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STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT
[Spoilers]
A film review by Timothy W. Lynch
Copyright 1996 Timothy W. Lynch
In brief: The best Trek film in fourteen years, possibly at all. See it, and see it on as big a screen as possible; you won't regret it.
Written by: Brannon Braga & Ronald D. Moore (screenplay); Rick Berman & Brannon Braga & Ronald D. Moore (story) Directed by: Jonathan Frakes
[NOTE: normally for TNG and feature Star Trek reviews, I include a detailed synopsis. Under the assumption that readers of rec.arts.movies.reviews and rec.arts.sf.reviews wouldn't be that interested, this version does not include it. Those wanting a review with synopsis can look in r.a.startrek.reviews or r.a.startrek.current, or check my FTP site at ftp.alumni.caltech.edu. Those wanting a synopsis alone for some reason can check r.a.startrek.info.]
Two years ago, when "Star Trek: Generations" premiered, I was beginning to harbor serious doubts about Trek as a franchise. "Star Trek: the Next Generation" had recently finished its seventh season, which despite a few gems was a very uneven season; "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" was in the middle of a terribly disappointing third season; "Star Trek: Voyager" didn't exist yet [which, as it turns out, was a blessing]; and "Generations" itself was, though reasonable, somewhat less than satisfying.
What a difference two years can make. "Voyager" may be more or less beyond hope, but DS9 is back to producing enjoyable television (if not quite the sort it made in its first two years), and with "First Contact", the movie run of TNG looks to be rejuvenated.
"First Contact" is quite unlike any Trek film that preceded it, and on the whole I think that's a good thing. Even in the mid-21st-century setting that much of the film provides, there are no goofy fish-out-of- water jokes that were so prevalent in the fourth film (and which, while funny once or twice, don't age well). Also gone are some of the lackluster villains that have peppered the later films (neither ST3's Commander Kruge nor "Generations'" Dr. Soran particularly impressed me, and I refuse to discuss the fifth film's existence at all); and gone is the difficulty of making the characters believable after twenty-five years that plagued the last few films in the series featuring the original cast.
What's back successfully, for the first time since "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan", is a tortured personal core to the story. (ST6 tried it, but backed away from it by the film's end.) This one was also more difficult to pull off: in ST2, Khan's obsessive pursuit of revenge was a serious threat to the heroes, but there was no challenge of making Khan sympathetic in the process. Here, since Picard was the one feeling bloody-minded, there was a real risk of turning some of the audience away from the hero -- and given the years-long wait between films and the pervasive myth among some segments of fandom that Starfleet characters and the Federation must be perfect, that's a worry with considerable implications behind it. "First Contact" took that risk and damned the consequences, which I can't help but applaud -- and it's a credit both to both the screenwriters and to Patrick Stewart that I find Picard even more interesting and worthwhile a character than I did before.
A lot of care was taken to make Picard's plight understandable both to long-time fans and to the more casual viewers. For anyone who didn't know about Picard's past as Locutus of Borg, one's education began from the opening shot of the film, an extraordinary pullback showing Picard as the only wholly human face trapped in a monstrously large Borg cube. Further elements, such as Starfleet's concern over whether Picard would be an "unstable element" during the Borg engagement -- a nontrivial concern that some fans had been asking about for years -- were brought in in a completely natural fashion. I haven't talked to anyone yet about the film who wasn't a hardcore enough fan to know all that had gone before, but I've a feeling that the back-story would be clear even to them.
A way in which "First Contact" differs substantially from ST2 is that while the latter film had several themes in it -- revenge, age vs. youth, and several others -- they all revolved around one man, namely James T. Kirk. "First Contact" branched out a bit more: while Picard's quest for vengeance was a significant component of the film, so too was the Borg's attempted seduction of Data (in several senses of the word), and so too was Zefram Cochrane's confusion at becoming a legendary historical figure in the world he helped bring about. As a result, the film was rather more complex than the second one, which I appreciate.
