I’m not here to judge the quality of Star Trek: First Contact as a Star Trek movie. Trekkies like Angela Collier and Mike Stoklasa have informed me that Star Trek has to be super serious, boring, and never fun. So on that note, First Contact is a terrible Star Trek movie. But as a movie movie, I say that 1996 was my year of awakening. Twister. Independence Day. Star Trek: First Contact. Or, “the triple headed dragon” as I like to say in film history. They changed everything. It was during this era that SFX/CGI was it it’s peak. Special effects were still special and First Contact still holds up remarkably well.
But I’m not here to talk about that shit. Instead I’m gonna talk about the first five minutes or so. It might be hard for kids to remember, but it used to be that plots kicked off starting at the first frame. They were very economical in how they established characters and backgrounds and typically stuck with the “show don’t tell” rule. In First Contact, post credits, the first frame was Picard being assimilated by the Borg. Seconds later, it’s revealed to be a dream. Then BAM. The plot kicks off. No time wasted. Even as a kid, I thought damn, wanna take me out to dinner first? But there was no need. I knew exactly what was going on and what the motivations were.
Mind you, I was a TNG fan so I knew what the history was. But watching this opening now, I can’t help but think how the runtime would be wasted nowadays on thirty minutes of Picard whining to Deanna Troi about his emotional scars and blah blah blah. But this was the 1990s. This was the era of confined space action films like Die Hard, Under Siege, Air Force One, etc. So we all had one question on our minds: what if the USS Enterprise was hijacked by space zombies? And it wasted almost no time in getting us answers.