Star Trek: First Contact

Our Review

The best Next Generation film by a parsec, and one of the best Treks of any era. First Contact sends the Enterprise E back in time to stop the Borg from assimilating the Earth of 2063, the night before humanity’s first warp flight and first contact with aliens. The premise is a perfect double hinge: stop the Borg, and protect the drunk genius who teaches Earth it is not alone. Jonathan Frakes directs with momentum and wit, and the film never lets either plot breathe long enough to sag.

The Borg are genuinely frightening here, horror movie monsters in a franchise that had gone soft. The assimilation of the Enterprise decks, crawling with nanite infected crew, plays like a space haunted house, and Alice Krige’s Borg Queen, seductive and surgical, gave the collective a face it never needed and is impossible to forget anyway. Picard’s arc is the film’s spine: a former Borg victim reliving his trauma, he goes full Ahab, screaming that line about breaking the gridlock, until Lily, Alfre Woodard’s no nonsense 21st century engineer, talks him down by calling him what he is. It is the best writing Patrick Stewart got in the entire film era.

James Cromwell’s Zefram Cochrane is a delight, a rock and roll cowboy who did not mean to change history and would rather be drinking, and the comedy of the crew revering him while he squirms never gets old. The deflector dish spacewalk and the Vulcans landing at the end, that handshake, still give chills. Nine out of ten, the peak of the TNG movies.