First Contact - 20 Year Anniversary

[timtonruben359]

I think First Contact's theme (which is great) often gets conflated with its entire score. Goldsmith wasn't exactly turning in masterworks in the last decade or so of his career, and outside of that majestic theme, First Contact's score is ... well, pretty close to the sonic wallpaper that so many people complain about.

In honor of the 20th anniversary I listened to the soundtrack over the weekend, and I agree with you that the First Contact theme, while lovely, was overused throughout the score. I would say out of the three TNG movies Goldsmith scored, Insurrection was arguably his best work.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember reading that Goldsmith was hired fairly late in the game and didn't have a lot of time to work on the score (he was also working on another movie at the time) which is the reason his son Joel wrote some of the tracks for the movie.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I didn't realize how bad a tonal mess the movie was for years after seeing the film, not until I got the ten-movie DVD set. I had somehow gotten the impression the Cochrane Follies and the Zombie Borg storylines interacted at some point, but they're really both off in their own little films and just wave to one another briefly near the end.

I suppose it's not something that has to be fixed per se, any more than Kirk and Khan need to do more than eat scenery at each other over the view screen. But it does give this impression of the movie being more casually thrown-together than is probably good for it.

I rewatched the film over the weekend, inspired by this thread, actually. Individually, the two plots are fine, if a bit unbalanced and episode scale, but, yes, they have nothing to do with one another. Someone wanted to do a big Borg story, someone else wanted to do a time travel story, they decided to do both. Watching the film again I realized that the Cochrane and the warp flight is the film's Maguffin -- and somehow they managed to turn the Maguffin into its own B-plot. Yet it's still just a Maguffin.

The Leonardo da Vinci idea they bandied about would have tied the two halves together, as I understand it, with the Borg attacking an Italian castle. I'm curious what that film would have been like, as it sounds more Doctor Who than Star Trek to me.

While I can think of a number of ways to fix Generations, I don't see any obvious ways of fixing First Contact without jettisoning one plot thread or the other unless you put the Borg on the ground in Montana, forcing the Enterprise crew to fight a battle to save history both in orbit and on Earth.

In honor of the 20th anniversary I listened to the soundtrack over the weekend, and I agree with you that the First Contact theme, while lovely, was overused throughout the score. I would say out of the three TNG movies Goldsmith scored, Insurrection was arguably his best work.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember reading that Goldsmith was hired fairly late in the game and didn't have a lot of time to work on the score (he was also working on another movie at the time) which is the reason his son Joel wrote some of the tracks for the movie.

Goldsmith was also working on the score to The Ghost and the Darkness, and that bled into his time for First Contact.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Yeah I have read about that other idea of the Borg attacking Earth in DaVinci's time period and I rather liked it. Not sure how they would have worked the whole thing into a movie but the idea seems strangely appealing to me.

The whole bit with Cochrane was just plain stupid. It wasn't done very well and didn't tell a good story. Yes we see the first warp flight ever. Woopee Doo.... The way it was shown just didn't feel good. It felt like a TV episode.

 

[Smellmet]

I would say out of the three TNG movies Goldsmith scored, Insurrection was arguably his best work.

I think the Insurrection soundtrack is the worst of the TNG outings. To me it's just by-the-numbers late Goldsmith, and could be on any number of films. I think the score for Nemesis was a lot more distinctive, and a big improvement.

 

[SPCTRE]

It was an exciting time to be alive for a Trek fan

yup, that was me also

 

[jaime]

The absolute worst shot in first contact is the one where you see a dozen or so borg emerge with all their red dots shining through the 'mist' in a dark room.

I could have shot better footage on my galaxy S5 with a few mates armed with laser pens.

So could Frakes have, if only he could just avail himself of technology from twenty years in the future.

 

[Smellmet]

So could Frakes have, if only he could just avail himself of technology from twenty years in the future.

You know what I'm getting at, besides, I bet full on Hollywood film cameras of twenty years ago could shoot better footage than a modern smartphone still. It was just such a poor, cheap looking shot. The borg just looked like dudes in rubber suits, which they were.

 

[jaime]

You know what I'm getting at, besides, I bet full on Hollywood film cameras of twenty years ago could shoot better footage than a modern smartphone still. It was just such a poor, cheap looking shot. The borg just looked like dudes in rubber suits, which they were.

I suppose they could, but that's an interesting debate about film versus digital.
I think the shot in question is probably trailer fodder, something of a test, that wriggled in to the final cut. I think judging it of its time though...it's really not TV level directing, it's motion picture level (not bad for a first timer actually) but since then TV has come to be more like films were then. This is the era things like the Xfiles were pushing that cinema at home feel in TV, and the language of film and TV was converging and changing (three act format to four act, cgi in a TV context, shorter attention spans on the horizon, handheld camera work...stuff was in flux, and Hollywood was about to have one of its death and rebirth moments within the decade.) so jusdging it against TV now is unfair...there's no way even it's opening shots are TV like, let alone all the Borg vision stuff or the hull walk sequence.

 

[2takesfrakes]

Some of Jonathan Frake's camera moves were really clever and interesting in FC ... and in INS, as well, like when the camera keeps circling Picard, Anij and Data in the flying holodeck. Frakes has a keen sense of cinematic style, when he puts his mind to it. In FC, there were shots of Data that had some complexity to them, the way the camera would pan around, then down to him lying there, asking the Borg Queen questions. Frakes is investing all of this exposition with some visual interest and he's quite good at doing that. Even in the television series, he was ... "Cause & Effect," is a good case in point.

 

[dub]

One of my favorite Trek films and scores.

