So, with Star Trek: Generations (1994) being so bad the old saying that the odd number Star Trek movies are bad and the even number films are good is holding true. Will Star Trek: First Contact (1996) continue the pattern? After all, it veers close to being a fan favourite film and is consistently praised as being the best of the TNG films. Who knows though, all I can say is I have a bad feeling about this.
In the twenty-fourth century, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-E has been ordered to patrol the Romulan Neutral Zone by the Federation to avoid interference with their battle against the insidious Borg. Witnessing the loss of the battle, Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) ignores orders and takes command of the fleet engaging the Borg. But the Borg plan to travel back into the twenty-first century through a vortex with the intention to stop Earth’s first contact with an alien race (the Vulcans). Following the Borg sphere, Picard and his crew realize that they have taken over the Enterprise in order to carry out their mission. Their only chance to do away with the Borg and their seductive Queen (Alice Krige) is to make sure that Zefram Cochrane (James Cromwell) makes his famous faster-than-light travel to the stars.
First Contact is a really lopsided film in that it invests the majority of its time and energies in the wrong story. Most of the good stuff is with Cochrane’s storyline but its full potential is never realised. With Cochrane you get to combine the ‘never meet your heroes’ stuff with this drunken lech coming to terms with the fact he’s one of the most important men in human history. How on Earth could someone handle that revelation? One minute he’s getting drunk and making crude advances, working on his warp drive out of greed rather than anything noble, and the next he’s being told he changes what it means to be human. It has so much potential, especially with an actor as skilled as James Cromwell. Instead, Riker stuns him and it’s all sort of fine, no conversation or great realization of his immense responsibilities; it’s just glossed over. What a waste. On the plus side we do get a sweet little Barclay scene and another fun scene with drunk Deanna Troi trying to win Cochrane over.
Instead of focusing on the vastly more interesting story of Cochrane and the lead up to first contact the film spends most of its time on the Borg. I have a lot of problems with this. TNG gave us pretty clear Borg details. Q Who (S2E16) establishes them, The Best of Both Worlds (S3E26/S4E1) fleshes them out, I Borg (S5E23) makes them evolve, and Descent (S6E26/S7E1) deals with the ramifications of that evolution. As far as I understood it some Borg now have individuality and have splintered off and I was basically clear on the status of the Borg after TNG ended. Now we have the Borg Queen and while Alice Krige gives a good performance, I’m not sure I really understand the Borg now. Is she a result of the ‘individuality virus’ implanted in the Borg in I, Borg? I mean, that makes sense to me, it’s an evolution of Borg society in that now there’s a physical manifestation of the collective but how did that happen? The Queen talks about the events of The Best of Both Worlds as though she was there, is she speaking from the perspective of the collective or as herself? The Borg sections of First Contact are nowhere near clear enough and apparently even the DVD commentary admits the waters have been muddied a little.
More to the point though, did we really need a story about Picard dealing with the Borg? We’ve sort of already gotten it with Family (S4E2) and I, Borg, the former of which follows Best of Both Worlds and is about Picard taking some time to recover from his trauma and the latter makes Picard (and Guinan) put aside their hatred of the Borg to consider their rights as living beings. I get that this sort of trauma will always affect Picard but it doesn’t make sense for it to be quite this raw. We don’t need an Ahab and the whale story between Picard and the Borg, that was I, Borg and, frankly, First Contact doesn’t do the revenge angle all that well. Picard wants to stand and fight the Borg despite it obviously being a losing battle, he’s convinced to leave, but then stays and fights that same battle. We did not need this story and it makes little sense for it to be told at this point.
While the problem isn’t as pronounced as with Generations, we once again have a film where most of the cast is pushed to one side for the sake of Picard and Data. Data’s story makes even less sense than Picard’s; the Borg Queen offers to make him a human being by seamlessly replacing his metal and wires with flesh and nerves. I mean, I guess that’s interesting but for me this suffers from the same problems as the emotion chip. Data’s quest to become more human doesn’t need an ending, it’s an arc that will continue as long as Data ‘lives’. I don’t know, maybe it’s just because I understood so little of what the Borg Queen was actually saying to Data and what their interactions were all about but I just didn’t get it. I don’t want to see Data and Picard take the lead for another film thank you, I want to rest of the crew to get some attention. Let’s have something focusing on Troi and Riker’s relationship and how stuff between her and Worf ended, I don’t care, just as long as everyone gets some attention. Honestly, I’m beginning to wonder whether its Patrick Stewart’s ego making these decisions. He’s not Jean-Luc Picard anymore, he’s a character from an action film who just so happens to be named Jean-Luc Picard and look an awful lot like him.
I also want to talk briefly about another character; The Enterprise. There’s a new Enterprise in First Contact and boy howdy is that bridge ugly. The Enterprise-D was light and sleek and beautiful; it looked like the sort of command center produced by an advanced people living in a utopia at its pinnacle would produce. The bridge of the Enterprise-E looks dark and generic, there’s zero character in this bridge or in this ship. I chalk a lot of that up to the fact that this isn’t the Enterprise we know and love, this is some new ship we’ve not grown attached to yet. When the Enterprise blows up in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) or crashes in Generations it’s painful to see an old friend die. The Enterprise is being violated by the Borg throughout this film and it amounts to nothing, this could’ve been any old space ship and we’d have felt exactly the same.
Star Trek: First Contact is a hugely overrated film that ignores a much more promising story in exchange for rehashing a character arc that passed this point long ago, muddying the background of the Borg, and adding pointlessly boring action sequences that are anything but what makes Star Trek great.
4/10
Boldfield25
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