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.