[7.7/10] I’m not sure there’s a *Star Trek* movie that is as simultaneously funny, scary, and dramatic as *First Contact*. Sure, *The Voyage Home* probably has better laughs. *The Wrath of Khan* can outdo this one in drama. And there’s plenty of other films in the franchise with a few good scares. But none mixes and matches all three as well as the *Next Generation* crew’s second mission on the silver screen does.

The film sees Captain Picard and company fighting the Borg in twenty-fourth century, only to have to follow their cybernetic adversaries into the past, to stop them from assimilating humanity and preventing that future from arising. When they arrive in the distant year of 2063, the crew of the Enterprise-E realizes the Borg are trying to stop Zefram Cochrane, the father of modern space travel, from making his all-important first flight.

The adventure breaks down into three more-or-less discrete stories. Riker, Geordi, and Troi help Cochrane reckon with his future and get his ship off the ground. Picard tries to protect his ship from the cadre of Borg who have secretly beamed aboard and are threatening to signal their allies to begin an invasion of Earth. And Data tries to withstand the temptations of the oddly flirtatious Borg Queen, so as not to give her control of the ship’s main computer.

The comedy mainly comes from the first part of that story. While there’s some dry wit and amusing moments back on the Enterprise (most of which involve Worf), the more plainly light and fun sequences take place on the Earth’s surface. From Troi getting drunk so she can have a word with Cochrane, to good ol’ Barclay getting starstruck by this great man of history, to the pilot himself turning out to be a jukebox jiving, whiskey sipping, destiny-avoiding oddball.

The nice thing is that it’s not just comic relief. There’s a broader theme to all the Cochrane mishegoss. We look to the grand figures of history as unimpeachable paragons of virtue. They loom large in our past to the point of becoming, as Cochrane himself puts it, saints and visionaries. But most of them were flawed. Many of them were deeply reprehensible, conflicted, or downright annoying despite their great accomplishments. Achieving something great doesn't mean the person who reached that achievement is or always was great, and *First Contact* has an amusing way of acknowledging that.

But it also recognizes that greatness can come from unusual places and people who aren’t looking for it. Cochrane admits that his own motives are mercenary, and even tries to run away rather than face a legacy of namesake schools and plaques and statues. And yet, in the end, he rises to the occasion (admittedly with a little cajoling). What makes that arc work is the bemusement that Riker in particular has with this historical demigod turning out to be a libertine. There’s an intuitive understanding, a “just excited to be there quality”, to the fact that this hero of history is just a guy. That approach helps with the movie’s broader project, to ground the brand of hero worship that *Star Trek* occasionally engages in, and recognizes that the people whose names echo through history books are often less than the larger than life figures the histories cast them as, but can still find themselves becoming better, worthier people, when history comes to them.

But sometimes, scary things come for them too. If *First Contact* accomplishes nothing else, it presents the most frightening outing for the Borg in franchise history. Kudos owe to director Jonathan Frakes, who shoots most of the Borg scenes on the Enterprise like a horror movie and gets appropriately unsettling results. The sequence of a smattering of red pin lights emerging from darkness creates a lastingly unnerving images. The production and design work and the movements of the Borg themselves is outstanding, adding a realness and a layer of visible skin decay and a gait that’s intimidating in and of itself.

At the same time *First Contact* leans hard into the body horror of assimilation, with adds an extra disturbing later that wasn’t able to be realized in the television series. We see severed limbs being attached to mechanical apparti, a drill bit advancing slowly toward Picard’s eye, and even just see the haunted visages of crewmembers half-assimilated looking like plague victims. An important part of this story is making the Borg seem like an enemy unlike any other, and the terror Frakes and company inject into their presence and deeds accomplishes that like gangbusters.

That also translates to what is arguably the least successful, but maybe most memorable part of the film: Data’s temptation by the Borg Queen. There too, the production design and costuming team does outstanding work, with the different Frankensteined versions of Data communicating his states of transition and the monstrousness of what was being dangled in front of him. The Borg Queen also is a strange cross between grotesque and alluring, which tells the tale of the odd space this storyline occupies.

I don’t know who in the writing team said, “We need to have a Borg Queen come in and try to seduce everybody.” To be frank, it feels like somebody’s kink brought to life with a blockbuster budget. Her presence recasts the leaderless Borg in a way that, ironically, drains them of some distinctiveness, while fulfilling the probable studio mandate that big budget flicks need identifiable villains. Her presence doesn't really add much to the plot, and the way the episode vaguely retcons “The Best of Both Worlds” from the TV show to make her a bigger deal leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

And yet, this part of the episode is genuinely weird and taking a big swing, which I can always appreciate in *Star Trek*. I don’t know that it really belongs in this movie, but the call and response between Data’s lack of a tactile response to the Phoenix, to having the Borg Queen manipulate him through the agony and ecstasy of tactile responses on the Enterprise is an intriguing note to play. It adds to the double entendre of “First Contact” that permeates the film. The sultry monster routine is, while more than a little bizarre, but also distinctive, which marks this movie as going for something bold and out there.

