Director: Jonathan Frakes
Original Air Date: November 22, 1996
My Overall Rating: 4 stars out of 5
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| via Memory Alpha |
The Borg are back to take another run at conquering the Federation. This time, they resort to time travel, going three hundred years into the past to interfere with Zefram Cochrane's momentous launching of Earth's first warp-capable engine. Obviously, Captain Picard and his Enterprise crew can't let that happen so they make the time trek, too. Our friends must approach 21st century Earthlings with caution, though, as they have not yet had contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Once again, Star Trek films follow their strange, well-established pattern. The even-numbered films are typically much better than the odd-numbered ones. Is there another film franchise like this? Most wouldn't survive a first awful movie. Trek makes mistakes in one, then fixes them for the next. The saving grace: thanks to the rabid fan base, even the terrible movies make money. Final Frontier is widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made, yet it exceeded budget at the box office by nearly 100%.
Whatever the explanation for this unique phenomenon, First Contact is a huge improvement over Generations. For starters, sticking with the NextGen-era characters works a lot better than trying to mix and match with the originals. More importantly, the narrative hits more cleanly on the emotional targets. I doubt any Trek movie moment will ever be more moving than the death of Spock in Khan but Cochrane's first handshake with the Vulcan captain runs a respectable distant second.
I hadn't seen First Contact since watching it in the theater nearly 30 years ago. I didn't know Trek nearly as well at the time. My high school friends and I would frequently watch NextGen together followed by The X-Files. But honestly, I didn't usually pay such close attention to either show. They were on in the background while I was doing other things - chatting, playing board games, etc. I knew the characters but would have missed the subtleties. I certainly didn't know the spinoffs so I wouldn't have understood why Worf was on the Defiant rather than the Enterprise nor would I have appreciated the cameos for either Ethan Phillips (Voyager's Neelix as a nightclub maitre d') or Robert Picardo (as the Enterprise's Emergency Medical Hologram).
This, along with some of the reviews I've seen for the new LEGO Enterprise, makes me wonder how much of the public knows Star Trek from the movies rather than the TV shows and how much of the material goes over their heads as a result.
Adding First Contact to my rankings...
I will admit upfront that I am biased towards NextGen stories. The characters are stronger and, as a result, the stories are stronger. However, I still feel Khan, because of the death of Spock, holds a special place in the broader legacy.
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