Star Trek 10 “Through A Glass Darkly”

Review by Vultural — April 2, 2012 @ 10:19 pm

This is a great improvement over the original.
I pulled up my copy of Nemesis beforehand and could barely sit through it. The pacing was deadly, and the narrative was cluttered.
Bionic Bob trimmed out the fat, and this movie goes!

The audio seemed fine to my ears. The video edits were smooth. The only “clinker” was the added bit at the end, though it was fun, nevertheless.

I am not a fan of STNG (prefer Voyager), but BB’s version of Nemesis is a winner, and I can recommend it to fans who tired of the series long ago.

8/10

Review by Sunarep — March 24, 2012 @ 5:09 PM

Man sometimes this site feels like a strange therapy holding together my childhood. Like Alien 4, Phantom Menace and so many more movies I liked Nemesis in its original form because I was not really very critical of it. I loved the fight against the scimitar and I have to confess that even the idiotic argo sequence was “cool” – maybe I was the target ADD-demographic back then who was responsible for this unmotivated action scene

Over the years Nemesis has not held up quite that well and I was not all that excited about it but now we have Bionicbob coming to rescue my childhood and give me a star trek: nemesis that I can watch without constantly rolling my eyes.

The edit is very bold and goes where no Nemesis edit has gone before – completely ripping out B4 is a bold move and it often takes bold moves from faneditors to finally make a significant improvement when a movie is that despised.

Without the action sequences it feels much more like a 2-part television episode with incredibly big budget. There is a lot of discussion and exposition and it feels like two predators circling each other until the battle breaks loose.

The edit moves at a fantastic pace, keeps all of the good stuff while taking care of annoying things (like not showing Tom Hardy on the photo Picard is looking at, thank god that is gone and what’s left is the discussion).
The finale is pretty much the same and while looking nice it still feels very “worn out”, it is a story about death and darkness and at the end you are quite exhausted that the star trek universe has become such a dark place.
Naturally most of the contrivances which no fanedit will ever fix are still there – Riker fighting Hellboy over a bottomless pit for the obligatory Riker-action-scene, the transporter not working even thought there is still the Captain’s Yacht, Picard playing Quake in God-mode when he goes to Shinzon’s ship

Overall this edit is very good there are just a few things I was not that happy with:

- when the enterprise leaves from Romulus the sound effect doesn’t really match the dynamic we see on screen
- Tom Hardy doing a Lurtz and pulling the metalbar through his body, necessary for continuity still atrocious
- the final scene has notably lower quality due to the fact that it is a deleted scene
- the safety-belt-chair gag is pretty dumb/not very star-trek-esque
- the 1-person-beaming-plotdevice is still very unbelievable

SPOILERS for the beaming device:

In the original the thing already feels forced into the story by being conveniently mentioned in the second act. But at least when Data uses it one knows what function it has. In the edit it bascially comes out of the blue and we are left with a “what the hell just happened”. Bob tries to smoothen this jarring device by showing us a flashback after the explosion explaining what it is – which actually helps a bit and is probably the best way to get rid of the B4 storyline.
Yet the flashback – while having some emotional resonance because of the line “we’ll find a way out together (loosely quoted)” – is a bit confusing: we have never seen this scene, did it happen? if it happened what did picard mean by finding a way together?
It throws in a bunch of questions to a silent moment where one should just mourn Data

END SPOILER

But overall except the beaming gripe this edit is a really enjoyable treat and I thank Bob once again for his fantastic work on all his edits.

Overall I enjoyed this edit of "Nemesis". Much of the filler subplots are gone (always a good thing) and what we're left is a tight film that moves along nicely. My main criticism with the film was towards the end when...

*** SPOILER ***

Picard is returned to the Enterprise by a device Data puts on him. This is shortly after the transporter fries and is told "that's it". Now, it's been a while since I've seen the original, so it's possible this transporter device is of Romulan design, but unless I missed it we never see Data ever actually pick this device up.

My second issue is after the Romulan ship blows up and Data is killed, we see Picard remembering Data giving him a data cartridge. Not only have we never seen this scene before (thus no reference as to what is actually happening) Data is also in non-starfleet clothes adding to the confusion. Again, perhaps I missed something while being distracted by my kids running around, but think if these scenes were explained I would have remembered. Because of this one scene I docked the visual editing a star as I think it would have worked better without.

The picture quality is just a bit below DVD quality with macro-blocking apparent in some scenes. While not terrible I would have liked a slightly higher quality. Adding to the lower rating of A/V Quality is that the audio is only stereo and not 5.1 as I've become accustomed.

Minus these minor issues I do think this edit is the better version of "Nemesis" and, if you're a Star Trek fan, it's worth checking out.

Review by DriggyDriggs — April 9, 2012 @ 3:17 am

Just watched this last night. Nemesis was also a disappointment to me in theaters. I was hoping for a special edition dvd, but instead what we got was the same theatrical version with poor quality deleted scenes in the special features. There was a time when I attempted a workprint of Nemesis myself, but I abandoned the project when I realized the deleted scenes were in such bad shape it would never be put up on the website. When I saw that BionicBob was attempting a version with B-4 completely gone, I was wondering how he would pull it off. On to the edit:

The good stuff:

- The wedding scene is trimmed. Thank God. Everything after Picard’s speech was dreadful. I’m glad it was all gone.
- The young bald Picard photo is not shown.
- No mind rape. It was done better in the TNG episode “Violations.” They basically ripped it off here and did it worse with a character that had no motivation to do it anyway. Glad it’s gone here.
- No B-4. B-4′s antics are just annoying. I’m glad he’s gone. Although I wish they had found a way to bring Lore back for this story so there was an actual parallel between Data and Picard. That would have required the director to actually be familiar with Star Trek, though. B-4 being gone makes the film much tighter, and actually gets rid of some other annoying things, like the federation “dune buggy.” However, removing B-4 does leave one serious narrative issue, which I’ll get into later.

The Not So Good Stuff:

-Some of the musical cues didn’t really mesh well due to scene deletions in the first 30 minutes.
-A minor plot hole was created because of a scene bring deleted. It is established at the wedding reception that Riker is leaving for his own command, but then he goes on a mission on the Enterprise right after his wedding. Why is he there? In the original film, they are giving him a ride, but they get diverted to Romulus. Maybe reinsert the scene where Picard tells him “the Opal Sea will have to wait” right after they are diverted to Romulus?
-Couple of continuity errors: Enterprise shown at warp a couple of times (one time out the window during the briefing scene) and then shown going to warp right after.
-The Viceroy is never established as having telepathic abilities in this edit, so Troi finding the ship through him and him feeling her presence seemed a bit contrived.
-Without the transport device having been introduced earlier during Picard’s capture, it’s appearance and explanation via flashback also seemed contrived. Unfortunately, without B-4, it would be hard to do Picard’s rescue from the Scimitar.

The faster pace gives this edit a lot of action, and I actually enjoyed quite a few of the edits. However, because of the narrative issues that I mentioned, my rating was lowered a bit.

Final Score: 7 out of 10