Movie: Star Trek: First Contact

I've seen this one several times before. It was one of the movies on VHS that were destroyed in my first basement flood last year because they'd been stored down there without my knowledge or permission. Rather than immediately try to replace everything, I put some of them on my Netflix queue to watch later and see if I really wanted them again, and this was one of those.

Of the TNG movies I bothered to see, this is the best. There are really three storylines going on through it.

First, down on the ground in the past trying to get the first human warp ship up and running and talk its inventor, a boozy old rocker named Zephram Cockram, into going through with the flight. Because, you know, inventors always do their own major testing.
Actually, seriously, I like this part once Deanna shuts the hell up. (I'm swiftly becoming Not a Deanna Troi Fan.) Zephram is such a fun character in his own right, and a very nice contrast the usual noble, inherently altruist, and slightly stick-up-the-assed TNG character.

Second is the Borg take-over and counter-insurgency on the Enterprise E. This one is also good, despite the various incomprehensible ship interfaces that become plot points. For instance, there's the not-so-manual manual override into engineering, and my favorite, the deflector dish's magnetic lock releases that practically require the strength of a Klingon to unlock and that's after you play a game of dominos to put them into manual configuration. (Honestly, why is manual operation not the default? If you've walked all the way out here in a space suit and magnetic boots, of course it is to use the manual override.)
There's some things that don't stand up to scrutiny. But for the most part it's exciting to watch, and you've got the whole Captain Ahab thing going and its good.

Third is the Borg Queen. That sucking sound? That is the sound of the Borq Queen breaking the structural integrity of the entire movie AND the whole concept of Borq and resulting in the destruction of the whole flick. Why? Why? She doesn't fit in with established canon at all. Worse, IIRC the shows running at the time had a hard time integrating it afterwards. They didnt' want to give up on Borg, but now we've got a dead queen to deal with. I think for a while like, Voyager (?) had every cube have their own queen, which wasn't even necessary to fit in with the movie. I mean, the movie establishes that yeah, she was on a ship that was destroyed and that wasn't a problem. It seems like if we're gonna go with the queen bit in the series, the same character shows up again (it can be different actress) and to answer 'why aren't you dead' is all like "Um, I am Borg. That means my consciousness is everywhere in the Borg. What part of Borg don't you understanding? Oh, and you will be assimilated, resistance is futile, you know the drill."

Why was she added at all? It's like the makers didn't think they could have a movie unless they somehow "sexed it up", and everyone in the fighting off Borg assimilation plot was too busy fighting Borg for a love interest, and no one wanted to see Zeph get laid, so we'll just add a Borg queen and have this weird Picard-Data-Borg menage a trois. The whole Borg queen is stupid and annoying and ruins the entire film.

Well, there you go. Entire film is ruined. I won't be adding this back into my collection after all, as much fun as the other two plots are.