A Life Through Film #040: Star Trek First Contact
Set phasers to fun! Is that anything? Did that work as a subtitle?
Release Date: 11/22/1996
Weeks at Number One: 1
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
Next year, a cultural icon celebrates the 60th anniversary of boldly going where no man has gone before.
The importance of Star Trek, Gene Rodenberry’s thoughtful, optimistic vision of the future, cannot be overstated. It has permeated basically every level of culture since its inception, influencing everything from the Civil Rights Movement to modern day fandom and fan fiction. Even if you’ve never seen an episode of that original show, you know characters like Spock and Captain Kirk, you know the Vulcan hand sign, and you know the Starship Enterprise.
Though the original ‘60s series only ran for 3 seasons, less than 100 episodes, its explorations of equality, rights, and capitalism lingered in the public consciousness for decades following its cancellation. As I grew up, my dad would regale me with particularly poignant episode plots, such as the time the crew of the Enterprise discovered a planet of black and white aliens had destroyed themselves in civil war over minor differences in appearance. Not exactly subtle, but bravely relevant given the time period it was released in.
In 1979, ten years after the show ended, Paramount released Star Trek: The Motion Picture to great success. Over the next twelve years, five more movies starring that original cast swelled series popularity more and more, despite the varying quality of the films (Wrath of Khan and The Voyage Home good, Search for Spock and Final Frontier bad). As these movies made more and more money, a new television series that capitalized on them made all the sense in the world.
By almost any metric, Star Trek: The Next Generation (which started in 1987) was an even bigger success than the original series. It ran for over twice the amount of time and aired over double the amount of episodes while benefiting from better special effects and a more diverse cast.
The focus of its narratives also shifted, often examining mankind’s relationship with technology through characters like the android Data and storytelling devices such as the Holodeck (a room that can use holograms to simulate any environment, real or imaginary). Though the original series was truly innovative and remains iconic to this day, The Next Generation garnered massive critical and commercial acclaim in its time, and may still be the fan favorite series overall.
I say “may still be” because I need to confess something.
I’ve never been a big Star Trek guy.
I love science fiction, but as a kid scrolling through TNG reruns, I was bored by the concept of a space show that focused more on talking and less on cool fights and explosions. Juvenile, I know, but you have to keep in mind that I was a literal child. As a result, I’ve probably seen fewer than 10 episodes total of TNG, and fewer still of the original series. I’ve also never watched any pre-2009 movies, only jumping in with the 2000s reboot series. Basically everything I know about Star Trek and The Next Generation comes from cultural osmosis via online nerd spaces, not firsthand knowledge.
I was worried that this unfamiliarity would be a hindrance this week, given the subject matter. But you can find a billion fansites chronicling the deep lore implications and mischaracterizations in each Star Trek movie. The diehard Trekkies are overrepresented online. Statistically, most of you are like me: casual fans at best who might know the basics of the franchise but never committed to diving headfirst into it. Today, I speak for the middle of the bell curve.
We’re skipping the rest of the series and jumping straight to this week’s movie. Appropriate, given its title.
Star Trek: First Contact is the second movie starring the TNG crew, the first to have no involvement from the original series cast, and the eighth movie overall in the franchise. However, the landscape of the franchise was far different in ‘96 than it was back in ‘79.
The popularity of TNG had led to even more Trek shows, with Deep Space 9 and Voyager both airing concurrently through the ‘90s. And yet despite it being the genesis of the franchise’s TV boom, The Next Generation had been cancelled in ‘94 at the height of its popularity. Fans were still pissed about that in late ‘96, seeing its two replacement shows as oversaturating the market with inferior content.
The movie Star Trek Generations used the casts from both TNG and the original series, and was released only a few months after the show’s cancellation. But the passage of time hadn’t made the absence of characters like Captain Picard, Riker, Worf, and Data any easier for fans. Interest in the series was declining due to the lack of TNG, but thankfully for Paramount, the studio had greenlit First Contact only a couple of months after the release of Generations. That first movie had acted as a passing of the torch moment from one era to the next. This new film would be pure TNG, right on down to the villain.
