Star Trek: Insurrection
Jonathan Frakes's second Trek film is the cozy one — Picard defying Starfleet to defend a peaceful people and their rejuvenating planet. Critics shrugged that it played like a long TV episode; for a lot of fans, that was exactly the appeal.
Star Trek: Insurrection premiered on December 11, 1998, with Jonathan Frakes back in the director's chair after First Contact. The plot is classic Trek ethics: Picard discovers a conspiracy to secretly relocate the peaceful Ba'ku from their rejuvenating planet for the benefit of the Son'a, led by F. Murray Abraham's vengeful Ru'afo — and he defies Starfleet orders to stop it. Defend the innocent, even if it costs you your career: the moral core carries the whole film.
It cost $70 million, earned about that much domestically and roughly $118 million worldwide, and drew mixed reviews — 55% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the consensus knock that it "plays like an extended episode of the TV series." Audiences were kinder, grading it B+ on CinemaScore. Lighter and lower-stakes than the Borg thriller before it, Insurrection became the eternal conversation piece in the odd-numbered-curse debate — the gentle, philosophical one fans defend with a shrug and a smile.
The production had its own milestones: it was the first Trek film whose space effects were rendered entirely in CGI, a full-scale Ba'ku village was built at Lake Sherwood, California, and Jerry Goldsmith composed his fourth Trek score. The ninth Star Trek film and third with the TNG crew, it was followed by Nemesis in 2002 — which made many fans retroactively kinder to this one.
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