Star Trek: First Contact Review
by Rick Kelvington (kelvington AT aol DOT com)November 25th, 1996
[Note that followups are directed to rec.arts.movies.current-films and rec.arts.movies.startrek.current only, not to rec.arts.sf.movies. -Moderator]
STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT
A film review by Rick Kelvington
Copyright 1996 Rick Kelvington
Star Trek: First Contact - A Review and Story Synopsis ...
or
How I Learned To Stop Loving Star Trek & Started Watching Babylon 5 Again.
First let me say, you probably won't like this review. If your a big Star Trek fan, (like I am) you should probably stop reading now, and pick up a twinkee, or other food product that will give you some level of enjoyment. I guarantee you this review will not. My personal favorite, is the Hostess Cupcake.
For those of you that have decided to continue on, here are the rules:
1. This is a review and story synopsis, not a criticism of a life style or clothing choice.
2. You can not flame me, if you are over your target weight by more than twenty pounds, or need a belt which exceeds 46 inches.
3. If you went to the theater more than 3 hours before the film started, you may not flame me.
4. If you went to the theater in a Star Fleet Uniform, or wore more than three star trek communicator pins, you may not flame me and finally...
5. If you think I am sleeping with your wife, girlfriend or daughter, you are probably not a big enough of a star trek fan to even bother to flame me.
Star Trek - First Contact
I wanted to like this movie, I really, really did. We needed to have one hit out of the park, the Star Trek franchise is starting to show it age. Now as a review of a movie, you can only take into account the things that happened on the screen, (which in my case also includes the previews) and the reaction of the audience, which in my book is somewhat secondary. Please note that anyone wearing a Klingon costume, or dressed as a Romulan does not technically count as an objective audience member.
The day started promisingly enough, with a delightful ticket taker, a few short previews, and no over acted computer animations telling me to shut up or throw away my trash. The theater was very full, nearly 80% of it's capacity. People waited with baited breath to see the continuing adventures of Picard, Riker and the rest of the gang. But then a surprise, a preview which had a small TV set showing Star Wars on it, which it turned out to be, was a very good and enjoyable preview of the re-release of the Star Wars films starting in February of next year, the preview even had new footage never before seen and killer effects. The scene was set. A good preview, nice ambiance, and some overly buttered popcorn.
The theater got quiet, as the stars on the Paramount logo came flying into view, followed by the familiar strains of the Classic Trek music we all grew up with. The titles, well they were less than inspiring, no bottle slowly falling through space, no ships passing by at warp speed. Just a reverse Superman type of generic title. But who cares about titles anyway, this could still be a good film.
Then we see what has to be the longest pull back shot in history of motion pictures and I was very excited, effects like this don't come cheap. This shot from inside Picard's eye to outer space was awesome! Then like most really good things, it turned out to be a dream. We see Picard on his new ship, without so much as clue as to how he got there, and where this ship came from. Everything seems to be normal except Picard knows the Borg are about to attack. Having been Borgified himself several years ago, he still hears Borg song in his head.
The most ruthless and vile enemy since the goatee Klingons of the sixties, the Borg. Part man, part machine, part plastic plumbing. These despicable life forms that stagger around like many of Universal Picture's most famous monsters, are the scourge of the galaxy, why the mere mention of their name can make a Klingon wet his pants or a make a security officer wish for the merciful death of a transporter accident.
Personally, I wanted to know how this ship got to be the Enterprise-E, I wanted to see it's commission, hear stories of it's design, maybe even see Picard working with the designers on it's construction. See how they go the crew to come back and watch as they slowly break orbit for the first time. But it was not to be, no matter, it can still be a good film.
Which brings me to my first rule of Acquiescence, just like the rules of Acquisition that the Frengie use. The rules of Acquiescence are used to point out major flaws in logic or rational thinking that they take for granted in the Star Trek universe.
Rule 1: We don't need to know anything about how people in the Star Trek universe get new ships, new eyes, or new hair colors for that matter. We can just take for a granted that Star Fleet will keep building new ships as fast as we destroy them.
The scenario is set, the Borg are on the attack. Will Picard defy orders and save the universe again, in a mighty battle around Earth, we see Star Fleet ships tossed about like plastic models being blown to bits by some intergalactic, M-80 firing, Rebukes cube. We see Picard, taking over the fleet and exploiting a weakness in the Borg that he had failed to mention to Star Fleet command during those long debriefings he must have gone through all those years ago.
But it seems destroying the Borg ship is not enough, the Borg launch a huge escape pod or cannon ball like item out of the ship as it blowing up, this escape pod has the ability to create a field that will allow it to travel back in time, the Enterprise get's caught in it's wake just long enough to see what happens when you introduce a dominate species into a submissive culture, the Borg take over Earth. By altering it's past. At first I had guessed this take over, which the Borg call assimilation, was done by forcing the people of earth to watch reruns of Regis & Kathy Lee until the strongest of our race killed themselves, and the rest were just given an email address and shown how to use a newsgroup until they were numb and nonresistant.
