Patrick Stewart Saved Us From Awful Star Trek Movie, Picard Was To Murder Data
Star Trek: Insurrection was poorly received when released in 1998 and is considered an ill-thought-out Star Trek movie. Thanks to the new oral history of Star Trek, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams, fans now know that Patrick Stewart spared them from an even worse version of Star Trek: Insurrection than the one that reached theaters.
According to the book, Patrick Stewart hated the first script for Star Trek: Insurrection so much he handed it back to screenwriter Michael Piller and pretty much said, “do better.” Piller described the day Stewart gave him back the script in disgust as “a dark day.” The writer goes on, however, to make it clear that the Picard actor made the right call.
Part of the story would have involved Picard killing Data after a malfunction.
“Patrick rejected the first draft I had written,” admits Piller in the book. The screenwriter goes on to say that Stewart was really rejecting the story he had come up with for Star Trek: Insurrection rather than the actual screenplay. Piller confesses that actor was right but states that even once the story was changed, he and Patrick Stewart still butted heads over the direction of Stewart’s character, Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
“We had a great deal of conflict regarding his character,” said Piller. The screenwriter’s original concept for Star Trek: Insurrection was a sort of Sci-fi rendition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—Apocalypse Now in space, if you will. Patrick Stewart would have played the Martin Sheen role as Captain Picard is sent to retrieve a Starfleet soldier gone rogue.
While the concept on its own doesn’t sound too offensive, Piller sheepishly noted that part of the story would have involved Picard killing Data after a malfunction. Given how a subplot from the first Next Gen movie, Star Trek: Generations, involved Data finally receiving human emotions, it’s understandable that Patrick Stewart would have balked at blowing the android apart only two movies later.
Clearly, Patrick Stewart made the right choice. It’s just too bad that he didn’t pass on Star Trek: Insurrection altogether. Insurrection isn’t Star Trek: V levels of bad, but it’s easily the weakest of the four movies based on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Jonathan Frakes did the best he could with the 1998 follow-up to Star Trek: First Contact—a hit in most fans’ eyes—but Star Trek: Insurrection looks cheap and mainly takes place in one location. Even Frakes’ capable hands couldn’t sculpt a sci-fi masterpiece out of the weak clay he was given.
The story Patrick Stewart didn’t reject and the one the movie put on screen, involves political ethics and revolves around the decision of whether or not to forcibly relocate 600 people to potentially save billions. More than any other Star Trek film before or since, Star Trek: Insurrection felt like a slightly longer episode of the TV series rather than an appropriately epic big-screen outing.
The Star Trek: Insurrection we got may not have been a great movie, but we’re willing to bet it’s a lot better than the first-draft trainwreck Patrick Stewart saved us from.
