Star Trek: First Contact
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| Star Trek: First Contact | |
|---|---|
| Image:Star Trek VIII.jpg Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | Jonathan Frakes |
| Produced by | Rick Berman Peter Lauritson |
| Written by | TV series "Star Trek" Gene Roddenberry Story Rick Berman Brannon Braga Ronald D. Moore Screenplay Brannon Braga Ronald D. Moore |
| Starring | See table |
| Music by | Jerry Goldsmith |
| Cinematography | Matthew F. Leonetti |
| Editing by | Anastasia Emmons John W. Wheeler |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
| Release date(s) | November 22, 1996 |
| Running time | 111 min. |
| Country | Image:Flag of the United States.svg United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $45,000,000 (estimated) |
| Gross revenue | $146,000,000 (worldwide)[1] |
| Preceded by | Star Trek Generations |
| Followed by | Star Trek: Insurrection |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Star Trek: First Contact is a 1996 science fiction film, and the eighth feature film based on the Star Trek television series. In it, the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation again encounter their adversaries, the Borg, and this time attempt to prevent the Borg from changing history by conquering the Earth of the 21st century through the use of time travel. The film was directed by Jonathan Frakes from a script by Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore, with music composed by Jerry Goldsmith. First Contact earned an Academy Award-nomination for Best Makeup.
Contents |
[edit] Plot
Following the destruction of the USS Enterprise-D in Star Trek Generations, most of the bridge crew were transferred to the new Sovereign class starship, the USS Enterprise-E. Shortly before the beginning of the film, a Borg cube ship has entered Federation space on a course for Earth. However, instead of stationing their most advanced vessel among the fleet assembled to protect Earth, Starfleet has assigned the Enterprise to patrol the Romulan Neutral Zone. Starfleet orders Jean-Luc Picard to do so in case the Romulans decide to take advantage of the situation. However, he is fully aware that the real reason is that, due to his past experience with the Borg, Starfleet considers him too unstable to lead a ship into battle against them.
At the beginning of the story, Picard chooses to disobey his orders and takes the Enterprise to Earth where the Starfleet armada has engaged the Borg in the Battle of Sector 001. Upon the Enterprise's arrival, Picard takes command of the remaining ships in the fleet and then beams aboard survivors from the heavily damaged USS Defiant, including its commanding officer, Commander Worf. After the loss of the Enterprise-D, Worf had been transferred to Deep Space 9, where the Defiant was based. Following Picard's instructions, the fleet defeats the Borg cube. However, shortly before its destruction, the cube had ejected a sphere. The Enterprise pursues the sphere as it heads toward Earth. The Borg sphere opens and travels via a tunnel through time. During the pursuit, the Enterprise sees that the Earth has been turned into a Borg planet, completely built over, its atmosphere made up of noxious gases. It is apparent that the sphere's crew has managed to change Earth's past, so the Enterprise follows on its altered chronotonic trail at maximum warp, and reaches the past to stop the Borg attempt. The two ships arrive in 2063, and the Borg ship immediately begins to fire on a former nuclear missile launch-facility in the northwest region of the United States. The Enterprise destroys the sphere; however, unknown at this time, a number of Borg drones and the Borg Queen manage to transport into a Jefferies tube in the ship's engineering section.
[edit] Fight with the Borg
Picard, realizing that the Borg were attempting to destroy the Phoenix, Earth's first warp-capable vessel, has an away team, including himself, transport in civilian clothes to the missile silo housing it. Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge and an engineering team work on the damaged vessel while Commander William T. Riker attempts to convince Dr. Zefram Cochrane, designer and pilot of the ship, to go through with the flight the next day. The time of his warp test is imperative to establishing first contact with the first alien species ever encountered by humanity (later revealed to be the Vulcans). This contact (as Riker knows) will bring prosperity to Earth, now devastated by the Third World War. At the same time, Captain Picard and Dr. Beverly Crusher return to the Enterprise with Lily Sloane, Cochrane's assistant, who is suffering from Theta radiation poisoning after the attack.