The Borg are a recurring villainous race in the series that, despite relatively few appearances, became fan favorites thanks to their strong concept. The hivemind of the Borg assimilate biological entities into it, wiping their personality and fusing them with synthetic materials to remove their individuality. The metaphor is pretty clear: over-reliance on technology makes us less human (or Klingon, etc.) by way of making us less distinct. The more granular rules of the Borg are a bit confusing, but their overall look and menace remain potent decades later.
Those attributes were actually what kept them from appearing more. First Contact screenwriters and TNG regulars Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore said that the Borg hadn’t been used since season 5 of the show because their technohorror prosthetics were too expensive and the team didn’t want them to become edgeless through repeated appearances.
One of the few episodes of The Next Generation that I’ve actually seen is called “The Best of Both Worlds Part I,” the finale of the show’s third season which aired in 1990. It isn’t the first episode to feature the Borg, but it’s one of the most important in the entire series. I forget the details of how we get there, but “Best of Both Worlds” ends with the revelation that de facto protagonist, Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart), has been assimilated by the Borg, the ultimate loss of humanity versus technology and a hell of a cliffhanger for the next season.
The assimilation is reversed in the Season 4 premiere, and though the Borg were never much of a physical presence in TNG afterwards, they remained a constant threat in the background.
Braga and Moore wanted to expand on their menace with a feature film, while also factoring in notes from their boss. Rick Berman was the supervising producer for all of The Next Generation, and he wanted a movie about time travel, damn it. I get it man! People were still hyped up over Terminator 2! [I remain hyped up over that movie. 5/5]
As a compromise, the plot of First Contact features both concepts. The Borg go back in time to the mid 21st century to prevent humanity’s first contact with an alien species while the crew of the Enterprise tries to defeat them, both on Earth and in orbit.
At first, the creative team looked for an outsider director. Ridley Scott (Blade Runner [3/5], Alien [5/5], Thelma and Louise) and John McTiernan (Die Hard [4/5, not a Christmas movie], Hunt for Red October [3.5/5]) were both approached, but neither man wanted the job. Berman realized that he needed someone who understood the gestalt of Star Trek, not a big name on the poster. Or at the very least, he figured the movie could use someone who’s name was going to be on the poster anyway.
Asker of strange questions Jonathan Frakes had not only starred in TNG as second-in-command Will Riker, he had also directed a few episodes of the show. He’d never helmed a feature film before, but Frakes understood what makes Star Trek more than any outsider director could possibly comprehend. Besides, the series had allocated directing duties to its stars before; Leonard Nimoy had directed the well-liked fourth film The Voyage Home, and William Shatner, not one to be left out of the fun, was behind its disastrous follow-up The Final Frontier.
A quick note about my use of sources this time around. For behind-the-scenes history, I typically don’t like just pulling from the Wikipedia page for a movie. That’s something that anyone could do in their free time. Typically I’ll search for other online sources: archived interviews, long form histories, things like that. However, the study of Star Trek has become near academic at this point, meaning the best information on the history of First Contact is found in books and special DVD commentaries that I frankly don’t have immediate enough access to. Please forgive this breach of my usual rules, but thankfully it couldn’t have happened to a more straightforward movie.
Paramount needed to get back those TNG fans that had been stewing in disappointment since the show’s cancellation. Jonathan Frakes, recognizing recent distaste for Voyager and DS9, promised in a ‘96 HBO special that with First Contact, “the sense of fun is back in Star Trek.”
I don’t know when or how the fun went away, but if it took making a feature length version of a Next Generation episode to find it, then mission accomplished.
That sounds dismissive, like I’m writing off this movie as simply a big budget version of something that works better in one hour chunks. You have to keep in mind though, Star Trek: The Next Generation is one of the most beloved shows of the ‘90s for a reason. It’s good stuff! It not only inspired new generations of Trekkies as it was airing, but anecdotally speaking, today you’re more likely to find cusper Millennials and Zoomers going back to watch that version of Trek, not the campy and dated Original Series.
