Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

This movie.

This...

Yes, this movie. I don’t understand this movie. Or rather, I don’t understand what variety of hallucinogens any number of people would have had to be doing in order to think this would be a good idea. And, shockingly, I’m not talking about Shatner. I’m talking about producers, writers, execs, editors, family members of all of them, David Warner… Okay, and to an extent, Shatner. If I had one question for any person involved in the conception of this movie, it wouldn’t be ‘what were you thinking.’ It would be this.

Were you thinking?

Let’s start at the bottom with my hatred of this movie. The title. Star Trek V. I can live with that. The Final Frontier. Okay, that’s a reasonably generic sort of sci-fi space-opera title, but whatever. The title, however, leads directly to the premise, which is The Enterprise Meets God.

Wait, what? I do believe that particular frontier has been on humanities collective mind since, I don’t know, before the dawn of recorded history? How is that the final frontier? Maybe if we move in on the premise a little bit, get a more detailed look. The Enterprise is hijacked by a feel-good psychic Vulcan on a quest to meet God.

Yeah, he totally exudes an air of "capable of hijacking a starship."

Nope, not getting any better. Let’s move in again.

The Enterprise, sent on a mission due to Shatner’s enormous ego, is hijacked by Spock’s Vulcan half-brother, finds an alien posing as God in the center of the galaxy (where they are not destroyed by gravitic tidal forces, somehow), who is a giant head that shoots lightning from its eyes.

Believe me, this move gets more ridiculous the closer you look.

Other general complaints include a terrible overall production value, thick-headed and silly script, actors that are too hilariously uninterested in the movie to care, and Uhura doing a fan dance.

I especially have an issue with the direction given by Bill Shatner, which was ballistically terrible. He helped write the thing too, which explains all of the ego-stroking that Kirk gets. The entire time he’s trying to present this movie as both an introspective exploration of humanity’s spiritualism and the formation of personal bonds as it relates to death, while simultaneously trying to present it as a comedy. The more astute readers out there might have noticed these two film styles as being tremendously difficult to combine.

The very beginning of the movie is funny. I’ll admit it, Shatner can do funny. And there’s a few other moments throughout that are intended to be funny, and if the entire movie were designed that way, like the previous Trek movie had been, those moments would have been hilarious. But as it was they didn’t even helpfully distract from the cataclysm that is Kirk trying to be instrospective. Introspective is not something Shatner can do. At all.

The closest Jim Kirk ever gets to "introspective" is when he sits and ponders over how awesome he is.

On the whole, then, this movie flops in nearly every way possible. It doesn’t know what it is, it doesn’t know who it’s targeting, it isn’t a comedy but can’t be taken seriously, and it’s boring. The writing stinks, the directing stinks, the acting stinks, the visuals stink, the sound effects stink, the music…

Well, scratch that. The music is really quite good. Goldsmith never fails to deliver.