That complexity also applied to the plot, in spades: while it wasn't quite on the level of Doc Brown having to take out a blackboard to explain the plot to the audience in "Back to the Future, Part II", there was a lot going on. The early stages of the film, though, helped make that complexity a bit easier to grasp by being more straightforward: just about everything up to the discovery of assimilated crewmembers is not only linear, but downright inexorable. It's a cinch that Picard is not going to stay on the sidelines forever, despite Starfleet's orders; it's equally expected that the Enterprise is going to follow the Borg back in time after the Borg have attempted (successfully, it would seem) to alter the course of history. I've thought another working title for the film could have been "Full Circle", as the story wound all the way from the Trek "present" back to the dawn of the Federation without seeming cramped by its scale.
The Earthbound side of the tale, with Our Heroes [tm] trying to persuade Zefram Cochrane to go ahead and create the history he already had been about to do (everybody got that?), was clearly the lighter side of the story, as a counterpoint to the relentlessly grim tale being spun aboard the Enterprise. It wasn't all for laughs by any means, as the fate of the Federation was at stake and Cochrane did have to deal with his future; since that future was a bright one, though, there was little real sacrifice involved. As such, the story there flowed more from the banter and the conversation than anything else, and more than ninety percent of it flowed quite well indeed. (The one line that fell really flat for me was "so you're saying you're astronauts, on some kind of star trek?" Ow. Ow ow ow. Never write that again.) Troi's drunk scene was far funnier than I expected, James Cromwell's performance as Cochrane was just over-the-top enough to be entertaining without descending into late-period Shatner, the repeated bursts of hero-worship made perfect sense (and with Dwight Schultz making a five-line or so cameo as Lt. Barclay, they worked even better), and the idea of having to build a better world out of the ruins of the old really felt ... well, almost inspiring.
On the Enterprise, on the other hand, the story started out dark and descended into the horrific in a way Trek's never done in a movie before. Some of the early scenes (like the "something coming out of the shadows in engineering" bit) didn't do much for me, but once the initial takeover is complete and it's clear that Picard and company are at a major disadvantage, the story turned into one of desperation. Desperation and revenge work well together as themes, so I wasn't surprised to see them linked; regardless, though, the plot traveling from one long-shot to another actually had my heart pounding in a way no SF movie has done to me in quite some time.
As is perhaps typical for time travel stories, though, there were a few moments in the plot that made me very briefly say "wait a minute...", but surprisingly few. I did wonder why no one suggested the idea of traveling back in time to just *before* the Borg arrived and destroying the ship then -- but as soon as the Borg presence on the Enterprise was known, that objection disappeared. I wondered a little bit about the seeming coincidence of the Borg queen being one of the few Borg who made it back into the past and aboard the Enterprise, but given how overwhelmingly powerful the Borg are in many ways, I don't have many difficulties with accepting that they're going to manage a few things we just don't figure out. The one concern I had that never quite went away is why Riker and Geordi accompanied Cochrane on his legendary flight; with every last detail of Cochrane's mission being studied by high school students in the future, you'd think they'd want to stay well out of sight. Given the circumstances (such as Lily's absence, since I assume she'd have been in one of those two seats otherwise), it's justifiable, but that's one case where I think the justification should have been given. (I also think the idea of Picard being able to hear the Borg in his mind should have been fleshed out a little more; it made sense overall, but I definitely had a few questions.)
On the character side, the two regular characters who were given the most to do were, not surprisingly, Picard and Data. I've already mentioned Picard's revenge quest, but it was best brought out in the Picard/Lily confrontation in Picard's ready room. When Picard tried to hide his desires behind his old platitude about how 24th-century humans have outgrown vengeance, I was cheering Lily's "bullshit!" cry in response. Every single moment in that scene was not only watchable, but compelling: from Picard's outburst where he breaks his "little ships", to the varied references to _Moby Dick_, to Picard's final realization that he may be sacrificing everything he has for a moment of pain, there really wasn't anything about that scene I'd change.
"The Last Temptation of Data" didn't come off quite as well, but it was extremely successful nonetheless. Many of these plot points (Data being given flesh and being literally seduced by the Borg queen, for instance) are ones that I'd heard about months ago and really winced at; they sounded terrible. Once it all got placed in context, though, it seemed chilling in the same way some of Bram Stoker's original _Dracula_ was: sexuality (or, in this case, Data's entire humanity) as a curse. Much of the credit for that has to go to both Brent Spiner and especially Alice Krige, who turned a character I was expecting to loathe into one I found compelling viewing, but some of it is really just waiting for the ideas to be placed in context.
