Since I generally try to watch movies that are actually good, I must admit that this is an odd pick. After watching through the entirety of Deep Space Nine a couple of years back, a series I’d never watched when it first aired, we slogged through The Next Generation last year though instead of watching everything, I tried to pick and choose the best episodes. Both my wife and myself agreed that TNG is substantially better. I told my wife that she should probably watch one of the TNG movies but we’d never done that, until now.

I’ve watched all of the Star Trek movies long ago of course, though for the truly awful ones it was only as in-flight movies while travelling. This one got picked because it is indisputably the best of the four TNG movies by a large margin. It’s a fairly straightforward action movie with the new Enterprise-E joining in the fight as the long awaited Borg invasion of Earth finally takes place. When the one cube the Borg sends is defeated (they never seem to send more than one though the Voyager series shows that they have plenty of them), a small Borg vessel is sent back in time to the 21st century to mess with the history of the Federation and so the Enterprise must follow it to undo its changes.

The biggest surprise I had is that the effects and sets generally look rather good despite this being a twenty year-old movie now. The extra budget really helps with things like dramatic lighting, richly textured surfaces and realistic environments. The difference is very stark if you remember the bland sets from the television series. Even the opening battle looks exciting despite it being frustratingly short. Strangely, the only thing that looks bad to me is how crude and low-tech the cybernetic implants of the Borg appear. I even enjoyed the messiness of 21st-century Earth even if all they did was show a tiny village, compared to how unrealistically neat and orderly everything normally looks in Star Trek.

Jonathan Frakes does a surprisingly good job at directing, particularly at keeping things going at a good pace. The action is much better than the stupid fights of the television show but still nothing special. I enjoyed how Data is murder on legs against the Borg unless he is restrained through overwhelming force but really Worf had the right idea and everyone should have been using melee weapons instead of the silly phaser rifles. One flaw in the movie is that the scenes on the ship and on the ground are completely separate and tonally different. Granted, communications have been cut so the engineering teams on Earth have no idea what is going on in space but it’s weird how they can monkey around with Zefram Cochrane while large numbers of the ship’s crew are being assimilated.

But obviously the biggest problem is that in order to furnish a suitably terrifying opponent for an action movie, it makes use of the Borg only to remove everything that is unique and interesting about them. Introducing a Borg Queen humanizes a villain that is horrifying only because they are a collective and conveniently gives them a single point of failure so that the heroes can save the day at the eleventh hour. At least the movie does somewhat preserve the ideals of Star Trek in that the future of the Federation is secured through peaceful contact and cooperation with the Vulcans. It’s a worse action movie than the reboot but still manages to feel more Star Trek.

Overall despite being the best of the TNG movies, it’s obviously still very mediocre and the only reason to watch it is to see the new ship and perhaps the characters in spiffy new uniforms. Even so, it’s pretty hard to recommend this even to committed fans since this show was never meant to work as feature films.