We soon find out that by following them into this temporal field somehow, that they plan to take over earth of the present by stopping something out of Earth's past. So far the film is off to blistering pace. The effects are impressive, the story a little strained but all in all, I still think I can like this movie.
Rule 2: You don't need to know how a technology works to use it, the Enterprise-E is somehow able to create, and then later in the film utilize, a here to fore unheard of way of traveling in time by making a cronosmetric field. Next I expect they will just turn off the Enterprise's chameleon circuit and the Enterprise will just turn into a big huge blue police box and be able to travel in time anywhere in time or space that they want to.
After following the Borg back in time to a post WWIII era decimated Earth, and deciding that The Borg were trying to stopping the "first contact" humans had with an alien race, ( a very old reference to an episode of the original Trek, where Vulcans were the "first contact" made with Earth and that this helped to save our world)
Rule 3: There are no longer any original ideas that can be developed in the Star Trek world, or so they would have us believe, without a reference or major story plot that somehow hinges on information we leaned in Kirks time. Soon I expect to read a book called "The world according to, Kirk"
The concept is the Borg will disrupt this meeting, by stopping the first ever test of a working warp drive ship called the Phoenix. They try and do this by firing randomly from space at the area around where the ship is housed. This well thought out plan and the writers deserve credit for trying it. The Borg's plan however, is disrupted by the appearance of the Enterprise-E in this post apocalyptic earth, when Picard blows the Borg ball out of the stars with a few well placed torpedo hits.
Rule 4: Shooting at things on the ground from space seems very difficult. You would think that with the technology necessary to travel back in time, and assimilate races of people, one of them would have been a tactical officer, capable of hitting one little missile size ship from their position in space. Or better yet, don't shoot at the little missile just blow up the whole damn town, missile, silo and all.
After this blistering assault on the town, the crew of the Enterprise beams down to find Zefram Cochran and make sure he can still do all the things necessary to keep Picard's future in tack, and stop the Borg threat. Up to this point the story was not bad, and everything was going along swimmingly.
But unbeknownst to the Captain, and the People on the Enterprise, and the internal sensors, and the crew in general, some of the Borg have beamed over to the Enterprise and are starting to in a very "Aliens" like way, take over the ship a few decks at a time. In scenes that seem all too familiar, where doomed crew members call out to each other, like they are looking for Jones the cat, instead of asking the computer where their shipmates are, they slowly one by one get pulled into the Borg collective.
Rule 5: The most powerful computer in the universe can be taken for granted when it would be convenient to ask it a question about a fellow crewman or something even more benign like "Computer, why is it so hot in here?" or "Computer, are there any Borg around the next corner?".
Picard, Data, and eventually Crusher and Lilly (whose role in the film is never really clear) return to the ship while the others look for Cochran. Once there, Picard discovers that it appears the Borg, somehow managed to beamed over undetected, while their ship was exploding, and are systematically taking over parts of the ship including engineering. After a few moments a plan is set into place to destroy part of the Enterprise's warp core cooling system, and that in turn will kill the organic parts of the Borg. Also the computer systems are locked out from the Borg by Data who encrypts them so well, that even drilling holes in his head won't get them out. I had a little problem with the holes being drilled in Data's head scene, his skin seemed very wooden like as bits of saw dust came from his skull, and these holes never show up again later in the film, which is a nice little flub on their part.
Picard runs into Dr. Crusher's patient Lilly, while trying to make his way back to the bridge, a women who is Cochran's, friend, wife or maybe just a lover, it's very unclear, and the two of them work their way back to the bridge. In doing so they encounter the Borg who chase them through a holographic program, where Picard conjures up a Tommy gun and kills the Borg who are following them. One point that is clearly brought out is that the bullets in the gun are not just holographic ones but are more real thanks in part to a few well placed commands that take all the safety precautions off of the holodeck. We saw this several times during the run of all the current Star Trek series.
Rule 6: Holographic bullets don't kill people, it's the over rides that do.
Picard takes a part out of the dead Borg, and plugs it into the top of his tricorder to help further the plot, and find out what the Borg are up to.
Rule 7: You can plug anything into a tricorder and it will interface perfectly. It seems the writers of this film have seen "Independence Day" and have determined that a computer, is a computer and they all speak exactly the same language in exactly the same way, and will talk to each other perfectly well. You can take what ever is lying around, plug it into the top of a tricorder and retrieve information from it, obviously tricorders must be running the Macintosh operating system.
Back on Earth they are searching for Cochran and trying to see if they can fix the ship in time for tomorrow morning's early lift off. After a time and few drinks, the crew catches up with Cochran and they convince him, he must complete his mission in order to save their future.
