So I re-watched
First Contact this evening. I still think it is a nearly perfect Trek film and certainly the best of the TNG films. I think Jonathan Frakes is a wonderful director, the script is extremely well-written, the visual effects are excellent, and Jerry Goldsmith delivers a masterful score as always. In watching it again, there were only two things that jumped out at me, as they have in the past, as criticisms I have:
1. The confrontation with Picard in the observation lounge absolutely should have been Crusher. Not only would it have given her a more significant role to play in the film, but it would have been appropriate given the history of those two characters.
2. It really bugs me every time that Picard says "make it so" instead of "engage" at the end of the film.
That's it. Those are my criticisms.
Thoughts?
My first thought is that the following is solely IMHO, so YMMV:
First, the good: Jerry Goldsmith's music, Alice Krige, and Alfre Woodard excel and making me buy into this film far more than it deserves (
Disclaimer: Yep, this 1996 entry is not my favorite of the four...)
It felt like a cast reunion party with jokes galore, even 4th wall faff that even TVH didn't try*, but having grew up on the 80s Kirk movies that catapulted Trek into brave new directions where the character content was stronger than any plot nitpicks, I was expecting TNG to have been even better onscreen. (IMHO) They weren't**.
FC's plotting doesn't make structural sense***, even contradicting itself
in the middle of the same scene - ostensibly for a big dramatic moment****, which doesn't land. One needn't be Plinkett either to be cataloging the problems and being taken out of the movie by all of those. I'd even walked out of the theater during second viewing as well, it was just so -
incoming unpopular opinion - dumb. Felt like a big budget monster invasion B-flick, like cheesy horror but with gobs of money thrown at it (the climbing through the ventilation Jeffries tubes with scary thing right on cue being one easy example of this), complete with big plastic engine room set that doesn't look convincing, and it's the one time they have a main viewer that is cloakable on command because "big movie cool". Style over substance defines the TNG movies too easily... the Borg POV is as impressive as it is bizarre as all the distortions would make it harder for them to do their work too... (it's making more grateful when VOY did Borg episodes better, even with the Queen!)
* But "City at the Edge of Forever", with Edith spoonfeeding so much that's so much on the nose that even a seal couldn't balance it in any entertaining way, we get it. (Or the officer in "Little Green Men" too, but at least LGM and FC were camping it up so it's not as bad, and all these examples are few and far between anyway)
** Which is why PIC season 3 is so good IMHO, they took the central tenets of the characters and did something bigger that felt big-screen worthy many times, and they all had military training and have all used phasers before so why some people claim they're zapping phasers makes no sense makes no sense, but before I digress...
*** None of the four feels grounded in any significant ways or taking characters in big new directions that aren't cheesy, but GEN always came closest to feeling proper big-screen Trek, but this one manages to wreck itself several times over even before the magical time travel portal opens (which then wrecks it again!! Hell, even the Nexus and Picard's fantasy of tending to children had more tangible dramatic agency as the movie revealed how his avoiding family cost him in other ways and give me the meat from TNG over all the rest any day, but I digress...)
**** One example is how they tell us about the peril of hitting the deflector dish all while a bunch of Borg are walking on it in slow motion, only to shoot with perfect precision a second or two later, and it doesn't feel like it's a big urgent deal where they had no real choice (they had plenty of time to lure anyone traipsing toward them away and then zappyzap then...) Plus, blowing up the dish and they're fresh out of those, would make getting back to the 24th century a lot more difficult given what the dish is supposed to do
