Random First Contact Thoughts

[Vger23]

So...

I watched Star Trek: First Contact for the first time in a while on Wednesday night. I figured the timing was appropriate given yesterday's anniversary of the film's release in the US.

Given that I hadn't watched it for some time, and that I was able to really focus and watch it through new eyes in a way, I thought I'd scribble down my thoughts:

General Observations:

1. The film never looked so good to me. I always disliked the muddy/murky tone this film seemed to have. But, watching it in my home theater on a very bright brand new 4K projector in BR…it really looked great.The colors popped way more than I had ever seen. The outdoor scenes in Montana in the morning before they launch were bright and sunny, and not murky like I remembered.

2. The Enterprise-E looks great in this movie. Tons of close-ups and gorgeous fly-by shots. I never felt that way about the CGI versions of the ship in the following two movies. Model work is definitely where it’s at.

3. The lighting in this movie is still terribly dark. They don’t turn the lights on in the bridge until the very last scene! I always assumed the dark lighting was due to the Borg cutting main power, but the lights are out in the whole first act, even before they arrive at the battle. For those who complain about the dark bridge on DSC…you might want to check this out too.

4. I loved the new costumes back then on premier night...still love them now.

Good Stuff:

1. Normally, the A/B plot structures are kind of irritating, but they really execute it well here in this movie. And, they are both very tonally different…but it actually serves the film rather than confuses it.

2. In the same way, the humor in the film is subtle and well-placed unlike the previous 3 films (TFF, TUC, GEN) and subsequent movie (INS) in the franchise. They definitely got it right here…and it pays off nicely.

3. The new Borg make-up is really spectacular. They did a great job of that in this movie, and it really sold the Borg as a fearsome, grotesque concept.

4. I love this version of Picard. He’s still stoic, serious, and in command like he was early in TNG. He still has a thoughtful approach and sense of wonder (particular example: encountering the Phoenix). But, he also has a dark demon lurking in the background and has considerable character flaws that need to be overcome, which was extraordinarily refreshing. I also love how he spends half the movie trying to be the version of Picard that I can’t stand (we’re an evolved people now and we better ourselves and we have no money blah blah blah blah shut the phuck up Picard) only be be stomped on unceremoniously by Lilly, who completely calls him out on his BS…successfully and rightfully I might add. I think the arc here is very nice, and it’s some of Stewart’s best work. Again, this is my absolute favorite version of the character.

5. The scene in the observation lounge between Picard and Lilly is the best scene in the movie. No phasers, no Borg, no visual fx, no explosions…just great conflict and electric chemistry.

6. I love how they subverted our expectations (and the crew’s) of who Cochrane really was. I also love how this seems to be a comment on The Great Bird and the reality vs. perceptions there. Very clever.

7. I think a lot of the action stuff is pretty well done. Usually this falls flat in Star Trek TNG …but most of the action / adventure in this movie comes across as pretty tense and kinetic. I love the horror elements early on when the ship is betting assimilated. Porter and his assistant disappearing into the conduit and being assimilated, for example…as well as the cut back to the Enterprise while random security people fight in the corridors. One has to wonder…lots of Enterprise crewmembers must have been lost in this incident.

8. EDIT: I forgot one major one...the soundtrack is awesome. I LOVE this opening theme. This theme and "The Mountain" from TFF are both similar in that they are emotional, intimate, yet also grand and epic at the same time. Awesome, awesome stuff.


Not So Good Stuff:

1. The Borg Queen subplot kind of falls flat for me. If you look at this as an isolated sci-fi story, I guess it works well. But, as a Star Trek story expanding upon the Borg…I didn’t like that. The Borg were frightening because they were soulless and couldn’t be reasoned with. Having a horny dominatrix queen bee leader kind of took the sting out of that whole thing and came off pretty campy. Also, the “Brent Spiner gets to play a bad guy” thing got old during the series…and was pretty played out by the time this movie came out, with regard to the climactic scenes in Engineering.

2. The scene on the deflector dish looks really dated. It’s a cool scene, but it really fails to be convincing as an EVA battle. The zero G stuff looks really silly and has BAD rig/wire work. The fact that you can see smoke and even sparks that shoot up and then fall back down to the dish really shatter the illusion as well. Picard says “NO! Don’t shoot at the dish” moments before….you know…shooting at the dish.

3. Much like TVH…they really play fast-and-loose with keeping the timeline secure here. I mean, Picard basically reveals the whole history of the Federation to Lilly while bringing her on a guided tour. Riker and company walk around on Earth interacting with Cochrane and a whole town of people. Hell, Riker and Geordi go on the frigging flight! It’s just a little too silly to be taken seriously.

