fter waiting in line to view the Museum of the Future in the Las Vegas Hilton's Star Trek: The Experience, visitors to Sin City's newest attraction find themselves hailed aboard the Copernicus Station, a research outpost near the border with the Delta Quadrant.
Lt. Stevens, a blond Starfleet officer in the gray-and-black uniform familiar to viewers of First Contact, welcomes a group of visitors who have arrived to take part in an innovative experiment. She lets the holographic Doctor (Picardo), newly assigned to Copernicus from the U.S.S. Voyager, explain further. Members of the group are to take part in Project Resistance because their genetic codes may hold the key to developing immunity to alien diseases and, most urgently, the nanoprobes of the feared Borg.
But before the visitors can complete their briefing, the station goes to yellow alert as an unidentified vessel approaches at high warp. The viewscreen confirms the Doctor's worst fears: It's a Borg cube, headed on intercept. Red alert!
The Bajoran commander of the station orders the station to open fire, but to no effect. Then the lights go out and the dreaded words come over the com: We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
Another Starfleet officer bursts into the room, a phaser rifle in his arms. Follow me!
Rushed into a battle-damaged corridor, the visitors are trapped as Borg drones close in on the hapless Starfleet officers, whose phasers have no effect. One after another, they are dragged off, screaming as they are assimilated.
Boarding an awaiting shuttle, the visitors blast off from the station, only to come under direct attack by the cube. With the front of the shuttle blown away, it is drawn into the heart of the cube, where the Borg Queen (Krige) awaits.
A pleasant multimedia immersion
Borg Invasion 4-D is the latest interactive multimedia ride to entice visitors, joining groundbreaking attractions like the original Star Trek: The Experience (now retitled Klingon Encounter) and the Terminator 2 3-D ride at Universal Studios in Los Angeles.
Like those rides, Borg mixes live actors, sets, stunts, pyrotechnic effects, a motion-platform floor and a widescreen 3-D digital movie to simulate the experience of being attacked in space and assimilated by Star Trek's most infamous villains.
The production values are impressive, beginning with the sets that reproduce the look and feel of a space station from the Star Trek: The Next Generation films, notably First Contact, and continuing with the ramrod comportment of the young actors who play the ill-fated Starfleet officers. It's easy to believe that one has boarded a space station that has come under attack: With each phaser or torpedo blast, subliminal rumbling vibrates the floor and walls convincingly.
The stunts are mostly tame, though one actor gets sucked into the ceiling at the hands of a Borg drone. There's a lot of yelling and screaming, flashing alarms and clanging klaxons. (Upon a second run-through, with a larger group of visitors, much of the live action gets missed amid the smoke and flashing lights. It's just too hard to see through the crowd.)
Once aboard the shuttle, the ride kicks into high gear, with a crystal-clear 3-D movie that offers a very up-close and personal look inside a Borg cube. There are a couple of obligatory cheesy 3-D effects, in which things are thrust directly at the viewer, but mostly the 3-D serves to enhance the feeling of being trapped and assimilated.
Seat, water and air effects simulate the sensation of assimilation, and the film morphs imaginatively into a 3-D approximation of the hive mind, with a groundbreaking 3-D Steadicam shot that recalls similar images from First Contact.
