Star Trek: First Contact is the eighth Star Trek film, and it is the second of four films to star the cast of the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation. It starts off in the year 2373, two years after the previous film, but the crew end up taking the Enterprise back in time to 2063, where (when) most of the film takes place.

Released in 1996, the film was sometimes labeled as Star Trek VIII, especially in some old box sets containing several Trek films, even though that was never officially part of the title. This designation is increasingly rare today.

First Contact is one of the highest-rated films in the franchise. It serves as an important sequel to the famed TNG two-part story TNG 3x26 & 4x01: The Best of Both Worlds, bringing back the Federations deadliest foe: the Borg. It also tells the important story of Earth's first time breaking the warp barrier (traveling faster than light).

One-sentence summary: The Borg go back in time to stop humanity's “first contact” with an alien species, so Picard and crew must follow them back to undo the damage to the timeline.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think one of the reasons this film was so successful is because it really does an excellent job of appealing to a larger audience while still feeling like Star Trek. It makes a great use of the forbidding Borg from the TV show, and it also tells a new, extremely important story for the Trek universe: the day humanity made their first faster-than-light warp flight. There were other time periods on the table for this story, including seeing the crew travel back to medieval times, but I really don't think that would have landed nearly as well as this story about first contact. Keeping the story in our “future” helps maintain that sci-fi feel. I suspect that seeing the futuristic, frightening, cybernetic Borg in contrast to a medieval backdrop would have only provided for a brief moment's intrigue and then would have quickly lost its novelty... but, there's no point in speculating how they could have made the movie worse when what we got is a near-perfect product!

This film is the movie directorial debut of Jonathan Frakes, who plays Commander William Riker, and he nailed it. Frakes previously directed several episodes of TNG, DS9, and VOY, but this was his first time directing a motion picture. His relationship with the cast and crew and his familiarity with the Trek franchise and its production process turned out to be a huge asset to the film, which came in on schedule and under budget. Bringing in an outside director may lend itself to fresh ideas, but it can also easily lead to disasters like Star Trek Nemesis.

This film also marks the debut of the Sovereign Class USS Enterprise NCC‑1701‑E, the successor to the beloved Enterprise‑D which was with us through all seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The E was made to look sleeker and more action-focused in order to match the tone of the movie, and I absolutely approve. By contrast – and I'm not going to make any friends by saying this – the flying cruise ship that was the D seems... almost silly. To match the sleek exterior, the new bridge is all business and ready for action, and has less of that “casual, living room” quality of the D's bridge. (Though, notably, it does still have carpet – a feature I sometimes miss in more recent productions with their cold, polished floors.)

Of the few criticisms of the film, there are two main ones that I've seen. One is how Picard seems a bit out-of-character, more vengeful and ungrounded than usual. Some fans didn't care for Picard losing his usual analytical and philosophical demeanor and lapsing into spite and irrationality. However, I tend to think that this is a very believable relapse from the trauma that the Borg caused him in TNG 3x26 & 4x01: The Best of Both Worlds and, in the end, Lily does manage to bring him back around to his normal self, which is why I think the inclusion of her character in this film is so important.

The other common criticism is the introduction of the Borg Queen, but I'll discuss that a little more in the “Pros and Cons” section below. All in all, this film brings together pieces that really work well together. The enemy is well-established in Trek lore and not just some new made-up “bad guy” that doesn't quite have the same impact (I'm thinking Shinzon and Nero, to name a few). It brings back the very real trauma Picard suffered at the hand of that enemy and provides a palpable conflict between the two. And the film tells the story of First Contact and Earth's first warp flight, something that feels very important to the overall Trek lore, and not just a story-of-the-week. Star Trek: First Contact is undoubtedly one of the best films of the franchise.

👍 The USS Enterprise NCC‑1701‑E — Picard's new ship is sleek and impressive! The movie-budget sets are obviously an improvement over the TV-budget Enterprise‑D sets. The bridge, for example, is a bit more expansive with a lot more computer displays. This is a bit more believable for the command center of a starship versus that comparatively spartan bridge on the Enterprise‑D. Similarly, the warp core in engineering is humongous and more fitting as the power source for a massive vessel.

👍 New Uniforms — To go along with the shiny new ship, the crew has shiny new uniforms that feel much more practical than the television versions. I think these are some of the best uniforms ever to be used in Star Trek, and it was good to see them get transferred over for use in Deep Space Nine's later seasons.

👍 Movie-Quality Borg Cube — With the big fancy movie budget, we get to see a Borg cube in more beautiful detail than we ever have before.

👍 Alfre Woodard as Lily Sloane — I find Woodard's performance in this role to be delightful to watch, and I think Sloane serves as a wonderful foil for Picard.

🤷‍♂️ The Borg Queen — This film introduces the Borg Queen for the very first time. Prior to this, the Borg were just a faceless force of nature with countless drones, all acting with one mind and one objective. At the time when this film was released, there was some mixed feelings about this fundamental change in the Borg's nature. Some fans objected to the change, which turned the Borg into more of a colony of insects controlled by a single queen, even though the queen's relationship to the Borg here is a bit more nuanced. However, with the benefit of hindsight and knowing how the Borg queen would come to be used in future Trek stories, I think the queen's introduction here really does work, not to mention the memorable performance by Alice Krige. The bottom line is that to make the Borg really work in a movie as the villain, that villain needs a face – someone that the cast can interact with directly as a representative of the whole.

👍 EVA & Escape Pods — Going on a space walk on the hull of the ship was a fun idea, and seeing the escape pods being ejected was also novel. We haven't really seen either of these things before in Trek.

👎 Casual Time Travel — I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the quick resolution and casual dismissal about how the Enterprise managed to get back to the 24th century. I get that it isn't really necessary for the average film-watching audience – we've had a great adventure, and maybe most of us are willing to shrug off that last detail, but I'm sure many diehard fans are a little dubious about Geordi just “figuring out how to time travel”. This probably could have been cleaned up a little with just a small sub-plot about finding some fragile Borg MacGuffin device that was used to do the time-traveling, in order to imply that it's not something that can just be done easily whenever anyone wants and that this was a special case, but... eh, the movie was so good that I don't really care.