Star
Trek: First Contact
(1996) is likely the finest of The Next Generation feature
films. In part, this is so because the
film combines an extremely popular villain, the Borg, with an extremely popular
idea in the franchise: time travel.
In
part, First Contact also thrives because the film is more
action-oriented and visceral than some of the other entries in the canon. The
screenplay, by Brannon Braga and Ronald Moore also goes through fewer contortions
than Generations
did to fashion its compelling tale.
Where Generations seemed confusing and contrived, First
Contact feels stream-lined and sleek.
Perhaps
most importantly, Star Trek: First Contact – while
occasionally gory and quite violent – remembers that the core of Star
Trek’s appeal does not rest in warfare and hatred, but rather in the
exploration of the “human adventure.”
By
ending on the high note of humanity’s first contact with the Vulcans, First
Contact honors Star Trek’s important legacy of hope
and promise. This vision of a better
tomorrow (and of a better humanity, to boot), differentiates the franchise from
virtually all other space adventures, and makes the film a pleasure to watch,
even fifteen years after its theatrical release. An average Star Trek movie can
excite you with space battles, certainly, but only a very good one can tap into
the inspirational nature of Gene Roddenberry’s celebrated creation.
Accordingly,
film critics approved of and admired the film, and First Contact remains one
of the best-reviewed Star Trek films in the saga’s
history. Variety wrote: “Star Trek: First Contact"
is a smashingly exciting sci-fi adventure that ranks among the very best in the
long-running Paramount franchise. Better still, this is one TV spinoff that
does not require ticket buyers to come equipped with an intimate knowledge of
the small-screen original. Fans and non-fans alike will line up for this wild
ride, and many will be repeat customers.”
Lloyd
Rose at The Washington Post praised Jonathan Frakes’ direction,
and
opined “There are moments of visionary beauty in this film that rank
with "Metropolis," with
Josh Meador's interior vistas in "Forbidden
Planet" and Irvin Kershner's and Ralph Quarrie's work in "The Empire Strikes Back" -- that
is to say, with the best fantasy films ever made.”
As a reviewer and unapologetic Trek fan, I boast deeper reservations about First Contact than Rose apparently did, and feel that while the
film is indeed the best of the Next Generation cinematic efforts,
it still falls short of the cinematic majesty and scope of The Motion Picture
(1979), or the sheer emotionality and humanity of The Wrath of Khan
(1982).
Part of the reason that Star Trek: First Contact
doesn’t work on the same rarefied level as those aforementioned titles is that
many of the earthbound scenes involving James Cromwell’s recalcitrant Zefram
Cochrane boast no effective foil for the mischievous inventor of warp
speed technology. Riker, Troi and Geordi are
beloved characters to be certain, but they are never really established
effectively in the script as larger-than-life personalities with the heft to
match Cochrane note-for-note and blow-for-blow.
As a result, the film’s pace lags badly every time First Contact returns to
Earth and the Borg are shunted off-screen.
By contrast, the Borg themselves (itself?) are
incredibly effective in design, concept and execution. They are visually-inspired, dynamic villains,
and First
Contact benefits strongly from their presence, even if aspects of their
culture (namely the Borg Queen) now seem contradictory and unnecessarily
muddled. As a longtime Star Trek fan, I was also
disappointed with some of the shoddy continuity in the film, especially because in most cases the flaws were unnecessary and could have been easily rectified
in post-production.
But such quibbles aside, Star Trek: First Contact
remains a fun and involving science fiction adventure. It’s an eminently sturdy entry in the
long-lived franchise, and comes close to recapturing successfully the character
chemistry that made Star Trek: The Next Generation so beloved an endeavor.
“A group of cybernetic creatures from
the future have traveled back through time to enslave the human race... and
you're here to stop them?”
In
the 24th Century, the cybernetic Borg attempt a second invasion of
Sector 001, the home of the human race. Instead of warping to planet Earth to join the battle, however, Captain
Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and the U.S.S Enterprise-E are ordered to
stay away. Starfleet fears that Picard’s
traumatic experience being assimilated by the Borg could make him an “unstable
element” in the critical defense of Earth.
With
his crew’s support, Captain Picard ignores Starfleet’s orders and assumes
control of the fleet battling the Borg Cube.
Able to hear the Borg’s thoughts, Captain Picard pinpoints the
cube’s weakness and destroys it, but not before a Borg escape craft opens a temporal anomaly and travels into Earth’s past.
