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The Appropriate Tune: 'Magic Carpet Ride' by Steppenwolf
While there are now more Trek shows in production than there has ever been, for better or worse, the prime time to be a Star Trek fan was the mid-90’s. Star Trek: The Next Generation had not faded in the public consciousness quite yet, Deep Space Nine was hitting its stride, and Voyager was still the hot new thing. Then there was the comic books, the novels, the video games, the themed restaurants, it was a glorious time for nerds who had nothing better to do with their time. As a nerd with a movie blog I’m allowed to say that, to be clear.
As long as you stayed out of the theaters that is, because the waters were a lot more murky there. The TOS films that dominated the 80s were a mixed bag but as a coda to the original show they were ultimately successful, but when the time came to pass the torch the franchise fumbled the ball. The TNG crew, the people who had done most of the legwork in revitalizing the franchise, in their debut film coming out of their final season are relegated to background characters in favor of more Kirk (apparently 6 films and a directing credit weren’t already enough), as Malcolm McDowell tries desperately to be a main antagonist with the scant few minutes of screen time he’s awarded, all wrapped up in a premise that feels woefully underutilized. Not a good first outing is what I’m trying to say, but what about their second time at bat? Purged of the last vestiges of TOS, how does The Next Generation fare at the cinema? Guess we’ll find out.
Released in 1996, Star Trek: First Contact was directed by Jonathan Frakes, written by Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore, and produced by Peter Lauritson, Rick Berman and Marty Hornstein. The Borg have finally decided that they want to invade Earth again, and rather than doing the smart thing and sending a fleet of ships to overwhelm Starfleet’s defenses they choose to send a single Cube. This Cube is ultimately dispatched thanks to the timely intervention of the Enterprise-E, lead by Captain Jean-Luc Picard and her crew, but not before it spawns an Orb ship, which just so happens to be a time machine. It’s destination? The terrifyingly close year of 2063. It’s mission? To sabotage the mission of Dr. Zephram Cochrane (James Cromwell), the man who in the next 24 hours will conduct the first successful warp speed jump, the catalyst for humanity’s first contact with alien life and the genesis of the Federation. The Enterprise follows the Orb and manages to destroy it, but not before they manage to damage Cochrane’s ship and somehow sneak onboard the Enterprise. Thus the mission is two-fold: repair Cochrane’s ship in time for him to make his flight tomorrow, and purge the Borg from the Enterprise before they take it over and use it to assimilate mankind’s past. Neither of which is all that easy, as it turns out.
Theoretically, First Contact stands on much firmer ground than Generations. It’s only natural that the first proper TNG film would utilize the Borg, arguably the show’s biggest contribution to the franchise, and the ‘time travel to ensure First Contact’ is one that falls firmly within Star Trek’s wheelhouse both in premise and in its optimistic tone. Braga, Berman and Moore now have a better idea of how to write for film rather than for TV, and while Jonathan Frakes’ directing experience wasn’t all that different from Dave Carson he obviously had spent enough time with this cast to now how to work with them. That plus the special effects boost that all Star Trek films get on the silver screen and you’ve got yourself a decent picture.
In practice it’s a bit shakier than that, so let’s start with our main antagonists, the Borg. First Contact is rather infamous amongst Trekkers for introducing the concept/character of the Borg Queen, played here by Alice Krige. Krige plays the role well enough, and on a visual level the Queen looks great, but I'm one of those people who thinks that the idea of a Borg Queen was unnecessary. The big conceit of the Borg was that they were man’s technology taken to its most extreme, so antithetical to our own views of life that they were easily the most ‘alien’ of all of Trek’s alien antagonists. It’s what made Picard’s capture and transformation into Locutus in the series so chilling-- that the beacon of Federation values could be so thoroughly transformed into the face of rapacious, unyielding conquest. That the Borg is not a collective consciousness but subordinate to an individual, and that this was always the case even before Picard’s abduction not only kills the power of that scene but also the mystique of the Borg in general. They go from this near-Lovecraftian vision of artificial intelligence to space bees.
Then we have the First Contact plot, which ironically is treated as almost an afterthought compared to the Borg plot. The arc is fairly obvious, Zephram Cochrane struggling against the weight of his legacy before he finally accepts it and starts to become the man history remembers him as. Most of the scenes involving Cochrane are of him listening to other characters tell him how great he is and him having the same reaction over and over. You’d think there’d be a scene where Troi prompts Cochrane to speak on his imposter syndrome, or Riker setting him straight with a speech about he’s under estimating himself, but that doesn’t happen. Of course the parts with the Borg are going to be the most action-oriented and audiences like action, but they couldn’t do anything more with this near-future post-apocalyptic Earth than using it as a convenient excuse to split up the crew? Star Trek 4 took advantage of its time travel plot better than First Contact does, and that movie was 70 fish out of water jokes and 30 percent whales.
The decision to make Patrick Stewart into an action star was another weird one by Berman, Braga and Moore. Putting aside the question of whether Picard’s genocidal Captain Ahab-esque rage would make sense as motivation at this point in canon, after the episode with Hugh I have my doubts, the whole thing seems to be set up in order to make Picard more like Kirk. Except that Picard is not Kirk; His personality, his style of command, his relationship to his crew, the first line under his name in the show bible might as well be ‘NOT KIRK’, so seeing him mowing down drones with a holographic machine gun is a less subtle version of Kirk’s relationship with Klingons. If they were setting up a bit of subversion, where Picard does the action and Riker makes the inspirational speeches they could get away with it, except Riker is barely in the damn movie and he barely does anything in it. There are some other rocky bits of characterization, like Troi’s one scene in the film being drunk and useless and Data stuck in this see-sawing development hell like usual, but action hero Picard is definitely the most tonally dissonant.
That being said, First Contact is definitely a more entertaining film than Generations. The pitched firefight in the cramped hallways of the Enterprise, Picard and company facing off against the Borg on the hull of the ship, sneaking missions down Borg infested hallways, never knowing if and when they’ll deem the characters a threat and fall upon them. The crew are locked in mortal combat with unkillable zombies, trapped on their own ship, where failure means the complete eradication of everything they’ve ever known. Not quite Cameron’s Aliens mind you, but I think Frakes manages to build an atmosphere of tension really well, and those special effects make the action much more dynamic than Patrick Stewart crawling around a rock 3 or 4 times. Also the Borg are looking really cool, very slimy and corpse-like.
I’m going to give First Contact the recommendation. Maybe my bad memories of Generations are affecting my judgment, but it’s got some neat action set pieces, a classic Picard speech, and it gives everyone on the cast at least some amount of screen time (as well as a cameo from popular side characters like Barclay). There’s too many nits I can pick to call it a must-see classic, which as a franchise film was never going to be the case anyway, but in terms of Star Trek films I’d put it in the upper half of the bell curve. Not quite on the level of 6 or 2, but definitely better than 5, but then a post-Chipotle dump is better than Star Trek 5, so check it if you’re interested. Dare I say it’s made me actually look forward to the next film, to see if they can maintain this momentum. We’ll have to wait until next year to find out though.
On to the Apes!
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