[Note that followups are directed to rec.arts.movies.current-films and rec.arts.movies.startrek.current only, not to rec.arts.sf.movies. -Moderator]
STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT
A film review by Robin Starvling
Copyright 1996 Robin Starvling
Star Trek First Contact: rename it STAR TREK FIRST CONTRIVEMENT
There will be spoilers, but how can one spoil a movie worse than this?
The movie takes place about a year after the last one. There's a whole new ship, a whole new crew of extras, brand new uniforms and Geordi suddenly has brand new eyes. No explanation. We're to take it for granted.
The Borg have arrived at Earth and plan to assimilate it. The Federation orders their brand new flagship to hide out in the Neutral Zone because they're afraid Picard might get assimilated again. He of course gets sick of this when news travels back saying that the entire fleet can't stop them.
Predicatable. Off they go in the new ship to save the day. They get there and suddenly Picard knows if everyone shoots at the same place, it'll blow up the borg ship. Why didn't he know this before? And how come Picard can suddenly hear them? Still a few implants in his brain that Doctor Crusher overlooked?
The Borg head towards Earth and suddenly go temporal. They head back in time. The Enterprise goes after them. At least they didn't mention anything about whales this time.
The tale drags on. A landing party goes down to fix temporal changes made by the Borg, The Enterprise gets infiltrated and Data, Worf and Picard try to stop them. Deanna gets drunk (the only tolerable scene in which either Sirtis or McFadden get any kind of center stage time) and after a number of predicatable and contrived plot developments and tried and proven lines of dialogue, Picard saves the day after being compared to Captain Ahab of Moby Dick.
The dialogue is stilted. Jonathan Frakes should have spent more time behind the camera and less in front of it. He "acts" like Frakes, not Riker. Worf's "assimilate this" rang of Terminator influence. Data's romantic trist with the Borg Queen was forced and uninteresting.
Gates McFadden as Doctor Crusher once again is given nothing to do, which again is predictable. All they did in Star Trek Generations was have Data push her into the ocean and give her a cold. She conveniently disappears after practically a cameo role in both pictures.
I went to IRC to see if I was the only one who disliked it. I found myself in the minority. To the point of being kicked out of the #trek channel after being invited by a CAPTMARY specifically for talk about the new movie. A little disagreement and suddenly I'm an outcast. Again predictable.
Guess Paramount is right. Stamp ST on something and the Trek masses will buy it in truckloads. This is not worth buying. The special effects were great, but you could say that about the first ST movie, which is one of the worst of the eight they've ever made.
If you haven't seen it yet, DON'T. Don't believe the hype. Don't even wait till it comes on video. It's forced, contrived, and predictable. It utilizes variations of many plot devices tried and proven in previous shows. It's a poor excuse not only for an ST movie, but any movie whatsoever.
Unless of course you want to be assimilated into the ST cash cow, then by all means give in to it.
--
Located Somewhere Near the Moon,
Robin Starveling
http://rampages.onramp.net/~myst/
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews