is star trek first contact best star trek movie

[Utopianvista]

First Contact started the Star Trek death spiral. And, as a result, eventually gave us the abomination of JJ's wreck.

It abandons everything about the Borg that made them unique, and fearsome, and turned them into comedy zombies with a ridiculous queen. And then, because the writers are lazy, they make it so if you kill the queen you automatically win! LAZY LAZY LAZY. The Borg were a collective not a hive. I'd even be tempted to call it sexist writing to try and sex up the Borg.

The Borg don't even bother to adapt to Starfleet's weapons. A battle that rages for hours and we still see the Federation blowing holes in the cube with phasers and photon torpedos. Dumb. Oh the Sphere taken out by one torpoedo! Come on. And a weak spot? Lazy.

It turns Picard into an action hero. The exact opposite of series Picard. In fact it just becomes the Data/Picard show. With cameos from the rest of the TNG cast.

Where are the DS9 people?

The time travel premise was ridiculous. So full of holes that have been discussed a million times so I won't even bother.

It's a mindless movie that isn't Star Trek. It doesn't even follow it's own canon. It basically was everything Voyager would eventually try to be.

[horatio83]

Care to elaborate on the "holes" in the time travel premise?

Before the brainless nitpicking starts I like to mention two benchmarks, Well's Time Machine and TVH.
The former spent a few pages to explain how time should be considered as fourth dimension and how the time machine doesn't jump ahead in time but accelerates the "speed" with which we move through time. I guess you could nitpick this to death without understanding one iota of what the short time travel setup of the story is all about, to simply get the protagonist into the future.
Same with TVH. Some contrived nonsense about warping around the sun to emerge in the past and some trippy images but who cares, it is just a way to get from A to B.

Ironically FC beats these two works of fiction in terms of brevity. Just some technobabble about chronotons and tata, after 1-2 minutes we are where we have to be.

[gottacook]

The Borg concept had already been stretched out of its ideal shape during TNG, with the episode "Me and You and a Borg Named Hugh" ...uh, I mean, "I, Borg." From there to the Queen was a relatively small step.

It might be that the Queen was a remedy for a script that refused to take shape with an enemy consisting of totally undifferentiated Borg.

I can forgive Picard as an impassioned action hero (on the Holodeck too, not just in "reality") because he was once a mindless slave of the Borg. A big problem with the remaining two movies was that Picard-as-action-hero reappeared, and for inferior reasons.

As to the illogic of Borg decision-making: How many successful movies have featured an absolutely logical, implacable, and totally invulnerable enemy? A short story or novel with such enemies can work, but perhaps a movie cannot. Case in point: The 1947 Jack Williamson novella "With Folded Hands" (concerning the arrival of the humanoids on Earth) is a beautifully written downer; could a movie end that way?

In any case, someone who is making a Star Trek movie has to have a scenario in which the captain (even if at great cost) wins; it's not like a TV series where occasionally you can have an ambiguous ending in which the captain isn't necessarily triumphant (i.e., "A Private Little War").

[Jeyl]

I wouldn't go so far to call it the best, but it is well casted and well acted. Character continuity from the series is pretty thin and the introduction of one-shot characters like Lilly who encompasses most of the dramatic scenes does rob our main cast for potential growth. Not to say Lilly's scenes weren't any good, but it is what it is. A character who we will never see again who only serves to cause growth in the main character.

But the biggest problem with First Contact is the introduction of the Borg Queen. For a race of beings that were once depicted as being made up of collective minds who didn't have a single leader I thought was unique and also horrifying. Giving them a leader who doesn't really act like a collective of minds since has to give commands to her drones just makes the Borg out to be her minions and not a collective. It also gives us something to familiarize and be comfortable with since if you kill her all the other drones will just die. Unfortunately the producers and writers of Voyager decided to latch onto the Borg Queen concept and take it to levels that ended leaving the Borg as one of the weakest villains ever to grace Star Trek.

For me, the best part of First Contact is Jerry/Joel Goldsmith's music. Their work on the film is just fantastic to listen to.

[horatio83]

The Borg queen has as much control as an ant or bee queen does. She is clearly just a representative who makes it easier in-universe-wise for people from individualistic cultures to interact with a collectivist one (Locutus as an "adapter" that eases the assimilation of humankind and the Borg queen as an "adapter" for Picard-Locutus). Plus there is the obvious real-world dramatic necessity for a Borg with whom Data and Picard can interact.
You got the same in the case of Daleks in Doctor Who, you need Davros or some leader Dalek or to make the dialogue more interesting.

[Tiberius]

Jeyl wrote:

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But the biggest problem with First Contact is the introduction of the Borg Queen. For a race of beings that were once depicted as being made up of collective minds who didn't have a single leader I thought was unique and also horrifying. Giving them a leader who doesn't really act like a collective of minds since has to give commands to her drones just makes the Borg out to be her minions and not a collective. It also gives us something to familiarize and be comfortable with since if you kill her all the other drones will just die. Unfortunately the producers and writers of Voyager decided to latch onto the Borg Queen concept and take it to levels that ended leaving the Borg as one of the weakest villains ever to grace Star Trek.

I must disagree. If we take the Borg Collective to be as I have suggested it, none of these problems exist.

The Collective isn't made up of "collective minds" in the plural. The Collective mind is one single mind that is spread throughout a collective of physically separate drones. That one mind is the queen. And killing her doesn't make all the other drones die. The body of the Queen is just a puppet. Killing the queen's body won't kill her anymore than killing a puppet would kill the puppeteer. The reason that all the Borg died in FC was that most of them were pushed into the acid gas stuff, and once all the drones were killed there were no drones to form the Collective mind. In other words, when the first drones were killed, the remaining drones overloaded from trying to have the mind of the Queen crammed into them.

For me, the best part of First Contact is Jerry/Joel Goldsmith's music. Their work on the film is just fantastic to listen to.

I gotta agree there. The music was SUPERB.