And this Star Trek, much to my utter dismay, does not break the chain. While it does have moments of humor, the whole thing is plodding and self-righteous, with no apparent relevance in sight. Sure, the special effects and make-up are Oscar worthy, but they don't at all redeem this movie.

This, the ninth movie in the series, starts with many peaceful shots of a small villiage of only 600 people on a small planet outsdie the federation. These are calm people, who live by farming and have no apparent technology in sight, although it is revealed that they have vast technelogichal capabilities. But they have a problem when a Data the android starts attacking the town. It is never quite fully revealed, to the best of my memory, why he does this. Put it does lead to the relevation that this peaceful little place has been monitored by the federation for possible colonization.

So to take care of Data, the federation calls in good old Captain Picard and the crew (including Worf, who is taking a break from his duties on Deep Space Nine) to come and destroy him. And they do, using a song from a play Data was putting on. But when they get back to the ship a relevatin is made. They all discover that they are getting younger after being on the planet. So Picard goes down to the planet again and confronts the citizens. They tell him that the planet has a regenerative field that gives them perpetual youth. Picard loves this idea, and when the federation decides to conquer the planet, Picard decides to intervene and him and the crew rebel and basically herd the people off the planet. Or something like that.

The villians in this movie are fairly two-dimensional, as far as the villians go in the Trek movies. The main bad guy, played by F. Murray Abraham, is just a vain creature that likes to pull his skin back just to look younger. Oh, and he used to live on the same planet as the simple folk with eternal youth. Aside from that, we don't much about him at all. Put the poorly constructed villians aren't the only problems this movie faces. For some reason they decide to make Picard fall in love, then they go absolutely nowhere with it. It just meanders about, with an occasional sappy scene where they have a really "emotional" talk. It' just recycled stuf from other, better, Star Trek pictures.

Big fans of the franchise, relax. It's bound to get better someday.