Star Trek: First Contact Review
by Scott Promish (scottjp AT removecris DOT com)June 16th, 1997
STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT (1996)
A film review by Scott Promish
Copyright 1997 Scott Promish
The Borg are back, uglier than ever (and looking more than a little like Cenobites from Hellraiser). At the start of the film, Earth is under attack, and Picard and his crew disobey a direct order and join the conflict. With the Enterprise's help, it doesn't take long for the Federation ships to obliterate the cube (why did it always take so long in the TV series?) However, the core of the Borg ship ejects right before the explosion and escapes through a time tunnel. The Enterprise follows, and once they figure out when they are, they realise that the Borg have intentionally travelled back in time to prevent humanity's first contact with an alien race.
Here, a brilliant scientist named Zefrem Cochrane will any minute now complete and fly the first craft equipped with warp drive (if he can stop drinking and carousing for just a little while), which will in turn attract the attention of a passing alien race and set the stage for world peace and the formation of the United Federation of Planets.
And here's where the problems begin, in this, the second film to feature the Next Generation cast. Assuming they're correct about the Borg's intentions and the time-trip wasn't just a last-ditch attempt to escape destruction, why would they want to come to this time period and tamper with it at all? The Borg exist to assimilate new technologies, not simply to create armies of drones wherever they go. And there is no technology here that would be of interest to them. Furthermore, by taking over the Earth at this stage, they'd be eliminating all that yummy potential Federation technology that they tried so hard to steal in the TV series. Sure, they wouldn't have to fight them, but the Borg consider themselves superior to everyone else anyway.
James Cromwell (BABE) plays Cochrane as the Al Bundy of the twenty-first century. I didn't for one moment believe that this drunken old fool was capable of assembling a model rocket, let alone a warp drive craft.
The writers have given the Borg a queen now (played by Alice Krige), perhaps intending to emphasise the hive-mind concept, but ultimately this makes them seem less formidable and certainly less alien. One of the more unsettling aspects of the Borg was that each one always knew what was happening in the eyes of every other Borg at any given time, and they acted as extensions of one gigantic entity; now, they are simply under this woman's command. Star Trek always had trouble giving aliens truly alien characteristics (settling instead for bizarre facial features) and the queen is no exception. She's completely human as she attempts to seduce Data to the "dark side." I suppose having Data claim that he is "fully functional" or having the queen ask him "Was it good for you?" is amusing to Trekkies, but I just didn't get a laugh out of it. The movie is rife with cheesy humor like this, and most of it fell flat.
The film is directed by Jonathan Frakes. He does a decent job, though there's little that's very impressive. One exception is at the beginning of the film, as the camera does an "infinite pullback" beginning with a close-up of Picard's eye and eventually shows us the incredible vastness of the Borg ship. It's a stunning sight, and it's too bad the rest of the film doesn't stay at this level. The quality of the acting would have been adequate for the TV show, but it seems substandard in a feature film; one expects more. In the end, what we have is basically a really long TV episode, and a carelessly put together one at that, as if the writers went with their first draft of the script and didn't bother to proofread it and see if it worked. At least in the films with the original cast, we had the updated special effects to set the movies apart from the TV series; with The Next Generation, we don't even have that.
I think my moviegoing companion and I summed our feelings up in a nutshell at the part where Beverly asks Picard if he thinks they'll ever build another Enterprise, and he replies, "There are plenty of letters left in the alphabet." I commented cynically, "That's how many more movies there's going to be," to which my friend replied, "Let's hope not."
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