One of the most popular Star Trek movies, First Contact contributed the series' only jointly written score. It is, nonetheless, a reasonably cohesive score, supporting what became one of the most popular films in the franchise.

First Contact, as the eighth film in the series, also extended a tradition that the "good" Star Trek films are the even-numbered ones. This is despite some structural flaws in the movie: it begins with the most exciting action and space warfare sequences, then settles into an almost personal-scale battle between Data and the film's villainess. In First Contact, veteran series writers and producers Rick Berman, Brannon Braga, and Ronald D. Moore penned a film concerning an attack on Earth's history by their most memorable super villains, the Borg Collective. (Star Trek: The Next Generation co-star Jonathan Frakes directed.) Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) uses his residual link to the Borg (who once assimilated him and named him "Locutus") to detect a sneak attack on Earth and arrives in time to foil it. One Borg Cube escapes through time, resulting in the total assimilation of Earth. Caught in their temporal wake, the Enterprise is temporarily immune and must follow them to prevent the disaster. They discover that the Borg attack is directed at the pivotal moment in Earth's spacefaring history: the first successful test of the Warp Drive by Zefram Cochrane and the resulting first contact between Vulcans and Humans. They must not only foil the Borg (now revealed not to be a collective intelligence, but a hive-like monarchy ruled by "the Borg Queen"), but protect the proper timeline. After using TV series composer Dennis McCarthy in the prior film, the producers decided to return to Jerry Goldsmith, the most popular of the Trek movie composers. Goldsmith agreed, but got caught in production delays in The Ghost and the Darkness, another Paramount film he as scoring, leaving him only three weeks to compose this score. Therefore, he brought in his composer, son Joel Goldsmith, to co-write. Joel Goldsmith, establishing his own voice as a creative artist, makes it a point that he does not create music that clones his father's style. Legend has it that when a producer told him he wanted Joel to write a Jerry Goldsmith score for him, Joel snapped back, "Then hire Jerry Goldsmith. Or James Horner!" But the two Goldsmiths cannily divided the score, giving Joel the scenes primarily involving the Borg, for which he produced memorably mechanistic music. (He even used a different orchestrator, Jeff Atmajian, than Jerry, who used his longtime friends Alexander Courage and Arthur Morton.) Although this sharing of the job resulted in some disunity in the score, it actually held together quite well. The two composers, sometimes using each other's themes, elevated the personal elements of the action in most of the film to a high pitch of excitement, leading to a pounding, intense "industrial percussion" climax. The actual "First Contact" between Vulcans and Humans falls flat, however, as the sequence did in the movie.

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