Star Trek: First Contact — The Making of the Classic Film from visual effects artist and magazine editor Joe Fordham provides a deep dive into what many fans consider to be the best Star Trek: The Next Generation movie, and the movie I consider to be the best of all the Trek films.
 
Published by Titan Books, this the latest large format book to look at a key aspect of the Star Trek universe. Unlike other similar recent books, like Star Trek: The Motion Picture — Inside the Art and Visual Effects, the First Contact book is a comprehensive look at the making of the movie, not specifically focusing on just the film’s art. And while there is still a focus on the art and visual effects, the expanded scope allows for the book to look at the casting, filming, and genesis of the movie too.
 
I found a lot to enjoy in Star Trek First Contact: The Making of the Classic Film. I have read quite a bit about the movie over the years, and found some new things that I did not already know about in this book. I also appreciated — like I always do with the Titan large format Star Trek books — that the extra page space allows for including bigger versions of concept art, model pictures, and behind-the-scenes photos.
 

There’s also a good balance in the content, as most of the important sections of the movie are covered in the book, ranging from the design of the Enterprise-E through to how they completed the Borg Queen introduction sequence (where her disembodied head connects with her body). The book also provides a little detail on the genesis of the movie — and other concepts and time periods that the Borg could have interfered with — that writers Ron Moore and Brannon Braga considered before settling on the post-World War III setting.

The book also devotes a decent amount of space to the redesign of the Borg and Alice Krige’s casting as the Borg Queen. I had no idea before reading this book, for example, that the Borg sequences are all accomplished with only eight Borg performers. The book also talks at length about the process of creating the Borg costumes, including for the Queen, and some of the creative decisions that went into getting the Borg ready for the big screen.

But while there are some good sections that focus on important parts of the movie — I learned about how they filmed the Phoenix missile silo sequence — there are some parts of the movie that fans are really interested in that feel under-explored in this book. The fleet of ships in the opening Battle of Sector 001 sequence, for example, and the new Starfleet ship designs created for the movie are not really explored in any detail.

The outside-the-Enterprise battle on the deflector dish also gets only a few paragraphs, where perhaps some more information about the complicated filming and wirework action would have been interesting. It’s possible that Fordham decided not to include more on either of these sequences because they have been covered in more detail in other sources, but I feel like works like this should stand alone — and not require readers to track down some other book or material in order to have the full story about the movie.

The included art, particularly from John Eaves and a number of fun behind the scenes photos, is also great. But the movie stills that make up the largest part of the art in this book are overly-enlarged and rather blurry on many pages. That may be because there was not a higher-resolution source for movie stills to work from, but it detracts from the overall look of the book when some of the spreads that have very little text don’t feel like the best presentation possible for images from the movie.

It is a definite disappointment, and means that this book feels like the least polished of the Titan reference books on Star Trek.

Despite that, though, this book is still an easy, breezy read that will tell you interesting things about a great Star Trek movie, give you some things to look at, and make you want to revisit the film and watch it again — so for me, that counts as a success.

Star Trek: First Contact — The Making of the Classic Film is in stores now.