I know this because a year or two back, my younger brother dove into TNG despite the show being cancelled four years before he was born. Most of the episodes of the show that I’ve watched have been put on by him when we’re both visiting our parents, the shared experience of watching TV completing our psychological devolution back to adolescence. When I reached out to him about First Contact, though, he hadn’t even been aware of any TNG movies, though he was quick to confirm to me that Captain Picard was “the absolute GOAT.”
He and the rest of the cast returns from TNG, and you can tell the group is still supremely comfortable in these roles. The dynamics between these existing characters aren’t explored at all in First Contact, since there had already been nearly 200 episodes of television dedicated to that already. Instead, Stewart and the rest of the gang get back into the Starfleet uniforms without too much interpersonal conflict. It’s one of a few storytelling choices in the movie that plays better if you’re already a fan of this franchise, but I found the exterior conflict pushing in on these characters interesting enough that I didn’t mind.
The highlight of the returning cast is, of course, Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard. The commander of the Enterprise has the strongest character arc in the film as the script digs into his terrible history with the Borg. Fittingly for a man with his theater background, Stewart lays the hell into his multiple monologues, selling the alternating composure and fury that Picard experiences as his trauma and anger intermingle. It’s a legitimately great performance from a legendary performer, maybe worth the price of admission into First Contact alone.
The rest of the TV cast do well, though none stand out as much as Picard. The closest would be Brent Spiner as the android Data, by virtue of him receiving the second-most amount of screentime. Data mainly plays the scene partner for the Borg Queen, a new character introduced to serve as a sexy mouthpiece (and leader? It’s unclear) for the hivemind. Their debates on the value of trying to emulate humanity as a synthetic being instead of seeking perfection through an embrace of technology line up with the show’s explorations into similar concepts, though First Contact combines headiness with horniness.
The Borg Queen, played by Alice Krige, is by far the most explicitly alluring character I’ve ever seen in a piece of pre-2000s Star Trek media. Her introduction, an excellent special effect of her neck and head being lowered and attached to the rest of her body while introducing herself to Data, establishes her strange combination of biological attraction and synthetic structure. From there, she uses the classic strategy of seduction to try and lure the noble android to the dark side of the Borg, even installing human flesh onto his arm to erotically blow on it. It’s a striking performance for the series, which makes it a shame that Krige isn’t in more of First Contact.
I just wish the Borg were just a tad bit better as villains. An Entertainment Weekly retrospective on the movie from 2016 looked back on the Borg as ultimately cringe. It argues that what the Borg represent (soul-destroying reliance on technology) is fun to ponder but not so entertaining to actually watch on screen, due to their dated aesthetics. Their cybergoth body horror feels more camp these days in a world where that style has been redefined multiple times in the decades since their introduction, but their aesthetic is not my main problem with the race.
Instead, I find their motivation seriously under defined in First Contact. They want to achieve perfection by assimilating all organic life into the hivemind, but what does that even mean for them? What is their end goal? Why is this their route to “perfection”?
These are surely questions explored and answered by the show itself, but First Contact assumes you already get the deal with the Borg by the time you start watching it. Despite Braga and Moore claiming that their script would be accessible to both fans and newcomers, the antagonistic threat of the Borg feels vague if you haven’t spent hours exploring their philosophy and goals already as a result of watching TNG.
Some highlights of the movie require no previous experience with the series though. James Cromwell and Alfre Woodard join the cast for this adventure as Zefram Cochrane, the inventor of faster-than-light travel in the 21st century, and his assistant Lily respectively. Bringing in two Oscar-nominated performers adds a bit of prestige to First Contact, and both actors do a great job.
Cromwell plays the lauded, idolized Cochrane as a loudmouthed, greedy drunk, a contrast to the Enterprise crew’s expectations of him as a noble scientist. It’s a fun performance that brings up interesting ideas of legacy versus reality, and whether a good thing done for bad reasons is still noble. I wish the screenplay dedicated more discussion to those themes and Cochrane’s arc in general, but Cromwell elevates every scene he’s in.
