enough that it deserved more discussion than a few shouted lines.