20 Things You Didn't Know About Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) Part 1
Revisiting the Trek movie that brought the franchise screeching to a halt.
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00:00 Well, my friends, the time has come.
00:01 It was something we put off for as long as we possibly could, but no, no, no, no.
00:07 Nemesis is here.
00:08 Listen, I will defend some parts of this film.
00:11 There are very interesting stories behind the scenes, and it's entirely unfair what
00:15 happened to Tom Hardy after the release of this film.
00:17 It wasn't his fault.
00:18 He didn't write it.
00:19 For, however, the very legitimate problems that there are with Star Trek Nemesis, think
00:23 of the positives.
00:24 We have those beautiful new scimitar designs, and of course the warbird designs, even though
00:28 I do miss Andrew Probert's warbird a lot.
00:31 But anyway, we have that beautiful score from Jerry Goldsmith, which would of course unfortunately
00:37 be his final act for Star Trek before he passed away.
00:40 There are wonderful scenes, including the wedding, there's the return of Wesley Crusher,
00:45 even if it's a Blink and You'll Miss It cameo.
00:46 There's of course, there's Guinan.
00:48 There is so much.
00:50 So what the hell went wrong?
00:52 I'm Sean Ferrer for Trek Culture, and here are 20 things you didn't know about Star
00:57 Trek Nemesis Part 1.
01:00 Number 20.
01:01 Patrick Stewart originally played both Picard and Shinzon.
01:04 Though Tom Hardy of course ended up playing the part of the villainous Reaman leader and
01:08 Picard clone Praetor Shinzon, the very first version of the script actually had Shinzon
01:12 being portrayed by Patrick Stewart as a more direct older clone of Picard.
01:17 There sadly aren't any further details available online about how this would have changed the
01:20 story, though it's fair to assume that Nemesis would have climaxed with Patrick Stewart effectively
01:24 battling himself.
01:25 Ultimately, the potential for goofiness would have been extremely high had they gone this
01:29 route, so bringing in a young actor to portray a younger clone was probably the right call.
01:33 However, a few years ago, a curious fan cleverly deep-faked Stewart into the role of Shinzon
01:38 to give fans a speculative glimpse of how it could have turned out.
01:42 Number 19.
01:43 Brent Spiner wanted Data to die for one specific reason.
01:47 Data actor Brent Spiner actually helped write Data's arc for the movie, in turn earning
01:51 the single writing credit of his entire career to date, though John Logan is credited as
01:55 Nemesis' sole screenwriter, Spiner received a story buy credit.
01:59 Spiner had been lobbying for many years, at least since the days of First Contact, for
02:03 Data to be killed off, and so conceived a storyline for Nemesis where he would sacrifice
02:07 himself to save Picard and blow up Shinzon's scimitar.
02:11 Spiner's reasoning for wanting Data to die was simply as he felt he had aged too much,
02:15 and that it made no sense for Data to be so noticeably advanced in years, being an android
02:18 and all, and so Data died in Nemesis, albeit with the door being left ajar for him to return
02:23 through his android brother, B4.
02:25 In the end, much of Star Trek Picard's first season was ultimately concerned with tying
02:29 off Data's arc seemingly once and for all.
02:32 Number 18.
02:33 Numerous legacy characters almost had cameos.
02:36 Nemesis memorably features a fleeting cameo from Voyager's Captain Janeway as Vice Admiral
02:41 Janeway, who briefly interacts with Picard in a video call, but several other peripheral
02:45 Star Trek characters were intended to make cameo appearances in varying capacities.
02:49 Most prominently, Seven of Nine was written a role in the film, and according to Geri
02:53 Ryan herself it was intended to be a substantial supporting part rather than a quick wink-wink
02:57 cameo.
02:58 Ryan turned it down, though, because she wanted to take a break from her busy schedule working
03:01 on Boston Public, and also felt that the part never rose above being pure fan service.
03:06 She also turned down an offer to cameo at Riker and Troi's wedding because she again
03:10 felt it didn't make any sense for Seven to be there.
03:13 Elsewhere, Ashley Judd's Starfleet ensign Robin Leffler, a minor character who had appeared
03:17 in two episodes of The Next Generation's fifth season, was written into an early draft,
03:21 but it never panned out.
03:22 And finally, Denise Crosby lobbied producer Rick Berman to bring Tasha Yar's half-Romulan
03:27 daughter Sela back into the fold somehow, but the writers never found a way to work
03:31 her into the movie.
03:32 Number 17.
03:33 Director Stuart Baird clashed with the cast.
03:35 It's been frequently reported that many cast members ended up clashing with director Stuart
03:39 Baird, who wasn't particularly familiar with Star Trek before shooting started, yet producer
03:44 Rick Berman felt he would bring a fresh energy to the flagging franchise.
03:47 LeVar Burton and Marina Sirtis have since spoken disparagingly of Baird, Burton claiming
03:51 that Baird often referred to him as "Laverne" on set, and Sirtis calling him an idiot.
03:56 There were also reports that Baird was clueless enough about Trek that he thought Geordi was
04:00 an alien.
04:01 Bloody hell.
04:02 Though Jonathan Frakes was more diplomatic, he did speak about how he would have directed
04:05 the film differently, namely shifting the focus away from Shinzon and more towards the
04:09 TNG cast.
04:10 On the film's Blu-ray commentary, it's abundantly clear that Baird wasn't exactly happy with
04:14 how the movie came out either, namely the enormous creative restrictions placed upon
04:18 him throughout the process, such is the nature of working on a gargantuan movie.
