Cinema Sunday: Star Trek V - The Final Frontier

It's another installment of Cinema Sunday and today's post continues our series on Star Trek movies.  After this week, I'm doing one more as we finish off the 6th film featuring the original cast and then we move on to other movies that are not Star Trek. There will be posts at some undetermined date that review the 4 films with the Next Generation cast and the 3 movies from the 2009 JJ Abrams reboot.

Today, Cinema Sunday's trek through Star Trek movies brings us to a low point, the arguable nadir of the Star Trek film franchise. 

Today we arrive at Star Trek V - The Final Frontier, directed by Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner.   

At Yosemite National Park, Captain James T. Kirk is camping with First Officer Spock and Dr. Leonard McCoy. Kirk is determined to climb the rock face of El Capitan (because it is there).  Thankfully, Spock brought rocket boots and keeps Kirk from splattering his innards all over Yosemite National Park.

(Or almost causing Kirk to Splatter his innards all over Yosemite National Park since Spock zipping up in his rocket boots to say "hi" causes Kirk to lose focus and fall. Whatever the reason, it's bullshit for Kirk to be up there in first place.)   

Camping time is interrupted because way out in space, shit is going down on the planet Nimbus III.  A conference of Federation, Klingon and Romulan diplomats has been taken hostage and (for reasons of plot) only the newly commissioned USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-A) is available to go see what's up. 

OK, there are other starships but no experienced captains? So only Kirk can save the day, it seems. Please remember who directed this mess. 

While Kirk is "the best captain for the job", the USS Enterprise is not the best ship. It seems Starfleet has slapped the old NCC-1701-A registry on the saucer section of a real piece of shit  space craft. Chairs are wobbly and the transporters don't work. There's not enough duct tape in the Federation for Scotty to hold this junk heap together.

But off they go to Nimbus III to save the day.

You know we love to borrow from Star Wars so say it with me:

"IT'S A TRAP!!!" 

The hostage crisis is a pretext to lure a starship to Nimbus III so that renegade Vulcan Sybok steal it so he can meet God. 

Sybok is of course Spock's half brother. (Damn, that Sarek does get around, don't he?)  

Sybok has a twist on the ol' Vulcan Mind Meld that taps into a person's deepest emotional pain and then *Poof!* takes it away. This makes the affected person particularly compliant to Sybok's will.

Spock ain't buying whatever Sybok is selling and Kirk is just too damn mule headed to let anyone take away his pain. But Sybok whammies everybody else to take over the Enterprise. 

Next up: planet Sha Ka Ree, a planet of myth and legend where creation began, snuggled away near the center of the galaxy behind an impenetrable field known as The Great Barrier.  

Sybok orders the Enterprise to go to there.

Well, they're not going alone.  A Klingon captain named Klaa thinks that whatever the Enterprise is up to might be important and decides to follow.  

(Seriously, Klaa's motivation is "What the hell? We weren't in  the middle of anything important. Let's see what Kirk is up to.")  

So with the Klingons tagging along, the Enterprise makes it through the Great Barrier to a desolate planet.  Sybok, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy take a shuttlecraft to the surface to see if God would like a chat. 

An entity appears in the form of a large glowy face and demands the Enterprise be brought closer to the planet. 

Then Kirk says the line that is perhaps the only good thing to come out of this awful mess:  "What does God need with a starship?"

This pisses the entity off. 

The Great Barrier isn't there to keep people out; it's there to keep this son of a bitch here in this desolate prison.

Realizing he's been played for a sucker, Sybok sacrifices himself in an effort to save the others, a valiant effort that will echo through the ages as....well, no. Sybok will never ever be referenced again in any other movie or TV episode. 

The entity is causing a shit ton of trouble on a very limited special effects budget but Spock pulls a Hail Mary with the Klingon ship and saves Kirk's ass.  

The movie ends with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy resuming their camping trip to Yosemite.

Oh what a mess this was. 

To be fair, some of this mess was beyond William Shatner's control. After the debacle of the first movie, Paramount executives have been notoriously cheap when it comes to budgets for Star Trek movies.  And when it came to Star Trek V, Paramount was bludgeoning the budget with a chainsaw.  

The climax of the film on the planet with the god thing was supposed to involve an attack by an army of rock monsters. Shatner was cut down to one rock monster.

And that was a dude in the rubber suit. 

Shatner once had this to say about his rock monster: "Our guy in the silly rubber suit ultimately just looked like ... well, a guy in a silly rubber suit."

It was agreed to replace the rock monster with an "amorphous blob of light and energy" that ultimately looked little better than a guy in a silly rubber suit.  

It would be easy to pick apart how cheap Star Trek V - The Final Frontier looks and lay the blame squarely at the feet of Paramount's penny pinching ways.

But there's way more going on here than just a cheap looking movie.

David Gerrold ("The Trouble With Tribbles") once wrote that most of a movie's problems can be solved in the typewriter.  

The problems with Star Trek V begin with a script filled with questionable choices, plot contrivances, poor characterization and clunky dialogue.  

Sybok's hostage scheme only works because Starfleet sent their best captain in a starship without working transporters.  

With working transporters, we don't need Uhura to do a naked fan dance to distract the apparently all heterosexual male hostage guards. 

Shatner doesn't realize space is big. Even in a universe where warp drive exists and regularly tells the laws of physics to get bent, getting to the center of the galaxy is nigh impossible. But the Enterprise and the tagalong Klingons get there. 

The Klingons are only there because the story needs them to be there. 

The Enterprise is an embarrassment.  Scotty is trying really hard fix that. "I know this ship like the back of my hand" he says before knocking himself unconscious on an exposed piece of pipe.

Gene Roddenberry talked smack about Star Trek V - The Final Frontier all the time but Gene's issues with the film owed less to concerns about the quality of the film but more to do with his petty jealousy that William Shatner got to do his "Star Trek meets God" story and Roddenberry never got to do his. 

There is one stand out character building bit in the movie.  When Sybok forces Dr. McCoy to confront his deepest pain, we find out that McCoy euthanized his sick father to alleviate his suffering only to have a cure for his father's condition found a few days later. It is a dark revelation that defines McCoy's character and his devotion to medicine. It is a secret that makes sense in the context of everything we know about Dr. McCoy.

Everyone else is completely out of character. 

At the 10th Golden Raspberry Awards, Star Trek V - The Final Frontier won 3 Razzie Awards: Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Actor for William Shatner.

And also we got this thanks to Star Trek V - The Final Frontier.

The movie was such a critical and commercial belly flop, the entire Star Trek movie foundation was called into doubt.  Eventually, Paramount agreed to one last movie with the original cast.

Next week for Cinema Sunday: Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country.