Star Trek: First Contact/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Award Snub: This movie lost the Academy Award for Best Makeup to the Eddie Murphy remake of The Nutty Professor. Though the Academy made up for it years later by giving the award to the 2009 Star Trek.
  • Base Breaker: The Borg Queen, also goes for her appearances on Star Trek: Voyager. Some find her an interesting addition to the Borg. Others believe her creation was a huge mistake, going against everything the Borg embody.
  • Complete Monster: The Borg Queen (especially when you take her Voyager appearances into account).
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Jerry Goldsmith, firing on all cylinders.
    • Plus Cochran blasting Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride" across the base as the Phoenix lifts off.
  • Fan Disservice: what's left of the Borg Queen after her flesh melts off.
  • High Octane Nightmare Fuel: The Borg. That is all. The "assistance" of a movie-sized budget in providing better costuming does not help one's sleep patterns.
    • At least five of the Borg drones are Klingons (presumably assimilated at the Battle of Wolf 359.) If Resistance Was Futile for them, what chance would the rest of us have?
    • The montage in which we see the Enterprise crew failing to hold back the Borg, during which we see several officers are being assimilated. One looking in horror as his amputated arm gets fitted with a cybernetic claw. Another with a freshly gouged eye being covered with an eyepiece.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Picard gets accused of acting like Captain Ahab. Guess what role Stewart would play two years later?
  • Holy Shit Quotient: The opening battle against the Borg ship. That sequence alone was worth the movie format. Especially when the Enterprise fires the blue quantum torpedoes the surround sound crushes you into the chair.
  • Memetic Mutation: "The line must be drawn HEEYAH!"
    • "Captain Ahab has to go hunt his whale!"
    • "Assimilate THIS!"
    • Picard's Big No (before he breaks his little ships) has also turned into something of a meme, even being referenced in South Park.
  • Narm: The scene where the crew depart via the escape pods would have looked more dramatic, if the escape pods didn't look like tiny pianos.
  • Special Effects Failure: The Earth that Picard shows to Lily looks rather unconvincing, and it's all the more jarring given how high the standard of the special effects in general is.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The trailers mentioned little to nothing about the Cochrane subplot, instead playing up the prospect of an all-out Borg invasion. That could've been as good, if not better, than what we got.
    • And this movie isn't half-bad, so that's saying something.
    • Still, they averted a potentially much worse case of this trope. The original screenplay was role-reversed and had Picard impersonating the injured Cochrane, while Riker fought off the Borg invasion. The focus of the story was Picard's wacky antics while pretending to be Cochrane, and in the end he never even found out that the Borg had ever been on the Enterprise. Thankfully Patrick Stewart stepped in and pointed out that it would be about a million times more logical to follow up "The Best of Both Worlds" and have Picard confronting the Borg once more.
    • Also, Sisko should have been in this movie. He would've been a good counterpoint to Picard, especially since they've both been hurt by the Borg.
      • SF Debris joked that the Borg deliberately waited until Sisko was away from the station and the Defiant to launch their attack. The stardates even work out.
  • Unfortunate Implications: The film suggests that even though humans created warp drive on their own, the real reason humans got out of darkness and became great was because visitors from the sky came down and made us that way. Disappointing when you remember Gene Roddenberry hated such tropes as Ancient Astronauts.
  • Villain Decay: While it works in this movie, the introduction of the Borg Queen marks the start of the Borg's overall decay, since even Data notes that the very existence of a Queen challenges previous assumptions about how the Borg work. Apparently earlier drafts of the script didn't have the Queen, but they realized that the Borg were essentially cyborg zombies without some sort of leader.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome: Many examples, including the battle at the start, the assembly of the Borg Queen, and the spacewalk on the hull of the Enterprise. Unfortunately the producers ditched ILM starting with the next film, meaning that the visual effects in this film wouldn't be surpassed until they were called back for Star Trek XI.
    • It says something about just how far visual effects evolve that years later, when Voyager also wanted to feature the Borg Queen, they managed to improve the visuals... on a TV show's budget.
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