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STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT
A film review by johnnyp@curry.lcs.mit.edu
Copyright 1996 johnnyp@curry.lcs.mit.edu
|| This week's movie: "Star Trek: First Contact" \/ CW loved it. So why the Down Arrow? It was over too damn quick! Now CW's gotta wait two and a half years for another one!
What a difference a good director makes (and a decent script that stays off the net)! Instead of ST:G's only-for-regular-viewers hodgepodge clunkiness, with Lursa and B'Etor, Picard's brother and nephew's death, Data's emotion chip, Enterprise-D's crash, and, oh yeah, *Kirk's death* all competing for attention, we get a story that's, to CW's surprise, more intimate than epic.
We only see maybe a dozen Borg, and now they're personified by their Queen. That's a change from the faceless unstoppable enemy in "BOBW". But what makes this as good as ST:The Wrath of Khan is that, like TWOK, the story comes down to a battle of wills and a battle against the self. There are many loose parallels between Kirk-Spock-Khan and Picard-Data-Queen. Similar themes of friendship and obsession are woven in. Melville replaces Dickens.
But what puts First Contact over the top was the astonishingly crisp, lavish execution in scene after scene (esp. "The Big Goodbye", on the hull, and in the final struggle in engineering). So crisp, it moved just a bit *too* fast...CW wanted to savor the moments a little longer. After all, when CW's got to wait years between Star Trek films, CW wants to see a 4-hour movie featuring a cast of thousands! Rest assured, The Franchise is safe for now.
----
/\ Picard || Defeating the Borg? No big deal. Calling Worf "coward" and getting away with it? Now *that's* impressive! Next movie, Picard calls Mike Tyson a "sissy".
/\ Data || Someone get it through this lunkhead's metal skull that humanity ain't what it's cracked up to be! *You* try going 8 yrs. w/out sex as a *real* human!
/\ Worf || His "kill you where you stand" line rocked, but how about *this* comeback: "Go stuff a croissant in your pants, Frenchy! You friggin' baldheaded jerk!"
/\ Lily || Who's this Alfre Woodward? Boy she can act! CW's never seen her before cuz she acts in Really Smart Films that are too hard for CW to follow!
/\ Cochrane || Lewd, profane, and pigheaded. Roddenberry must be rolling over like mad! Good thing they got Cromwell...CW heard Howard Stern was 2nd for the part!
/\ Borg Queen || Y'know, CW liked those cute little ears of hers. CW'd go out with her... but only if she promises not to assimilate mankind on the first date.
/\ Riker || Notice how he's all smiles in just about every scene he's in? Forget the assimilation of humanity..you'd smile too if you were directing a Trek film!
/\ Troi || It's tough being Trek's 19th banana, but hey, she oughta be thankful! Ya don't see CW getting a drunk scene in any $100,000,000 grossing films!
/\ Geordi || Damn, he looked good in those Oakleys! *Big* improvement over the barette! But handled the real Zepham Cochrane about as well as the real Leah Goldman.
/\ Beverly Crusher || Blink and you'll miss her, but we do see her "special" relationship with Picard in play...like her "Jean-Luc" soothe when he loses it on the bridge.
/\ Holo-Doc || One of the things that sucks about r.a.s.c. it's too easy to get tipped off about surprises like this one! Still, a very shrewd, self-aware gag.
/\ Wesley Crusher || He gets an up arrow for *not* showing up! Bwah hah hah! (btw, Wil Wheaton's making a comeback in Robin William's "Absent-Minded Professor" this summer).
/\ Jerry Goldsmith || A surprisingly restrained, majestic main theme. Almost something you'd expect for a historical ship movie about whale hunting or something...
|| Berman \/ "A Rick Berman Production"? How about "A Rick Berman Ego"? Enjoy your damn $100,000,000 gross! (By the way, Voyager better not suck next week!)
---- (c) 1996 King of Internet. All rights reserved.
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