Star Trek IX: Insurrection (4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Copy)

This was better than I remembered, not because it was more like a Next Gen episode than a big movie (I love this aspect of the movie--I hate when it always has to be about saving the entire galaxy), but because I remembered it merely as a mashup of two NG episodes with a dumb villain. Although this may be true ("Thine Own Self" and "Homeward" and F. Murray Abraham enjoying his "flesh stretching sessions" with the girls), it was very enjoyable to rewatch this for the first time since it was in theaters. There was a time when Star Trek ruled television, and around this time I thought it was weird that the writers would somehow not realize that just about everyone in the theaters would have already seen these episodes. Anyway, I had forgotten that the F. Murray Abraham race of people had more going on; I remembered it as a Hollywood allegory of vanity and facelifts versus the needs of the happy people. It was unfortunate that it manifested in the movie as their faces needing stretching, rather than, say, actual organ harvesting like in the old UFO tv show. Star Trek has always tried to deal with the idea of "Paradise" and the problems it might bring to humans (not getting enough work done, achieving nothing, no time to herd goats, etc.). This installment of that idea is appropriately Star Trekkian, and it does bring up some philosophical gems (how many people can be hurt before something's considered "wrong"--you know, the whole "needs of the many" thing), but it did start to tread into unnecessarily politically correct native resettlement territory (esp since there were no actual people native to the planet), the kind of stuff Star Trek started to do in more modern times in order to get people riled up because certain people were running out of ideas and maybe wanted to further some kind of agenda. Apparently there were some production problems making the film, but I think it came out beautifully. I enjoyed Troi's flirtations with Riker ("on this ship anything's possible") as a setup to the opening of the next film, "Nemesis." I'm torn on that film, though... other than the opening scene with the original cast being happy, "Nemesis" is basically unwatchable and a disheartening conclusion to the film series. "Insurrection," though, was really quite a nice venture out into the galaxy to explore and help people, before everything started going south in the ST universe.

Brings back memories of living near the Fountain of Youth.