Star Trek: First Contact

More than past Star Trek features, this one requires a little background. What the Klingons were to the original Star Trek, so the Borg are to the Next Generation. They are the malevolent foes that Trekkers love to hate. Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart), himself once "assimilated" by the Borg, and the Enterprise crew follow his nemesis back in time to the pivotal date of April 4, 2063. This is the day before "first contact," when a scientist encountered beings from another world, leading to the birth of the United Federation of Planets and the ‘Star Trek' universe. Conventional wisdom states that the even-numbered ‘Star Treks' are better than the odd-numbered ones. This is number eight. Recommended. (K. Lee Benson)[DVD Review--April 5, 2005--Paramount, 2 discs, 111 min., PG-13, $19.99--Making its second appearance on DVD, Star Trek: First Contact--Special Collector’s Edition has the same transfer as the last DVD release with DTS surround and Dolby Digital 5.1 and includes two audio commentaries (one with director and costar Jonathan Frakes; the other with screenwriters Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore), and a text commentary by Michael and Denise Okuda. The second disc is broken down into six categories. “First Contact Production” contains a “making-of” featurette (20 min.), and featurettes on the art (17 min.), the story (15 min.), two scene-specific featurettes about “The Missile Silo” (14 min.) and “The Deflector Dish” (10 min.), and a six-minute set construction featurette; “Scene Deconstruction” has the featurettes “Borg Queen Assembly” (11 min.), the “Escape Pod Launch” (5 min.), and the “Borg Queen Demise” (3 min.); “The Star Trek Universe” has a tribute to composer Jerry Goldsmith (20 min.), “First Contact: The Possibilities” (20 min.), and “The Legacy of Zeffrom Cochrane” (12 min.); “The Borg Collective” looks at the design matrix for the Borg costumes (18 min.), the evolution of the Borg in “Unimatrix One” (14 min.), and features an eight-minute segment with Alice Krige on her character the Borg Queen. In addition, the disc includes storyboards, a photo gallery, and trailers. Bottom line: a characteristically fulsome extras package for one of the better Star Trek feature films.]