Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

I finally purchased and watched the final Star Trek movie in the franchise and I found it to be an exceptionally riveting and emotionally moving denouement to the Star Trek corpus. Only nitpicking Trekkers without a real life would call this a sucky movie (and they do). What's up with hissyfit critiques on the order of "Capt. Picard had three more grey hairs in this movie -- man, he is showing his age and should be retired"? "Lt. Cmdr. Data's left eye is .001% less yellow than his right eye -- he looks terrible"? "After all the trouble with Lore, why would they reassemble B4?" (Hm, maybe something to do with "to seek out new life and new civilizations"?) "Too much emotion, not enough science" from some and "too much science, I wanted more emotion" from others? You just can't please the schematic nerds. Moviemaking is ideally about story, characters and drama -- with inevitable compromises (against the print genre in favor of the visual genre or against rigorous franchise consistency in favor of suspense). Nemesis holds up the best, in my mind, against all other Star Trek movies in this regard: No cheesy humor (Spock employing "colorful metaphors"), anachronistic pop culture references ("Lock and load") or deus ex machina time-travel machinations; instead we get a completely self-contained character- and story-driven narrative with a build and resolution that makes sense from start to finish. I was alternately frozen to my seat and moved with great sentiment by the transitions and choices of every character. Each actor did yeoman's work in his or her part. Picard found a match in his clone (who, for the benefit of his detractors, does not act like Picard because he's an evil clone -- and don't forget, it's nature and nurture) as did his clone in him. In the end, the Enterprise and Picard would have been bested if not for Data -- his legacy is secure. My favorite of the ten franchise films, Star Trek: First Contact, is more iconic and fannishly sentimental but Star Trek: Nemesis holds together and stands alone with greater dramatic integrity. 5 stars.