Rule 8: Post nuclear Earth is the perfect time for building a warp drive, it seems the parts and equipment must just be lying around waiting to be assembled. Even if it a takes a while to find enough titanium.
By this time I was starting to ask myself a lot of questions about the plot, but I figured, I must hang on I'm sure this is going somewhere, I can stay the course for a few more scenes. Besides how often do we get to see Trio drunk?
Cochran who is anything but noble and heroic (which was a touch I really liked), gets so spooked by the hero worship from the Enterprise crew, (including an all to brief appearance by the bumbling and socially inept Barkley). That he goes and runs away and is eventually phasered into doing his duty bit for the future.
Rule 9: The boys from Temporal Investigations frown on shooting historical figures with phasers. What's wrong with a good old fashion punch or a blanket party, do we have to shoot everyone who is the least bit cranky with a phaser?
On the ship after a long and somewhat boring non-battle and wrestling match with the Borg, where we see somewhat Borgified crew members get phasered to death by their Captain, and Data who all but breaks the head off one the Borg only to be captured by one of the oldest tricks in the books.
Rule 10: There seems there is only one door on the Enterprise-E which open up, and Data just happens to be standing in front of it at the time when the Borg raise it just enough to recognize his Bruno Molly boot and pull him under it.
It's determined that the Borg, who have been whipping the asses of everyone on the ship so far, need reinforcements, which it seems are located somewhere in the delta quadrant. No doubt setting traps for Voyager to stumble into in the next few years. They will get these reinforcements by attaching a type of homing beacon to the main deflector dish and sending for them. I can only hope the Borg's Seti program is better than ours, or chances are they would never hear it.
Picard, Worf and Hawk, not the same one from "Buck Rogers" fame, but a mere body to be killed later decide that the only way to stop them is to go and do an EVA (Extra Vehicular Ascent) walkabout on the ship and destroy the deflector from the outside.
Data on the other hand is being tempted by the sins of the flesh by the Borg Queen. Who one can say, despite all her obvious flaws and faults is not spineless. As a matter of fact she is head and shoulders above the rest. She is lowered into her waiting Bat suit of body armor and entices Data to join her in her quest for perfection. Eventually she seduces him and for the moment it seems he has "Come one with the Borg".
Rule 11: Never have sexual relations with a women who has no body. It's just plain bad form.
Picard, Worf, and the soon to be dead crewmen, go outside of the bridge to where the deflector dish is, when they get there they see the Borg setting up the homing beacon. Now one very interesting thing to note during the fight sequence that takes place is that the Borg don't need space suits to breath in outer space. Picard and Worf manage to destroy the beacon before it is activated. This type of scene has always been a pet peeve of mine, there is no way to do a zero gravity scene well, unless you spend endless time and money on it. Everyone who flew looked as if they rejects from "The Peter Pan School of Flying". This was also the scene where I had pretty much given up on the film, by the time Worf said "Assimilate this!" I was well on my way to a frown.
Rule 12: It is very, very cold in space and organic materials do not respond well to the vacuum of space. You would think that even if they don't have to breath (see Rule 13) their faces, and other organic parts would pretty much either seize up, or just plain explode in the absolute zero of outer space. It is mentioned very early on in the film that the Borg like 38 plus degrees Celsius, so how do all those mechanical and organic parts function so well in outer space. This was a big mistake.
Rule 13: Some type of humanoids do not have to breath in outer space, the list includes Superman, Space Ghost and obviously The Borg!!! Even if you were mostly mechanical, you would think that your collective brain would have told you to take an oxygen mask with you for your organic side.
Back on the ground the warp ship is being readied and launched, with the help of Riker and LaForge who tag along for the ride, which I'm sure is a breach of time travel etiquette. Fortunately the cockpit has seating for three, and we can only hope that Cochran's previous co-pilots were thrown on the funeral pyres before Riker and LaForge took their places. As they travel into space and start their trek, things on the Enterprise are not going so well.
After losing more ground to the Borg, and a bitter talking to by Lilly, who did an excellent impression of Guianan, but I'm sure that was just a coincidence and it had nothing to do with the fact that Whoopi Goldberg wasn't in the picture. Also in this scene we see all the previous ships that have the Enterprise name attached to them. The ones that get broken looked just like the models you get in the store except they were gold plated, in this very, very expensive film, this looked really cheesy.
Picard decides to destroy the Enterprise and have the crew abandon ship. Crusher asks, "Do you think they build another one?" Good question, since we seem to be going through them at an amazing rate. I wondered why not just separate the ship and leave the Borg the bottom half and then destroy the bottom half of the ship while they had the chance.
Rule 14: There is only one type of allegory that works, a literary one. If you are not well versed in the classics you will never understand why you do things.
