Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
Written by William Shatner & Harve Bennett & David Loughery
Directed by William Shatner
Release date: June 9, 1989
Stardate: 8454.1
Captain’s log. We open on Nimbus III, the so-called “planet of galactic peace,” located in the Neutral Zone. (Which NZ, it doesn’t say.) A man named J’onn is working hard in the desert when he’s approached by a man on a horse. J’onn grabs his crude, handmade weapon to defend himself. (Weapons are, strictly speaking, forbidden on Nimbus.) The rider approaches and stares intently at him, which manages to take his pain away telepathically. J’onn is eternally grateful, and the rider asks in return that J’onn join his quest. J’onn agrees, and then rider throws back his cloak to reveal tapered ears—he’s a Vulcan. He tells J’onn that they’ll need a starship. And then he laughs.
Cut to Yosemite National Park, where Kirk is climbing El Capitan. Spock flies up to meet him wearing gravity boots in order to have a rather stupid conversation. Below, McCoy is watching through binoculars, talking to himself, convinced that Kirk is going to die. Sure enough, Spock’s babbling at Kirk distracts him enough to cause him to fall, though Spock is able to use the gravity boots to accelerate faster than the 9.8 meters per second per second that Kirk is falling and catch him just before he goes splat.
On Nimbus, the rider, whose name is Sybok, has gathered an impressive following. He, J’onn, and the rest of his forces storm Paradise City just as the new Romulan representative, Caithlin Dar, arrives. She’s barely met St. John Talbot of the Federation and Korrd of the Klingon Empire before Sybok’s forces take them prisoner.
On Earth, we find out why Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are free to take leave in Yosemite together: the new Enterprise is a mess. Nothing works, and Scotty opines in his log that the ship was assembled by monkeys.
In mid-repair, Starfleet Command contacts them with a Priority 7 situation. Despite their condition, all personnel to be recalled. Uhura contacts Sulu and Chekov—who are relieved to be contacted, as they’re lost in whatever park they’re hiking through. Meanwhile, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are having dinner around the campfire—McCoy’s family recipe of beans cooked in Tennessee whiskey—and toasted “marsh melons,” the latter from Spock’s attempt at research of campfire traditions. In the spirit of that research, they attempt a singalong of “Row Row Row Your Boat,” which is something of a disaster, and then they go to sleep, Spock grumbling that life isn’t a dream…
They’re awakened by Uhura in a shuttlecraft—since they didn’t bring their communicators with them, she has to pick them up unannounced. (The transporters are still not working. And won’t until the plot needs them to, but right now the plot needs them not to.)
Klingon Captain Klaa, whose ship has been modified with a personal periscope-style gunnery control for the command chair, receives word of the hostage taking on Nimbus and changes course, hoping to engage a Federation ship.
Kirk reports to the bridge and is informed by Starfleet Command about what happened on Nimbus. There are other ships in the sector, but no experienced captains. They need Jim Kirk, the admiral says, to which both Kirk and the audience say, “Oh, please…” Concern is expressed about the Klingons also sending a ship; at no point does anyone discuss the possibility of the Romulans doing likewise.
The ship sets course for Nimbus III, though absolutely nothing works right. Uhura provides information on the hostages, as well as the recording made by Sybok demanding a Federation starship to parley for their release.
Spock recognizes Sybok, and he informs Kirk and McCoy that he knew him as a student. He was brilliant but also a revolutionary, who rejected logic and embraced emotionalism. He was banished from Vulcan.
They arrive at Nimbus. There’s a Klingon ship two hours out, and the transporter still isn’t working. (Hey, Starfleet! Maybe don’t send a ship to do a hostage retrieval that doesn’t have a working transporter!) Kirk, Spock, Sulu, McCoy, Uhura, and a security detail fly down in a shuttle. Meanwhile, Chekov is in command, and he stalls Sybok.
The shuttle lands a good hour’s walk from Paradise City to avoid detection, but there’s a lookout party nearby with horses. Uhura distracts them by singing and dancing naked with fans—yes, really—and then the landing party takes their horses.
Except for Uhura, who goes back to the shuttle, they ride into Paradise City. Unfortunately, when they rescue the hostages, they discover that the three consuls are also on Sybok’s side. The landing party is taken prisoner, and Sybok and Spock have a lovely reunion.
The landing party hops onto the shuttle as Sybok’s hostages, pretending to Chekov and Scotty that they’re coming back with the bad guys. Unfortunately, the Klingon ship cloaks, which means they’re going to attack. Chekov raises shields, and advises the shuttle to find safe harbor on the planet. Sybok refuses, but does allow Kirk to land the shuttle on the ship. He has Sulu fly in manually, with the shields lowered only for a few seconds. As soon as the shuttle’s on board, Chekov goes to warp, barely avoiding being struck by Klingon weapons fire.
Sybok instructs Kirk to take him to the bridge. Kirk tries to fight back, but Sybok tosses him around like a rag doll. Spock gets his hand on Sybok’s weapon, but cannot shoot Sybok because, it turns out, Sybok is Spock’s half brother. Sarek was his father, his mother was a Vulcan woman.
Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are placed in the brig, while Sulu and Uhura, and later Chekov, are converted to Sybok’s cause. Sybok then addresses the entire ship and announces that they are headed to what Vulcan mythology refers to as Sha Ka Ree, which he says is at the center of the galaxy. Kirk points out that no ship or probe has penetrated the great barrier around the center of the galaxy.
