After the last films over the top action I guess they decided to make a "more science fiction" story. But they didn't really succeed. Stealing from Who Watches the Watchers was probably the best idea they had for the movie. But deciding to have it also be Journey's End and a psychotic version of Thine Own Self was just terrible. Also having this be the one where romantic plots from the show come to fruition is fine, but to just ignore that the show ended with Worf and Deanna together plus leaving Crusher out almost completely was pretty crappy. I don't know what the evil admiral in this one was thinking either, there is no way the Federation would actually stand for what he was up to if it ever looked into it.
The film opens with an idyllic farm scene being watched through a cloaked observation post. Then Data goes crazy and takes off his invisibility cloak and starts fighting everybody and even blasts the observation post revealing it. Cut to the Enterprise, weak excuse for Worf to be there and Picard is doing some diplomatic thing he doesn't want to be doing. They learn that Data has freaked out and go to investigate directly against orders. The planet is in some dangerous nebula or something. The operation at the planet is being run by stretchy faced villain Ru'afo who they do nothing to give any depth to other than surprise he is the same species as the "primitive Ba'ku below." But now he makes drugs and enslaves other races and stuff like that. And has a stretchy face.
The Enterprise arrives and finds the situation on the planet is calm. The Ba'ku aren't really holding people hostage at all so WTF. Also Data finds a cloaked holodeck ship that is clearly being prepped to remove all the Ba'ku people. The Enterprise gets into a fight with the bad guy ship and Picard leads the Ba'ku to caves and falls in love with their leader. The Ba'ku aren't actually primitive it turns out, they just found a fountain of youth planet and have given up tech. The evil guys want to steal all the fountain power which will wipe out all life at the same time. The Enterprise gets into a fight in the nebula and has to eject its warp core but still has power for some reason.
Picard ends up getting shot with a transport tag and brought aboard the bad guy ship. He manages to guilt the number two guy into helping him and they get Data to blast the bad guy shields so they can transport all the bad guys out and onto a holograph of their ship without them noticing (never mind that isn't how transporters work in Trek). Ru'afo activates the death/life stealing satelite thing but it is the fake, not the real one so once he figures it out he beams over to the real one and turns it on. Picard has to go over alone for no good reason and fight him. Picard blows the thing up and gets beamed to safety by the still warp coreless Enteprise at the last minute.
Review: This wasn't quite as bad as I remembered. Not as good as First Contact, but better than Generations. I still wouldn't recommend it to anyone, especially anyone who actually cares about Star Trek.
3 out of 10
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