A Brief Guide to Star Trek (26 page)

The second
The Next Generation
movie (the eighth in the series overall) would enjoy a different reception upon release in November 1996, two and a half years on from the end of the series. By this time, fans of
The Next Generation
had seen enough time pass since their heroes beamed away from regular television episodes to be excited about seeing Picard and his team in action once again. In addition, this time they’d be up against one of the television series’ iconic foes, the Borg.

Generations
had been a muddled movie, trying to achieve too much in just one film. It was yet another send-off for (some of )
The Original Series
crew, an introduction for
The Next Generation
team to the big screen, a chance for series’ icons Kirk and Picard to meet, and it had to tell a story of its own.
Star Trek: First Contact
would be different – this time
Star Trek
would be an allout blockbuster action movie.

Rick Berman was still in charge of Paramount’s
Star Trek
franchise, and he turned once again to
Generation
’s scriptwriters Brannon Braga and Ron Moore for story ideas, suggesting he’d like to see something involving time travel. ‘All of the
Star Trek
films and episodes I have been most impressed with –
The Voyage Home
, ‘Yesterday’s
Enterprise
’, ‘The City on the Edge of
Forever’, and I could give you half a dozen more – have all been stories that deal with time travel’, said Berman. ‘In a way,
Generations
dealt with time travel. Nick Meyer’s wonderful movie
Time After Time
, dealt with time travel. The paradoxes that occur in writing, as well as in the reality of what the characters are doing and what the consequences are, have always been fascinating to me. I don’t think I’ve ever had as much fun as being involved with ‘Yesterday’s
Enterprise
’, and having to tackle all the logical, paradoxical problems that we would run into and figure out ways to solve them.’

It was Braga and Moore who wanted to bring the cybernetic Borg to the big screen. Their first attempt to incorporate the time travel aspect saw consideration being given to stories set in the American Civil War and Roman times. However, the most developed idea was for a trip to the European Renaissance for Picard and the Borg, under the title
Star Trek Renaissance
. Ron Moore recalled the story involved Picard investigating a village under siege by hideous monsters. ‘We begin to realize that these horrific monsters were the Borg. We track them down to a castle near the village where a nobleman runs a feudal society. We suspect the Borg are working in there, but no one can get in. So Data becomes our spy, impersonating an artist’s apprentice . . . Data became friends with Leonardo da Vinci, who at the time was working for the nobleman as a military engineer . . . you would have sword fights and phaser fights mixed together, in fifteenth-century Europe . . . it risked becoming really campy and over-the-top.’

Saner heads saw the film’s setting relocated to the twenty-first century, allowing the story to explore the origins of the
Star Trek
universe through the development of warp drive technology and humanity’s ‘first contact’ with the Vulcans. Out to foil these events would be the Borg, setting out to assimilate the past. Brannon Braga recalled: ‘The one image that I brought to the table is the image of the Vulcans coming out of the ship. I wanted to see the birth of
Star Trek
. We ended up coming back to that moment. That, to me, is what made the time travel story fresh.
We get to see what happened when humans shook hands with their first aliens.’

Following the elevation of Leonard Nimoy into the director’s chair for
Star Trek III
and
IV
, Picard’s ‘number one’, Jonathan Frakes, was invited to direct
First Contact
. Frakes had the innate understanding of
Star Trek
that Nimoy had enjoyed (which gave the Paramount brass confidence), but in its more modern guise of
The Next Generation
. He had directed a variety of the show’s episodes on television, including the acclaimed ‘Cause and Effect’ (and would go on to direct
Deep Space Nine
and
Voyager
episodes, as well as appearing in the series finale of
Enterprise
).