Caught
in the energetic wake of the escaping Borg sphere, the Enterprise crew can only watch as
Earth of the past is assimilated by the cybernetic organisms. The starship follows the Borg to the past, to
April of 2063 in an effort to prevent the change. There, they learn that
the diabolical aliens plan to scuttle Earth’s “first contact” with alien life
forms following the successful test flight of Zefram Cochrane’s (James Cromwell’s)
experimental warp ship.
Picard
realizes he must preserve the timeline, or the human race will become…Borg.
Before
long, the Enterprise herself is infested with Borg invaders. Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner) is captured
by the Borg Queen (Alice Krige), who requires the information stored in his
android brain if she wishes to access the ship’s computer and stop Cochrane’s historic
flight.
Meanwhile,
on Earth’s surface below, Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes) must convince
Cochrane to make his historic flight…
“I am the beginning. The end. The one
who is many. I am the Borg.”
The
Borg are really no-brainers as movie antagonists. The most beloved episode of Star
Trek: The Next Generation remains the two-parter “The Best of Both
Worlds,” concerning a Borg incursion into Federation space. The Borg are such popular villains
because they promise a fate much worse than death.
It’s
one thing to be killed by drooling, murderous aliens; it’s another thing
entirely to have your individuality wiped away and your intelligence sublimated
into the Borg Collective. In that state,
your memories belong to the Borg. Your
physicality belongs to the Borg. Your
very soul…is theirs.
Somewhere
inside, you may want to struggle against the Collective or Hive, but you can’t
succeed. You must stand by and watch in
a kind of living Hell as the Borg exploit your knowledge and exploit your body,
perhaps even condemning your very loved ones to the nightmare of being “one”
with the collective. It’s a horrid fate to imagine, let alone endure.
The
Borg threat also works remarkably well in the context of The Next Generation, a
series that -- through the inclusion of half-Betazaoids, Klingons, androids,
the blind and other colorful characters -- champions diversity as a worthwhile
human ideal.
The
Borg destroy diversity, making all life-forms conform to their vision of
perfection, thus making them a perfect adversary for our colorful and very individual 24th
century heroes.
Assimilation
into the Borg group consciousness is such a powerful, frightening notion that
it would be nearly impossible to ruin the threat of the Borg in a two-hour
motion picture. And yet, First
Contact almost achieves the impossible by giving the Borg a heretofore
unseen new ruler, a single individual called the Borg Queen.
Now,
let me be plain: Alice Krige is remarkable as the Borg Queen here. She gives a performance simultaneously terrifying and
sensual. Similarly, her
appearance is both frightening and incredibly sexy. And yet the very idea of a Borg Queen
represents a terrible undermining of the original notion of the Borg: a collective life form.
Now,
suddenly – after several years of Next Generation episodes – we learn that that the Borg are
ruled by an individual leader? By the
equivalent of a Queen Bee? And worse,
this Queen Bee is apparently seeking a human mate? Here, it is plain she seeks not to make
drones of protagonists Captain Picard or Data, but to make them her lovers and
companions, co-rulers of the lower Borg caste.
In
one fell swoop, then, the terror and anonymity of assimilation is largely
undone. For one thing, the Borg can
maintain individuality after assimilation, as the presence and personality of the Borg Queen prove. For another, our heroes don’t face total
erasure of individuality. Instead, they
get to hob-knob it with the sensual, if sadistic, Borg Queen. There are some humans who may not consider
that arrangement so terrible, frankly, given her overt sensuality…
I
understand the (flawed) thinking that individuals make a “better” enemy in a
movie than a group of bad guys, but the popularity of the Borg as a collective in the
Next
Generation TV series proves the fallacy of such thinking. First Contact invents a new character
in the Borg Queen that -- while beautiful and menacing -- totally undercuts the
terror of the Borg equation.
Her
presence raises important questions too.
How does the Queen exist in multiple dimensions at once, since First
Contact suggests that she was present on the Borg ship with Locutus,
although though we never saw her there in “Best of Both Worlds?”
Secondly,
and perhaps more importantly, how do the Borg survive (into episodes of Voyager)
if their multi-dimensional Queen keeps getting destroyed? How many Queens are there? How does she die? Does Star Trek now possess an un-killable
character? Also, because she can apparently be in more than one dimension at a time, why does the Queen have to bother with sending a message to the Borg of her time by sensor dish? Why not just transition from one place to another, one time to another?
Another
serious problem in First Contact again comes down to how writers Ronald Moore and Brannon
Braga choose to highlight crew interaction. Specifically, superficial “movie
thinking” undercuts what could have been incredible scenes
of conflict and drama between Enterprise team members.
