It's basically just a good zombie action movie (in spaaaace!), but I agree that it doesn't necessarily make good Star Trek as such. Regardless, I enjoy it a lot.
Why is First Contact actually so beloved by the fandom?
- Thread starter Unimatrix Q
- Start date
This. I used to be one of those 'what is true good cinema and film and we must respect the art' and what not. These days, I have my opinions, but ultimately, if I was entertained, I'm a happy man.
Nice analogy. INS and NEM had terrible sauces.
In 1996, I thought it was "okay", with big plastic sets, regurgitated sci-fi tropes for camp value, with self-aware worthy of 70s sitcoms... some pee jokes too except "The Orville" made them funny... except for its season 2 opener, the subplot with the children was by far the better storyline, but that's not important right now...
...but it all hasn't dated well. The movie felt like a cast reunion party with drinks all around. And Picard going on about how killing his crew is doing them a favor is more antithetical and apocryphal to Trek than anything Roddenberry was going on about regarding STV's perceived point-missing... never mind puncturing the windows of the plasma conduits, which creates a nice and easy point for a possible leak should the pressure get too high... at least everyone can see it while it happens, like a popcorn bag in a microwave, I guess...
Nanoprobes I could accept, to an extent, Picard knew of those before TBOBW. But the instant and near-total borgification did break belief suspension... combine that with the Queen's inclusion, bad one-liners, serious ideas used as joke fodder with no payoff*, nonsensical plot devices that we were thinking of long before Red Letter Media made a field day out of them**, stupid non-dialogue about "three dimensional terms" as to how she escaped from the Cube she was on when assimilating him, and a number of other things... it was bad enough the TNG movies didn't have a few years beyond TNG TV show's ending, which may have helped, but the action schlock and "John MacLane in Space"(tm) trope felt so out of place for Picard himself. Maybe Riker, but TNG had less trope wiggle-room than Kirk's era had, regarding expanding the in-universe and feeling bigger without resorting to anything that felt like a worn out trope out of the gate.
* They do "insurrection" a movie too early, as a butt of a joke, and yet when they arrive and right on cue, nobody questions Picard. The entire battle sequence, complete with garish "time travel!", does everyone bad. Especially the Borg, who aren't that stupid... or if nothing else, the lone drone who tried to pipe up with "Hey everyone, what about--" was told promptly to be a good little drone, or told how they already knew that, or whatever, and voila...
** and did a hilarious job in doing so, so in the end maybe it was worth it... but I'd rather see a proper TNG movie instead, one that would elevate it in the way someone figured out how to expand the Kirk era without being cheesy.
Though me thinking FC is the only TNG movie worth watching, I can do without the "Assimilate this...." line. That made me cringe.
"Time travel" and using it sure does seem to get a lot of hate. I get that sure it can seem too easy and/or arbitrary (and/but) it is used a whole lot, that doesn't seem a reason to just dislike it, resent it in general.
Edit:
I think Insurrection did, overly so, but FC pretty much didn't, and even if it did most sequels, let alone sequels to a television series, do pretty inevitably feel like that and/or like one more episode.
Edit:
I think Insurrection did, overly so, but FC pretty much didn't, and even if it did most sequels, let alone sequels to a television series, do pretty inevitably feel like that and/or like one more episode.
Last edited:
The difficulty with time travel is the simple fact that it rarely has any built in limits. So, when it does get used then the rules that are applied feel extremely arbitrary without any clear concern for the consequences. It can be used effectively, and there are a few episodes and films that do make it work. But, overall, it is something I treat with extreme reticence because it is not enjoyable.
My experience.
I was 16 years old, just starting my Junior year of high school. Huge Trek fanboy.
November 12, 1996 - Mission Impossible (good flick!) came put on VHS. Before the feature film was the trailer for STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT.
I must have watched that trailer well over 50 times before the film came out:
November 22, 1996.
Watching that trailer still gives me chills to this day.
It was a hype bigger than I had ever known in my 16 years on this earth, and few have come close since.
