Sunday 05 February 2012

Behind the scenes on Star Trek: First Contact

The torch had been passed, the lessons learned, and in the words of scriptwriter Ron Moore, it was now time for The Next Generation to “kick butt”. Like The Wrath of Khan, the eight Star Trek film would be a flat-out action movie. It would have humour like The Voyage Home. And most important of all, it would hook Star Trek and science-fiction fans by delivering never-before-seen visual effects designed to bring them back into the theatres for multiple viewings. The chief, never-before-seen effects would be the realisation of the first new Starship Enterprise in nine years, to replace the Andrew Probert-designed telvision Enterprise which had been destroyed in Generations.

With no limits and no studio-mandated requirements for the story, other than it be a good one, Moore and Braga attended their first story meeting with Rick Berman with the perfect threat already in mind—The Next Generation's favourite villains: the Borg. For his part, Berman attended the meeting wit hthe perfect plot complication already formulated: time travel. He explained: “All of the Star Trek films and episodes I have been most impressed with—Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, 'Yesterday's Enterprise, 'City on the Edge of Forever', and I could name half a dozen more—have all been stories that deal with time travel. In a way, Star Trek: Generations dealt with time travel. Nick Meyer's wonderful movie Time After Time dealt with time travel. The paradoxes that occur in writing, as well as the reality of what the characters are doing and what the consequences are, have always been fascinating to me.”

Since a feature film story required a scope larger than a single television episodes, there was no need to choose between the two approaches. A time-travel story involving the Borg was quickly decided upon as the direction to go. But it wasn't enough to make just a Star Trek action film. Michael Piller's influence was inextricably woven into The Next Generation's appeal. There had to be some part of the story that made it personal, that made it revolve around one of the main characters. Again the answer was simple and direct—always a good sign in developing a strong story: Five years earlier, Picard had become part of the Borg Collective. To him, the scars of that encounter were permanent. To the Borg, he was the one who got away.

'The Best of Both Worlds', Part I and II were now simply acts one and two of a bigger story. The new film, at one point titled, Star Trek: Resurrection, would become the final act in Picard's encounter with the Borg. Once again, the storytellers wernt back to what had worked in the past. Khan had quoted Moby Dick while he had chased Captain Kirk, and that classic tale of obsession would again be invoked to underscore Picard's potentially self-destructive hatred of the Borg.

To make the story even more personal, for the first time the Borg would be give an individual face and voice: the Borg Queen. And the time-travel aspect was just as direct: the Borg would go back in time to subvert Earth's development, so that an Earth-led Federation would never be able to develop to resist the Borg in our quadrant of the galaxy. Another essential component of a Star Trek story laid out by Gene Roddenberry was that the Enterprise must be considered a character, too. What better way to put a sleek new starship in danger than to have it infiltrated by Borg and face assimilation?

The various parts of the initial story fell into place effortlessly. The imaginative possibilities were literally endless. Berman, Moore, and Braga had only to answer a few key questions to create the spine of their story: To what time would the Borg return? How could Picard stop them this time? What could the movie show that Star Trek fans had always enjoyed seeing in a feature film? And what could the movie show that Star Trek fans had never seen before?

The answer to the first two questions would remain to be discovered during the story's further refinement. But the second two questions inspired powerful answers. Fans had increasingly been enamored of Star Wars-style space battles, so the new film would open with one. And there was an aspect of Star Trek which had only ever been glimpsed once, in the very first film—a spacesuit sequence, something which Berman had always resisted during the series because of his concern that it could not be done believably on a television budget. But now the time was right for so much that was new about Star Trek, and it was time for the venerable franchise to embrace what so many hit science-fiction films had succesfully used to insure box-office success. It was time for a Star Trek visual-effects extravaganza.

Akira

The Akira class was one of the four computer-generated starships that were designed for the battle with the Borg Cube early in the film, and it became the favourite of the Industrial Light and Magic artists. One designer, Alex Jaeger, recalled that the radically different look of the new ships was born out of necessity. "The main reason they look really different is that from a distance, the producers wanted them to be completely new looks, because we introduced a new Enterprise in the film and didn't want it to get lost. They initially planned to have at least one ship that we could get closer to camera. That was the Akira, so it got the most attention to detail. It wound up being almost as big as the Enterprise-E—the 'E' is longer, but the saucer section is almost the same size."

"It was one design they [the producers] liked from the get-go. It has some of the feel of the old USS Reliant NCC-1864 and its rollbar effect, but with a catamaran style with the split hull design. In the side view you almost can't see the bridge because between the sides of the hull, down between the two sections, is a protective device. Jaeger produced several drawings that depicted parts of the ship in greater detail for First Contact and the vessel went on to appear on several episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Voyager.

       

 

N. Ottens
June 26, 2007

Sources for this article include:
• Eaves, J. & J.M. Dillard, Star Trek: The Next Generation Sketchbook, The Movies (1998)
• Reeves-Stevens, J. & G., The Art of Star Trek (1995)
• Reeves-Stevens, J. & G., Star Trek: The Next Generation—The Continuing Mission (1998)
• “Designing the Akira class,” Star Trek: The Magazine, volume 1, issue 3 (July 1999)