The loss of the
Enterprise-D
in
Generations
necessitated the creation of a new, more streamlined ship for use in
First Contact
and future movies. Long-time
Star Trek
production designer Herman Zimmerman came up with the new, sleek movie
Enterprise
, while the Borg were redesigned to stand up to the greater scrutiny they’d be under on giant movie screens. After Paramount executives criticised early drafts of the script (under the title
Star Trek Resurrection
) for making the Borg come across as little more than space zombies, a leader was created, in the style of the assimilated-Picard Locutus of Borg, seen in the Borg’s best-known TV appearance ‘The Best of Both Worlds’. The Borg Queen would be a figurehead for the collective, as well as an audience identification point and a Borg with whom the crew of the
Enterprise
could communicate, allowing for clear and simple exposition of major plot points that might otherwise be difficult to get across.

Like
The Wrath of Khan
before it,
First Contact
drew its central character from an episode of
The Original Series
. Zefram Cochrane had been played by Glenn Corbett in the episode ‘Metamorphosis’, discovered by Kirk on an isolated asteroid after having been missing for 150 years. Cochrane was an important figure in the creation of the Federation as the inventor of the first warp-capable ship, the
Phoenix
. In the episode, Cochrane’s youth has been maintained by a female alien ‘companion’ creature. The movie would explore Cochrane’s
creation of the pivotal warp drive technology, and his encounter with Picard’s
Enterprise
crew and the Borg. Although Tom Hanks – a well-known
Star Trek
fan in Hollywood – had expressed interest in playing the role, he wasn’t available due to directorial commitments, so the part went to acclaimed actor James Cromwell. Oscar-nominated for
Babe
in 1995, Cromwell was a
Star Trek
veteran, having previously appeared in two episodes of
The Next Generation
and in an instalment of
Deep Space Nine
, two out of the three times under heavy alien makeup. Cromwell would play the part of Cochrane once again in the pilot episode of
Enterprise
, ‘Broken Bow’.

The action-oriented role of Lily Sloane, a twenty-first-century woman working with Cochrane who battles the Borg on the
Enterprise
alongside Picard, went to actress Alfre Woodard, another Oscar nominee. South African-born Alice Krige filled the challenging role of the Borg Queen, who kidnaps and tries to convert Data to the Borg point of view. Krige would reprise the role on
Voyager
’s series finale ‘Endgame’. Comic relief was provided by the character of Barclay, a clumsy, fearful
Enterprise
crewmember played by
The A-Team
’s Dwight Schultz, and Robert Picardo as an alternate version of
Voyager
’s Emergency Medical Hologram.
Voyager
’s Ethan Phillips also appeared in the movie in a small, uncredited role.

Just as
The Wrath of Khan
was a more accessible and enjoyable
Star Trek
adventure than
The Motion Picture
, so
First Contact
was an easier, more straightforward adventure for a non-
Star Trek
fan audience to connect with. The film cost about $10 million more than
Generations
at $45 million, but took $92 million at the US box office, a sum well in excess of
Generations
’ $75-million US take.
First Contact
pulled in an additional $57.5 million worldwide, and scored a $30.7-million US opening weekend, taking the number one spot in the top ten. The reviews were widely positive, with Roger Ebert leading the charge: ‘One of the best of the eight
Star Trek
films’, he wrote in the
Chicago Sun-Times
. ‘
Star Trek
movies are not so much about action and effects as they are about ideas and dialogue. I doubted the
original
Enterprise
crew would ever retire because I didn’t think they could stop talking long enough . . . [Director Frakes] achieves great energy and clarity. In all of the shuffling of time-lines and plotlines, I always knew where we were.
Star Trek
movies in the past have occasionally gone where no movie had gone, or wanted to go, before. This one is on the right beam.’ Writing in the
Los Angeles Times
, critic Kenneth Turan felt that
First Contact
‘does everything you want a
Star Trek
film to do, and it does it with cheerfulness and style’. James Berardinelli, of website ReelViews, wrote that the film ‘single-handedly revived the
Star Trek
movie series, at least from a creative point of view’.

The cast and creative crew could rightly bask in the appreciation being heaped upon
Star Trek: First Contact
– although it wouldn’t last, with the
Star Trek
movies about to enter a downward spiral.