Scotty has managed to avoid the brainwashing, and he breaks Kirk, Spock, and McCoy out of the brig. (Previous attempts at a breakout from inside have failed. Spock points out that the brig is new and they tested it against the most intelligent, resourceful person they could find—Spock himself.) Scotty directs them to a turboshaft that’s down for maintenance that they can climb to the forward lounge, which has an emergency transmitter. Spock flies them up via his gravity boots, and they get a message out—however, it’s Klaa’s ship that receives it. His first officer, Vixis, claims to be from Starfleet Command and assures Kirk that they’ll send a ship right away. Klaa then sets course for the center of the galaxy.
For his part, Scotty bumps his head on a pipe just after muttering that he knows the ship like the back of his hand. Sulu and J’onn find him and have him sent to sickbay, where Uhura greets him upon regaining consciousness.
Sybok enters the forward lounge and talks with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy about Sha Ka Ree—humans call it Eden or heaven, Klingons call it QI’tu, Romulans call it Vorta Vor. He also explains his brainwashing technique: he forces people to confront their pain and send it away, enabling them to also cast off fear (and, apparently, common sense and loyalty).
We finally get to see what it is Sybok does. McCoy sees himself at his father’s deathbed. McCoy confronts the fact that he committed euthanasia on his father—he was in tremendous pain, and McCoy did it to preserve his dignity and end the pain. But not long after that, they found a cure for what ailed him. Sybok claims that the pain of that decision has poisoned his soul.
He then takes on Spock, who insists that he hides no pain, but Sybok knows better. Sybok shows them Amanda giving birth to Spock, and Sarek sees the child (whose ears are not yet tapered) and cluck-clucks, “So human.”
Kirk refuses to take his own journey, saying he needs his pain. As for Spock, the brainwashing doesn’t take because Spock knows who he is now—he’s not the outcast child Sybok left behind. McCoy sticks with his buddies, though he actually is grateful for the brainwashing, same as the rest of the crew.
The Enterprise approaches the great barrier. Sulu reminds Sybok that no ship can get through the barrier. Sybok says they’re wrong, that it’s just fear talking, and then the Enterprise—a barely-together ship that’s not functioning remotely correctly—gets through the impenetrable barrier with no explanation.
There’s a world at the center, which Sulu puts the ship into orbit of. Chekov detects a power source like nothing he’s ever seen before. Sybok frees Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and lets Kirk have command of the ship again, to Kirk’s surprise. Sybok knows that, now that they’re here, Kirk won’t be able to resist exploring the world at the heart of the galaxy.
And he’s right. Leaving Chekov in command, Kirk takes Spock, McCoy, and Sybok down in a shuttlecraft—which another force takes control of as they approach. They land in an open field and disembark from the shuttlecraft. Sybok has apparently taken the time to get a haircut before boarding the shuttle. On the bridge, the crew, the consuls, and Sybok’s people are watching the feed from—well, I don’t know what it’s from, since we see the shuttle, so it can’t be from there. Everyone’s so enraptured by the sight of an incredibly boring desert planet that looks like half the other planets they’ve visited that nobody notices that Klaa’s ship has also somehow penetrated the barrier and is on approach.
After walking in a direction that appears to have been chosen at random, Sybok suddenly stops and screams, “WE HAVE TRAVELED FAR!” then quietly adds, “…by starship.”
Just when Sybok is thinking that maybe he came all this way for nothing, the sky grows dark, the ground shakes, and stalagmites start growing out of the ground, forming a sort of fence. The landing party walks in, and then a big giant head shows up in an explosion of light. The face is a white guy with a beard because that matches the landing party’s expectations—though I can only imagine it matches Kirk’s and McCoy’s.
The big giant head says that they’re his first visitors, and he asks how they penetrated the barrier, and when Sybok tells him, he asks if this starship can carry his essence, his power, his wisdom to the galaxy.
This prompts Kirk to ask a rather on-point question: what does God need with a starship? The big giant head refuses to answer the question, and when Kirk presses him, he gets himself zapped with ray beams from the big giant head’s eyes. When Spock points out that he hasn’t answered the question, he gets zapped, too. McCoy—who’s been willing to give the big giant head the benefit of the doubt (“Jim, you don’t ask the Almighty for his ID!”)—stands and declares that he doubts any god who inflicts pain for his own pleasure.
Sybok is aghast. The God of Sha Ka Ree would not behave this way. The big giant head has no idea what Sha Ka Ree is. He’s been imprisoned for an eternity, and he wants out via the starship. Sybok, realizing how badly he’s screwed up, approaches the big giant head and says that he can’t help but notice the creature’s pain…
As Sybok and the big giant head tussle, Kirk orders Sulu and Chekov to fire a photon torpedo at the big giant head. That doesn’t destroy the big giant head, but it gives Kirk, Spock, and McCoy time to run to the shuttle—which, apparently, is no longer working. Scotty has restored enough transporter power to beam two people aboard, so he takes Spock and McCoy—
—and then Klaa decloaks and fires on the Enterprise. His terms of surrender are that they give him “the renegade” Kirk and he doesn’t blow up the Enterprise. Spock counters that Kirk isn’t on board, and then he enlists Korrd to stomp all over him, since he’s Klaa’s superior officer. On Korrd’s order, Klaa beams Korrd and Spock over, takes the ship down to the surface, and fires on the big giant head, then beaming Kirk aboard. Klaa, reluctantly, apologizes, saying that firing on Kirk’s ship was not sanctioned by his government.
