I was never a drooling fan of Star Trek, and my reasons are really nit-picky. It's an hour-long show (I have the attention span of a hummingbird), a lot of which takes place in an immaculately clean starship set, and features people with identical, starched uniforms. They speak in tech-heavy, stilted dialogue. The aliens always look like people with globs of latex stuck on their faces. And back in the day, when they took it upon themselves to wander around on some new planet... hoo boy. Even as a kid I didn't buy it. Plus the background noise from the original series' ship used to drive me nuts. ("PIIIING! PIIIING! PIIING!!") So I didn't get into it with the fervor of say, Star Wars, Transformers, or compulsive masturbation.

However, over the years it was televised, ST: TNG won my affections. The plots didn't seem to openly insult your intelligence as much, and I really liked the characters. (Particularly the late Tasha Yar, in that skin-tight mustard-colored uniform, before she fell prey to some Exxon Valdez-spill looking alien thing, and before her hairstyle would be considered by some to be "dykey". And don't forget, she and Data bumped uglies.) Which is why I liked Nemesis. It had all the elements of "one last good romp". The story was fairly fresh, if that's at all possible anymore, the acting was good, and the villains (who look like a crossbreed of bleu cheese and Nosferatu) were villainous. Picard burns rubber in some kind of tricked-out space 4x4, and the Enterprise crew seems as comfortable around each other as a bunch of old friends should be. Which makes it very easy to slip into the whole experience and really enjoy yourself. Mysteriously though, the actresses who play Dr. Crusher and Deanna Troi have somehow escaped the march of time and hardly seem to have aged at all, while Riker looks about two days away from retirement, and Data is beginning to look like his warranty has expired. (Unfortunately we don't get to hear Troi talk about the texture of her boobs, as she did in the last cinema voyage, Insurrection.)

But I'm being judgmental. This is a damn good film, possibly the best of the entire ST movie run. The "R" in "Star Trek" is backwards in the opening for some reason (as was loudly pointed out by the oaf two seats to my right), but I guess it makes sense once you see the movie. I don't want to describe the plot in any real detail, because there are a lot of great surprises and I reveal too much sometimes anyway. If you're a dyed-in-the-wool Trekker, this movie will make you misty-eyed with joy and sadness at times; if you're a newbie to the whole franchise, you still get a lot of bang for your buck. It's great fun, it's well-written, and I'll bet you money that you won't even realize Ron Perlman or the naked showering hottie from Starship Troopers are in it until the end credits. One thing- that weird morph between Picard and the bald villain Shinzon from the commercial and trailer isn't in the movie. I waited the whole movie to see what that was about, and it kind of bugged me. Misleading. Minor quibble though. Plus, the ten or twenty of you out there with Ol' Yellow Eyes Is Back on CD will be pleased to know Brent Spiner sings Irving Berlin in this movie. And the director of The Usual Suspects plays a bridge officer. I go now.