The original Star Trek crew managed to work their way through six films in a decade and a half; the Next Generation have now been in four, and it looks as though this might be their last. Riker and Deanna have finally tied the knot and gone off to run their own ship, and by the end of the film the Next Generation family is bereft of yet one more member …

The film starts out with the Riker-Troi wedding (with Wesley Crusher, Guinan and Dr. Pulaski all making cameo appearances), and then the Enterprise heads out for Deanna’s home world, Betazed, where the wedding will be reprised Betazed-fashion (i.e., clothing not even optional). En route, however, the ship has to detour, first to a desert planet where, after some running around in a super dune-buggy, Picard (Patrick Stewart) and company discover a primitive version of Data (Brent Spiner) apparently left there by Data’s creator; then they go off to the planet Romulus on a diplomatic mission, and it is here that the real story begins. Seems that Romulus has been taken over by a cadre from its sister planet Remus (where do they get these names???), led by a young human named Shinzon (Tom Hardy). Shinzon, who supposedly bears a remarkable resemblance to a younger Picard — they are, after all, both bald — seems a nice enough fellow, but it turns out that he has evil designs on earth …

The story did not strike me as particularly strong. There is some philosophizing about the effects of nature vs. nurture, but it is all fairly weak, the more so because Shinzon’s physical resemblance to Picard is, in actuality, less than perfect (the lips and eyes tell it all). Storywise, this is probably the weakest “Trek” film since Generations; First Contact gave us a fairly coherent back-story (which in turn led to the current TV series Enterprise) and Insurrection’s philosophical underpinnings at least struck me as being more relevant to the world in which we live.

On the other hand, the special effects seem to be getting better. The climactic space battle is genuinely high-powered.

As to the future of the Next Generation franchise … well, as I said it looks as though it’s effectively dead. Nevertheless, we have the example of the third film, almost twenty years ago, that shows us what can be done in the way of resurrection, as well as that more primitive Data-like android, so perhaps …