My Favourite Movies: Star Trek – First Contact

Eight years after the battle (or should I say debacle) of Wolf 359 and the assimilation of Captain Jean-Luc Picard into the Borg Collective the enemies of Mankind (and arguably of all civilizations) are back with Earth in their sights. Still not fully trusted by Star Fleet Command the captain of the most powerful ship in the fleet is told to go play by the Neutral Zone and not get involved but, just as things start to go badly Jean-Luc disobeys orders and high-tails it back to Earth to save the day. Taking command of the remnants of the fleet facing the Borg cube he co-ordinates an attack that destroys it utterly…… but not before a Borg sphere emerges and races back in time to assimilate the planet before the Federation came into existence. Caught in a temporal vortex the Enterprise follows the Borg back to the day before First Contact when Human Destiny forever. With the sphere destroyed everyone begins to relax until internal sensors go off-line and environmental control starts acting strangely. Meanwhile down on Earth the crew are looking for the fabled Zefram Cochran, the inventor of warp drive and hope that he survived the Borg attack or the future they came from may have ceased to exist.

This is very much a movie in two halves, or at least in two sections. Once the initial battle is over the film settles down to the set on Earth and the launch of the Phoenix as one aspect of the plot and the other the resistance to the Borg on the Enterprise itself. Personally I thought that the Earth based plot was silly, stupid and badly handled from the get-go. However the saving grace in the movie was the fight against the Borg led by Picard himself fuelled by fanatical anger at what they had done to him in the past, his crew and ship in the present and his fears for the rest of the galaxy in the future. Unfortunately this was not really enough to elevate this rather lacklustre movie into the classic film that it could have been. The blame rests, I contend, with Jonathan Frakes who directed this great might have been of a film. A poor actor at best he is a much worse director. Compare this movie to the Enterprise episode ‘Regeneration’ that picks up the story years later in the arctic where ‘survivors’ of the sphere explosion are found and revived. This single 45 minute episode has more drama, more tension and is far more frightening/disturbing than the movie it followed on from – with a much smaller budget, and that was without the wonderful Alice Krige. Krige, who played the Borg Queen, was a revelation. At the same time incredibly sexual, truly frightening, obviously psychotic and honestly stomach churning disgusting in her Borg make-up she simply blew everyone else off screen whenever she appeared and easily out-acted everyone else in the movie – apparently without any great effort. I could watch the film again and again just for her. I was so glad when they brought her back for the finale of Voyager in 'Endgame'. A fitting tribute I thought to her seminal role.

So despite its many, many faults this is still on my list and still gets watched from time to time. I think that the Borg are great enemies and always look forward to confronting them on the screen even in the emasculated version presented in some Voyager episodes. They are, I think, a warning to us as to how things might turn out as we push technology further and further. As the Queen said “Human! We used to be exactly like them. Flawed. Weak. Organic. But we evolved to include the synthetic. Now we use both to attain perfection”. Where have we heard that before in not so many words? Watch, be entertained and leave thoughtful……