In Jonathan Frakes’ 1996 film “Star Trek: First Contact,” the normally diplomatic and composed Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) inexplicably breaks down. The Borg – an evil race of all-eating cyborgs – have gone back to the year 2063 to mess with human history. They intend to prevent a key moment in “Star Trek” history and indoctrinate as many people as possible into their unthinking mechanical group. Several years earlier, Picard was assimilated by the Borg, and was rescued and extracted only at the last minute.
It took a long time to recover, but Picard faced the Borg on several occasions after that and was finally able to face them with control and thoughtfulness. In “First Contact,” however, the Borg attacked again and Picard – for whatever reason – couldn’t handle it this time. This time, when he sees the Borg, he shoots it. When he confronts the Borg Queen (Alice Krige), he breaks her spine. In one notable scene, two Borg infiltrate the holodeck and Picard creates a 1930s-style noir mystery atmosphere to distract them. Picard then grabs a holographic tommy gun, removes the holodeck’s security protocols and blasts the Borg with holographic bullets, killing them soundly.
As he fires the gun, Picard screams like there’s no tomorrow, his body shaking from the explosive kickback of the ancient weapon. For a few moments, he truly becomes Rambo.
According to the oral history of “First Contact” Featured in The Hollywood Reporter in 2016Much of that scene was achieved using digital effects. Stewart was actually holding a real prop Tommy gun on set, but the filmmakers didn’t feel his reactions were dramatic enough. Adam Howard, the film’s visual effects supervisor, revealed that they had to deconstruct Stewart’s body and digitally recreate it to give him the proper “shock.”
Stewart’s Tommy Gun antics
Howard recalled that Frakes got two takes of Stewart firing the Tommy gun. In the first take, Stewart mimed a lot of kickback, hesitated appropriately, and actually gave a physical performance, fully interacting with his gun. The gun had no blanks, so there was no on-set gunshot for Stewart to react to. In the second take, Stewart was more determined and firm in his kills, moving very little and looking without flinching. Howard did not comment on Stewart’s performance in either take, but he did say that the final selection – the second – required a lot of additional effects work on his part:
“They chose a second take for us to put the flash of the muzzle of the Tommy gun in, but then they realized there wasn’t enough kick in his arms or any real reaction in his body from the power of the gun. I literally cut his body out digitally and I adjusted the kickback in his arms and added a very slight twitch to the skin on his face and we put a very slight blink in his eyes so he would have a reaction to the muzzle flash going off in front of him.”
Basically, Howard had to do some of Stewart’s impersonation.
The scene is brief, and the editing is so fast that a casual viewer might not recognize that Stewart’s body was being digitally manipulated to move and shake. Recall that “Star Trek” takes place in a world of phasers, which have no explosive “kick,” and bullets are considered obscure and old-fashioned; a 24th-century resident would not know about guns. However, Picard loves 1930s noir mysteries starring his favorite detective Dixon Hill, so it could be argued that he would at least be familiar with the Tommy gun.
