Borg War

Firstly i apologise if this review is not as coherent as it could be, but this is the first I have reviewed anything, and I'm not spending hours tweaking my words etc.

NO Spoilers below Generally, this film is about the Borg collective making another attempt on the alpha quadrant 17 years after the return of voyager. Federation, Klingon and Romulan must form an alliance to combat the new Borg threat in order to resist assimilation, yet there is deception and a new threat emerges with the intent to annihilate all.

For me, it took nearly 1/2 an hour to understand what the plot line was - due to the fact of an extremely 'rushed' opening to the film which was preoccupied trying to force the action and suspense etc down my throat in order to try to grip the audience and enforce confidence that it will be action packed and enjoyable. Personally i found it a bit jumbled and was stumped as to what was going on. I've found is a common folly of fan flicks, no character interaction and no real introduction which is a big part of the real Star Trek. I imagine its done in fear of the audience thinking that as it is a fan flick that it will be boring. BUT ... About 20 minutes into it you begin to understand and the pieces do fit together very well.

For the most part, this film is the best fan production from the Star Trek universe. Albeit that it was essentially made from the game engines of primarily the Star Trek Elite Force games for interiors and characters, Starfleet Command III and Bridge Commander for the exteriors and ships. Despite the graphics being aged by todays standards, the director and produced i will admit they did a good job in piecing this together.

This was the only fan production i have ever enjoyed, which includes Star Trek : Of Gods and Men. I was very surprised and the thought involved and the action throughout.

However..

I have given this 4 / 10 for 3 reasons :

1 ) The speech splicing was reminiscent of a prank call sound board, very very very very VERY annoying when its gets 1 hour in.

2 ) It seems to have been compiled on a extremely weak and old computer, the frame rate goes right down to a flip book during action sequences.

3 ) Not as important as the above - Glitches. Planets, ships and star bases jump and judder around, which as far as i can remember did not happen in the games. Probably due to reason no 2.

If the three tiny points had been ironed out i would have given this 7/10. But frankly, how the makers of this let those points slip through the net is bewildering and beyond me. As an analogy, Michelangelo has just finished the Sistine chapel ceiling painting and decided to smear feaces on it....

But give it a try anyhow!

You can't expect a lot from a Machinima movie. The characters are 3D models reused from various games, the animations are kind of locked in place and the only thing that can save it is a good story and good audio dubbing. With this in mind, it has a decent story and bad, but not horrible dubbing. The sound bits were cut and pasted, though, from who knows what source and it fast gets really annoying.

But consider the plot. An unsuccessful assimilation of an alien species results in a hybrid that wants to take over the Borg and destroy all life. Picard's Enterprise and Tuvok's Dallas (a version of Defiant) join forces with Klingons and Romulans to defend. However the strenuous relationship between the three races leads to complications and we get to witness in the end a semi assimilated Enterprise with a holo-cloaking device fighting a planet-size Borg sphere wrecked by interspecies civil war. It can hardly get better than that.

Now, the plot is sketchy, there are numerous confusing bits and parts that make no sense and all the characters are horrible clichés of their respective races, but what was worst of all was the dialogue. I understand that they had limited audio material to work with and, by that standard, they did a very decent job. But objectively it is still horrible!

Bottom line: a Borg methadone pill for the hardcore trekkie having withdrawal symptoms.