Kirk holds a party for the Klingons, his crew, and Sybok’s followers on the Enterprise. It’s unclear if or how Sybok’s brainwashing has worn off. Scotty and Korrd share some Scotch, Sulu and Chekov appreciate Vixis’s muscles, and Klaa salutes Kirk. Spock muses on how he lost a brother, prompting Kirk to say that he lost a brother once, but he was lucky and got him back.
Then we cut to Yosemite, where Kirk, Spock, and McCoy resume their camping trip. Spock has his Vulcan harp out, and he starts playing “Row Row Row Your Boat.”
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The Enterprise and Klaa’s ship manage to penetrate the impenetrable barrier at the center of the galaxy because reasons. How they got to the center of the galaxy so fast is also left totally unexplained. Also, apparently they assembled the Enterprise-A in a hurry, because nothing on it works right—except for the get-us-through-the-impenetrable-barrier drive, that works great.
Fascinating. We find out that Spock has a half-brother. Given that Sybok was exiled from Vulcan, and given how reluctant Vulcans in general and Spock in particular are with discussing their personal lives (cf. “Amok Time“), not to mention how revolting Spock finds rampant emotionalism, it’s not surprising that he never mentioned him before.
I’m a doctor not an escalator. As usual, McCoy gets the best lines, though they are fewer and farther between. Also, we learn that he killed his father.
Ahead warp one, aye. Not Sulu’s best day: he gets lost with Chekov (the pilot and the navigator get lost! Ha ha ha! That’s funny!), he gets knocked off his horse, he crashes the shuttle (to be fair, it was a damn difficult bit of piloting, and at least all his passengers survived), and he gets brainwashed.
Hailing frequencies open. Uhura fares far worse, however. Not only is she brainwashed, prior to that she is conscripted to strip naked and do a fan dance and song to distract Sybok’s lookouts so they can steal their horses. Because the one thing that’s been missing from Star Trek all these years is a Russ Meyer moment.
I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty manages to fix the transporter in the nick of time, and also keeps the ship from falling completely apart. He also bangs his head on a pipe right after saying he knows the ship like the back of his hand. (He knows the ship like the back of his hand, but he bumps his head! Ha ha ha! That’s funny!)
It’s a Russian invention. Chekov gets to pretend to be captain to distract Sybok, and does rather a good job.
Go put on a red shirt. Kirk brings a security detail to Nimbus, and one of them gets shot. Nobody seems to notice or care.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. For some reason, Uhura and Scotty start acting like a couple. There’s been no hint of it before, and there will never be any hint of it again.
Channel open. “You really piss me off, Jim!”
McCoy, speaking for the entire audience.
Welcome aboard. The big guests are Laurence Luckinbill as Sybok and David Warner as Talbot. Warner will be back in the very next film as Chancellor Gorkon and again in TNG‘s “Chain of Command” two-parter as Gul Madred. Charles Cooper plays Korrd, the first of two high-ranking Klingons on his resumé, the next being Chancellor K’mpec on TNG‘s “Sins of the Father” and “Reunion.” (Amusingly, he’ll wear the same cloak as K’mpec that he wore as Korrd.)
Jonathan Simpson and Cynthia Blaise play the younger versions of Sarek and Amanda seen in Spock’s memories. Bill Quinn plays McCoy’s dying father; it was his last screen role before he died in 1994 at the age of 81.
Stunt folk Todd Bryant and Spice Williams play Klaa and Vixis, respectively. Bryant previously played a cadet in The Wrath of Khan, and will return as a Klingon translator in The Undiscovered Country. These days, he’s mostly a stunt coordinator, fight choreographer, and second unit director. Williams—known now as Spice Williams-Crosby after marrying George Crosby—is a well-regarded bodybuilder, and has continued to work in the stunt world as well. She’ll play a Klaestron kidnapper in DS9‘s “Dax.”
Rex Holman plays J’onn; he was last seen as Morgan Earp in “Spectre of the Gun.” George Murdock plays the big giant head; he’ll return as Admiral Hansen in “The Best of Both Worlds” two-parter on TNG. Cynthia Gouw plays Dar.
Producer Harve Bennett plays the admiral who gives Kirk the assignment, and Melanie Shatner, daughter of the star/director, plays the yeoman who hands Kirk his jacket when he comes on board. With the latter appearance, all three of Shatner’s daughters have now appeared with him on Star Trek, with Lisabeth and Leslie having appeared as two of the kids in “Miri.”
Finally, the usual suspects of James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, and George Takei are present. Takei gets an “and” credit, which is a bigger credit than simply being listed, which he probably got as a way of getting him to do the film. Reportedly, Takei—who has never gotten along with Shatner—wasn’t interested in being directed by him, but he was talked into it.
Trivial matters: As with the third film, this was William Shatner’s first feature film directorial credit, though also as with Leonard Nimoy, he had directed television before, having helmed ten episodes of T.J. Hooker, the cop show he also starred in. Shatner asked to direct this film based on the “favored nation” clause in both his and Nimoy’s contract that basically said that whatever one got, so did the other.
This movie picks up from the end of the previous film, as Scotty references Kirk’s final line in the film asking, “Let’s see what she’s got,” and answering it poorly.
This is the second time the Enterprise has gone to the center of the galaxy. Last time, in “The Magicks of Megas-Tu,” they found magic and mythical creatures. This time, they find a big giant head pretending to be God. The barrier around the center is called “the great barrier,” which is also how the barrier around the outside of the galaxy—first seen in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and also traversed in “By Any Other Name” and “Is There in Truth No Beauty?“—is referred to.
The producers wanted Sean Connery to play Sybok, but he was already committed to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. They named Sha Ka Ree after him instead.
