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Renegades: The Requiem
Sky Conway, Tim Russ and Walter Koenig attempted to get their own Star Trek spinoff going a few years ago. They produced a pilot and called it "Star Trek: Renegades", and crowdfunded a bunch of money. You can read my review of that here. No one picked it up, so they tried to make it on their own, only to have Paramount come down hard on Trek fanworks, forcing them to file the serial numbers off of the final product. I think this was originally supposed to be a series, then a two-part movie. What was eventually released is an hour long. And it's kinda awful.
If I had any suspension of disbelieve left--and given the lousy script, mediocre acting and bad CGI backgrounds, that was unlikely--the fact that they'd either changed everyone's names or written around them would have done it. Russ is now sans Vulcan ears, play Admiral Kuvuk of the Confederation. Terry Farrell is there as "Jada", clearly supposed to be a clone of Jadzia Dax, except they had to change her name and race. Robert Beltran is there as "Cordero", clearly supposed to be Chakotay and mostly pointless in his actions.
They space most of the cast (the crew of the renegade ship) in the first battle without them appearing on screen, except for two characters who come back just long enough to die. Scenes with Cirroc Lofton and Nichelle Nichols are clearly there just because they could get the actors; not to mention the absurd recurrence of Crystal Conway as Chekov's great-granddaughter who is there to emote badly.
This plays as a series finale, pretending like we actually cared about the characters and as if there had been events between the first show and this. Captain Alvarez and his crew get treated like we've actually been seeing them for a whole season rather than this being their first appearance. And it was obviously intended to be a send-off for Chekov, except that we're getting flashbacks to his childhood trauma which we'd both never heard of before and also didn't actually figure in to the events that took place or his actions.
And even the CGI and makeup, which they obviously poured their money into, aren't really worth it. The space battles are beautiful, but stupid and badly-choreographed. The aliens are more creative than most of what we're seen from Trek before (they made me think of Farscape), but are only there for a pointless Cantina scene. We watch a large-breasted bartender feed peanuts to an alien! For no reason! It establishes nothing and never matters!
Overall: ...I'm glad that was only an hour long and I didn't pay much for it.
If I had any suspension of disbelieve left--and given the lousy script, mediocre acting and bad CGI backgrounds, that was unlikely--the fact that they'd either changed everyone's names or written around them would have done it. Russ is now sans Vulcan ears, play Admiral Kuvuk of the Confederation. Terry Farrell is there as "Jada", clearly supposed to be a clone of Jadzia Dax, except they had to change her name and race. Robert Beltran is there as "Cordero", clearly supposed to be Chakotay and mostly pointless in his actions.
They space most of the cast (the crew of the renegade ship) in the first battle without them appearing on screen, except for two characters who come back just long enough to die. Scenes with Cirroc Lofton and Nichelle Nichols are clearly there just because they could get the actors; not to mention the absurd recurrence of Crystal Conway as Chekov's great-granddaughter who is there to emote badly.
This plays as a series finale, pretending like we actually cared about the characters and as if there had been events between the first show and this. Captain Alvarez and his crew get treated like we've actually been seeing them for a whole season rather than this being their first appearance. And it was obviously intended to be a send-off for Chekov, except that we're getting flashbacks to his childhood trauma which we'd both never heard of before and also didn't actually figure in to the events that took place or his actions.
And even the CGI and makeup, which they obviously poured their money into, aren't really worth it. The space battles are beautiful, but stupid and badly-choreographed. The aliens are more creative than most of what we're seen from Trek before (they made me think of Farscape), but are only there for a pointless Cantina scene. We watch a large-breasted bartender feed peanuts to an alien! For no reason! It establishes nothing and never matters!
Overall: ...I'm glad that was only an hour long and I didn't pay much for it.