Star Trek Sundays: "The Final Frontier" is far from the worst Trek film
It ain't perfect, but dammit this movie has heart!
It’s Sunday, and we’re going through all 13 theatrical STAR TREK films, a series that includes a number of pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). We continue today with STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER. Enjoy…
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
1989, Dir. William Shatner
Originally published in 200 Reviews, based on notes from 2022
Star Trek V is not, contrary to popular opinion, the worst Star Trek movie. The original series cast is simply too sharp and entertaining an ensemble to ever draw this film beneath the worst dregs of The Next Generation movies, and moreover, for all the missteps The Final Frontier makes in its first hour, it genuinely goes to some interesting places in its second, and has a few knockout moments I treasure very deeply. The film is a mess, but it’s a mess that’s occasionally very deeply felt, and while William Shatner obviously failed to prove himself as a director here like Leonard Nimoy did on the last two entries, he shares a love for the series that, as with Nimoy’s films, you can feel in the finished product, warts and all. I don’t think this was simply an ego trip, prone as Shatner might be to such assumptions; he wanted this to be good, and under different circumstances, I think this could have been something special.
To be fair to Shatner, he was not dealt an ideal hand here. The 1988 WGA strike delayed work on the script, but Paramount didn’t budge on the planned 1989 release, meaning the film was rushed into production with a truncated pre-production window, and the budget, though higher than any film in the series since the first, was cut shorter than expected at the last minute, with another cut in post-production reducing the resources for special effects. The result is a film that, despite its nominally high price tag, looks astonishingly cheap. The special effects – which had remained pretty strong across the first four films – are suddenly reduced here to the look of a 1950s B-movie, little toy ships moving around with no sense of weight. Sadly, the only good effects shots are the ones recycled from other movies, and key sequences like the climax look effectively unfinished.
To be less fair to Shatner, the film shoots itself in the foot plenty of times regardless of material resources. While there is still plenty of irrepressible charm on display by the cast, the attempts at jokes here are very much the opposite of what The Voyage Home did so well, relying on the characters acting uncharacteristically stupid or silly (e.g. Chekhov and Sulu pretending they’re in a blizzard). There is a lot of low-effort physical slapstick comedy that’s much too broad, and doesn’t play great especially with the cast aged so much, and the film definitely hits a low-point when it asks Nichelle Nichols as Uhura to do a sexy dance to distract the guards and let the men go be heroes, which is definitely one of the most baffling creative decisions in all of Star Trek, and out of keeping with how the series ideally treated this cast. The Final Frontier has good ideas that could absolutely form the core of an interesting Star Trek film, but it goofs around for far too long to ever build up a head of steam; the film is only 106 minutes long, but it takes 59 of those minutes before we learn what antagonist Sybok’s goal even is, and therefore what the movie is about, leaving a scant 47 minutes for developing and paying off the plot.
Yet just as the movie seems to be spiraling out of control, Sybok begins drawing out the inner pain of the various crew members as a gambit to win their loyalty, and McCoy is confronted with the memories of his late father, whom he euthanized in the midst of terminal illness just before a cure was discovered. It is a true knockout of a scene, featuring some of DeForest Kelley’s greatest acting – which is saying something – and some genuinely great staging by Shatner, positioning the moment as both memory and reenactment. And from there, the film starts working, if only in fits and starts, and the closer it gets to the end, the more good little human moments we get with the characters, as everyone on the ship licks their wounds and contemplates their existence. If the film’s first hour didn’t unnecessarily goof around for so long, a lot of this material could hit pretty hard, and some of it lands no matter what, like Spock’s rejoinder to Kirk after the encounter with ‘God,’ playing on a moment from earlier where Kirk shared his intuition that when he died, he would be alone.
Kirk – “I thought I was going to die.”
Spock – “Not possible. You were never alone.”
Kirk pays that beautiful bit of brotherhood back in a later exchange, as Spock reflects on the death of Sybok, his half-brother.
Spock – “I've lost a brother.”
Kirk – “Yes. I lost a brother once. I was lucky I got him back.”
McCoy – “I thought you said men like us don't have families.”
Kirk – “I was wrong.”
Nope, this is not at all the worst Star Trek movie. It can’t be, when there are others that don’t come close to producing a moment of genuine emotion that good.
It all makes me wish the material with Sybok and the search for ‘God’ was better fleshed out, the script more confident in its ambitions, the production more capable of realizing what Shatner had in his head. The confrontation with the false God at the climax is, indeed, clumsy and limited by budget and production problems (Eden is apparently…a particularly barren stretch of Arizona?), but even then, it manages to at least be weird and evocative and memorable. There’s something there, and that’s more than I can say for The Next Generation films.
And even in the mostly-rough first hour, there are things I enjoy. It’s nice to have Jerry Goldsmith in the composer’s chair again, for the first time since The Motion Picture, and to see him play with some of the great themes he wrote for that movie (though it is odd to hear the opening fanfare from that film used here, since by the time The Final Frontier came out, it had been co-opted as the theme song for The Next Generation on TV). I really like the idea that the shiny new Enterprise Kirk and company got at the end of The Voyage Home is actually an unfinished junker nobody else wanted, a funny little running gag that neatly undercuts the ease with which they acquired a second Enterprise. And no matter what, the infamous campfire scene early on with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy is absolutely amazing. Not good, necessarily, but amazing all the same. It feels vaguely improvised, some of it is quite charming, and some of it is deeply weird, like when Kirk ticks through several actual campfire songs when they’re trying to decide what to sing, before landing on “Row Row Row Your Boat,” which is not, in fact, a campfire song, but a nursery rhyme. I love it.
The Final Frontier is the least of the six films with the original cast, but it’s still a solid cut above many of the films that would come after, and is definitely a solid testament to the sheer chemistry and likability of the Original Series crew. If you have affection for these characters and have avoided checking this one out due to its reputation, I would give it a watch; it was the one that took me the longest to get around to, and I will admit that, flawed though it may be, The Final Frontier puts a little smile on my face when I think about it now, both for the goofy ways it falls apart, and those brief shining moments when it very much comes together.
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