Each of the films from this one through to Nemesis are the only ones produced while a Star Trek TV show was on the air—this and The Undiscovered Country while TNG was airing, Generations while DS9 was airing, First Contact and Insurrection while DS9 and Voyager were airing, and Nemesis while Enterprise was airing.
Kirk really did lose his brother, in “Operation—Annihilate!” when George Samuel Kirk was found dead on Deneva. Kirk also says “men like us don’t have families,” even though all three of them do have families, as established in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” and “Operation—Annihilate!” for Kirk, “Journey to Babel” for Spock, and “The Survivor” for McCoy.
While McCoy’s father is not named in this film, McCoy did provide “David” as his father’s name in The Search for Spock. In the novel The Sorrows of Empire, David Mack established that McCoy’s Mirror Universe counterpart (from “Mirror, Mirror“) tortured his father to death on orders from the Terran Empire.
The big giant head, identified as simply The One, will also be seen, and given an origin, in Greg Cox’s The Q-Continuum trilogy, which also features cosmic entities Q from “Encounter at Farpoint” and beyond, the swirly thing from “Day of the Dove,” and Gorgan from “And the Children Shall Lead.”
McCoy’s grumbling to himself that he’s worried about starting to talk to himself calls back to a similar line, also prompted by Kirk’s behavior, in the character’s first appearance in “The Corbomite Maneuver.”
The timeframe of Nimbus III’s establishment is problematic, as this movie can’t be more than a few months after The Wrath of Khan, which was fifteen years after “Space Seed,” which means it’s also fifteen years after “Balance of Terror“—which was the first contact between the Federation and the Romulans in almost a century. So how could the Romulans be involved in “the planet of galactic peace” twenty years prior to this episode?
Nimbus III is never mentioned again onscreen, but it does feature in the Decipher role-playing game, Star Trek Online, and the Vanguard novel series by David Mack, Dayton Ward, & Kevin Dilmore. It’s also seen in an alternate timeline in Geoff Trowbridge’s The Chimes at Midnight, in Myriad Universes: Echoes and Refractions.
Korrd also appears prior to this film in “Though Hell Should Bar the Way” by Greg Cox in Enterprise Logs and your humble rewatcher’s “The Unhappy Ones” in Seven Deadly Sins and after it in Sarek by A.C. Crispin, In the Name of Honor by Dayton Ward, “The Lights in the Sky” by Phaedra M. Weldon in Strange New Worlds, and J.M. Dillard’s novelization of The Undiscovered Country.
Klaa would continue to be a recurring antagonist for Kirk and the gang in DC’s second monthly Star Trek comic written by Peter David and Howard Weinstein. He also appeared in Weinstein’s novella The Blood-Dimmed Tide, part of the Mere Anarchy miniseries.
Sybok is mentioned briefly in your humble rewatcher’s The Brave and the Bold Book 2 during Spock and Worf’s mind-meld (Spock’s disagreements with Sybok paralleling Worf’s with Nikolai Rozhenko), and alternate timeline versions of him are seen or mentioned in Engines of Destiny by Gene DeWeese, The Tears of Eridanus by Steve Mollmann & Michael Schuster in Myriad Universes: Shattered Light, the comic book Star Trek Annual #6 written by Howard Weinstein & Michael Jan Friedman, and the aforementioned The Chimes at Midnight.
Harve Bennett’s admiral, simply identified as “Bob” in the film, is given the name Robert Bennett when he appears in the novels Forged in Fire by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin and the aforementioned In the Name of Honor.
The first episode of TNG to be produced after this movie’s release was “Evolution,” in which Data mentions that there has not been a total technological failure of a starship in seventy-nine years, a deliberate reference to the Enterprise-A’s balky shakedown in this movie.
This film was novelized by J.M. Dillard, who adapted all six of the remaining mainline universe films. Dillard reconciled Sulu being offered his own command with his being back to the helmsman here, explained how the Enterprise got the center of the galaxy so gosh-darned fast and was able to penetrate the barrier (Sybok modified the engines and shields so that they could get there fast and then get through, and Klaa acquired those new specs from scanning the Enterprise in order to follow), remembered things like the fact that Kirk actually had a brother, gave backgrounds for the three Nimbus III ambassadors, showed what Sybok did to brainwash Uhura, Sulu, and Chekov, and so on. In addition, as with the previous two, there was a comics adaptation from DC by the then-current creative team of the comic book, in this case Peter David, James W. Fry III, & Arne Starr
To boldly go. “What does God need with a starship?” What a godawful mess. Pun intended.
There is almost nothing to recommend this film. It’s bad Star Trek, it’s bad cinema, hell, it’d even be bad television. The humor is labored and forced, and very little of it elicits more than an occasional chuckle. (“I need a shower.” “Yes.” That works. It’s one of the few.)
Gene Roddenberry tried to declare this movie to be non-canonical, which many fans seized upon in order to dismiss the film. Of course, the reason why Roddenberry hated this movie isn’t because it’s bad, it’s because Shatner got to make his Enterprise-meets-God story and Roddenberry didn’t. The Great Bird’s original notion for what eventually became The Motion Picture, which Paramount rejected, involved meeting a version of God. Roddenberry even tried to make it into a novel, The God-Thing. (Here’s a very impressive chronicle of the tortured history of this never-to-be-published novel from the mighty Steve Roby.)
I suspect that Roddenberry’s story of the meeting with God would have been dire, though it couldn’t possibly be much worse than this misbegotten piece of crap.
