ollowing the aftermath of Capt. Picard's (Stewart) fatal encounter with Enterprise-B Capt. James Kirk in Star Trek: Generations as well as a wealth of small-screen skirmishes on the Next Generation series, Picard continues to struggle with his onetime assimilation into the half-mechanical collective The Borg. Taking the helm of the newly retooled Enterprise-E, Picard is assigned by Starfleet to surveil a conflict between the Federation and the Borg; contradicting orders, he enters the battle and helps defeat the Borg cube, but not before it ejects its sentient core into space.
Picard and his crew soon discover that they have unwittingly changed the course of the future, including the Federation's government of the universe; the Borg traveled back in time and disrupted the moment of "first contact," an historic meeting between humans and Vulcans, who saw the experiments of a daffy rocketeer named Zefram Cochrane (James Cromwell) and deemed them worthy of joining the interstellar community. Unfortunately, the Borg have cultivated a universe-wide tactical advantage over all remaining Federation ships and begin to overturn control of the Enterprise to the Borg Queen (Alice Krige).
Commander Riker (Frakes) mounts a small landing party to return to Earth to persuade Cochrane to fulfill his destiny and make his historic launch; meanwhile, Picard fights for control of the Enterprise, which continues to evolve into a breeding ground for the Borg. As the Borg Queen attempts to seduce Data (Spiner) for key information that will fully release control of the ship to the Borg, Picard struggles to decide where his personal vendetta against the Borg and his professional obligations as captain begin and end and faces a seemingly insurmountable challenge to rescue his fellow shipmates, regain control of the Enterprise and reconfigure history to fit the events that actually occurred.
Easy to resist
Star Trek: First Contact was the first installment in the Star Trek film series to debunk the widely held theory that the best movies were made in even numbers. The predominant problem that existed at the time of its release was whether a story writ large on the silver screen could transcend the imagination and scope of weekly episodes of the series; for perhaps the first time, it did not. But reflecting on the film almost 10 years on, its flaws are much more specific, and more significant, starting with Jonathan Frakes' slapdash, mediocre directing.
Frakes directed several episodes of the television show before mounting his own film, but did not gain the requisite visual ambition to elevate his filmmaking style to suit motion-picture imagery. Case in point: the Borg's continued overgrowth of the Enterprise seems like ripe territory for some ornate visual accoutrements, such as those demonstrated in James Cameron's Aliens or any number of other moody sci-fi pictures (it is a hive, after all). But Frakes lights the hallways as if they're destined to be projected on a 19" screen in one's living room, not in a movie theater, and his calculated attempt to show Borg vision amounts to little more than a distorted lens. If they are always assessing whether an intruder is a threat, or discerning what purpose can be served by engaging their enemy, shouldn't there be some kind of visual representation of that?
Further insult is added to injury with the film's centerpiece conflict, a showdown on the hull of the Enterprise between a number of crew members and Borg. The scene is as clumsily staged as its potential for drama is ripe, and the ultimate buildup—whether Worf will pass away after enduring 45 seconds of space conditions—is almost forgotten altogether. That said, the rest of the film does have some good ideas, but again, they do not successfully elevate the film to a level not only sustaining but necessitating theatrical treatment.
Despite the middling success of the film's storytelling, the newly released collector's edition DVD offers so many extras that arguments of First Contact's merits are largely rhetorical. The first disc offers one text and two audio commentaries (the former fast becoming my favorite way to watch older movies), as well as remastered picture and sound; disc two, on the other hand, boasts 15 (!) featurettes about the making of the movie in addition to trailers, storyboards and photograph archives. Suffice it to say that as much time can be spent reviewing the film's making as watching the movie itself; but then again, in my humble estimation, that would prove to be significantly more valuable watching.
