Star Trek: First Contact

(Jonathan Frakes, USA, 1996)

What a joyful occasion: the first Star Trek movie in many a year of which a fan can be unhesitatingly proud.

The Trek films have always foundered on an uneasy compromise: they have offered neither simple extensions of plot lines from the television series, nor completely new, radical deviations from the fictional “universe” so beloved by fans.

The previous entry in the series, Star Trek Generations (1994), was one of the worst ever attempts at negotiating this compromise. Star Trek: First Contact is bolder; quite simply, it is a film aimed at the faithful, the already converted. Strangers to this fanciful world first delineated by Gene Roddenberry will just have to struggle to comprehend as best they can. Cult-followers, on the contrary, will be in heaven: every in-joke, cameo appearance, or reference to a famous TV plotline is a sheer delight.

In truth, First Contact is rather like an extended episode one of the later Trek TV series (The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine or Voyager). It is high on action-packed goals, twists, intersections and deadlines – and low on metaphysical, philosophical speculation. Jonathan Frakes, who plays Commander Riker, doubles as director – and he has obviously made the salutary decision to gear his unfussy style to the breakneck speed of the plot.

Few sci-fi plots are this busy. The villainous Borg – an unfeeling, collectivist species – launch a multi-pronged takeover plan. They aim to “assimilate” the Enterprise and its crew. They skip back in time to reverse the course of interplanetary history. The Borg Queen (Alice Krige, fresh from her 1995 stint with the Quay Brothers in Institute Benjamenta) develops a particularly sexy interest in the android Data (Brent Spiner). And Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) suffers flashbacks to his last scary encounter with the Borg as he awaits the ultimate showdown.

First Contact marks the first time that I have noticed the baleful influence of that fashionable myth-pedlar Joseph Campbell on a Star Trek narrative. Casting James Cromwell from Babe (1995) as a “reluctant hero” on a rendezvous with destiny is one sure sign of this; the plot-thread conjuring Picard as an Ahab-type figure eaten away by his personal revenge quest is another.

Naturally, series creator Rodenberry and those who have now inherited his mantle have always had some pretty cosmic, grandiloquent pretensions. But the more successfully mythic aspects of First Contact are those with a more immediate cultural resonance: in particular, the disquieting and all-pervasive blur in this story between the categories of human and alien, or man and machine.

As we behold Picard struggle against the Borg within, or as we thrill to the spectacle of Data gaining bits of human flesh and once again succumbing to those famous weaknesses to which flesh is heir – at such highpoints, First Contact is a more authentically thrilling parable for our time than most self-consciously cyberpunk movies of the ‘90s. Besides, one good Star Trek movie is definitely more fun than a hundred Johnny Mnemonics.

It is a fact of life: the appeal of Star Trek can never be explained to any cool dude immune to its daggy, thrilling charms. At that level, First Contact is probably beyond analysis or critique, like all true pop culture obsessions.

But this much can be said: it is the best possible Christmas present for a fanatic like myself to whom Star Trek (in all its various guises), as a protean work of popular art, has given such deep, prolonged pleasure.

Postscript 2024: In a curious case of cine-tele-phile fickleness that I can scarcely explain myself, I was deeply and intensely “into” the Star Trek franchise for a period of 5 or so years – I devote a chapter to it in my 1994 book Phantasms – but, after reviewing the less engaging 1998 instalment in the movie series, Star Trek Insurrection (1998), I suddenly and utterly lost all enthusiasm for this cultural phenomenon. I have not bothered since to watch a single Star Trek story in any medium for the past 25 years!

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© Adrian Martin November 1996