Star Trek Sundays: "First Contact" has no imagination and no flair
Far from being 'the good TNG movie,' this one's a bore
It’s Sunday, and we’re going through all 13 theatrical STAR TREK films, a series that includes a number of pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). We continue today with the second Next Generation film, STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT. Enjoy…
Star Trek: First Contact
1996, Dir. Jonathan Frakes
Originally published in 200 Reviews, based on notes from 2022
Star Trek: First Contact is an enormously better movie than Star Trek: Generations, but being ‘better’ than a raging dumpster fire only gets you so far. This is the Next Generation movie fans are usually more positively inclined towards, but I think you have to be grading on a pretty steep curve to think there’s anything special going on here. It is, like Generations, more televisual than cinematic, paced like one of The Next Generation’s two-part episodes, complete with act-break rhythms and an A-plot/B-plot structure, with flat and workmanlike visuals that do nothing to meaningfully convey a ‘bigger,’ ‘theatrical’ experience. There is no originality on display at all, the plot an uneasy mash-up of Star Trek IV (time travelling into the past to save the present) and Star Trek II (a revenge story with copious Moby Dick references) with the main action serving as a fairly repetitive sequel to the TV show’s finest episode, “The Best of Both Worlds.” There is nothing new we haven’t seen here before, and mostly, the film just makes me wish I was watching “Best of Both Worlds” instead, a two-parter that is better than all four Next Generation movies combined. Ultimately, First Contact answers the question “what if Wrath of Khan was just sorta ‘okay’ and made you want to watch ‘Space Seed’ instead?” And I don’t think that’s a question anyone was asking.
A few positive points: Jerry Goldsmith is back on music duty, as he will be for the next few movies, and that definitely helps things go down easier. He takes the amazing Klingon theme he wrote for The Motion Picture and transforms it into Worf’s fanfare here, which is probably the single slickest element of the entire film. First Contact also holds a special place in my heart as the first time I remember hearing about socialism as a kid; the scene where Picard explains to Alfre Woodard’s character how humans overcame money to create incredible things like the Enterprise has always stuck with me, this lovely little moment of a space communist from the distant future speaking to a person closer to our time and inviting her to not only imagine a world without money, but showing her the evidence. I like that.
And an immediate advantage First Contact has over the other Next Generation films is that it at least gets right down to business. Taking its cues from The Voyage Home, the threat is established quickly, and the crew is travelling through time before the fifteen-minute mark. It allows Picard and company to be much more proactive in this one, versus the extremely reactive stance of Generations where they are being buffeted by the winds of the plot for the entire run-time.
That sense of momentum doesn’t last long, however, as the film quickly divvies its cast up into an A-plot and a B-plot – Riker’s contingent on Earth helping Zefram Cochrane in the lead-up to the eponymous first contact, and Picard’s contingent battling the Borg up on the Enterprise – and the two halves proceed entirely cordoned off from one another. There is very little interplay between them for the bulk of the movie, and as it rounds the second act, the film starts moving like molasses, every subplot moving at a snail’s pace, the urgency of the opening scenes entirely dissipated. The different plot strands have tenuous narrative links to one another, but nothing in the way of thematic interplay. Data’s whole psychosexual nightmare with the Borg Queen has nothing to say about Cochrane and his anxiety about breaking the warp barrier, which has nothing to say about Picard’s vendetta against the Borg. It’s all happening at the same time, but none of these plots belong together in one cohesive story. On television, we might let it slide, especially if there were commercial breaks between the cuts, which is obviously the rhythm writers Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore were still most comfortable with at this point. On film, it all feels hopelessly lethargic.
Speaking of Picard’s (well-earned) hatred for the Borg, while the story gives Patrick Stewart a lot of big moments to play, I do not like or understand why they frame the character the way they do here at all. First Contact does all the Moby Dick references, because Star Trek II did all the Moby Dick references, but it misses that Moby Dick is about a man hunting a whale whose death will bring him no material or spiritual benefit (which was fully analogous for Khan’s pursual of Kirk), whereas Picard wanting to destroy the Borg is good, necessary, and logical. It’s pretty much his job, actually, to want to eliminate the enemy that is currently invading earth and trying to execute a temporal genocide on his entire species. The Wrath of Khan is a pretty straightforward translation of Moby Dick into interstellar sci-fi; First Contact is Moby Dick if the whale had killed and tortured countless scores of humans, including Ahab, and wanted to go on killing and torturing the rest of humanity in perpetuity, but for some reason Ishmael thought Ahab was being way too extra for wanting to “draw the line here” and stop the whales from continuing their reign of terror.
The film’s stupidest moment is one I cannot decide if I love or I hate, and it involves what I believe was the first title drop in the history of the franchise, as Cochrane tries to wrap his head around what the Enterprise crew is telling him:
“And you people, you’re all astronauts, on some kind of Star Trek?”
Terrible, but kind of amazing. It’s not funny now, and it probably wasn’t funny in the 90s, but seeing the film make a dad joke this bad makes me wish Generations had gone for it too, and had Kirk, upon meeting Picard, look his British counterpart up-and-down and say “What are you, some kind of Star Trek: The Next Generation?”
Cowards.
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