Star Trek: First Contact

Jonathan Frakes’s first feature. The Borg travel back in time to stop humanity’s first warp flight; the Enterprise crew follows and the ship is taken from inside. The first draft, Star Trek: Renaissance, put the Borg in a 15th century Italian castle dungeon with Data as Leonardo da Vinci’s apprentice; Patrick Stewart refused to wear tights. The Borg Queen came from Paramount head Jonathan Dolgen, who found the script undramatic and wanted one Borg the characters could speak to. Cochrane’s Phoenix took 4 days at the Titan Missile Museum south of Tucson, where a disarmed missile got a fibreglass capsule. Borg makeup went from 1 hour on television to 5. Between 8 and 12 actors filled every Borg role, with half finished mannequins behind. Michael Westmore’s son programmed the eyepiece lights to spell a crew name in Morse. It was nominated for Best Makeup at the 69th Academy Awards, which The Nutty Professor won, and turned 3 of its 10 nominations at the 23rd Saturn Awards into wins: Brent Spiner, Alice Krige and Deborah Everton for costumes. A good fit if you want to know how many makeup hours and actors an enemy’s look rests on. Not for anyone starting the series here; Picard’s history with the Borg comes from the show, summed up here in the opening nightmare.