The movie is not completely flawed. It has some good moments. For all that the dialogue is labored (a problem throughout the film), the campfire scenes are fun. The revelations of what Sybok focuses on for McCoy’s and Spock’s pain are very enlightening about both characters, especially McCoy. Knowing that McCoy, in a moment of weakness, performed euthanasia on his own father to preserve his dignity and relieve his endless pain pulls McCoy’s entire character into focus. His dedication to his work, his insistence on the sanctity of life (seen in this very film when he bitches out Kirk for risking his life for no good reason by climbing El Capitan), it all comes back to that one decision that he obviously regretted deeply and which has informed his entire life, making him into the superlative surgeon that we’ve been seeing regularly.
And this is the thing Sybok wants to take away. Kirk is the only person who seems to understand that. (Spock, to a lesser extent, does also.) All the people on Nimbus, all the rest of Kirk’s crew, they all just give in to the brainwashing.
Which, by the way, is never properly explained. Sybok stares at a person, talks about letting go of their pain, and then they blindly follow him anywhere, act out of character, commit acts of assault and theft, and so on. The leap from one thing—working through a past trauma—to the other—being a mindless moron—is too far to be in any way convincing.
The movie is one big character assassination of everyone who isn’t one of the Big Three. Besides the fact that Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, and possibly Scotty (it’s not clear with him) have succumbed to Sybok’s brainwashing (so has McCoy, but he’s at least got the wherewithal to remember his Starfleet oath, unlike the others), we get Sulu and Chekov getting lost, Scotty bumping his head, and Uhura’s fucking fan dance.
I still recall seeing The Final Frontier in the theatre at age twenty. With each scene, my jaw is dropping further, aghast at just how awful it all is, and then we get to the motherfucking fan dance, and I just closed my eyes and muttered profanity to myself. (I wanted to scream, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, noooooo!” but I was in a crowded Manhattan theatre and was mindful of the rest of the audience.) Star Trek has always had a major dollop of sexism leavening its enlightened attitudes, but there’s no excuse, none, for that appalling, disgusting, ridiculous scene of Uhura distracting the lookouts by dancing naked for them, getting them to all abandon their posts as one. (Funny how Sybok’s brainwashing is enough to make Starfleet officers violate their oaths but not enough to keep his lookouts from acting like a wolf in a Tex Avery cartoon.) Good thing for Kirk’s despicable plan that they were all heterosexual males in the lookout party…
All of this is done to make the hero look better. It’s really hard to forget whose name is on the director credit when the movie goes to such great lengths to make Kirk out to be the bestest captain evar!!! He climbs El Cap! He’s the only one who can save the consuls! He leads the landing party and wrestles a three-breasted cat lady! (No, really!) He’s the only one who manfully resists Sybok’s brainwashing! He dares to ask the big giant head an important question! (Which is another of the few great lines in the film.)
Sixteen years ago, I got into a discussion of this movie on a now-defunct Trek books board, and several people defended the movie as being thoughtful and it was actually about seeking out new life and new civilizations and that it was about something and that something was very much in Roddenberry’s spirit. Except, to me, all this movie had to say was that everyone (except for Kirk and Spock, anyhow) is a weak-willed moron who doesn’t have the ability to say, “Hey, maybe I shouldn’t mind-meld with this laughing Vulcan I’ve never met and let him give me hallucinations.” Also that Starfleet is so incompetently run that there’s only one captain who can handle a diplomatic crisis and they can’t even be arsed to give him a ship that works properly. (Seriously, I get that Kirk is the only one available with the experience, but in that case, give him a ship that actually functions, for crying out loud!)
As for seeking out new life and new civilizations, yup, the movie is about that—and it’s the villain of the piece who’s doing it, and our heroes are trying to stop him. That’s so very Star Trek. Sigh.
Naturally, there are no consequences for what happened. The next time we see the crew, they’re either in the same positions or have been promoted. Even though they disobeyed orders, endangered the ship, assaulted their fellow officers, and so on. Sure.
I was going to give this a zero rating, but watching it again I found myself drawn to McCoy’s flashback. It really does do a great deal to explicate one of the most compelling characters in the franchise, and DeForest Kelley does superbly with the scene.
But it’s the only rose in this pile of cowflop. Just an embarrassment to the entire franchise.
Warp factor rating: 1
Next week: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s latest release is the short story “Behind the Wheel,” the latest in his cycle of urban fantasy stories set in Key West, Florida starring Cassie Zukav, weirdness magnet. The story is in TV Gods: Summer Programming, which also features stories by Trek scribes Michael Jan Friedman, Robert Greenberger, and Aaron Rosenberg.
“Captain Kirk is climbing a mountain, why is he climbing a mountain?”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who is not sorry
Some TV royalty-kin in this film: Luckinbill is Lucille Ball’s son-in-law, Quinn was Bob Newhart’s father-in-law. (And he played Mary Richards’ dad.)
Can’t argue with the review, though the one I wrote at the time for my college paper was more forgiving. I think I was making the best of things while waiting for BATMAN to release.
cuz he’s like a man of action or some nonsense
It’s odd that McCoy is written well in this movie, while everyone else is written so badly. McCoy’s flashback, and the shot of his utter righteous rage when he delivers his “I doubt any god…” line are two scenes that get the character exactly right, IMO. It’s really a shame they’re stuck in such a bad movie.
I saw this when I was 8 at a drive-in and it was playing with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. That about the only good thing I can say about this crap show…
One thing you didn’t mention. Sybok whole moronic plan to steal a “starship” would have completely failed if Starfleet had sent a ship that actually worked. Fly in, beam up the hostages and this movie is a whole lot shorter than it was. Also, we can be sure that there was some mind control going on. Why else would everyone follow the creepy, laughing Vulcan.
