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human
CMV: First Contact, while an exciting film, ruined the Borg by introducing the queen

The claim I am making is the one stated in the title. I believe that Star Trek: First Contact is a thrilling and exciting film with one of the best Patrick Stewart performances of the entire series. It's fun, it's just long enough, it has some drama and is overall a great film, however its introduction of the Borg queen is simply a bad idea both for the movie and for the series in general.

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To explain, let's examine the Borg as an enemy pre-First-Contact. They are a collective semi-robotic meta-organism consisting of several (thousands, probably) species from all over the galaxy. Their creation is unknown, but it is clear that their goal is "perfection". They believe they can achieve their goal by "assimilating" species into their collective, a process in which the individuals of the assimilated species are joined into the existing hive-mind consciousness of the collective. 

In my opinion, this is an absolutely brilliant setup for a villain for a number of reasons. 

  1. It is clear that in their mind, the Borg are not the bad guys. Their goal is perfection - how can that be bad? Clearly, any species standing in their way stands in the way of perfection, and that's bad, right?
  2. Their ability of assimilation and adaptation makes them a formidable enemy as they are ready for anything we can throw at them - after a couple of tries.
  3. Defeat against the Borg presents a fate that, to most people, sounds worse than death - total loss of identity and a hellish existence as one slave voice in a cacophony of slave voices, all driven toward an overarching idea of "perfection"
  4. The Borg represent a non-centralized villain that is incredibly hard to defeat. The only way we can ever defeat them is by killing every last one of them. This is because the Borg can be seen as a single organism of which each individual "being" is only a component. All components are equal, meaning that no matter which Borg we kill, we only destroyed one billionth of the threat (an insignificant amount).

Now examine the Borg after First Contact. They are now a collective *lead* by their queen. Her mind represents the aggregation of the entire Borg community, which makes them little more than a glorified ant colony. They become a villain with a clear head which the good guys can aim to chop off (see Voyager)

I think the best part about the Borg is their decentralization. They are, at their core, closer to a force of nature than an evil entity. They are a mindless threat with a single intent, and their pursuit of that single intent got way way out of hand. I think a lot of that is lost when you introduce the queen. They are no longer a force of nature, they are a centralized colony working to appease their queen. Sure, the queen is misguided, but she is a single entity, so not that much more different from any other Star Trek villain.

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TL;DR: one of the best parts of the Borg is their facelessness, and putting a face on them diminishes them as a threat.

EDIT: just fixed some typos.
gpt
Star Trek has always put story over realism. For example, everyone speaks English. You can say Universal Translator this and that, but it's really just having everyone speak English because that is easier and better for the story.

Same with everyone being humanoid and all the worlds having Earth-gravity and oxygen environments. It isn't about the details, it is about the ability to tell stories.

In the TNG episodes with the Borg, they were meant to be a scary, faceless villain. They were a force of nature, like Nazis in most WWII movies. But in First Contact, we needed to personify the Borg. We needed to give them a voice to be a villain with its own motivations.

The Queen created that. Maybe it'd have been better if she was named the Ambassador. But we needed a personification of the Borg because they aren't the monster of the week anymore, they are more complicated than that.

The scenes between Data and the Queen are some of the best in the film. Data has always been a crowd favorite and his Pinochio-esque desire to be human is in direct confrontation with the Borg's desire to wipe out all the flaws of organic matter.

He embraces the Personality Chip in the beginning of the film and that newfound individuality comes in direct conflict with the cold logic of the Borg. But Data can't talk to "the Borg." He has to talk to someone, preferably sexy. So the Queen is a storytelling device.