04:22 Number 16.
04:23 Wesley Crusher originally had a speaking role.
04:26 One of the odder things about Nemesis is the blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo from Wesley
04:29 Crusher, which can be seen momentarily at Riker and Troi's wedding, yet he strangely
04:33 doesn't say a word.
04:34 This is because most of Wesley's role was cut during editing.
04:37 On the movie's DVD, there's a brief scene at the wedding after Picard's toast where
04:40 he speaks with Wesley, who's preparing to run the engineering night shift on the USS
04:44 Titan, serving alongside Riker and Troi.
04:47 It's a small moment, but like so many other deleted scenes in Nemesis, added welcome shade
04:51 and character to a film that was so thoroughly lacking in it.
04:54 Fans would have loved to have seen Wesley chatting with Picard again after years apart,
04:58 but alas, Baird made the bizarre decision to leave this short exchange on the cutting
05:02 room floor.
05:04 Number 15.
05:05 Riker's back hair was removed with CGI.
05:07 CGI sure is capable of incredible things, eh?
05:10 Well, it played a major role in one of Nemesis' most infamous and often ridiculed scenes,
05:15 the sex scene between Riker and Troi, which is interrupted by the extremely egregious
05:20 and inappropriate scene of Shinzon's attempted mental rape of Troi.
05:25 Because much of the scene focuses on Riker's back, the filmmakers asked Jonathan Frakes
05:29 to shave his back for a more aesthetically pleasing visual, but he refused, and so it
05:33 fell to VFX Company to do the work instead, giving Riker's back a digital shave.
05:38 And to be fair, you'd never even know it, even though it's tough to believe that somebody
05:42 actually cared this much about Riker having a tufty back.
05:45 Number 14.
05:46 Marina Sirtis almost didn't return.
05:49 As much as she's an integral member of the TNG crew, Deanna Troi almost ended up being
05:53 conspicuously absent throughout Nemesis, due to negotiations breaking down between Marina
05:58 Sirtis and Paramount.
05:59 As it often does, the crux of the issue came down to money, with Sirtis feeling insulted
06:03 by the apparent lowball offer given to her.
06:05 In interviews, Sirtis has spoken extensively about feeling undervalued compared to her
06:09 male co-stars in particular, and claims that Paramount threatened to put Seven of Nine
06:14 in the movie in her place if a salary agreement couldn't be reached.
06:17 Sirtis plitily retorted to the studio, "Jerry Ryan won't do it for that money, that's
06:21 for sure."
06:22 Thankfully, the matter was eventually resolved, and though Sirtis was ultimately one of the
06:26 cast's more vocal critics of Nemesis, or to be exact, of director Baird, she maintains
06:31 that she was happy with Troi's role in the film.
06:34 Number 13.
06:35 The Enterprise ramming into the Scimitar was a, mostly, practical effect.
06:40 Though the previous few Next Generation movies began progressively phasing out practical
06:44 effects and had deferred to almost entirely digital shots of the Enterprise in action,
06:49 a practical Enterprise effect was employed in Nemesis for one sequence.
06:53 When the Enterprise rams the Scimitar on Picard's order during the final battle, a practical
06:57 seventeen-foot Enterprise saucer was built and collided into a model of the Scimitar.
07:02 The film's production crew shot the effect in slow motion at 360 frames per second to
07:07 imply a greater sense of heft to the miniatures, and also hung the models upside down so the
07:11 resulting debris from the clash would fall up as it would in zero gravity.
07:15 VFX company Digital Domain then added explosions and other ambient elements to the scene, ensuring
07:21 the end result is a winning marriage of practical and digital effects wizardry.
07:26 Number 12.
07:27 An estimated 50 minutes of material was cut.
07:30 On Nemesis' DVD, Rick Berman claims that roughly 50 minutes of material was cut from
07:35 the theatrical release in order to achieve a more commercial 117 minute runtime.
07:39 Though 17 minutes of cut material appears on the DVD, that leaves over half an hour
07:44 of footage unaccounted for.
07:46 Most of the cut material was apparently character-centric scenes that fleshed out the relationships
07:50 of the Enterprise's crew, which were cut to keep the emphasis on the battle between
07:53 the Enterprise and the Scimitar.
07:55 This includes a far longer wedding sequence in which Picard and Data have a lengthy heart-to-heart,
07:59 a more involved subplot about Shinzon's obsession with Troy, more scenes with Data
08:04 and B4, bigger parts for Worf and Dr. Crusher, and a more prolonged epilogue.
08:09 It's infuriating that so much of this material remains locked away, because much of it sounds
08:13 like it would have added considerable weight and nuance to a fundamentally threadbare film.
08:18 Number 11.
08:19 Jude Law was considered for Shinzon.
08:22 In the summer of 2001, a few months before shooting was set to begin, rumours did the
08:26 rounds online that Jude Law had been cast in the role of Shinzon, and though this of
08:31 course turned out to be untrue, he was indeed in contention for the part.
08:35 Originally, the plan was to find a name actor who resembled a younger Patrick Stewart to
08:39 portray Shinzon, and Rick Berman settled on Law.
08:42 However, director Baird argued that Shinzon should be portrayed by a basically unknown
08:46 actor, eventually leading to Tom Hardy being cast in the part following an extensive, and
08:51 by Hardy's word, "appalling" audition process.
08:54 While it's easy to imagine Law pulling off the required menace, it was probably better
08:58 to go for a less established actor in the role.