I will give it props for employing the time honored Trek convention of slapping a horn on an animal and making it “alien”.
*Edit: I had a sweet picture of Worf’s horned warthog from TNG, the horned dog in TOS, and Sybok’s unicorn from this movie, but alas, I cannot get it to load*
This never occurred to me before, but what the hell is with the “go climb a rock” shirt? Were slogan t-shirts like that ever used at any other time in Star Trek?
I didn’t really care for the plot embarrassing every other credits character. There’s no reason Sulu and Chekov would even go on holiday together, much less the exact same recreational activity as the big 3. Scotty banging his head, the fan dance. Arg. I suspect if you could peel back the layers of history, you’d find that this is when the rest of the main cast really started to hate Shatner.
The novelization redeems some of the movie’s other sins, and is quite readable. And given how many times Kirk and Spock have had to escape from confinement of some kind, I appreciated the bit about testing the escape-proof brig on Spock. But overall this is a pretty terrible outing.
Oh Star Trek V, no one can ever love you. I’ve never had a problem with Trek V, however I also can’t defend Trek V. Luckily for me I guess it always felt really short and went by pretty fast.
@6, I guess that’s Kirk’s civilian t-shirt from camping, he hasn’t had time to change yet.
[edited to add] Star Trek almost never shows us civilian clothes of contemporary Earth. And when they do, they’re pretty dire. (Yes Wil, I’m looking at you.).
@8, well, it’s basically a below-average TV episode, most of which are at least watchable.
I’ve come to appreciate this movie more than I used to — largely because I decided that this is fiction and I don’t have to take every bit of it as literal truth (see my comment earlier today in the TVH thread about how Roddenberry approached Trek as an occasionally inaccurate dramatization). For one thing, I realized that there are only three near-consecutive lines in the whole film specifying that Sha Ka Ree is at the center of the galaxy. So if I just ignore maybe 20-30 seconds out of the movie, I can pretend it’s actually somewhere much closer to Federation space and thus avoid worrying about how the Enterprise-A made a trip in 20 minutes that would’ve taken 30 years for Voyager. Similarly, I just ignore the turboshaft sequence where there are 100-plus decks in a ship that’s only 25-ish decks high, and not only that, but they’re numbered in the wrong direction. So much of the dumb stuff in Trek goes away if you look at it as an imperfect dramatization of the underlying reality.
I actually rather like Sybok as a character; Luckinbill does an excellent job bringing him to life, and his existence adds new insight into Spock’s backstory in much the way Keith said about the revelations in McCoy’s past. The fact that Sarek’s older son was banished and disowned for his extreme rejection of Vulcan principles explains why Sarek was so upset about Spock joining Starfleet that he disowned him too. It’s because he thought Spock was doing the same thing Sybok had done and he overreacted. In general, I think the whole sequence with the three leads and Sybok, leading up to the “I need my pain” speech, is pretty excellent stuff and makes up for a lot of the silliness elsewhere in the film.
As for why removing people’s pain would make them so suggestible, I can’t help but be reminded of the recent story arc in Agents of SHIELD, where the main characters were placed in an immersive virtual-reality recreation of the world and had their life histories changed to remove their greatest regrets — and in a couple of cases they turned out to be much worse people as a result. As Kirk said, we need our pain — we need the lessons that it teaches in order to motivate us to try to do better. People who never have to feel the consequences of their mistakes never learn to be better. So maybe when Sybok takes away someone’s pain, he also takes away their moral center and their guiding motivation, and that leaves them without judgment or direction and makes them susceptible to whatever he offers to fill the void.
Although I’ve usually favored a simpler interpretation: that Sybok is basically brainwashing them and just deluding himself into thinking he’s helping them.
I also like the confrontation with the “God” entity. Kirk’s puckish “Excuse me!” is one of his funniest moments, and McCoy’s “I doubt any God…” line is classic Bones. Although it makes no sense that the characters survive a photon torpedo — an antimatter warhead much more potent than a nuke — going off less than 30 yards behind them. This is another bit I have to rationalize away in my head — I figure the torpedo actually penetrated some distance underground before going off.
There is still a lot of dumb stuff here, though. Kirk doesn’t quite feel in character — nor does anyone except Spock and Bones, really. The gravity boots are inane. (Same problem as Iron Man’s boot jets — it’s incredibly unwieldy to have the thrust come out that far from the center of mass. You’d go flailing all over the place. A gravity vest would make more sense.) There are all the conceptual and logic problems Keith mentioned. Also, it’s kind of pointless to try to do a story about the search for God when it’s a given going in that they won’t find God in a commercial movie that needs to be reasonably non-controversial. I’ve read about the turbulent development process for this story, and I couldn’t help thinking their main problem was that they kept trying to make the search-for-God plot work rather than throwing it out and starting over with something more feasible.
The movie benefits immensely from the return of Jerry Goldsmith as the composer. This is one of my favorite Goldsmith scores. I used to be quite fond of listening to it while traveling, and watching the clouds drift by out an airplane window or the landscape go by out a bus window is quite an experience while listening to “The Barrier” or “A Busy Man.”
@7/StrongDreams: It’s been a pretty common thread in tie-in fiction to show Sulu and Chekov hanging out together on leave or off-duty, sometimes with Uhura in the mix as well. The various novels by L.A. Graf focus heavily on the Sulu-Uhura-Chekov triad and their friendship.