 

[Random_Spock]

Gosh I can't believe that this movie is 20 years old! The best of the TNG films but I get a bit sad when I watch it now because it really was the last great hurrah of the franchise and the last Trek film that I remember being truly excited for.

I can't either. I loved that movie. Word. Saw it in theaters and it was worth every cent.

 

[Smellmet]

I suppose they could, but that's an interesting debate about film versus digital.
I think the shot in question is probably trailer fodder, something of a test, that wriggled in to the final cut. I think judging it of its time though...it's really not TV level directing, it's motion picture level (not bad for a first timer actually) but since then TV has come to be more like films were then. This is the era things like the Xfiles were pushing that cinema at home feel in TV, and the language of film and TV was converging and changing (three act format to four act, cgi in a TV context, shorter attention spans on the horizon, handheld camera work...stuff was in flux, and Hollywood was about to have one of its death and rebirth moments within the decade.) so jusdging it against TV now is unfair...there's no way even it's opening shots are TV like, let alone all the Borg vision stuff or the hull walk sequence.

I'm not dumping on Frakes as a director per se, there was some good stuff in there, the examples which you've mentioned are the ones I would cite as good examples of his work. There's plenty to like in FC still, but there's a few too many times the TV origins and lack of experience as a director are on show, which cheapens the look of the film somewhat to me, much like The Search for Spock.

 

[suarezguy]

The two plotlines are a bit too tonally different but they both still really work and they relate to each other well enough. I think it's overall a pretty close second to TWoK for best Trek film.

I think it especially works in being true enough to the characters and tone of the TV series while also being appropriately more intense. The Borg are one of the Trek villains and, though a bit weaker, this still makes a great follow-up to TBoBW (one of the best series episodes) and big screen version of them. I also think traveling back in time to a time that's still in our future was a great concept.

I think both his Trek outings as director look like made for TV movies.

In adapting a television series to movies being television-like can go too far but it's not, if taken less far, a bad thing. Television isn't necessarily worse or less than films.
In fact I thought in The Search for Spock the extreme close-ups of Kirk and Sarek felt a little like trying too hard to be cinematic.

Narratively and visually, it's not an ambitious film; it's a television-scale film that was accidentally shot in 35mm.

I think characters dealing with their temptations, dark sides and fallibility as well as parts of the ship being taken over and having to abandon it makes for a pretty ambitious narrative.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I just found my paperback version of First Contact and it had a lot of extra stuff added after the novel had finished about the movie, and the other draft idea that they wanted to do with the italian castle and DaVinci. The novel is really good, and in some ways better then the film.

 

[Horizons96]

I've got planned a special little ritual this coming night of the 28th, the 20 year anniversary of not only my country's release, but my experience watching it.

So I got down to business Monday night. My ritual might sound unconventional, but most rituals of most Trek fans usually are quite eccentric...

The cinema where I saw FC in 1996 has been closed down for over a year, but the signs outside the building haven't been taken down. There is still a large thoroughfare of people in that area too.

I came up with the idea of putting an actual cinema-used poster for FC up outside the cinema, on a 'now showing' display box.

I have a larger size movie poster as well, but I bought the smaller one on eBay specifically because it was advertised as 'cinema-used' - that makes the smaller poster the preferred option here for sentimental reasons.

Then I walked home and watched FC - (on Blu Ray for the first time), also timed to fit in with my current chronological Trek watch-through.

Trek on.

 

[jaime]

I just found my paperback version of First Contact and it had a lot of extra stuff added after the novel had finished about the movie, and the other draft idea that they wanted to do with the italian castle and DaVinci. The novel is really good, and in some ways better then the film.

The novel is pretty much identical, except it retains dialogue explaining Cochran being bipolar and unable to get Meds because Apocalypse. Hence his self medicating with booze. Crushed fixes him up in a tip of the hat to Star Trek IV and it's magic kidney pills.

 

[Saul]

I was so pumped about this film before it came out. Loved it.

I know the Borg are seen as overused but out of 13 movies we got them only once. They need to come back one day.

I just found my paperback version of First Contact and it had a lot of extra stuff added after the novel had finished about the movie, and the other draft idea that they wanted to do with the italian castle and DaVinci. The novel is really good, and in some ways better then the film.

Have you ever read 'Star Trek Generations'? Parts of that were quiet different. I'd have loved to have seen it onscreen.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Have you ever read 'Star Trek Generations'? Parts of that were quiet different. I'd have loved to have seen it onscreen.

Yes I have and I quite like it. My FAVOURITE Trek novel is "The Devil's Heart" which I love to bits and can't get enough of.... I just love that one. I wish that had been a movie.

Q Squared is also fun and we learn that the Q can visit God, as Q claims he has talked to God.

 

[suarezguy]

First Contact is occasionally fun (though hideously shot and directed), but there is absolutely nothing qualifying it as a "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant film," which are the criteria of the National Film Registry.

It's not on the level of some other classics in terms of lasting impact but I think the Borg, including as they were in the film, were at the time and for some time after pretty widely identified as huge and even great villains for Trek and science fiction in general.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Yes I have and I quite like it. My FAVOURITE Trek novel is "The Devil's Heart" which I love to bits and can't get enough of.... I just love that one. I wish that had been a movie.

I have a fondness for The Devil's Heart myself. In college, I wrote a "missing chapter" for the book that revealed the Ko N'ya had been on Earth as the Holy Grail. I was on a Holy Grail kick at the time (I had written a paper in my freshman English class about the myth). The idea, as I remember it, was that it one of its journeys from one Alpha Quadrant power to another, the ship crashed on Earth (creating the Waste Land), and it "ascended" back into space at the end of the Grail knights' Quest. (In other words, another ship recovered it using a tractor beam.) I don't have the story any more -- that was over twenty years ago, and things get lost over time.