I was 16 years old, just starting my Junior year of high school. Huge Trek fanboy.
November 12, 1996 - Mission Impossible (good flick!) came put on VHS. Before the feature film was the trailer for STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT.
I must have watched that trailer well over 50 times before the film came out:
November 22, 1996.
Watching that trailer still gives me chills to this day.
It was a hype bigger than I had ever known in my 16 years on this earth, and few have come close since.
I also could not stop watching it. But it was a trailer before another film we rented on VHS.
First Contact is the most DS9-like of all of the films in that there is a great deal of nuance. Ron Moore really took the piss out of Picard here. My appreciation of FC has grown with my appreciation of DS9.
Like most of TNG crew, Picard is usually portrayed as an "enlightened" do-gooder. FC, however, really humanizes him - he loses his temper, he shows a cold indifference towards deceased crewmen, and he's willing to endanger his crew to satisfy his thirst for revenge. When he attempts to use the "evolved humanity" defense, he is rightly admonished for it.
Cochrane is also a character who subverts expectations. His motivations are antithetical to those of the Federation. Doesn't care about the betterment of humanity, just wants to get rich and have sex with hot chicks.
History often sanitizes it's heroes. Cochrane's drunken, self serving nature would offend most in the Federation - yet he was a man who accomplished something truly great.
I never realized the parallels of Cochrane, the originator, and the later Federation morality expected, and Roddenberry, the originator, and the later Fandom expectations, and the sanitizing of his legendary status, until right this second.
I saw Captain Picard being seemingly cold to assimilated and then dead crew as pushing down his own trauma. And him telling the crew to shoot those who had been assimilated was as good as saying, “I wish you’d killed me instead.”
I think the suggestion of the movie was that Cochrane himself was changed somehow by his first-contact experience.
This is probably me taking elements from the novelization and reading too much into Cromwell's performance, but I always got the sense that there was some small spark of idealism to Cochrane that got beaten down by a lifetime of horrific events in the world to the point where being a money hungry, drunken lech simply was the natural endpoint.
The first contact scene is thus him finally stepping into a world much bigger than himself and experiencing a vision of something beyond his own personal gain for probably the first time in decades.
The first contact scene is thus him finally stepping into a world much bigger than himself and experiencing a vision of something beyond his own personal gain for probably the first time in decades.
FC is my favorite TNG movie, hands down. Cool cinematography, great soundtrack, and decent character development. It's also the only Trek movie that scared me even a little bit. Parts of some of the others, like the earworm scene in TWOK, grossed me out, but that's not the same thing. The way Picard's behavior changed when the Enterprise was being assimilated was utterly believable as evidence of his PTSD. If there's one thing that bothers me about TNG, it's that Picard's trauma's never mentioned again after Family. (I haven't seen Picard, Discovery, or SNW yet.)
That's not to say it's without problems, though. The Borg Queen worked in the movie, I'd even argue she was necessary for it to work. Sadly she was also the beginning of the end of the Borg as a scary enemy species, although I'll say that Seven ruined the Borg for me, although the way Janeway & co just shrugged off their assimilations didn't help.
That's not to say it's without problems, though. The Borg Queen worked in the movie, I'd even argue she was necessary for it to work. Sadly she was also the beginning of the end of the Borg as a scary enemy species, although I'll say that Seven ruined the Borg for me, although the way Janeway & co just shrugged off their assimilations didn't help.
Although that isn't present in the film itself, what's left in the film is enough for Cochrane to have a great character arc.
Neither did I. Bravo.
That line was obviously put in for the audience reaction. I saw the film in a packed house in Mann's Chinese Theatre, and that line got an ovation. Fist pumping, whooping, the whole bit. Not surprising that it suffers somewhat on home video.
Seems reasonable.
There were also "I, Borg" and "The Drumhead".
That's certainly true, especially in I, Borg. In The Drumhead, it was a matter of a few throwaway lines at best. To be sure, it wouldn't have been the same show if it had shown Picard half-incapacitated by his trauma...
Similar threads
- Locked