Here,
Patrick Stewart delivers an incredibly well-written Moby Dick speech about the
Borg, explaining in detail why he won’t fall back again, why he won’t let the
Borg win. Stewart does a terrific job
with the material. It’s the monologue of
an obsessed, driven man, and it works quite effectively in terms of the character we
love, even if it seems logical that he would have exorcised these Borg demons
already, given the span of time between “Family” and First Contact.
But
forget all that. Picard gets called on the carpet and called out for his obsession
with Borg… by Lily (Alfre Woodard), a one-time guest star in the
franchise. She goes toe-to-toe with Picard
and points out how his pursuit of the Borg doesn’t make sense. She’s known him for maybe a few hours, when
she makes the speech.
I’ll
be blunt: this confrontation should have occurred between Captain Picard and
Dr. Crusher (Gates McFadden). She has
known Captain Picard longer than anyone else aboard ship, she can speak from
experience -- not hear say -- that his orders usually make sense, and she
boasts the standing as chief medical officer of the Enterprise to stop Picard
in his tracks if he is acting in a manner that is dangerous to the well-being
of the starship’s crew.
If
this were an original cast Star Trek movie, do you have any
doubt that it would have been McCoy calling Kirk on the carpet over his
behavior, as he did, explicitly in Star Trek: The Motion Picture
(1979), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
(1989), to name just three incidents?
McCoy could do it because he was Kirk’s confidante, and because he had
that standing as CMO to question a captain’s behavior.
Again,
Crusher – who shares breakfast with
Picard every day as we know from the series – is that person in The
Next Generation universe. Yes,
Stewart and Woodard are powerful in the confrontation scene together, but it
doesn’t resonate deeply in terms of Star Trek history, because Picard
doesn’t get checked by one of his own, by one of his crew. These movies are supposed to be about how
starship crews work together to resolve problems, right? Shouldn't the person who actually knows Picard be the one to question him? You may recall, I had a similar problem with how Generations used Crusher. She should have been Picard's "Nexus" ideal, given their relationship there. And she should do her duty as CMO here, in First Contact. It's not that I have a thing for Crusher (though I like her just fine). It's that as a member of the team, when there is an opportunity to use her character appropriately...she should be thus used. And she never is. In any Star Trek movie. Even Chekov, Sulu and Uhura had moments in the sun in the original Star Trek films when there was opportunity.
I’ve
always believed this a major flaw in the Next Generation movies: they give
the supporting cast members little to do, and farm out the dramatic work to
guest stars inside of established characters.
The Moby Dick scene would have been infinitely more powerful if Gates
McFadden – whom we know and love as
Crusher – had been given the opportunity to stand up to Captain Picard. I wrote above how Riker, Geordi and Troi don’t
seem equal to the task of countering Cochrane here. The same is true of Crusher in First
Contact: she’s written like a doormat.
She remains on the bridge, without questioning orders, while Lily enthusiastically
performs her job as chief medical
officer.
This
reveals -- as we see time and time again – that there’s definitely a pecking
order in the Star Trek: The Next
Generation movies: the men get
better roles than the women do, and Picard, Riker, Worf and Data get the lion’s
share of the drama, while the rest of the characters are afforded only brief
moments that play as the equivalent of shtick.
Troi gets to play drunk, for example.
In First Contact, Crusher not only shirks her duty to hold Picard’s feet
to the fire over a bad decision, she actually loses a patient (Lily again…) who is under her
protection. That’s the best the writers
could come up with for a character who raised a son, overcame the tragic death of her husband, commanded the Enterprise from time-to-time and even headed Starfleet Medical?
In
short, for First Contact, the writers decided to go out and invent a woman
tough enough to challenge Picard, when a woman already in the Next
Generation stable could have done it just as well, and it would have
resonated far more with the Trek fan base. All they needed to do was to write Gates
McFadden a decent part.
In
the introduction to this piece, I wrote about some careless errors in the film. Let me name just a few. At one point, Picard tells Lily the Enterprise consists of 24 decks. Later, Worf’s security chief replacement reports that the
Borg control "deck 26." If we’re to
believe Picard, that deck doesn’t exist.
By looping “24” over the “26” dialogue, this would error would not have
occurred. I just can’t believe that
nobody was checking continuity on a major studio’s tent-pole franchise.
Other
matters of concern include the origin of Zefram Cochrane. He is a character from the original series
episode “Metamorphosis,” and one with an entirely different look and origin (in
terms of home planets, apparently) than what this movie establishes. But First Contact feels no obligation to
explain the discrepancies in Cochrane’s biography.