Having praised Stewart, Spiner, Cromwell and Krige, I should also mention that Alfre Woodard did a strong job as Lily Sloane; I didn't find her performance quite as sterling as the others', but it was a near thing. She only had two really major scenes, and both worked well: the "Ahab" one with Stewart I mentioned earlier, and the one where Picard reveals to her where she really is. In the latter, she was the stand-in for the audience, giving us her own sense of wonder; and boy, did she ever.
(The rest of the cast? Fine, but they didn't have all *that* much to do. They generally fared better than last time, though, with the exception of Gates McFadden, who again was left with only a few token scenes.)
That leaves the presentation: visuals, music, direction, and so forth. In that respect, "First Contact" was absolutely stunning. I've seen a lot of SF films in my time, but visually "First Contact" is probably the biggest treat since "Blade Runner", and the biggest treat set in space since "Star Wars" hit the big screen nearly twenty years ago. There were several striking moments (the opening pullback being one, and the glorious shot of Picard, Worf, and Hawk striding out onto the underside of the ship being another, along with the entire more or less scientifically accurate zero-g combat sequence), and Frakes was very careful not to linger too long on them (which would risk turning parts of the movie into parts of the first Trek picture back in 1979). The effects, the music and Frakes' direction combined to give a real sense of atmosphere to the assimilated Enterprise, and on the big screen it was tough not to let a certain feeling of awe seep in -- especially in the final scenes, where we finally get to see Earth's first contact with the Vulcans.
A few other notes for trivia fans:
-- One of the ships in the initial Borg attack is the Bozeman. I don't know if it's intended to be the same one we saw in "Cause and Effect", but it's certainly still Brannon Braga's hometown. (And gee, Bozeman's in Montana. Fancy that coincidence.)
-- Jerry Goldsmith put in a couple of musical stings that sounded familiar. In the early scenes with Worf, he re-used the Klingon theme from "Star Trek: the Motion Picture" to good effect, and one of the early shots of the battle on the hull included a riff that sounded suspiciously like the early notes of "Also Sprach Zarathustra", of "2001: A Space Odyssey" fame.
-- "2001" was clearly on the everyone's minds during that scene. While the magnetic locks are being eliminated, the graphic showing the program status refers to subunit "AE35"; in "2001", it's the AE-35 unit which allegedly fails, thus throwing off contact with Earth. Very cute.
-- Most of the cameo appearances worked well for me: Schultz's quick turn as Barclay was a scream, and Ethan Phillips' human appearance as a bouncer in Picard's Dixon Hill scenario was cute. I was less enchanted with Robert Picardo's guest appearance as the Emergency Medical Holographic program a la "Voyager"; the idea was fine, but the implication that this doctor has the same personality that the one on "Voyager" developed over the span of months is not.
-- And, on a personal note, there's one character now deceased whom I'd like to see return. Who might that be? The redoubtable, yet tragically assimilated, machine-gunned, and mutilated Ensign Lynch. I know the name's coincidence -- but hey, I can still be amused by it. :-)
That would seem to cover it. (Whew.) So, some closing summaries:
Writing: A few small unanswered questions or muddled moments here and there, but startlingly few for such an ambitious story. Nicely done. Directing: Not bad for a big-screen rookie. :-) Keep him. Acting: Kudos to all.
OVERALL: I probably should make it something like a 9.5, but I can't resist giving an extra half-point for the Ensign Lynch cameo :-), so it's a 10. Bravo; would that they all could be like this.
Tim Lynch (Harvard-Westlake School, Science Dept.) tlynch@alumni.caltech.edu <*> -- Copyright 1996, Timothy W. Lynch. All rights reserved, but feel free to ask... This article is explicitly prohibited from being used in any off-net compilation without due attribution and *express written consent of the author*. Walnut Creek and other CD-ROM distributors, take note.
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