4. I know there are a lot of people who feel very differently, but I found the opening Borg battle to be very weak. The comm chatter prior to Picard deciding to warp to Earth was FAR more effective and dramatic (Frakes does a great job milking this scene). Even the BoBW2 scene of the Enterprise-D arriving too late and the scenes that open DS9’s pilot were better and more effective. This just felt like a bunch of little ships hurling special effects at a big cube…until Picard finally says “hey everybody, do this” and KARBLEWYthe big mean cube blows up. Blah….weak.

5. Maybe going back to comment 1…I always was annoyed how every subsequent time we see the Borg…they are different and operate differently. I know I could fanwank that away if I wanted to by saying “as they assimilate different races they change)…but it just irritates me. They go from completely soulless automatons interested only in technology (Q Who) to wanting to add Locutus to the fold and “adapt your culture to service us” to now having a queen and being able to speed-assimilate individual people. I don’t know…kind of annoying. I know they were going for a zombie-vibe...but it was distracting to say the least.

6. The time vortex thing was almost as cheezy and inexplicable as the slingshot effect. Pretty lazy writing here…but I get that the point was just to get them back in time…so it doesn’t kill the whole thing for me.

7. What DOES kill it for me though is the amazingly Voyager-like ending where they wrap up in about 12 seconds “Hey, the Vulcans didn’t see us!” “Oh, excellent, Geordi, re-create that vortex and let’s get out of here!” ….and it’s just that easy. Pretty ridiculous.

Overall, it is still a very entertaining movie. Probably still my favorite TNG movie...and rivaling my less-favorite TOS films (TVH and TUC).

 

[Desert Kris]

I cued the movie up last night, after Thanksgiving with family. I like the lighting on the ship being dark from the get-go, because it sells that the movie itself is going for dark and scary. I've always liked the newer Enterprise. I also like the new uniforms, they look terrific, except for on Worf; somehow his costume doesn't look right; I'm not sure why.

I never thought that Cochrane was in spirit meant to echo Gene Roddenberry, but it'll be interesting to watch it again with that in mind. It fits with the writers' idea that movie is about the creation of Star Trek itself being in danger, so TNG crew have to save ST; Cochrane as Roddenberry reinforces that. Oh, and Phoenix=Great Bird, ect, wow!

I kind of like how they play fast and loose with the historical era they have arrived in. I've read comments that point out that First Contact does something a bit different with time travel, in that their history has technically already been destroyed, and they have to physically rebuild it and occupy spaces that were different in the original history. Cochrane doesn't have a ground crew anymore, his co-pilots are dead or missing (I can't be sure, but I thought Lily would have gone up with him in the original version of history), the attack happened because of his project, and now he surrounded and overwhelmed by people from a shadow future that might not happen, who don't see him as a person. His hard work and accomplishments in the face of extreme adversity are destroyed in a few short minutes, and these people from the shadow future manufacture it nearly effortlessly, and prop him up in the pilot chair. There's darkness there between the lines, but it's nice that the film makers try and have fun with it, in the spirit of the optimistic future they are trying to save. The idea that a timeline that is mostly the same, but with differences after First Contact has grown on me.

 

[The Wormhole]

I also love how this seems to be a comment on The Great Bird and the reality vs. perceptions there. Very clever.

I never thought that Cochrane was in spirit meant to echo Gene Roddenberry, but it'll be interesting to watch it again with that in mind. It fits with the writers' idea that movie is about the creation of Star Trek itself being in danger, so TNG crew have to save ST; Cochrane as Roddenberry reinforces that. Oh, and Phoenix=Great Bird, ect, wow!

Braga and Moore have denied over the years that their take on Cochrane was meant to be based on Roddenberry in anyway. But, come on, he totally is.

What DOES kill it for me though is the amazingly Voyager-like ending where they wrap up in about 12 seconds “Hey, the Vulcans didn’t see us!” “Oh, excellent, Geordi, re-create that vortex and let’s get out of here!” ….and it’s just that easy. Pretty ridiculous.

What you really got to wonder is how did they re-create the vortex? The main deflector was ejected and blown up.

I can't be sure, but I thought Lily would have gone up with him in the original version of history

That's my interpretation as well, based mostly on Lily's line near the start when she's trying to convince Cochrane to leave the bar. "I'm not going up in that thing tomorrow with a drunk pilot."

 

[Desert Kris]

That's my interpretation as well, based mostly on Lily's line near the start when she's trying to convince Cochrane to leave the bar. "I'm not going up in that thing tomorrow with a drunk pilot."

Ah, I knew there was a reason I thought that. I thought I knew the movie really well, seen it lots of times; yet somehow I forgot that specific line!