Also,
since when can Captain Picard hear the voices of the Borg? Is this a common side effect of those who
have been separated from the Collective?
If so, did Hugh, the Borg refugees of “Descent” and Seven of Nine also
hear Borg voices in their heads whenever they encountered them?
In
spite of such problems, Star Trek: First Contact is a highly
entertaining movie with many dramatic and visually-appealing high points.
Prime among these is the zero-gravity
sequence in which Picard, Worf and Hunt must battle the Borg on the exterior of
the Enterprise hull, on the main deflector dish.
This scene is splendidly-directed, buttressed by incredible special
effects, and it features an undercurrent of anxiety throughout, as the Borg – slowly becoming aware of Picard’s
interference – begin to menace the crew as the team works to stop them.
I
remember, circa 1994 or so, I was deeply disenchanted with the Star Trek
universe and consequently looking back at Space: 1999 (1975 -1977) with much appreciation, because I felt that the world of the Enterprise had become too safe and predictable. Space adventuring was no longer
dangerous. Now it consisted of
vacations on holodecks, endless resources and material wealth, courtesy of replicators,
and even families living on the saucer section while exploring the final frontier. I lamented the fact that not once in Star
Trek: The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine up to that point,
had any main character been seen in a space suit, actually reckoning with the actual
environment of space. The crew members of Starfleet seemed to me too insulated from danger.
So
I was delighted that Star Trek: First Contact included
this zero-g sequence and put my qualms to rest, at least momentarily.
The zero-gravity action scene in Star Trek: First Contact reminds us
that these men and women are in a dangerous profession, and that even with all
the comforts of “technology unchained” in the 24th century, they
must still sometimes go out into space with precious few resources to fight
enemies, or attempt to repair their ship.
The zero-gravity fight scene is actually my favorite in the film because
it is so tense, and because it features so many nice character touches, from
Picard’s unconventional cleverness (blasting a Borg into space by shooting the
deck of the ship…) to Worf’s “always be prepared” mentality, bringing a blade
out into space with him. It’s terrific
stuff.
I
also enjoy the climax of Star Trek: First Contact tremendously because it
remembers that Star Trek isn’t always supposed to be about battling hostile
aliens. This is one of the reasons why I’m
not all that impressed with Star Trek Online. It’s a game about
going out to other worlds and fighting aliens, about firing phasers and
engaging in battle.
For me, that’s but one small aspect of Star
Trek, and not, for me, the one with the most appeal. Star Trek: First Contact features
great battle sequences, but more than that, ends on the high note of first
contact. It shows us an important and
inspiring scene in human history, our first, peaceful meeting with
extra-terrestrials. In this case, the
humans who broach that contact are fatigued from war, and not “perfect” (like our 24th
century protagonists).
And yet they lead with trust and peace, and a wonderful,
new era is opened up because of their willingness to go out on a limb. Frankly, I find
the final scenes of First Contact absolutely inspiring, reminding us of the better angels
of our nature. We can greet the
unknown not with fear, paranoia and suspicion, but with hope and peace and
trust.
In
ending the film on this high note, rather than the (admittedly-satisfying) defeat of the villainous
Borg, First Contact remembers and honors the highest aspirations of
Gene Roddenberry and the Star Trek saga.
Remember “the human adventure is just beginning?” the tag-line of Star
Trek: The Motion Picture? First
Contact literalizes that motto, and shows us the wondrous beginnings of
man’s odyssey to the stars, beginning with the first moments of brotherhood with another
race. It’s a fantastic and inspiring
story-point.
I
also appreciate the creativity involved in Data’s subplot in First
Contact. I didn’t care for how Data was utilized in Generations…as a
veritable bi-polar psychotic. Here, he seems more...balanced. He faces temptation as the Borg perform an
assimilation in reverse. Usually, the Borg
apply mechanical prosthetics to biological skin. Here, they apply biological skin to a
mechanical apparatus. It’s an interesting
idea, especially since Data suggests early on that he can’t be assimilated by
the Borg. The Queen proves him wrong,
and in a diabolical fashion that tempts Data. We never really believe he has turned to the dark side...but as Data suggests, a few seconds can feel like eternity when we're uncertain of his exact motivations.
I understand that Star Trek fans are divided on the subject of Frakes as a director. He gets good performances from the cast here, and manages several action scenes nicely. Judging by First Contact, he certainly seems up to the center seat...the director's chair.
Between
the zero-g action, the up-lifting last moments of first contact, and Data’s unique experience being
Borgified, it’s largely futile to resist First Contact, a high-point for the
Next Generation cast at the movies.