I spelled my first name like that to clue you in that the most irritating thing in this movie is that the Romulan ambassador’s name is CATHLEEN and NOBODY PRONOUNCES IT RIGHT!
I didn’t really go into it in the rewatch, but it always amused me that at the time Harve Bennett tried to blame The Final Frontier‘s poor box office on TNG, saying that the show saturated the market for Trek. This is nonsense on all kinds of levels — the movie was released during TNG‘s summer hiatus, the movie had a strong opening weekend but dropped off considerably in its second, indicative of shitty word of mouth (because the movie was bad), and the next movie proved that being released alongside a TV show (in this case, in the midst of that TV show’s fifth season) doesn’t actually hurt box office if both are popular.
I suspect part of Bennett’s grousing at TNG was because that was Roddenberry’s bailiwick, and the Great Bird had been slagging the movies after they removed him from having anything to do with them, and I suspect that there was massive resentment for the other on both sides.
There’s also the fact that the real competition for The Final Frontier was other theatrical releases, and the summer of 1989 also saw Lethal Weapon 2, Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade, and Tim Burton’s Batman all coming out as well. This already-deeply-flawed movie didn’t stand a chance….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@5:
1) Keith does allude to how the transporters only work when the plot demands and Starfleet should have sent a ship with working transporters…
2) Obviously not defending this movie, but I actually think his plan would work just fine if the consuls were “rescued” by teleporter– remember they were on Sybok’s side. They immediately say something like, “Oh, hey, the guy you’re looking for is this vulcan called Sybok. You should beam him up and take him into custody.” Then Sybok is on the ship, uses his brain control whammie, and the plot pretty much proceeds the same way with taking over the ship from the inside. Which, in some sense, makes the movie even worse. All the nonsense on the planet was completely unnecessary to the “story” (although the shuttlecraft landing sequence is kind of fun). And, come to think of it, it probably would be way easier to just go to a starbase where a starship is already docked, whammy crewmembers dockside, and go from there. That guarantees a ship, but without being so high-profile. So there’s obviously a bunch of problems here, but I’m not sure this is one of them.
One good thing I remember about this film… I remember one shot, of the Enterprise up against the moon… That image was beautiful.
Pretty much everything else is unwatchable.
I’ve got nothing positive to say about this movie. I know I saw it for my 17th birthday, with friends. (Side-effect of having a birthday that falls near Memorial Day — you get to see a lot of summer blockbusters for your birthday.) I know that the theater was next to a bookstore, and I went and bought the novelization immediately afterward. I’m not sure if I did that in the hope that the novelization would be better, or because I legitimately enjoyed the movie at the time. I know I thought the fan dance was humiliating for everyone concerned, including the audience. It’s the only Trek movie that I would resist rewatching; in fact, I’m not sure if I’ve seen it again since 1989.
I personally think the story would be okay if it wasn’t a Star trek movie. As Star Trek it is a mess, but as a more generic SF movie, it would be okay.
Also Sulu didn’t crash the shuttle. He merely made a semi-controlled dynamic landing at speed. There is a difference ;o)
Thanks for the shout-out, Keith. The God-Thing hunt was fun while it lasted.
I remember writing some similarly negative comments ST V for Teri Meyer’s old Interstat letterzine. A few of us Interstat readers did. And we all got the same anonymous letter from someone going on about true fans and love and how we were emotionally stunted jealous haters and on and on. You don’t need the Internet to get anonymous cranks spouting gibberish about who’s a real fan and what Star Trek is really about. (Hey, fanlore.org has a bunch of Interstat stuff. Cool.)
I’ve only seen this once, but it was quickly on the heels of II, III, and IV, which I found brain-stabbingly awful, so I remember this a little more kindly. I won’t mount a defense of it, but I liked that it felt like an episode of the show writ large. For all its flaws, I’d rather watch this again than the last three.
I only saw it once, but no matter how often I read a recap like this I can only remember three things: Kirk climbing a mountain, the fan dance, and “What does God need with a starship?” Absolutely none of the rest of it will stick in my head. Bits of the cartoon would pop up in my memory during the TAS rewatch, but absolutely none of this beyond those three things.
The only other thing I remember about seeing this movie is that the friend I saw it with stopped at the bank on the way to the theater and withdrew something like $200. He lost his wallet in the theater, but it was never turned in. To this day, I’m not sure if losing all that money or seeing this film is the worst thing that happened to him that day.
@14, You are correct that Keith did allude to it. I was just pointing out how it played directly into Sybok’s hands that the ship they sent was a broken down wreak. The plan you describe would have made a better movie, but that isn’t exactly hard to do with this as a starting point.
Oh, by the way, I had a question about Keith’s comments regarding the novelization. As I recall, Dillard explained how Sybok modified the shields to get through the Barrier (using plans sent to him by The One), but she didn’t explain how they got to the center of the galaxy so quickly. I distinctly remember how much that annoyed me in the movie and how disappointed I was that the novel didn’t explain it.
One thing about the film that I have mixed feelings about: The shuttle bay set is a strikingly accurate full-scale recreation of the miniature shuttle bay used in TOS. They actually took the original design and built the thing full size! Which is a damned impressive continuity nod. But it’s also a continuity problem, because the starship it’s in is the same refit design introduced in TMP, and in TMP we clearly saw that its shuttlebay interior looked completely different and was part of a much larger, open cargo complex that filled most of the secondary hull. So why would a ship of the upgraded design revert to an earlier type of shuttlebay?
@12/Caithlin: Well, presumably “Caithlin Dar” is supposed to be a Romulan name, so maybe in Romulan it actually is pronounced that way.