There was considerable momentum behind
Star Trek
following the blockbuster success of
First Contact
. Somehow, over the next two films the creative brains behind the movies managed to squander that momentum, along with fan and public goodwill, by turning out two very disappointing movies in
Star Trek: Insurrection
and
Star Trek Nemesis
.

The writers of the two previous films, Braga and Moore, were unavailable for the third
The Next Generation
movie as they were committed to both ongoing
Star Trek
TV series,
Deep Space Nine
and
Voyager
, as well as scripting
Mission: Impossible II
for Paramount. Michael Piller was brought in by Rick Berman to work on the project after he’d lost out on the opportunity to write
Generations
. Piller’s reaction to
First Contact
was that it was ‘too dark’ for a
Star Trek
movie and he wanted to move things in a lighter direction.

Piller had explored a concept he called ‘the Roddenberry box’, meaning the limitations that Gene Roddenberry had initially set for
Star Trek
and had adhered to most strictly on the early years of
The Next Generation
, but which each subsequent series had strived to work around. Roddenberry’s rules for life
in the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries were not fixed in stone – he often revised them as he went along – but they were his rules. Writers trying to create dramatic conflict often fell foul of these ‘rules’ as they seemed to inhibit many of the standard dramatic techniques used by screenplay writers for film and television. Unlike many, Piller quite liked the restrictions of working within ‘the box’, believing that
Star Trek
fans were drawn to that universe precisely because of the rules that Roddenberry had developed. Part of that was portraying the future in an optimistic manner: ‘The strength of
Star Trek
depends upon making people feel good about the future’, said Piller. The next
Star Trek
movie would, therefore, be a ‘feel-good’ movie.

Various ideas came together in the discussions between Piller and Berman. Piller was conscious of his own ageing process, and like the themes contained in the earlier
Star Trek
movies of the 1980s, he was keen to tackle the subject again, perhaps in the form of a quest for the ‘fountain of youth’. Berman was also thinking in terms of a quest, but more along the lines of Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
, a loose inspiration for the structure of Francis Ford Coppola’s
Apocalypse Now
(1979). In an interview on startrek.com, Berman addressed Piller’s early work: ‘He wanted to tell a story of Picard ending up being stripped of everything, losing his ship, his crew, his commission in Starfleet, losing everything but his sense of what was right and his integrity, and being left with nothing but that. When the studio read the story, they had the same reaction I had, which was that it was just nothing close to what a
Star Trek
movie should be.’

The problem for Piller was that
First Contact
had effectively used up
The Next Generation
’s best villains in the Borg. He couldn’t return to them, but neither was it wise to try and develop an even more powerful adversary. His decision was to make a different kind of movie, something that wouldn’t try to compete directly with the previous
Star Trek
film. His initial attempt – under the title
Star Trek: Stardust
– had Picard pursuing a renegade Starfleet officer who’d taken it upon himself to attack the
Romulans. During the chase, the crew of the
Enterprise
find themselves getting younger as they get closer to a mysterious area of space that seems to function as a fountain of youth.
Star Trek
had reverted its casts to childhood on several occasions on TV, in the episodes ‘The Counter-Clock Incident’ (
The Animated Series
) and ‘Rascals’ (
The Next Generation
) – as well as making them extremely aged in ‘The Deadly Years’ (
The Original Series
) and ‘Encounter at Farpoint’ (
The Next Generation
).

Script revisions resulted in the rogue Starfleet officer being replaced by Data, in the Colonel Kurtz role from
Apocalypse Now
, and the fantasy-like fountain of youth notion was dropped altogether. The idea of Picard pursuing his rogue android friend seemed to work well, but Piller and Berman knew that Data would have to have very good reasons for turning on Starfleet. The result of their thinking through the problem was to posit an upcoming alliance engineered by powerful forces between the Federation and the Romulans. This outline again met with resistance from Paramount executives, who considered the proposed film too political, and from star Patrick Stewart who wanted to continue the development of Picard as an action hero as seen in
First Contact
.