Star Trek: First Contact

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Star Trek: First Contact

Directed by	Jonathan Frakes
Produced by	Rick Berman
Written by	Rick Berman Ronald D. Moore Brannon Braga
Starring	See table
Music by	Jerry Goldsmith
Cinematography	Matthew F. Leonetti
Editing by	John W. Wheeler
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date(s)	November 22, 1996
Running time	111 min.
Language	English
Budget	$45,000,000
Preceded by	Star Trek: Generations
Followed by	Star Trek: Insurrection
IMDb profile

Star Trek: First Contact (Paramount Pictures, 1996) is the eighth feature film based on the Star Trek science fiction television series. It is the second film to feature the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, who encounter their adversaries the Borg. The film is directed by Jonathan Frakes from a script by Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore, with music composed by Jerry Goldsmith.

1 Cast
2 Plot summary
3 Critical reception
4 Notes and trivia
5 Errors and inconsistencies
6 Trademark litigation
7 External links

[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	Counselor Deanna Troi
Alfre Woodard	Lily Sloane
James Cromwell	Dr. Zefram Cochrane
Alice Krige	The Borg Queen
Neal McDonough	Lieutenant Sean Hawk
Michael Horton	Lieutenant Daniels
Robert Picardo	Emergency Medical Hologram
Dwight Schultz	Lieutenant Reginald Barclay
Patti Yasutake	Nurse Alyssa Ogawa
Jeff Coopwood	Voice of the Borg

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

A Borg cube has entered Federation space on a course for Earth. However, instead of stationing its most advanced vessel, USS Enterprise-E, among the fleet assembled to protect Earth, Starfleet Command orders the Enterprise to monitor and patrol the Romulan Neutral Zone in case the Romulans decide to take advantage of the situation. However, Captain Picard and the rest of the senior crew are fully aware that the real reason behind the order is because of Picard's past experience with the Borg (see "The Best of Both Worlds").

The Enterprise crew listens in on the progress of the battle via subspace. Hearing that the fleet is being decimated by the Borg, Picard chooses to disobey orders and join the fight. Upon arriving at Sector 001, the Enterprise takes command of the fleet and transports aboard survivors from the heavily damaged USS Defiant, including its commanding officer, Lt. Commander Worf. Picard provides strategic information about the Borg that allows the fleet to destroy the cube, but a sphere escapes the explosion and shoots toward Earth. The sphere opens a temporal vortex and travels into Earth's past, and Picard orders the Enterprise in after it.

The Enterprise arrives in 2063, the day before First Contact, a pivotal moment in human history during which humanity achieves warp drive and encounters extraterrestrial life for the first time. Realizing that the surviving Borg are attempting to change history by destroying Earth's first warp vessel prototype, Picard quickly orders the Borg sphere destroyed. The Enterprise fires several torpedoes at the sphere, destroying it, but not before it has fired a number of projectiles aimed at the missile complex where the prototype is located.

An away team transports to Earth in civilian clothes to ensure that the warp ship, the Phoenix, and its pilot, Zefram Cochrane, make their pivotal test flight on schedule. Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge and an engineering team begin to repair the damaged Phoenix while Commander William T. Riker and Counselor Deanna Troi attempt to convince a somewhat perturbed (and soused) Cochrane to go through with the flight the following day. Dr. Beverly Crusher returns to the Enterprise with Lily Sloane, Cochrane's assistant, who is suffering from radiation poisoning after the attack.

Meanwhile, anomalies begin to appear in the Enterprise's systems. Sensing a continued Borg presence, Picard returns to the ship with Data, discovering that some Borg transported to the Enterprise just before the destruction of their own ship and have now begun to assimilate the Starfleet vessel and crew, starting with the Engineering section. Data's inhuman speed allows him to encrypt access to the ship's central computer just in time, but all other main systems are taken out by the Borg (save for the emergency systems keeping the ship's environment stable). Picard leads a raid on Engineering, but the Borg strength is overwhelming and the raid fails. Lt. Commander Data is captured by the Borg and a retreating Picard is taken hostage by a confused Lily in a Jeffries tube.