 

[Butters]

I remember thinking this was the first time on screen that the ship felt like a real ship, and not just a set. Probably down to the external shots with internal detail, the walking on the hull, geographically recognisable places seen out through the windows, seeing the ship through a telescope from the ground, the escape pods at last. Even checking the powerlevel on the phaser rifles. Just so much detail.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I've read comments that point out that First Contact does something a bit different with time travel, in that their history has technically already been destroyed, and they have to physically rebuild it and occupy spaces that were different in the original history. Cochrane doesn't have a ground crew anymore, his co-pilots are dead or missing (I can't be sure, but I thought Lily would have gone up with him in the original version of history), the attack happened because of his project, and now he surrounded and overwhelmed by people from a shadow future that might not happen, who don't see him as a person. His hard work and accomplishments in the face of extreme adversity are destroyed in a few short minutes, and these people from the shadow future manufacture it nearly effortlessly, and prop him up in the pilot chair. There's darkness there between the lines, but it's nice that the film makers try and have fun with it, in the spirit of the optimistic future they are trying to save. The idea that a timeline that is mostly the same, but with differences after First Contact has grown on me.

There's an attractiveness to that idea. One could imagine Jon Archer's era being slightly different without the Borg affecting Cochrane's flight a century before.

What you really got to wonder is how did they re-create the vortex? The main deflector was ejected and blown up.

The easy way would be to take "the slow path" -- accelerate to relativistic speeds for the time dilation effects. But that would cause all sorts of problems; the Enterprise-E would be visible and trackable by ships of the period it's passing through at every stage of its voyage.

Spitballing an idea -- I could see a future Timefleet ship appearing thirty seconds after the end of the film. "We've been monitoring you all along, to make sure that you repaired history correctly, ready to step in if you stepped wrong, and now that that's done we'll take you home."

 

[Lance]

I've been long overdue a rewatch of this so I'll probably hook it up on the weekend

Great thoughts everybody

Just quickly on the Cochrane-as-Roddenberry thing, I tend to believe it was an accident, but it works as a comment on Trek's creator anyway. The tone they were going for was obviously more of the "Were historical figures in reality what their three paragraph descriptions in the encyclopedia make them out to be?", ie if we could actually go back and talk to General Washington we'd almost certainly notice his more "human" tendencies (and probably be shocked by them) because history has created an idealized version divorced from who the man ever really was. The comparison to Gene Roddenberry is valid.

 

[Desert Kris]

There's an attractiveness to that idea. One could imagine Jon Archer's era being slightly different without the Borg affecting Cochrane's flight a century before.

One simple but neat idea I came across somewhere on this forum is that Jonathan Archer and mostly the same crew had all the same adventures on a ship that was basically the exact same ship as Enterprise...it just had a different name. Whoever it was speculated that in the show's version of events Dr. Cochrane remembered it was a starship named Enterprise that helped save his project, and he wanted to honor that and encouraged the name; something like that.

You could explain away the other temporal shenanigans, too; like the Xindi. Maybe even that the Borg's destructiveness made the areas of history in close proximity to First Contact a more susceptible and desirable front for the temporal cold war; where it was a more difficult to change before, or a less desirable target until tampering started to happen.

 

[arch101]

I've always loved the film and usually use it to initiate non-fans to a Trek production. Typically works well.
My biggest gripe right from the time of the films' release: Ent E should have been a big exploration ship like the D with families and civilians aboard. Nothing would have brought the horror of the Borg home more than seeing assimilated civilians, children and even pets. It's one thing when professional space crew are absorbed by them, much different to see everyone and everything absorbed too. It would have really gotten across the idea of how uncompromising they are.
Otherwise, still a good watch.

 

[Vger23]

I've always loved the film and usually use it to initiate non-fans to a Trek production. Typically works well.
My biggest gripe right from the time of the films' release: Ent E should have been a big exploration ship like the D with families and civilians aboard. Nothing would have brought the horror of the Borg home more than seeing assimilated civilians, children and even pets. It's one thing when professional space crew are absorbed by them, much different to see everyone and everything absorbed too. It would have really gotten across the idea of how uncompromising they are.
Otherwise, still a good watch.

Yikes...I never considered that...that would have certainly changed the tone of the film.

I think the "behind the scenes" rationale was that after the Wolf 359 disaster, Starfleet discontinued its experiment of having families aboard starships due to the risk. One has to look no further than the Saratoga to see why this might have been reasonable.

But...yeah...that would have been very interesting...!

 

[Vger23]

I've never subscribed to the idea that the Enterprise-E involvement created a separate timeline, thus explaining perceived differences in ENT.

