Star Trek: Insurrection

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General		Extras
Category	Science Fiction	Teaser Trailer Theatrical Trailer Featurette-Behind The Scenes
Rating
Year Of Production	1998
Running Time	98:45
RSDL/Flipper	RSDL (59:24)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Programme
Region Coding	4	Director(s)	Frakes, Jonathan
Studio Distributor	Paramount	Starring	Stewart, Patrick Frakes, Jonathan Spiner, Brent Burton, Levar Dorn, Michael McFadden, Gates Sirtis, Marina Abraham, F. Murray Murphy, Donna Zerbe, Anthony
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$39.95	Music	Goldsmith, Jerry

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s)  French Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s)  Italian Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s)  Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Subtitles	English French Portuguese Hebrew English for the Hearing Impaired	Smoking	No
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Star Trek Movie Rule #2: If members of the cast sing in a Star Trek Movie, be afraid. Be very afraid.

    Star Trek Movie Rule #3: If the Director of a Star Trek movie also stars in the movie, he'll give himself some really hammy and gratuitous scenes.

    Star Trek: Insurrection follows all of these rules, more or less. The 9th movie to date, and the 3rd with the Next Generation crew, it is weaker than its predecessor, but overall is one of the better "odd" movies in the franchise, but don't even think of getting me started on the singing...

    The 600 Ba'ku are a peaceful but small in number race. Their planet, however, is remarkable for its fountain-of-youth-like properties - the race has not aged in over 300 years. The Son'a have developed a device to capture the unique radiation which bathes this planet, but need the support of the Federation in order to harvest this radiation as the Ba'ku planet is in Federation territory.

    One slight problem: harvesting the radiation will kill all the inhabitants of the planet, so a plan is devised to translocate the Ba'ku to another planet whilst maintaining the illusion that they are still on their home planet. Unfortunately, this would result in the Ba'ku ageing and dying, but it is felt by the Federation and the Son'a that this is a small price to pay for a technology that could benefit billions of people. Captain Jean Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and his crew feel otherwise, and there is a nice little sting in this tale to keep the interest level high.

Video

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. It is 16x9 enhanced.

    The transfer is beautifully sharp and clear at all times, with tremendous amounts of fine foreground and fine background detail being visible at all times. Shadow detail is superb, with the darker scenes on the Ba'ku planet being particularly stand-out in this regard. Take a look at the detail visible on Picard's uniform at around the 40:00 mark. Despite being darkly lit, fine gradations in texture are clearly apparent during this sequence. Having said that, to take full advantage of all this lovely detail on offer, you will need to watch this DVD in strictly controlled lighting conditions. There is, of course, no low level noise to mar the image.

    Colours are interestingly rendered. As I remarked in my review of Star Trek: First Contact, the planetary greens are on the pale side - perhaps this is a conscious colour palette choice on the part of the director and cinematographer, but I cannot remember how Insurrection and First Contact looked theatrically in this regard, but they both exhibit the same, undersaturated greens in foliage. This is not an issue on the various starships, where colours are uniformly strong and vibrant. Interestingly, all blues were very vibrant, making for some stunning planetary shots of water and sky.

    No MPEG artefacts were noted. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of some very minor aliasing, most noted during the slow pans in the opening sequence, but noticeable enough for me to drop the rating of this video transfer below reference quality. Film artefacts were essentially non-existent.

    This disc is RSDL formatted. The layer change is placed at 59:24, between Chapters 13 and 14, and is moderately disruptive.
 
 

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There are 4 audio tracks on this DVD; English, French, Italian and Spanish in Dolby Digital 5.1, all at the higher bitrate of 448Kb/s. I listened only to the English soundtrack.

    Dialogue is always clear, easy to understand and firmly planted in the center channel. There are no audio sync anomalies.

    Jerry Goldsmith has crafted another superb Star Trek score for Insurrection. I particularly liked his "Paradise theme", which sets the scene nicely for the Ba'ku planet. Other than this specific outstanding notable moment, the music effectively took a companion seat to the on-screen action, helping it along beautifully without ever getting in the way of it.

    The surround channels carry the special effects, but less effectively than I expected them to. There was little aggressive use of the surround channels other than during the cave sequence, where they sprung into life to provide some quite unexpectedly aggressive ambient support to the front soundstage. The many space battles tended to focus the soundstage towards the front, rather than being all-immersive, although the music carried enough ambience in the rear channels to be quite immersive.

    The subwoofer, whilst active, was restrained in its activity, and the various explosions, phaser shots, crashes and the like seemed strangely reigned in and muted rather than full-on as a result.
 
 

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

Teaser Trailer

Theatrical Trailer

Featurette-Behind The Scenes

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Demtschyna, Michael (read my bio)
Sunday, April 22, 2001