Picard and Lily return to the rest of the crew and find that the Borg are building a communications antenna on the Enterprise's navigational deflector to contact the Borg of this time, in order to call for reinforcements. 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 activate the three manual controls that will detach the dish. The drones building the antenna move against the three and assimilate Hawk, but Picard finishes Hawk's job and completes the cycle. The released plate, carrying several Borg and the antenna, begins to move away from the Enterprise and Worf, uttering a defiant "Assimilate this!", destroys the antenna and its attendant Borg with his phaser rifle.

Meanwhile, the Phoenix has been repaired and Cochrane convinced to make his test flight. The vessel is launched on April 5, 2063 as it is supposed to be and escapes Earth's gravity without incident.

On the Enterprise, after Picard thwarts the Borg's plan to call for reinforcements, the cyborgs continue their expansion throughout the ship, assimilating the crew into their collective and adapting to become resistant to all onboard weapons. Worf advocates setting the self-destruct function and abandoning ship. Picard refuses to allow the Borg to cause the loss of the Enterprise. The two argue heatedly until Lily convinces Picard that his desire for revenge is clouding his reasoning, and he agrees to leave the Enterprise. The crew evacuates as Picard remains behind to save Data.

In Engineering, the Borg Queen attempts to entice him to become Borg by giving him real skin and sensations, bringing him closer to being human. After a few tries, Data apparently gives in and joins the Borg. When Picard arrives and offers himself in exchange for Data, the Queen says that Data may leave if he wishes, but the android refuses. The queen then has Data deactivate the self-destruct program and give her control over the main computer, which he does as Picard watches helplessly. She orders Data to fire on the Phoenix.

However, Data's quantum torpedoes miss the Phoenix. Before the enraged Queen can react, Data punctures a coolant tank, flooding Engineering with plasma coolant. Picard saves himself by climbing the Queen's lifeline tubes to the second level of Engineering, but the coolant liquefies the Queen's organic components and disables the Borg, who cannot survive without her. The Queen is ultimately destroyed when Picard drops down after the coolant is dispersed and breaks her writhing spinal cord from her metallic skull. Data, his patches of real skin gone, reveals that he was tempted by her offer, but only for 0.68 seconds—although "for an android, that is nearly an eternity."

The Phoenix flight is a success. Shortly after Cochrane returns, the Vulcan survey ship T'plana'hath lands to make first contact with humans, having detected the warp signature. The Enterprise crew returns to the ship, and Lily watches from Earth as the ship disappears back into the future.

[edit] Critical reception

The film's total domestic gross was $92,027,888. First Contact was well-received by both Trek fans and reviewers, who felt that the film would appeal to fans and casual viewers alike. Rotten Tomatoes indicates that 94% of national reviews of the film were positive [1]. First Contact would be the last Star Trek movie to be given "two thumbs up" by Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel who stated that, because of this film, Star Trek was "cool again."

[edit] Notes and trivia

In order to meet Wikipedia's quality standards, this article's trivia section requires cleanup.
Content in the trivia section should be integrated into other appropriate areas of the article.

