Star Trek V: The Final Frontier 1989

[7.4/10] There’s usually something to recommend, or at least salvage, from even the worst Star Trek outings. A slog of an episode may still have a handful of funny lines, or a poorly-done installment may still have an interesting concept to parse out. For much of The Original Series, the redeeming element of even the shoddiest of episodes was frequently the relationship between Kirk, Spock, and Bones, the triumvirate that made up the core of the show. Even when the scenario was implausible or the situation contrived, the connection between those three almost always rang true, heightening the series’ strongest hours and buoying its weakest ones.

By dint of the famed odd-even distinction, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is considered one of the weaker Star Trek films, a reputation it earns. After a strong start, the movie falls apart with absurdities in its final act, and features heavy-handed interludes that border on the hokey before then. But it’s great strength comes in treating the show’s three man band -- the adventurous Kirk, the reserved Spock, the cantankerous Bones -- as something not only sacrosanct, but legitimately sacred.

In its way, Star Trek V is the franchise’s strongest embrace of secular humanism, the philosophy that permeated The Next Generation and other parts of the world spun off from the original crew’s adventures. It presents a dichotomy. On the one hand there is Sybock, the soothsaying cult leader who aims to meet the Almighty himself and lead his followers to paradise. On the other is Star Trek’s own holy trinity, who reject this messianic figure and his lofty promises, and even the godlike being they confront in favor of the strength and loyalty they have for one another.

What’s frustrating is that half of this approach is done subtly and charmingly, and half of it is loud and goofy. The best choice The Final Frontier makes is to lean into the rapport between its three lead characters. Despite the various issues behind-the-scenes, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley developed an on-screen rapport after two decades of playing these characters. The film plays the rock-paper-scissors nature of their relationship broadly at times, but it’s a combination that works. It’s time-tested, and the shared history of the characters and the shorthand of the performers carries much of the film.

But when the film drifts off toward strange interludes about formative, painful moments in the characters’ lives, or has them spouting shopworn banalities in the shadow of Sybock’s sermons, or features them, you know, staring down the literal face of God, Wizard of Oz style, Star Trek V loses the power of that central connection in ways that serve the plot but not really the point.

The plot sees our heroes’ shore leave interrupted by a hostage situation on Nimbus III, a Tatooine-like planet meant to be a shared, peaceful community for humans, Romulans, and Klingons that quickly devolved into infighting and squalor. After some character-reestablishing moments out and about, the Enterprise crew return to their malfunctioning new ship and ventures out to investigate. They find Sybock, the charismatic, Orson Wells-esque religious leader who aims to commandeer the Enterprise to take it past the galactic barrier at the center of the galaxy to find the divine, and Klaa the Klingon commander who wants the glory of defeating Kirk in battle.

The presence of two antagonists initially adds intrigue to the movie. Even before the reveal that Sybock is Spock’s half brother (which took some of the sting out of Star Trek Discovery’s strained familial connection for me), he makes for an intriguing enemy for the good guys. He exists as the yin to Spock’s yang, a Vulcan who is as brilliant as Spock, but who embraces emotion and salvation and, most notably, freedom from pain in a way that our favorite Vulcan eschews. His ability to nigh-magically persuade people to his side using some variation on Vulcan mind melding techniques gives him a unique ability to match his mythic presence here, even if the nature of that power gets jumbled in the finally tally.

Klaa is much more straightforward -- a traditional Klingon warrior who’s after Kirk for the thrill of the hunt. In truth, he and his crew seem like more of a throw-in, a standard adversary to heighten the stakes in a conflict with a mostly non-violent cult leader, but it presents two very different sorts of challenges for the Enterprise crew to have to handle at once.

The problem becomes that once these threats grow and bloom, they begin to lose focus and force. While the thrill of the unknown has always fueled Star Trek to some extent, seeing a floating head in the sky, claiming to be the creator, demanding starships and blasting people with laser vision is just too big and too silly to match the high-minded tone the film is going for. The way Klaa is talked down by a washed up Klingon General dovetails well enough with the film’s “power of people > power of deities” message, it’s underwhelming fix to the cheesy problem of a renegade god who can apparently be defeated with laser blasts.

Throw in a bewildering and demeaning “fan dance” and the heavy-handed symbolism of a ship’s wheel with “To Boldly Go” inscribed on it, and you have the makings of a ridiculous, almost nonsensical ending to a film that sets up interesting things for both its characters and stories, and yet has trouble paying them off.

What’s striking, however, is that however many problems exist with the film’s script and story, it’s a surprisingly well-shot and directed film with William Shatner himself calling the shots. Perhaps the credit belongs to cinematographer Andrew Laszlo instead, but this is the most visually impressive Star Trek has been since The Motion Picture.

Laszlo’s camera finds interesting angles in which to frame Sybock and his soon-to-be convert in the film’s Lawrence of Arabia-inspired opening. He captures the scenic beauty of Yosemite in the sweeping shots of Kirk’s ascent. He frames our heroes symmetrically as they march down a corridor, or all in a row as they step onto the paradise planet. The swirl of cloud-like vista, or the pink hue of the planet itself, all help create an atmosphere visually than the story has trouble trying to evoke with words and plot alone. Whatever qualms I may have had about Shatner as a director, he oversaw some of the best-shot and captured images in the whole of the franchise.

And for someone who had a notoriously contentious relationship with his co-stars, he presides over a film that values those found families and the kind of meaning found through long-held interpersonal connections, above the supernatural and divine. It would be too much and too far to call Star Trek V a rejection of religion, but it’s certainly an affirmation of the power, comfort, and perhaps even providence that stems from the people we surround ourselves with. It rejects promises and attempts to take away pain, Inside Out-style, resting instead on the idea that these experiences make us who we are, and bring us to the people who make our existence worthwhile.

The Final Frontier gives us that in the budding romance between Uhura and Scotty, in the funny friendship between Sulu and Chekov, and in the indelible camaraderie shared among Kirk, Spock, and Dr. McCoy. The film loses the plot sometime between when the latter trio break out of the brig and when the credits roll, but even at its worst, it gains strength from the humor, heart, and hallowed place that those three individuals scratch out in the backdrop of silly, space-bound, and supernatural.