Meanwhile, the Borg begin to assimilate the equipment and crewmembers that they encounter on the Enterprise, taking over main engineering and moving upward through the decks. Realising their presence, Picard leads the remaining officers against the Borg, during which Lt. Commander Data is captured by the Borg. Picard encounters Lily, whom he informs as to what's happening. The two flee from a group of drones and take refuge in a holodeck, which Picard loads with a scene from a Dixon Hill holonovel in a crowded nightclub, disengaging the Holodeck's safety measures whilst doing so. He then obtains a Tommy gun and kills the Borg drones that are pursuing them with it; his behaviour and the manner in which he kills the Borg indicates to Lily his great hatred for them. He takes a chip from within one of the Borg Drones' body, a former crew-member that was assimilated, which reveals to Picard details on the Collective's schedule.
The two return to the rest of the crew and find that the Borg are building a communications antenna on the Enterprise's navigational deflector to call for assistance from the Borg of this time. Picard, Worf, and Lt. Sean Hawk don space suits and magnetic boots and venture out on to the hull armed with phaser rifles. They make their way to the deflector dish and begin to switch on the three manual controls that release the central part of the dish. The drones building the antenna begin to move against the three. They assimilate Hawk; Picard moves over to Hawk's control and activates it while Worf kills Hawk. The released plate, carrying several Borg and the antenna, begins to move away from the Enterprise and Worf destroys the antenna with phaser fire, exclaiming, "Assimilate this!"
[edit] Phoenix flight
Meanwhile, the Phoenix has been repaired and Cochrane is convinced to make his historic flight. The vessel is launched on April 5, 2063, on time and to the sound of ancient 20th century music "Magic Carpet Ride", and exits Earth's gravity without incident.
On the Enterprise, the Borg have continued to climb upward. Worf advocates setting the ship's self-destruct function and abandoning the ship via escape pods. Picard refuses to allow the Borg to cause the loss of the Enterprise. The two argue this heatedly until Lily convinces Picard that his hate of the Borg is clouding his reasoning, comparing him to Ahab of Moby Dick. He agrees to destroy the ship. As the crew are escaping the ship, he doesn't join them, instead proceeding to engineering to recover Data.
Meanwhile, Data has been taken to the Borg Queen, who has been attempting to entice him to join her through replacing pieces of his artificial skin with human skin and connecting them to his nervous system, helping him in his goal of becoming human. When Picard enters main engineering, he offers to remain willingly with the Queen as Locutus if she frees Data. The Borg Queen agrees and Picard tells Data to leave; Data refuses and the Queen tells Picard that she no longer needs him, as Data is a more appropriate counterpart. The Queen then has Data deactivate the self-destruct program, which he does, and fire on the Phoenix. Data fires three quantum torpedoes. However, he deliberately misses the Phoenix by a wide margin and then kills the queen by breaking open a tube carrying a coolant that dissolves organic tissue on contact. The death of the Queen causes the collective on board the ship to fail. Picard saves himself by climbing up on tubes dangling from the ceiling until the gas has drained from the room. Data, his patches of real skin gone, reveals that he had considered her offer of joining her for only 0.68 seconds - although "for an android, that is nearly an eternity."
The Phoenix test is a success. Shortly after Cochrane returns, the Vulcan survey ship T'plana-hath lands in the camp to make first contact with humans, having detected the warp signature from the Phoenix. The Enterprise crew returns to the ship after witnessing the historical event, and it returns to its own time using the means that the sphere ship did. The movie ends with Cochrane showing the Vulcans beer and music.
