As a long-time Star Trek fan who nevertheless didn't warm up to either series until "The Next Generation" moved into its 2nd and 3rd seasons, I give this movie a recommendation, but with some personal reservations.
It's a decent action film and probably appeals to the casual audience more than any other film in the series outside of "The Voyage Home." The Borg Queen is a popular villainess, and for good reasons the FX were outstanding and Alice Krige's performance is sexy and appropriately intimidating. The time travel theme is a sci-fi theme that audiences are familiar with and that presents opportunities for anachronistic humor that are irresistible. James Crowmell is a magnificent actor with charisma to spare, and even those unfamiliar with Captain Picard will find Patrick Stewart's performance convincing and intriguing. He's been given an excellent foil from the past, Lily Sloane (Alfre Woodard), who brings out a lot of dimension in Picard and goes a long way towards helping anyone who hasn't seen previous Trek outings to see what distinguishes Picard and his crew from your generic space soldiers (they are "Roddenberry People"). In fact the introduction of a "normal" character into the fantasy environment is a key component of successful fantasy storytelling; this device is discussed in J.R.R. Tolkien's essay "On Faerie Stories" and was used by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis as well as many who followed after them. It should be noted however that it's a fantasy theme or device, not science fiction.
The film isn't as impressive for those who are already familiar with the Trek world and who expected (or at least hoped) the Next-Generation movies would take the universe and its characters into uncharted frontiers. The original series didn't really develop its characters, only focused on 3 primary characters and kept those characters and their relationships constant through the 3 season run. In the Original Series (TOS) films, however, Kirk Spock and McCoy go through a series of character developments that alter their personal stories while keeping their relationship mostly intact. Strangely, the situation is reversed for Next Generation (TNG) the series paid attention to a larger group of crew members and spent a lot of time developing those characters and their relationships (Worff dated Troi, Data turned out to have a twin brother and met his creator, etc.). However when TNG went to film virtually all character development was abandoned. Part of the problem is unavoidable to a certain extent after all, there are simply too many characters involved to give each of them screen time and still advance an interesting plot. But I wish that they had tried a little harder to incorporate actual sci-fi ideas instead of just turning the series into another action franchise cloaked in sci-fi costumes and set pieces. Many steps backward have been taken the Borg no longer have a truly alien collective mind but are instead drones led by a Queen Bee type. As much fun as the Borg Queen is, she doesn't represent any new interesting ideas about the Borg and wouldn't be out of place in any action film out there. Also there is a lot of repetition here the time travel story feels familiar from "The Voyage Home" and of course the Borg have already been seen many times in episodes of the show. I've never understood why the producers at Paramount kept thinking that they needed to recycle stories from the shows, especially after the negative fan reaction to "VGER" in the first film. It's boring for the fans. So it's impossible for me to really give an "objective" reaction to this film, seeing as I've already been exposed to so much of the material in its original form when it was actually better done.
I also think that the sequence outside the ship with the deflector dish didn't work out very well, much too slow and improbable. Why did the Borg die when Picard let all that green stuff out of the big tube but they were fine walking along in space without suits? Stuff like that is probably stuff that the writers intentionally don't worry about and think that fans are too petty but basically what they've done is to turn sci-fi into fantasy. And it's somewhat insulting to our intelligence. On the commentary, the writers say that fans don't want to hear about how time travel works and so they just make it really easy for the Enterprise to travel in time after the Borg. As far as I'm concerned, that underestimates the audience greatly and it's indicative of the reasons why this film feels so unintelligent and uninspired.
But not to be totally negative even from a fan perspective the James Cromwell is a fun character and does provide a subtle kind of tribute in that certain aspects of his character remind us of Gene Roddenberry himself. What made Roddenberry's series so different from previous sci-fi was that he presented us a utopic world that we'd all love to explore, but he peopled it with believably flawed human beings. Woodard's character is also very well done and the scene in the Captain's quarters ("this far and no further!") was a stunner to be sure. I loved how she said "Jean-Luc, blow up the damn ship!" The Borg Queen herself was very well done if you ignore the fact that it damages the concept of the Borg collective itself. The space battle at the beginning is very nice to look at, as is the sequence with the camera's eye drawing back from Picard's Borg eye to reveal the whole ship. But for this fan, I couldn't escape the feeling of "been there, seen that." However, from another perspective, looking at how poorly the subsequent films and TV series turned out, this film represents basically the last quality Star Trek product ever produced. So it deserves at least some affection simply on that basis.
