Though the Borg were already getting nerfed in their TV incarnation, Hollywood was on the cusp of the zombie craze. Which was a pretty good choice on the film makers’ part. Breaking the streak set by the prior 5 movies, each of which included at least one Klingon antagonist, First Contact gives the Klingons a rest and brings the Borg to the big screen. If I owned Paramount, I’d order every episode of TNG edited to replace every shot of the Enterprise-D with this masterpiece, which has far greater aesthetic continuity with the NCC-1701.įor now, I’ll have to content myself with this fan-made alternate intro:Īlong with a new Enterprise, STFC features a new main villain (for the film series). In all seriousness, the Sovereign-class Enterprise should have been the one used throughout Star Trek: The Next Generation. She’s like a flawless gem that reveals beautiful new facets as you turn them into the light. What’s more, the graphic design and props guys made good on STG’s promise of a new starship Enterprise.Īnd in a Hollywood rarity, they overdelivered. And that contrast does the movie a great service. This time out, he mellows the bold triumphalism with a gentler, more intimate touch. STFC brings back the great Jerry Goldsmith, who gave us the opening theme of TMP and TNG renown. To its credit, First Contact has one of the most underrated scores in the whole franchise.Ī lot of people say they like the music in Generations, but it always sounded like rejected DS9 tracks to me. So they had ILM cook up a big action set piece featuring dozens of ships flying around shooting lasers. It’s submarine warfare in space.īut Hollywood execs had already decided that audiences lacked sufficient attention spans to sit through another three-dimensional Enterprise vs Reliant battle. With First Contact, we first run into the equal folly of trying to make Star Trek a swashbuckling, mass space combat Star Wars ripoff.Īnd as we’ve seen before, Star Trek’s forte isn’t fleet maneuvers or gunfights. Generations established the model for the first mistake: scripting a Trek movie like a two-hour episode of the TV series. Then they committed the second main stylistic error that would plague the TNG films. So to hedge their bets, they came up with another kitchen sink script bashing together key ideas from other successful Trek entries.įor example, we have time travel to Earth’s past, a main character on a Melvillian quest for revenge, and a technologically superior giant object threatening Earth. Which goes partway toward explaining Kirk’s Scotty’s, and Chekhov’s roles in Generations.īut the suits knew they’d have to let the TNG cast work without a net at some point. It’s long been theorized in Trek fandom that Paramount didn’t trust the Next Generation crew to carry a movie on their own. The studio nevertheless tried to play it safe, though. Which it may owe in part to the presence of Jonathan “Two Takes” Frakes in the director’s chair. Having just watched it and Generations within a few days of each other, I can report that STFC improves on its direct predecessor. That’s not to say that First Contact is a bad film. Pop culture was enjoying something of a dead cat bounce at the time, which may have helped get this movie into audiences’ good graces. Having premiered in 1996, First Contact holds the distinction of being the last Star Trek movie released before Cultural Ground Zero. And Star Trek: First Contact didn’t let them down. Trek fans were eager to see how the TNG cast would fare in their first solo outing. Though a general audience pleaser upon release, Star Trek: Generations has since acquired a reputation as a mixed bag of good visuals marred by character mishandling and questionable plotting. Our retrospective on the Star Trek film franchise left off on the installment that officially handed the keys to the Next Generation crew.
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