“Well I sure as hell am not going up there sober.”
The popular “best” of the four Star Trek: The Next Generation feature films, Star Trek: First Contact is actually my least favourite. It’s hard for me to imagine a more stupidly, or crassly, conceived franchise property than this. The film drips concept rather than storytelling, and is clumsy and inorganic, a rabble of unconnected story points and ideas built around a greedy base premise (“make a Borg movie – cuz they’ll like that”) while skipping the step where the film is telling any kind of interesting story. It’s nauseating to watch the crew of The Next Generation get put through such meaningless paces as this, especially in the big-screen debut of their most successful foe.
The Borg in First Contact are the first instance of what I call Borg 2.0. Having already wasted away on Star Trek: The Next Generation (by Lore’s turn with them in “Decent,” I’d argue that the Borg had outlived their usefulness as regular components of the series), the alien cybernauts are here reimagined more in line with other big-screen science fiction baddies. Borg 2.0 are part zombie, part Terminator, part Giger’s alien. The cyberpunk jumpsuits of the television series have given way to prosthetic rubber body armour and vampiric assimilation tubules. Basically, they’ve been “badassed,” but to no great effect; they aren’t any more menacing or frightening here than they were on the show (rather, less), and by the time Borg 2.0 are popping up all over Star Trek: Voyager – a series which would, in its desperation to find a reason for itself to exist, adopt the species wholesale for seasons four through seven – any sharpness to the original brief on this particular villain is gone. Oh: and First Contact hammers the last nail into the coffin itself, with the introduction of the Borg Queen.
The Borg Queen is awful, a needless recontextualization of the entire species. Gone are the mindless, endlessly replaceable drones with one unified, displaced consciousness; in their place, we have a sloppy riff on James Cameron, where a single female monarch is the unified consciousness, largely as a gambit to give Data a sex scene. The Queen’s arrival might be First Contact’s only memorable image – as her torso is inserted into her body after floating down from above – but it instantaneously replaces the Borg’s malevolent facelessness with yet another unimaginative incarnation of the bondage-style science fiction leather queen. I hate her. I love the sweaty, sensual Alice Krige, who plays her; but I hatethe Borg Queen.
As the Next Gen crew’s first solo big screen adventure – and having crashed the Enterprise-D in Generations – First Contact provides a massive visual update for the series. Unfortunately, it’s rarely for the better. The Enterprise-E, an ugly battleship that seems like a complete philosophical inversion of the community design of the Enterprise-D, drives the ship interiors towards the submarine aesthetic, per Star Treks II and VI. The colourful Starfleet uniforms are replaced with more rough and ready jacket/jumpsuit combinations, which strip down to Bruce Willis-style tank tops when it’s time for the captain to have an action sequence. (Janeway would get the better of Picard on this front, in a third-season episode of Voyager… though Stewart’s biceps here are quite impressive!) The phasers are gone too, replaced by rifles with headlights, which read more appealingly on camera. Geordi gets rid of his VISOR in favour of prosthetic eyeballs, and inexplicably, Beverly is blonde – and just as inexplicably, written out of the film yet again, with her only opportunity for a meaningful dialogue with Jean-Luc handed over to the Special Guest Star.
The film’s most resounding failure, though, is simply its maddening story. As I’ve pointed out in the past, Star Trek: First Contact has no stakes, because the good guys are always winning.
Review: the Borg invade the Federation. Do they send a fleet of cubes to wipe out Starfleet? No, they send a single cube, the same type of vessel that Starfleet already handily destroyed in “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II.” Starfleet destroys this one, and much quicker than they did the other time. When the cube is destroyed, the Borg launch a smaller vessel – a sphere – and travel back in time to stop Zephram Cochrane’s warp flight. Do they succeed? No, they fail to kill Cochrane or permanently damage the warp ship before the Enterprise follows them into the past and destroys the sphere, too. Before the sphere is destroyed, the Borg beam a tiny handful of drones onto the Enterprise, with the aim of taking over a ship with over 800 people aboard. Now: what are the odds that they’re going to succeed this time? Star Trek: First Contact doesn’t need the crew of the Enterprise to fight the Borg; the writers are doing it for them.
First Contact is two hours of the Enterprise crew handing the Borg their ass at Every. Single. Encounter.The Borg try to take over the Enterprise’s deflector array to call for backup (and who can blame them?); Picard and two other people stop them. The Borg follow an unarmed Picard into the holodeck while he’s on the run with Lily; Picard kills them with a holographic Tommy gun. The Borg try to swing Data to the dark side so that he will destroy the warp ship in flight; Data, being Data, never swings, fools the Borg, saves the ship, and wins the day. This is beyond weak dramaturgy; this is flat-out insulting.
And to make matters worse – as if worsening were required – the script adds the whole throughline of… uh… Crazy Picard. The good captain acts like a lunatic throughout the movie, in yet another Cameron riff (this time it’s Ripley, circa the first half of Aliens). For no particularly good reason, Picard bears both a preternatural understanding of the movements of the Borg, and a paralyzing inability to fight them without freaking the fuck out. He murders Starfleet crew members, guns down Borg drones, screams at his friends, and contravenes common sense to fuel his kill-crazed vendetta. He even throws a hissy-fit and breaks his toy starships. I won’t belabour the point, because I’m sure it’s pretty clear where I’m headed by now: this is not Picard. At no point in First Contact do I see the character I have admired through seven television seasons and three (out of four) feature films.
The film’s one meaningful runner, to my surprise, is the titular first contact itself. Clunky as it may be to get there, Cochrane’s warp flight (with Riker and Geordi riding shotgun!), and the subsequent arrival of the Vulcans, are the only points at which First Contact becomes anything approaching fun. Here, Jerry Goldsmith – scoring a Next Gen feature film for the first time, after his theme for Star Trek: The Motion Picture was appropriated as Next Gen’s title cue – lifts the proceedings to the rafters with a massive, ethereal theme. If workman director Jonathan Frakes can do little besides ape E.T. and hope for the best, the first contact scene still brings a shiver when the visiting alien flips back his hood, and reveals those pointy ears.
I am giving Star Trek: First Contact two measly Enterprises out of five, largely for physical production achievements – the movie is well made. But holy crap, it is awful storytelling. Merry Christmas!
Blogging The Next Generation was a weekly series on my Tumblr as I worked through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. The Star Trek: The Next Generation feature film series is available on blu-ray.