First Contact is known for being one of the best Trek movies if not the best Trek movie ever created. I remember when I was only 7 watching it for the first time.....it scared the living hell out of me. I couldn't sleep for a weeks without thinking some Borg was coming in and assimilating me. When I got older I started to realize something....its 90210 in space. Its essentially about a woman being rejected by a man and is out for revenge against him. The Borg Queen was head over heals for Picard during his stint in the Collective during TNG and wanted him as her equal or should I say possibly lover. Seems like Picard has that effect on women even ones as dark and scary as the Queen of Borg. So think about this, once Picard rejected the Queens advances...she wants to hit him where it hurts, and for Picard that's history and space exploration. What better way to take revenge on a man like Picard, destroy the one thing he loves just as much as the Enterprise. I mean you already robbed him of his invulnerability we saw in early TNG, you broke the man, now you break his soul, which she almost did. That is until she banged Data and tried to turn one his best friends against him, the very man who literally broke Picard out of the Borg Cube. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned and considering the great lengths of planning it must have taken, the Queen was very angry.
Funny the Borg always talk about perfection and the need to surpass the confines of humanity, when in fact the Queen is far more human then she realizes and that means just as imperfect as those she assimilates.
In my opinion the very antithesis of an SJW Mary Sue movie, yet the Queen is a very strong and likable female character.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC] "This planet smells, it must be the Klingons"
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Not even, pal. And it only gets worse from there.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
We may have disagreed on some things in the past coldnapalm... but in this case... I agree.
WTF did I just read?
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
Personally, I feel FC contradicts too many events seen on TNG and thus, the Borg Queen and Picard going mad feel totally cheap, forced and artificial. Also... Starfleet doesn't trust Picard to fight the Borg, but a few years earlier he was ordered to lead a Taskforce investigating an attack by the Borg... yeh… sure. Nice try, movie.
Also... Picard defying his (idiotic and undeserved) standing orders so he could join the battle was very shallow; the battle would have been won without the Enterprise, albeit under more severe losses… when the Enterprise arrives the cube is already heavily damaged, and a rather large portion of the now fairly well-prepared SF-armada is still combat-capable.
On a sidenote, if SF would have acted in a realistic fashion, they'd have assigned somebody else to command the Enterprise temporarily, so there's that as well.
Structure and storyboard of the movie are a mess, too. The battle in the beginning is the most spectacular part of the movie and thus has no business being in Act 1 - unless it can be topped later. It would all work so much better if the landing of the vulcans was the beginning of the movie and more like a flashback-kinda thing but relevant to something that's gonna happen in the movie, in a more meaningful manner than it actually ended up being.
The visual effects are great and hold up very well, but that's about all the positives. Some of the "Horror"-Scenes are good, but are ruined by how the Borg act like zombies more than borg..
Bottom-line… the movie's fine if you enjoy it without thinking about it. If you start to actually break it down bit by bit, you will see that it's incredibly flawed, shallow, and incompetently written.
The script was definitely way too front-loaded. They could have shifted it back to a more conventional action climax format easily enough by doing things like having the hook be Cochrane and company cautiously do the "first contact" meeting with the aliens unseen until they get close and a cyborg arm reaches into view as if to shake his hand, then suddenly grabs and injects him with nanites before slamming to black and moving on to the TNG era or something along those lines.
From there they could have split the big fight scene into alternate versions in "bookend" format, where the first one did not go well. Perhaps the ships start getting mysteriously assimilated as their shields were beaten down or something, or the cube starts getting stronger for no apparent reason in the first version as Enterprise breaks off and chases the sphere, and in the end one Enterprise returns to the still going battle against the main cube where the assimilation never happened or stopped and reversed itself or whatever and the cube is finally overpowered and destroyed interleafed with the hook scene again but a Vulcan arm reaching in and the camera swinging and pulling back to reveal the Vulcans and their ship. Maybe they thought something like that would be too "Back To The Future" or whatever.
As it was the movie seemed like the writers could not decide if they were primarily doing horror, space procedural, or action movie and botched all three.
The only problem with this is that Enterprise has to be protected from the changes that the Borg made in the 21st Century. Otherwise, the Enterprise would not exist. It only took a few seconds for the 24th Century Earth to go from normal to assimilated after the Borg ship went to the 21st Century. So for this to work, the Enterprise could be studying some ancient ruins that protected the Enterprise from temporal changes and encounters a bunch of Borg ships that shouldn't be in the area with communication with Starfleet HQ being impossible.
I would have personally not made it a time-travel plot in the first place, because let's face it: Time-travelling Borg that would actually go after Earth in its past would be instant game over for that branch of the timeline, and it makes the battle in the beginning even more stupid (like.. hey borg, you know you could have just gone to the past BEFORE they shoot your cube, and without a Starfleet-ship accidentally following you).
Nah. Making a good time-travel plot is really not that easy.
A relatively simple fix would be to structure the movie like this:
1. We see the Landing of the Vulcans. Perhaps with narration, explaining to the audience what First Contact is.
//This means the movie would be more accessible to audiences not too familiar with Trek. Also, it would fix an issue with the movie as it is now: FC is the title, but it happens in the very end of the movie, which is plain stupid.