Woodard, meanwhile, gets to have fun as a 21st century woman exploring a 24th century spacecraft. It’s an audience surrogate role done well, with Lily standing up to ask the questions about how the future works that the movie would otherwise never answer. On top of that, her outsider perspective also helps her serve as a moral anchor for Picard. The captain’s battle with the Borg starts to become dangerously personal due to his history with them, a Moby Dick allusion the movie is happy to point out to us on multiple occasions. Lilly, by virtue of missing all that backstory, is better equipped to talk the captain down from dooming his crew in his quest for vengeance.
By the way, Stewart and Woodard have surprisingly good chemistry in this movie? I had always thought of Captain Kirk as the womanizing captain in Star Trek, but the back and forth between Picard and Lily evolves an initially hostile relationship to one of surprising depth and trust. They also have a fun scene together where they disguise themselves in 1920s garb as the Holodeck takes on the form of a Prohibition-era ballroom. Like all good parties, it starts with dancing and ends with a dapper Picard blasting away the Borg with a tommy gun (incredible moment).
By the time the movie ends with only a peck on the cheek, I was honestly a bit disappointed that the movie didn’t explore the relationship more.1
If you’ll notice, I believe that’s the third time I’ve brought up First Contact not fully exploring its ideas. Legacy versus reality, humanity versus technology, revenge versus survival, past versus present, all concepts brought up and briefly discussed but never fully fleshed out.
The adaptation from TV installment to feature length film is the problem, unfortunately. In an episode of TNG, the writers would have dedicated a full hour to prying the depths of these philosophical debates while also developing the relationships between characters. But in an effort to make a bigger version of the show, Berman, Braga, and Moore are forced to simply allude to the show’s thoughtfulness in between big action set pieces.
As a kid, I didn’t want to watch TNG reruns because they weren’t as fun and explosive as Star Wars. As an adult, I’m realizing that classic Star Trek leans scholarly because that was its strong suit. The action in First Contact isn’t bad, but it’s extremely bland.
The ship combat early on looks okay, if uninspired. The moments of hand to hand or armed combat between individuals lack all thrill, due to boring framing and fight choreography that only incorporates one step at a time, rather than stringing multiple moves together to craft a dance of conflict. Frakes understands how to shoot the dramatic conversations of Star Trek, but his ability to make action exciting leaves a lot to be desired.
It’s a shame the action is so limp, because those scenes are filled with the movie’s surprisingly strong effects. First Contact combines practical effects (like wirework and puppetry) with computer graphics courtesy of Industrial Light and Magic. I won’t tell you that the CG has held up as well as Toy Story or that the overall visuals are as good as Independence Day, but I was consistently impressed by them. Early CGI holds up better when it’s being used to model spaceships instead of living things, meaning I was hardly taken out of the viewing experience by a bad looking render.
The peak of these effects is also the movie’s best action scene, a tense confrontation between the Borg and Enterprise crew in a communications dish on the exterior of the ship. By combining wirework, costuming, and a vast blue screen, ILM nails the perils of the zero gravity exchange. The effects combine with the necessarily slow pace of the fight forced by the setting to build tension that all other scenes in the movie lack. First Contact is still a middling action film overall, but this centerpiece scene is a real highlight that bolsters the movie overall.
Speaking of the Borg: their makeup! First Contact loves to luxuriate over the light body horror of assimilation. The flesh of unlucky Enterprise crew members warps and grows a sickly shade of grey. Organs, limbs, entire sections of their body are replaced by wiry, jagged machinery, the focus on practicality leading to a look that is still effectively freaky, Entertainment Weekly be damned.
TNG effects regular Michael Westmore was brought back to handle the look of the Borg, now no longer constrained by a TV budget. His efforts paid off with an Academy Award nomination for Best Makeup, though First Contact ended up losing to The Nutty Professor.