It doesn't always work, and in some places it fails entirely. But it’s hard not to admire the *Next Generation* team highlighting the “strange” in the famed “strange new worlds” part of the mantra, even if the results are hit or miss.

*First Contact* also takes a big swing in its visuals writ large and, thankfully, Frakes and cinematographer Matthew F. Leonetti hit that one out of the park. From the intricate, fractal-like shots of the Borg cube, to the visions of ships swarming and firing in unison, to simple well-staged shots of our heroes in conflict with one another, this is the most cinematic *Star Trek* has looked since 1979’s *The Motion Picture*.

True to that film’s influences, *First Contact*’s best sequence has a *2001: A Space Odyssey* vibe to it, as Picard, Worf, and a poor doomed red shirt try to stop the Borg from commandeering the Enterprise’s deflector dish. What follows is a dose of slow-spun terror. Setting the action on the exterior of the ship adds a layer of tension to everything, as the steady movements of the Borg make it harder for our heroes to flee or make a stand. There’s a tactile quality to the mission, as Picard and others struggle with the mechanisms necessary to accomplish their task. And the setups and payoffs, from the poor lieutenant’s conversion to Worf’s decompression and save, make the entire outing a masterclass in how to make one of these big budget set pieces a thrill without having to move at a breakneck pace.

*First Contact* doesn't just offer laughs, or terror, or action though. It aims to offer a tale of piercing psychology, where Picard grapples with his PTSD and raw thirst for revenge against the beings that hurt him so badly in the past. And in the process, it means to use a person from Earth’s past to show that these enlightened space men can still feel and falter just as much as their more “primitive” ancestors could.

It’s a nice tack to take, with the problem that the movie doesn't really know what to do with it. The film means to grapple with whether Picard is the right man to grapple with the Borg after what he’s been through, or whether he’s too emotionally scarred to be able to do that properly. The catch is that the TV show already went through a lot of that. Sure, a full-fledged invasion of Earth again is a different story, but *First Contact* still doesn't align especially neatly with Picard’s prior post-Locutus encounters with the Borg.

Still,, taking the storyline as we find it offers a mixed bag. The film struggles to present Picard with choices that dramatize his internal issue. The final decision to stay and fight versus destroy the ship does a nice job in the “Do you want to save people or just hurt the ones who wronged you?” department. But otherwise, Picard’s decisions don’t seem particularly questionable (even if he has some extra rage going), and the connection between his personal arc and his inevitable third act confrontation with the Borg Queen is thin at best.

The best you can say is that after a movie’s worth of incidents where Picard is willing to sacrifice or even kill his own soldiers in the name of thwarting the Borg, here he’s risking his life to save one of them. But frankly, that seems incidental, and the fact that he’s rescuing Data while he let unknown crewmen perish just makes it seem like he’s playing favorites, rather than having a moral awakening. There’s something to the notion of Picard realizing his folly, his Ahab-like loosened grip on his own principles and sanity (boy do *Star Trek* writers like *Moby Dick*, but the film struggles to balance that internal story with the one that needs some (admittedly stellar) blockbuster action for its big time release.

Still, what saves the storyline, and makes all that drama worthwhile is the same thing that so often saved the shakier storylines on the T.V. show: Patrick Stewart. Even where the script falters, Stewart has the chops and the gravitas to sell Picard’s descent into vengeance over duty. And the film’s stealthy best choice is to pair him with Alfre Woodard, who plays Lily, one of Cochrane’s friends and fills the role of the voice that questions Picard.

*First Contact* goes big with its emotions and presentations. Picard rages, Lily challenges him, and the captain is forced to confront his own anger at what’s happened to him in bombastic tones. Thankfully, both performers have the rare talent to take such big emotions and high volume reactions and make them land flawlessly. Stewart’s Shakespearan background delivers in his over-the-top or self-questioning moments, and Woodard is every bit his equal in scenes both intense and light. Their rapport and match is the strength of what is arguably the main storyline of the film.

Those performances support the high drama that the film engages with as Picard processes his long-festering wounds from his Borg capture and transformation. The visual excellence conveys both the tension of this cybernetic threat, and the horror these creatures can inflict in moments that sell the abject terror and they inspire. And all of his serious and scary stuff is balanced by a lighter and more fun trip to the past to help a drunken noodnik make history.

What *Star Trek: First Contact* lacks in tonal consistency, it makes up for in balancing these disparate but separately enjoyable elements. In that, it may not be the franchise’s best film, but it’s the one that best captures all that *Trek* can do and be in a single, rollicking package.