2. We cut to the Enterprise in present tense. The team goes through the results of the final field-testing of the new ship, the latest reports regarding the situation with the Dominion and sightings of a Borg-vessel that appears to be heading for Earth, also Vulcan Science Academy has requested assistance.
//this would bring the audience up to speed about what's happening in the ST-universe at that time, and it would capture the tone of TNG a Little better. Enterprise is the flagship, so they've got A LOT TO DO. Also, again, better for general audiences and for those who didn't binge-watch TNG and DS9. FC as we know it doesn't even attempt to explain what is going on other than "Hey look, it's the Borg, you remember the Borg, right!? Oh you didn't know Worf ended up at DS9? You don't know the Defiant? But look here, Borg have a Queen now!".
3. At Vulcan, my concrete ideas kinda end because from there, the movie would be open for several possible stories that tie back to the original First Contact somehow; Like it's FC-day, the Vulcans have some diplomatic or explorative task, and somewhere halfway through that a transwarp-conduit is detected in relative proximity to Sol, and the battle would be an actual payoff for the aforementioned reports of Borg-activity.
With better structure and creativity the movie could be decent.
Instead, my suggestions would be to have Enterprise too far out to respond in time to get to the battle, but be outfitted with an experimental version of the quantum slipstream drive debuted in VOY. Picard orders its use, hoping to close the gap to Earth; meanwhile, the cube arrives at Earth, disables terrestrial defenses (including ships in orbit), and sends its probe backtime. Enterprise arrives in Earth orbit to find the planet's been Borged, and history changed around them. We have our traditional cut to the conference room:
DATA: Intriguing, sir. I would theorize that the effects of the quantum slipstream, which take us momentarily out of phase with our universe, protected us from experiencing the change in the timeline. This would be similar to the effects experienced by the away team on the planet of the Guardian of Forever, when it was discovered in the 23rd century. The differences--
PICARD: Yes, quite interesting, Mr. Data. But is there some way to reverse the changes?
We Treknobabble a bit, find that the original Borg temporal corridor has left a "wake" of sorts, follow that, and the rest of the plot proceeds from there.
Still far from the best Trek movie, especially if we insist on keeping the characterization of Zephram Cochrane as a drunk with no interest in space whatsoever beyond its monetary possibilities, but IMO improved in structure at least.
As for Cochrane's portrayal... having him start out as the drunk would show how the events changed him into the man people idolize as the father of Warp Drive.
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Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
My character Tsin'xing
I agree but it still had a better reason for Worf being around than any other TNG movie after he joined DS9
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
There should be no temporal shenanigans at all. Time-travelling Borg would (when written with realistic thoughts about what they'd do) ruin the universe for everybody in that branch of the timeline. There'd be no way to stop them from annihilating something they know they won't defeat quickly enough, and they would just time-travel to points in time where they could get super-powerful technologies and use those in the past. They could never be defeated by anyone if they would start time-travelling.
Not only in 'Family'.
In fact, some sources claimed that the "best scene" of FC is the one where Picard has his tantrum with Lily, but the basic frame of that scene was essentially copy-pasted from 'I, Borg' and decorated with quotes from Moby TRIBBLE; there's that scene where Guinan is getting unusually angry with Picard about not wanting to use Hugh as a tool for genocide. And it's really not much different, except Guinan is the one who starts yelling.
While at first Picard was considering to take the opportunity, he quickly realized that a Borg-drone is still a life-form. He was actually advocating for the disconnected drone while Guinan initially was was like "U mad bro?".
And later, in 'Descent', Picard shows absolutely no sign of particular fear or hate against the Borg at all, and Admiral Nechayev even dissed Picard for actually acting like a rolemodel of a Starfleet-captain. Granted, it's not the collective itself he faces in 'Descent', but Lore's drones didn't look different from Borg within the collective - if Picard would still be traumatized at that point, he'd have had a mental breakdown when Lore presented himself surrounded with drones.
Raven, without "temporal shenanigans", First Contact isn't First Contact, it's a completely different story. Which might not have been a bad idea - I think Trek went to the Borg well far too many times - but that's not what's under discussion here. I mean, it's a little like saying, "I don't think Khan should have been the Big Bad in TWoK." Fair enough, but then the second Trek movie wouldn't have been a sequel to "Space Seed", but a different thing altogether, and unless someone's going to knock out a spec script for free we'll never know what else it might have been.
(And no, the proposal for "flashbacks" to the Vulcan landing and then the rest of the movie being about commemorating this wouldn't make for a good movie, unless your goal is to limit ticket sales to the sort of person who argues with Memory Alpha about details of Trek history.)
We don't really see any Borg who aren't Disconnected after BoBW until First Contact.
The primary variables we have are:
Honestly I feel that any Captain would not take their ship and crew being assimilated lightly.
Combine that with him being able to hear the Borg and the presence of a Queen... it is possible that those were stress factors that could lead even Picard to go Ahab on them for a while, as we saw in First Contact.
Insurrection is one of my favorites. I personally feel that Nemesis was too much of a fanboy one-up rehash of Undiscovered Country. I mean...
Honestly the whole concept of Shinzon just... feels awkward. Also Picard did have hair back in his academy days.
1) Genetically engineered villain
2) Weapon of mass destruction
3) Crewmember sacrifices himself to save the ship and instantly drop hints on how they can be brought back
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
My character Tsin'xing