5 out of 5

Director: Jonathan Frakes

Sure, five stars, why not.  This is, after all, the Wrath of Khan of the Next Generation crew – a little over-serious at times, leaning more on action than sci-fi, dashes of humor jutting up against great tension, and fan service in terms of show elements crossing over.  Fitting that it’s also their second entry, suggesting it takes a first stumble to figure out how to fill the big screen.  And fill it it does: in his first directorial outing, Jonathan Frakes does an amazing job of not only expanding the show palette but also properly balancing characters and subplots and coming up with some exciting framing for every sequence.  It doesn’t reek of first job at all, the camera feeling confident and the actors’ portrayals seeming assured.  ST VIII would also be the first film to get legit computer effects and to look damn fine in their execution.  Although about half of the previous films did respectable jobs with either money or technology limitations, they all do show their age, but First Contact still holds up.  It’s nothing too flashy, of course, but it helps with the stability of the film.  Which concerns: the Borg finally invading Federation space.  Picard is told to stay away due to his history with the ‘race’, but he breaks rank when the Feds attacks start to fail, and quickly decides to follow the Borg into a time distortion into their timeline’s past (still our future) to prevent some human history fiddling that will allow the Borgs to assimilate the Earth… and so on.  The time travel cards are played pretty slippery like (a la Voyage Home) but the stakes are given a fun sense of history and the Borg are wonderfully creepy, especially led by Alice Krige… whose part is weirdly sexualized in one of Frakes several nigh missteps in trying to make the flick into a jack-of-all-trades.  But it comes and goes quickly, giving way to some excellent dialogue in the final quarter of the film (Picard’s emotional turnabout, Data’s Borg confrontations) as well as some awesome action.  The movie lacks the epilogues the initial series’ entries tended to have, but it doesn’t at all make the thing incomplete.  Still exciting, still worth watching, and definitely top of the pops for Next Gen as well as being a top tier sci-fi movie.