Is Star Trek: First Contact worth watching if you have limited experience with The Next Generation or the franchise in general? It depends on your tolerance for science fiction.
I love the genre, and enjoyed the film thanks to its strong performances, surprisingly solid effects, and basically decent script (it even has an A plot and a B plot, just like a TV episode!). It is annoying that major narrative elements, like characterization of both heroes and villains, is left to prerequisite knowledge of the show, which many people will see as an instant turnoff. I understand that sentiment, but believe that First Contact is worth the frustrations as a fun, ultimately optimistic scifi romp with a screenplay headier than your average blockbuster.
Critics adored First Contact, with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 93% making it the second-highest rated installment in the franchise on the website. Roger Ebert loved it, giving it nearly full marks and ranking it among the best in the franchise, behind only Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Adam Smith from Empire recommended it, though in his review he admits to it being a movie that it’s a movie better suited for existing fans, citing its thin characterization and plot that “looks like a distended television episode.”
Emily Carlisle at the BBC was one of the few negative reviews, criticizing Frake’s direction as lacking suspense. She ends her review with a dig at the movie’s attempt at being more cinematic:
Focusing more on action sequences than characterization, the breakneck pace gives an unsatisfying result.
But what about the fans? This is a franchise built on diehard adoration from viewers, to the point where around the time this movie came out, the Patrick Stewart Fan Club had evolved into the Patrick Stewart Research Library (unfortunately that archive appears to now be closed). A review of a First Contact art book on a Star Trek fanblog from a couple of years back mentions that the movie is generally considered one of the best films in the franchise, a sentiment I see matched all around the internet. Empire Online, Space, and Den of Geek all rank the movie within the top echelon of the series, often only coming behind all-time classic The Wrath of Khan.
The few elements of the movie that rub me the wrong way seem to be what the fans love. The characters behaving as they’d expect, the TV-like pacing, and of course, the Borg, all made Trekkies very happy.
In an interview with the New York Times a month after the release of First Contact, Frakes is ecstatic over the fan response for his directorial debut, saying he’d “never done this well as an actor, as [he’d] been doing as a director.” His joy was well-placed; after debuting in first place with a killer $30 million gross, First Contact had already made $77 million domestically by the time the director spoke to the Times. The film was a consistent money maker through the end of the year, eventually exiting theaters with $92 million.
Its final pull of $150 million speaks to a slightly cooler international audience, but it still turned a major profit on its $45 million budget. Even after the franchise blockbusters of the 2000s and 2010s, First Contact remains the fifth highest grossing film in the series.
Star Trek was in a strange place in 1996: the once cult hit had grown into a merchandising behemoth and a major presence on television, yet was scarred by the bitter absence of its most acclaimed series. The progressive optimism of the franchise now seemed less necessary with the Cold War in the past. The franchise could still offer thoughtful stories, but it ultimately faced the same philosophical vacuum that James Bond faced in 1995: without all the terror and uncertainty in the world, was it necessary for an entertaining, hopeful salve like Star Trek?
Paramount needed a major hit with the fans in order to prove the franchise’s worth at the end of history, and First Contact nailed the mark. On top of being a fun, feel-good scifi flick, it brought back the Next Generation crew in a big way, framing them not as secondary to original series cast but instead true inheritors of their legacy. TNG was still gone from TVs (except in rerun form), but their stories had been elevated to worthy of the big screen. Picard, Riker, Data, Worf, Dr. Crusher, and the rest of the Enterprise crew will be back in this column again.
Rating: 3.5/5
What Else Was in Theaters?
Merry Christmas! Jingle All The Way, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s mean-spirited, bitter, commercialist dreck Holiday flick, came out the same day as First Contact, ultimately peaking in 4th place. Terrible film. 1.5/5
Next Week: Who let the many, many dogs out? Disney gets into the live-action remake game decades early with their updated version of 101 Dalmatians.
See you then!
-Will
Also, Patrick Stewart was 55 years old while filming this movie and looks real good. Confirmed it with my wife: dude’s a baddie.