Star Trek: First Contact (1996) Review

Official trailer

Most franchise filmmaking would have treated Picard’s assimilation by the Borg as backstory and built a different plot on top of it. First Contact, the best Star Trek film after Wrath of Khan, refuses to do that. Picard’s assimilation isn’t something that happened before this story.

It’s this story, generating every major decision Picard makes and several that cost the people around him.

The Borg episodes are why this film exists and why it works. Without the television series establishing what the Borg are, what assimilation means, and what it cost Picard, First Contact is a competent time travel thriller with a good villain. With that context, it’s one of the more psychologically honest entries in the franchise, a film willing to show its hero making decisions driven by damage instead of principle.

To my mind this is the Trek film that comes closest to what made the Borg frightening on television, and I get a real charge out of watching Picard lose his grip. My problem is the back half, where the movie trades that for action set pieces and a Data subplot it wraps up far too fast.

The Borg and What They Mean

Of all the antagonists in the Star Trek universe, the Borg are the most frightening because they violate the franchise’s central assumptions.

Star Trek is optimistic about intelligence and consciousness, it believes that thinking beings can communicate, that difference can be understood, that conflict can be resolved through reason and mutual recognition. The Borg make none of those assumptions possible. They don’t communicate. They assimilate. They don’t recognize difference, they eliminate it.

They’re the franchise’s central nightmare: what happens when you encounter an intelligence for which the values Star Trek holds aren’t values at all but vulnerabilities to exploit.

The Best of Both Worlds, the television two-parter where Picard is assimilated and becomes Locutus, is the moment the Borg became more than a villain type. That episode made the threat personal in ways that the franchise had avoided, it took the hero and turned him into the enemy, used his knowledge and authority against the people who trusted him, and then returned him to himself without resolving what had been done to him. The trauma was real and the series kept it real in later episodes instead of resetting to normal.

First Contact is built entirely on that foundation. The Borg returning triggers something in Picard that all his command authority and philosophical discipline can’t contain, and the film is honest about watching a great man behave badly because of something that was done to him.

Picard Going Wrong

Patrick Stewart is exceptional in the scenes that require Picard to be wrong. This isn’t easy material. The film needs to show a character whose authority the audience has trusted across seven television seasons making decisions driven by personal damage instead of rational command judgment, and it needs to do so without either excusing the behavior or condemning the man so thoroughly that the character becomes unsympathetic.

Stewart threads this with precision. Picard refusing to evacuate the Enterprise. Picard destroying the Borg with a satisfaction that’s nothing to do with tactics.

Picard quoting Moby Dick at Lily when she challenges him, a choice that’s both intellectual and self-aware, Picard knowing he’s acting like Ahab and not caring because caring would require stepping back from something he can’t step back from. The scene where he smashes the model ships in the display case is the film’s most direct moment: a man whose damage has reached the surface, visible and undeniable.

Lily’s confrontation with him is the film’s best scene because it doesn’t let him get away with the self-awareness. Knowing you’re acting like Ahab isn’t the same as stopping. Alfre Woodard plays Lily with the directness of someone who has no reverence for Picard’s authority and no reason to soften the observation. “You broke your little ships” works because it’s both literally true and figuratively devastating, it names exactly what Picard has been doing throughout the film to everything around him.

That’s the scene I’d point to if anybody asked why I rate Stewart so highly here. “You broke your little ships” lands like a slap, and I’m delighted that Woodard gets to be the one person on screen who isn’t impressed by him.

Zefram Cochrane

James Cromwell’s Cochrane is the character I enjoy most, and the comedy comes from the gap between the mythological figure the Enterprise crew expects and the actual man. Cochrane built the warp drive because he needed money.

He’s horrified to discover that his drunken, mercenary act of engineering has become the founding event of a new civilization. The crew’s reverence nauseates him, and a historic site called “Zefram Cochrane’s Hall of the Future” visibly disturbs him. I’d watch him squirm under that hero worship all day.

This works because Cromwell plays Cochrane as a real person instead of as a comic device. His self-deprecation is real instead of performed, he doesn’t think of himself as a visionary, because he wasn’t being one when he built the warp drive. He was being practical. The gap between how he experienced the moment and how history records it is real to him, and real to the audience watching him deal with the Enterprise crew’s expectations.

Cochrane’s eventual decision to complete the flight, to honor the significance his crew assigns to it even if he can’t share their conviction, is the film’s most moving moment. He does it for them. That’s not the same as doing it for history, but it’s something real and specific, and the film respects it as such.

The Borg Queen Problem

The film’s biggest conceptual compromise is the Borg Queen, and I don’t like what it costs.

The Borg’s horror in the television series was the absence of individual will. There was no queen with desires and plans, only a collective that eliminated individuality entirely. Adding a queen gives the collective a single villain face that makes it narratively manageable and philosophically less disturbing. A Borg with a queen is a conventional hierarchy. A collective without a center is stranger and more threatening, and I’d have kept it that way.

Alice Krige’s performance almost compensates. She plays the Queen with the sensuality of an intelligence that finds individuality interesting because she’s eliminated it in everything she encounters, Data’s emotions are novel to her, interesting in ways that make her more frightening instead of less. The scenes between the Queen and Data are the film’s most unusual and most successful: a negotiation between two kinds of non-human consciousness about the value of humanity, conducted by beings who have different relationships to what they’re discussing.

The Queen is a compromise that the film makes work better than it should. The compromise still costs something from the purity of what the Borg were.

The Second Half Problem

The 7 instead of higher reflects the film’s second half. That leans too heavily on action mechanics at the expense of the character work that makes the first half absorbing. Once Picard’s arc reaches its turning point, Lily’s confrontation, the decision to help the crew evacuate and fight the Borg his way, the film shifts into extended action sequences that are well-executed but less interesting than what preceded them.

The time travel framing keeps the second half connected to the character story through Cochrane’s arc, but the Enterprise sequences in the film’s climax are mostly conventional thriller mechanics. The Borg Queen’s plan to seduce Data into betrayal is more interesting conceptually than it is dramatically, and the resolution of that subplot is too rapid to fully honor the philosophical questions it raises.

I’d have cut some of the climax’s running and shooting and given the Queen and Data one more real scene. Their conversation is the most interesting thing in the film, and the ending treats it like a loose thread to snip on the way out.

Is Star Trek: First Contact worth watching?

First Contact gets its 7 as a franchise film that does what most franchise films refuse to do: engages seriously with its protagonist’s trauma instead of treating it as background detail. The Borg episodes are why this film exists and why Picard’s behavior across it matters.

Stewart’s willingness to play his character wrong and damaged instead of heroic is the performance the film needed. Cochrane is a real character instead of a mythology delivery device.

The action-heavy second half, the Borg Queen compromise and the rushed Data subplot keep it from being the great film its first half promises, and that’s why I stop at a 7. I’m still very glad it exists. It’s the best of the Next Generation films and the second-best Star Trek film behind Wrath of Khan, and Stewart playing Picard damaged and wrong is worth the price of admission on its own. (See also my tribute to Sir Patrick Stewart)

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