Image:Star trek first contact 2.jpg

An episode of Star Trek: Enterprise filmed several years later called "Regeneration" is based on the premise that debris from the Borg sphere, including some drones, eventually made its way to Earth's surface and landed in a frozen Arctic environment. It also establishes that the Borg drones that are revived in the episode send a message to the Borg collective before their destruction, but that it would take two hundred years to reach the Delta Quadrant. This implies that this episode was not only a result of the events of First Contact, but the cause as well. (And the cause of all the Borg incursions into Federation space, and the special interest they frequently seem to take in humans and their homeworld).
Footage from this film was reused in the Star Trek: Enterprise episode "In a Mirror, Darkly". The reused footage was integrated with newly created scenes to present the Mirror Universe version of Earth/Vulcan first contact (in which Zefram Cochrane shot and killed the Vulcan captain, and the assembled humans stormed the spacecraft and stole its technology). Footage of the Phoenix's launch sequence was also used for Enterprise's opening title sequence.
In a bit of irony, Patrick Stewart's character, Captain Picard, is compared unfavorably to a later Patrick Stewart character, Captain Ahab, from the novel Moby Dick. It is this very comparison (made by Lily, during Picard's tirade against the invading Borg) that motivates Picard to take a course of action that will help him avoid being compared to Ahab. (Patrick Stewart played Captain Ahab in a made-for-television adaptation of the novel in 1998; he has noted in interviews that it was during the filming of First Contact that he began to consider taking on the role of Ahab.) This was the third explicit reference to Moby Dick in the Star Trek film series - the first was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, with Khan being the Ahab character. The second was the question by a visitor to the Cetacean Institute in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: "Do whales attack people, like in Moby Dick?"
There are two cameo appearances made by actors from Star Trek: Voyager. One is the appearance of the Enterprise's EMH, played by Robert Picardo. The other is Ethan Phillips (Voyager's Neelix), who is seen as a maître d' in the holodeck nightclub scene.
There are many references to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); for example the deflector dish is labeled AE35, the name of a component of a satellite dish in 2001.
Since the film hadn't finished production when the trailer was released, the trailer contains a lot of recycled footage from previous Star Trek movies and series episodes. For example the Enterprise-D is shown several times, as well as Voyager.
The Star Trek/X-Men crossover comic book Second Contact picks up immediately after Star Trek: First Contact, with the Enterprise-E accidentally detouring to the reality depicted in most Marvel Comics publications (Earth-616) while trying to return home. The title Second Contact is both a play on the film's title and a reference to a prior crossover where the X-Men encountered the crew of the original Star Trek series. The story in Second Contact then leads into the novel Planet X, where the X-Men are pulled into the Star Trek universe.
Tom Hanks is a Star Trek fan and wanted very much to be in this film, and would have played Zefram Chochrane but was unavailable due to filming (and directing) "That Thing You Do".
At the start of the film it shows Picard undergoing his assimilation from 'Best of Both Worlds'. These scenes were re-shot to include a new borg ship, a new suit for 'Locutus' and more detail in the cybernetic implants (wires in his veins).
In this movie, Cochrane becomes the first and (to date) only character in the history of the franchise to actually utter the term "star trek".

[edit] Errors and inconsistencies

A member of the crew, Lieutenant Daniels, reports that the Borg have taken over deck 26, but Picard tells Lily there are 24 decks.
There is a scene where the Enterprise-E is flying past Earth. But North America is facing the sun, which is impossible since the beginning scenes with Cochrane when Riker and Troi meet him are at night.
The storm system seen over the East Coast of North America is rotating anti-cyclonically (clockwise) as opposed to the normal cyclonically (counter-clockwise), which would be impossible for a low pressure system of that magnitude in the Northern Hemisphere.
Zefram Cochrane is incorrectly spelled as "Zefram Cochran" in the credits and subtitles.
When Picard smashes his phaser rifle into the display case in the observation lounge in front of Lily, we see the small gold models of previous ships that carried the name Enterprise. After the glass finishes breaking, we can see that despite being loosened from their mounting, the model ships are all intact. The next time we see the damaged display case, the models of the Enterprise-C and Enterprise-D are broken apart. Lily picks up the broken piece of the Enterprise-D (the drive section), mentioning to Picard that he "broke [his] little ships". Some speculate that Lily picking up the broken Enterprise-D was a small homage to the vessel which was destroyed in the previous film.
When the Borg begin to attack on Deck 16, the drone that Worf kills with the butt of his rifle changes between the two separate shots. The second shot's drone is the same as the one that attacks Picard when the door to Engineering is opened; however, that was killed by Data.
As Picard's and Data's security team heads for Deck 16, an orange stage light can be seen for about a second.

[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 titled "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] External links

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Star Trek: First Contact

Star Trek television series and feature films
	Television series The Original Series · The Animated Series · The Next Generation · Deep Space Nine · Voyager · Enterprise
	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
	Unknown-Era Feature films XI