[edit] Cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Patrick Stewart | Captain Jean-Luc Picard |
| Jonathan Frakes | Commander William T. Riker |
| Brent Spiner | Lt. Commander Data |
| LeVar Burton | Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge |
| Michael Dorn | Lt. Commander Worf |
| Gates McFadden | Commander (Dr.) Beverly Crusher |
| Marina Sirtis | Commander (Counselor) Deanna Troi |
| Alfre Woodard | Lily Sloane |
| James Cromwell | Dr. Zefram Cochrane |
| Alice Krige | Borg Queen |
| Neal McDonough | Lieutenant Sean Hawk |
| Robert Picardo | Emergency Medical Hologram |
| Dwight Schultz | Lieutenant Reginald Barclay |
| Patti Yasutake | Nurse Alyssa Ogawa |
| Jeff Coopwood | Voice of the Borg |
| Michael Horton | Lt. Daniels |
| Majel Barrett | Computer voice |
[edit] Critical reaction
The film garnered a 91% "Certified Fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes,[2] making it the eighteenth highest reviewed film of 1996.[3] It also received a rating of 70 out of 100 at Metacritic, earning "generally favorable reviews.[4] Rotten Tomatoes placed the film 35th on their list of the "100 Best Reviewed Sci-Fi Movies", making it the highest placed Star Trek film on the list.[5]
First Contact earned an Academy Award-nomination for Best Makeup, losing out to The Nutty Professor. At The Saturn Awards the film was nominated in ten categories including Best Science Fiction Film, Best Actor for Patrick Stewart and Best Director for Jonathan Frakes. It won three: Best Costumes, Best Supporting Actor for Brent Spiner and Best Supporting Actress for Alice Krige.[6]
[edit] Trademark litigation
Paramount was sued over the film in federal court by the heirs of William F. Jenkins, a science-fiction author who wrote under the pen name "Murray Leinster". Jenkins had published a short story in 1945 entitled "First Contact", which may have been at least one of the original sources of the term, and his heirs who held the rights to the story claimed that Star Trek: First Contact infringed their trademark in the term. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted Paramount's motion for summary judgment and dismissed the suit (see Estate of William F. Jenkins v. Paramount Pictures Corp., 90 F. Supp. 2d 706 (E.D. Va. 2000) for the full text of the court's ruling). The court found that regardless of whether Jenkins first coined "first contact", it since became a generic (and therefore unprotectable) term that described the overall genre of science fiction in which humans first encounter alien species. Even if the title was instead "descriptive" — a category of terms higher than "generic" that may be protectable — there was no evidence that the title had the required association in the public's mind (known as "secondary meaning") such that its use would normally be understood as referring to Jenkins's story. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court's dismissal without comment.
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=startrek8.htm
- ^ Star Trek: First Contact (1996). Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved on 2007-07-25.
- ^ Best of Rotten Tomatoes. Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved on 2007-07-25.
- ^ Star Trek: First Contact. Metacritic. Retrieved on 2007-07-25.
- ^ Star Trek: First Contact (1996). Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved on 2007-07-25.
- ^ Awards for Star Trek: First Contact. Internet Movie Database. Retrieved on 2007-06-25.
[edit] External links
- Official Star Trek: First Contact web site
- Star Trek: First Contact at the Internet Movie Database
- Star Trek: First Contact article at Memory Alpha, a Star Trek wiki
- Star Trek: First Contact at Rotten Tomatoes
Star Trek | |
|---|---|
| Television series | The Original Series (Eps) · The Animated Series (Eps) · The Next Generation (Eps) · Deep Space Nine (Eps) · Voyager (Eps) · Enterprise (Eps) |
| TOS-era feature films | The Motion Picture · The Wrath of Khan · The Search for Spock · The Voyage Home · The Final Frontier · The Undiscovered Country |
| TNG-era feature films | Generations · First Contact · Insurrection · Nemesis |
| Upcoming films | Star Trek (2008) |
| Other | Star Trek: Phase II · Books · Comics · Games · Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki |
| Borg stories | |
|---|---|
| Star Trek: Enterprise: | Regeneration |
| Star Trek: The Next Generation: | Q Who? | The Best of Both Worlds | I, Borg | Descent | Star Trek: First Contact |
| Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: | Emissary |
| Star Trek: Voyager: | Unity | Scorpion | The Raven | Hope and Fear | Drone | Dark Frontier | Survival Instinct | Collective | Unimatrix Zero | Endgame |
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