 

[The Wormhole]

I think the "behind the scenes" rationale was that after the Wolf 359 disaster, Starfleet discontinued its experiment of having families aboard starships due to the risk. One has to look no further than the Saratoga to see why this might have been reasonable.

I don't know. Children and families continued to be on the Enterprise D right up to its destruction, and we know as of the Homefront/Paradise Lost storyline on DS9 there are still families living on starships. I suspect Starfleet's encounters with increasingly hostile aliens and the probability of war breaking out with the Dominion likely played a part in ultimately removing families from starships.

 

[Vger23]

I don't know. Children and families continued to be on the Enterprise D right up to its destruction, and we know as of the Homefront/Paradise Lost storyline on DS9 there are still families living on starships. I suspect Starfleet's encounters with increasingly hostile aliens and the probability of war breaking out with the Dominion likely played a part in ultimately removing families from starships.

Yeah, that's definitely a good point. It was probably a cumulative assessment of recent losses and potential threats rather than just one particular thing.

 

[Timo]

...Or then there never was a policy change, and the E-E either stands out as a place for swinging singles or NINK couples, or then actually has plenty of families aboard, only ushered into safe rooms when the Borg come a-knocking and kept there.

As regards the "TNG heroes changed history" concept, I rather prefer to think that they were elemental in this history happening in the first place. That is, Cochrane would never have attained warp if not for LaForge and Barclay building a warp engine for him, and history would have been different if not for the Borg making sure that it wasn't. After all, the Borg set out to achieve something. They had time travel, so by default they would have attained this something eventually. And it's pretty logical for them to strive to attain the birth of the Federation, the most delicious assimilable in the known galaxy.

What you really got to wonder is how did they re-create the vortex? The main deflector was ejected and blown up.

For this rare once, the deflector wasn't involved: LaForge "calibrated the warp field" instead.

Even the earlier draft we can read at TrekCore didn't bring in the deflector (even though it, too, had the fight where the deflector gets blown up). But it's a bit disappointing that the writers didn't use the concept of a "conduit" here - the Borg are famed for those, and their time tunnel could again have been a structure others can use if they know the activation code or frequency or whatnot.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crimson Forcefield]

First Contact is a great example of Rule of Cool. A lot of the plot doesn't really stand up to scrutiny but it is just so satisfying to watch.

 

[Vger23]

First Contact is a great example of Rule of Cool. A lot of the plot doesn't really stand up to scrutiny but it is just so satisfying to watch.

That's actually true of almost every Star Trek movie!

 

[STEPhon IT]

The production was top-notch; every penny was spent on the screen. As a Star Trek film, I didn't like it at all. Rewriting what was known about Cochrane and having the Vulcans the first aliens to meet us... on Earth shows a lack of imagination. The first aliens should've been silhouetted, allowing fans and audiences to wonder who they could be as Picard and Co. head home. I hate the retroactive universe where Humans didn't start off pioneering the stars, but needed alien assistance to cheat. I doubt Roddenberry would've allowed this... he thought more of the human condition and our nature to explore no matter how dangerous it would be.

 

[Vger23]

The production was top-notch; every penny was spent on the screen. As a Star Trek film, I didn't like it at all. Rewriting what was known about Cochrane and having the Vulcans the first aliens to meet us... on Earth shows a lack of imagination. The first aliens should've been silhouetted, allowing fans and audiences to wonder who they could be as Picard and Co. head home. I hate the retroactive universe where Humans didn't start off pioneering the stars, but needed alien assistance to cheat. I doubt Roddenberry would've allowed this... he thought more of the human condition and our nature to explore no matter how dangerous it would be.

I've often was bothered by the last point you made here as well...but it always occurs to me that humans DID invent warp drive on their own. It was just happenstance that the Vulcans were passing by and decided to land. But, honestly, humanity could have just as easily gone out on its own.

When I remind myself of that, it doesn't bother me as much.

 

[STEPhon IT]

I've often was bothered by the last point you made here as well...but it always occurs to me that humans DID invent warp drive on their own. It was just happenstance that the Vulcans were passing by and decided to land. But, honestly, humanity could have just as easily gone out on its own.

When I remind myself of that, it doesn't bother me as much.

Yeah... but also needed help from figures from the 24th Century who not only engineered and joy rides with Cochrane but also spills the beans about the future. It bothers me a lot.

 

[Vger23]

Yeah... but also needed help from figures from the 24th Century who not only engineered and joy rides with Cochrane but also spills the beans about the future. It bothers me a lot.

I understand...but in fairness, they only needed 24th Century help because the Phoenix was damaged by the Borg attack, several project engineers were killed, and Lilly was made unavailable.

You could assume that, barring Borg interference, they would have been ok without the help

I dunno....just brainstorming.