It's a decent action film and probably appeals to the casual audience more than any other film in the series outside of "The Voyage Home." The Borg Queen is a popular villainess, and for good reasons the FX were outstanding and Alice Krige's performance is sexy and appropriately intimidating. The time travel theme is a sci-fi theme that audiences are familiar with and that presents opportunities for anachronistic humor that are irresistible. James Crowmell is a magnificent actor with charisma to spare, and even those unfamiliar with Captain Picard will find Patrick Stewart's performance convincing and intriguing. He's been given an excellent foil from the past, Lily Sloane (Alfre Woodard), who brings out a lot of dimension in Picard and goes a long way towards helping anyone who hasn't seen previous Trek outings to see what distinguishes Picard and his crew from your generic space soldiers (they are "Roddenberry People"). In fact the introduction of a "normal" character into the fantasy environment is a key component of successful fantasy storytelling; this device is discussed in J.R.R. Tolkien's essay "On Faerie Stories" and was used by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis as well as many who followed after them. It should be noted however that it's a fantasy theme or device, not science fiction.
The film isn't as impressive for those who are already familiar with the Trek world and who expected (or at least hoped) the Next-Generation movies would take the universe and its characters into uncharted frontiers. The original series didn't really develop its characters, only focused on 3 primary characters and kept those characters and their relationships constant through the 3 season run. In the Original Series (TOS) films, however, Kirk Spock and McCoy go through a series of character developments that alter their personal stories while keeping their relationship mostly intact. Strangely, the situation is reversed for Next Generation (TNG) the series paid attention to a larger group of crew members and spent a lot of time developing those characters and their relationships (Worff dated Troi, Data turned out to have a twin brother and met his creator, etc.). However when TNG went to film virtually all character development was abandoned. Part of the problem is unavoidable to a certain extent after all, there are simply too many characters involved to give each of them screen time and still advance an interesting plot. But I wish that they had tried a little harder to incorporate actual sci-fi ideas instead of just turning the series into another action franchise cloaked in sci-fi costumes and set pieces. Many steps backward have been taken the Borg no longer have a truly alien collective mind but are instead drones led by a Queen Bee type. As much fun as the Borg Queen is, she doesn't represent any new interesting ideas about the Borg and wouldn't be out of place in any action film out there. Also there is a lot of repetition here the time travel story feels familiar from "The Voyage Home" and of course the Borg have already been seen many times in episodes of the show. I've never understood why the producers at Paramount kept thinking that they needed to recycle stories from the shows, especially after the negative fan reaction to "VGER" in the first film. It's boring for the fans. So it's impossible for me to really give an "objective" reaction to this film, seeing as I've already been exposed to so much of the material in its original form when it was actually better done.
I also think that the sequence outside the ship with the deflector dish didn't work out very well, much too slow and improbable. Why did the Borg die when Picard let all that green stuff out of the big tube but they were fine walking along in space without suits? Stuff like that is probably stuff that the writers intentionally don't worry about and think that fans are too petty but basically what they've done is to turn sci-fi into fantasy. And it's somewhat insulting to our intelligence. On the commentary, the writers say that fans don't want to hear about how time travel works and so they just make it really easy for the Enterprise to travel in time after the Borg. As far as I'm concerned, that underestimates the audience greatly and it's indicative of the reasons why this film feels so unintelligent and uninspired.
But not to be totally negative even from a fan perspective the James Cromwell is a fun character and does provide a subtle kind of tribute in that certain aspects of his character remind us of Gene Roddenberry himself. What made Roddenberry's series so different from previous sci-fi was that he presented us a utopic world that we'd all love to explore, but he peopled it with believably flawed human beings. Woodard's character is also very well done and the scene in the Captain's quarters ("this far and no further!") was a stunner to be sure. I loved how she said "Jean-Luc, blow up the damn ship!" The Borg Queen herself was very well done if you ignore the fact that it damages the concept of the Borg collective itself. The space battle at the beginning is very nice to look at, as is the sequence with the camera's eye drawing back from Picard's Borg eye to reveal the whole ship. But for this fan, I couldn't escape the feeling of "been there, seen that." However, from another perspective, looking at how poorly the subsequent films and TV series turned out, this film represents basically the last quality Star Trek product ever produced. So it deserves at least some affection simply on that basis.