Everything seems to being going well for Cochran and his ship the Phoenix as they approach the light barrier. I did notice one very striking similarity between the Phoenix and the original star ship Enterprise, the Nacelles seemed very familiar. Maybe this was an omage, or maybe Nacelles just have to look that way.
Picard attempts a rescue of Data and runs into the Borg Queen. Offering himself as a mate for her if she will let Data go. It seem she was on the Borg ship all those years ago, we just never saw her, or ever heard about her, or had any clue as to her existence before this film.
Rule 15: You can destroy a Borg vessel without any apparent survivors drifting in the wreckage and yet the Borg Queen will get away and will mock you for your very linear thinking for not understanding how she could have survived? Go figure.
After Data is released from the Borg Queen's force field he gives the impression that he is actually on the Borg's side, just long enough to send a few torpedo bearing down on the Phoenix. The torpedo eventually miss their target and the jump to light speed for the Phoenix attained. Data then implements the plan to destroy the Borg by allowing the engine cores cooling system to pore out into the engineering deck, while Picard looking like Stallone in "Cliff Hanger" climbs out of the way of the boiling vapor which kills most of the Borg and disables the queen.
Rule 16: You don't need warp core coolant to keep your star ship engine cool. It seems after you spill it out every where the core is just fine, even if you don't have an engineer or any crew to fix the damage.
The Borg Queen or what's left of her and her Bat suit, are finally killed by Picard who while doing a promotional tie-in with "Mortal Combat - The Next Generation", takes out her spine and snaps it in two. He then goes over to Data who has had his new fleshy self boiled away by the coolant leak, and who now resembles Arnold Schwarzenegger in the "Terminator" movies, get set to recall the crew and repair the ship.
On Earth, all is right with the world, the warp experiment has attracted the notice of an alien race, the Vulcans. I was stunned that people in the audience didn't know what was about to happen when the Star Trek mythos clearly states our First Contact was with them. They land and emerge from their craft, in a very "E.T" like scene, speaking perfect mid-west English (long before the invention of the universal translator) and giving the basic Vulcan welcome of "Live long and prosper".
We learn the Vulcans never knew the Enterprise and here crew were there due to the moon gravitational fields, and we have figured out not only how to generate this cronosmetric field, but how to return to our own time using it.
Rule 17: Transporters do not set of sensor alarms of any type on a vulcan ship.
The movie ends with a scene very familiar in look and feel to "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier", all that was missing were the strains of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat", and people getting drunk. Well we actually do have Cochran getting the Vulcans drunk, which I thought was an interesting little movie moment. Welcome to Earth, have a drink!
All in all the movie was very flawed, with only the performances of the major cast members making it worth while.
The acting was very good, a particular nod goes to Frakes for not putting himself in the movie too much, and to McFadden for having more hair styles in a single movie than Emelda Marco has shoes. I also like seeing Troi drunk, it was a classic Trek moment.
The effects were spectacular, as always. We have come to expect the best from ILM. They delivered seamless and believable effects from the opening shots through the very end. My favorite has to be the pull back from Picard's eye to outer space. It will go down in the history of Trek as being unforgettable. The weakest effects, and this isn't ILM fault was the Zero-G stuff, it still looked like people hanging from wires, even if those wires have been digitally removed.
The music was way too familiar, and I thought James Horner stole from his own work, this sound track was choppy at best and didn't add anything to film, if anything I would have like to been without it when it was drowning out some of the dialog between Riker and Cochran.
The direction, was slow and plodding, it was a good first outing for Frakes, but it was way to slow for a Star Trek film, I kept waiting for it to pick up, and it never did. I also think the film was about ten minutes too long, a lot of things could have been cut. Namely, half of the Zero-G stuff, and half of the dialog about Cochran being such a hero.
The writing was rather bland, there was no new ground broken here, I also have always hated the idea of rewriting history. I did enjoy seeing Picard still having trouble dealing with his encounter with the Borg from six years ago. But by adding the Borg Queen concept when it never existed there before was just plain cheating, and to add insult to injury having her escape the original fate of the Borg was just a slap in the face to the writers of the "Best of Both Worlds".
I loved seeing the Emergency Holographic Doctor and Nelix's alter ego from "Voyager" there, they were very funny. Also Barkley added a nice moment and will certainly spawn a five dollar action figure for is five seconds of screen time.
Overall, the production values were high, the risk great. But Star Trek - First Contact, just never connected for me. Maybe I was expecting too much, maybe they just can't make a good Trek film without the original crew, or maybe it reminded me just a little too much of Star Trek V. Whatever the reason, it's obvious that Trek needs fixing. Maybe new writers or killing a major cast member is in order. What ever the answer is, I hope it comes before we see, "Star Trek Voyager - The Movie".
More on 'Star Trek: First Contact'...
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