STAR TREK: INSURRECTION - This time, the crew of the Starship Enterprise is revolting!

Star Trek (9): Insurrection - Nip/Tuck

They say there's a curse on odd numbered Star Trek motion pictures, so to break this curse, they stopped numbering the films after Star Trek 6, but the curse didn't lift.

Star Trek: Insurrection, the ninth in the series and the 3rd to feature the Next Generation crew certainly lives up to the curse of the odd numbers. Not that Insurrection is bad to the degree that Star Trek 5 is bad, God no, nothing in the series matches that stinker. It's bad in the sense that Insurrection is basically a run-of-the-mill hour-long episode plot dragged out to fill about two hours.

The crew of the Starship Enterprise is back and they seem restless and bored with their duties of greeting alien diplomats and sitting around the universe waiting for an even numbered film so that the Borg or the Romulans will attack. Just when it seems that things can’t get anymore boring, the crew is ordered to the planet of the Ba’ku a race of eternally young and white humanoids who are being threatened by the Son’a. The Son'a are a race of ugly, bad guys, who are addicted to botox and elective surgery and are lead by equally ugly and apostrophized Ru’afo (F. Murray Abraham).

Things really get bogged down as the Enterprise crew, lead by Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) arrive and have to sing Gilbert & Sullivan tunes in order to stop a malfunctioning Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner) from revealing the Federation's "duck-blind" outpost, from which they watch the boring day to day blandness of the Ba'ku village.

Eventually the crew discover that the planet is being bombarded by a specific form of radiation that causes the Ba'ku to remain young, healthy and white. They also discover that the Son'a, with the inexplicable assistance of Federation Vice Admiral Dougherty (Anthony Zerbe), are planning on stealing the radiation to feed their own quest for eternal youth. Of course the catch is that the Ba'ku will all be killed by the radiation collector in the process.

Apparently the Star Trek filmmakers were suffering under the delusions that we, the Star Trek audience, want them to funny-up the franchise along the way. It's all good and touching when blind Geordi LaForge (LeVar Burton) temporarily regains his sight. But then the extreme silliness ensues as the crew begins to experience the effects of the de-aging radiation. Picard begins to chase after one of the local girls, Anij (Donna Murphy), Worf (Michael Dorn) experiences the heartbreak of Klingon acne, Crusher and Troi (Gates McFadden & Marina Sirtis) notice that their "boobs are firming up", and Riker (Jonathan Frakes) gets all hot and bothered and even starts to believe that he's a director. The crew finally discovers Ru'afo's plot, they begin the much hyped "insurrection" by revolting against Vice Admiral Dougherty's orders and trying to save the Ba'ku from the Son'a.

There's plenty of gross-out Son'a plastic surgery and Ba'ku pretentious pseudo-new-age feel-goodisms to fill out the gaps between the non-action. I won't spoil the big surprise about the Son'a and Ba'ku connection, since no one probably cares anyhow. But it did occur to me that since there only seem to be a few hundred Ba'ku and Son'a, that the Son'a could have just moved to the other side of the planet and gotten their radiation the old fashioned way, instead of being so greedy and icky.

To be fair, this isn't the worst Star Trek movie. That dubious honor will probably always belong to Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier. However Star Trek: Insurrection is about as interesting as you might imagine life in the quaint Ba’ku village might be, and it will make you long for much better Star Trek movies like First Contact and The Wrath of Khan. Plus the sight of Commander Riker in the bath tub, getting shaved by Troi will hurt you, not as much as Uhura's naked fan-dance from ST5, but there is pain involved, and it’s all pretty revolting.