Shortly after this came out in the theater, I attended a Star Trek convention in Dallas. There was some discussion with a guest (I can’t remember who, I think it was someone on the production side of the film) about the problems with Star Trek V. The speaker said that Paramount rushed the movie out, knowing that Star Trek fans would show up opening day weekend no matter what, so they could show some good financial numbers as they were in talks with Viacom to merge. I found an article from the LA Times from May of 1989 that at least verifies that talks had started some time before that (http://articles.latimes.com/1989-05-06/business/fi-2144_1_five-television-and-eight-western-deal-sumner-m-redstone). I don’t know how much better the film would have been if post-production hadn’t been cut short, but at least we wouldn’t have seen the same level pass by twice in the gravity boot/turboshaft scene. Shatner’s has said over the years that he had a much more elaborate ending with demons running around everywhere. There are some serious flaws with the film, but if Paramount hadn’t rushed it, it might have at least seemed less amateurish.
As for Sybok brainwashing everyone, it had long been established that Vulcans have some kind of psychic power, beyond just reading minds through a mind meld. He could sense when the entire crew of the Intrepid was destroyed and, here my memory fails me again, didn’t he use something like a psychic suggestion to get a guard to give him the keys to a cell in an episode of the original series? So I just figured that Sybok was using powers that Vulcans had mostly renounced to just mentally screw with everyone.
Part of the tragedy here is that this train wreck is really just “one more revision” away from being decent.
-Make Sybok a prodigy who trained as a Vulcan Master before going rogue, and say that his feats of telepathy and psionics are comparable to legends from before Surak’s time. In fact, make that his motivation; he rejects Surak’s kohlinar teachings, believing that they have weakened the Vulcan people, and wants to tap a source of power that will allow him to “liberate” (i.e., mind-control) all Vulcans.
-This would also put more narrative weight on Caithlin Dar (who is introduced as if she’ll be a pivotal “viewpoint” character), since “liberated” pre-Surakian Vulcans would also be ancestral Romulans.
-The Enterprise‘s condition only really seems relevant regarding the transporters; it’d be easy to have the ship fully functional except for the misaligned pattern buffers or something. Maybe they don’t need to be down at all –Sybok could have orchestrated the hostage situation to make himself one of the hostages (perhaps as a local religious leader), thus being “rescued” alongside the ambassadors.
(-A quick-and-easy rescue would also obliviate any need for the fan-dance.)
-As noted, Sha Ka Ree doesn’t need to be at the centre of the galaxy. It could just as easily be hidden in a nebula somewhere –perhaps an intact planet inside a supernova remnant (where it should have been destroyed by the nova), which should be enough to pique any Starfleet officer’s curiosity. For that matter, why not have the Enterprise already en route when they detect the distress call from Nimbus III (from which the Sha Ka Ree nebula is visible in the night sky, and where Sybok found ancient scriptures which pointed him toward the “holy site”). Sybok would take Spock’s presence on Sybok’s pilgrimage vessel-of-opportunity as a sign of divine providence.
-There’s any number of phenomena that can disrupt a transporter; local radiation, jamming fields, damage incurred from Klaa’s attack. Perhaps Sha Ka Ree just happens to be a no-transporter zone.
-The failed photon torpedo attack could have struck a shield (projected from the same place as the transporter-jamming), requiring someone to physically bring a ship down into range to collapse the temple –either an armed shuttle or the Klingon ship, since Klaa’s attack means the Enterprise is no longer reentry-worthy.
(-While we’re at it, why not give Sulu or Uhura the hero moment of pitting Korrd against Klaa, leaving Spock and McCoy on the planet with Kirk? This way, Spock can bear witness to his brother’s final, heroic self-sacrifice –giving him the movie’s emotional arc. It’d also help set up for Sulu getting his own command and/or show off Uhura’s communication/diplomacy skills)
-The denouement now includes a joint Starfleet-Klingon-Romulan archeological dig on Nimbus III to determine just what the hell that was. Cap things off with a conversation between Spock and Caithlin Dar on their shared heritage, and how Vulcans and Romulans have both grown far beyond what they were before Surak (and perhaps setting up Spock’s future in the Reunification movement –a more forward-looking dream than Sybok’s cultural atavism).
@23/ Matthew: I recall reading that the god being was originally to be revealed as a huge stone/lava demon creature at the end, and chase the heroes around shooting lightning from its eyes. It’s depicted that way in the DC Comics adaptation. I think some part of the sequence was filmed, but it was unconvincing, and Shatner rejected it. There was no time (or possibly no money?) left to reshoot the monster scenes, so it was re-done with the floaty cloud effects seen in the final version.
@22, as I recall, Caithlin Dar was half-human, and possibly even specifically Irish (at least in the novelization).
Not explained in the movie (or not much) but covered in the book is the idea that St. John and Korrd are washed up drunks** sent to a diplomatic outpost that no one takes seriously because their careers are basically over, and Dar is a young idealistic peacemaker who volunteers, and is sent their because her government doesn’t take her seriously.
**Which is why, in the book, its much more impressive how Spock has to really injure Korrd’s pride to get him to act like the General he was/is supposed to be.
If the transporters work, Shatner didn’t get to ride a horse. And that always seemed like his purpose for making this movie.
I wonder how much in need of money Nichols was to agree to do that stupid naked fan dance.
My mom always told me if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything. So, I’m done here…
1989 was one of the most fascinating movie summers to my mind. I call that stretch from May to July of 1989 ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ – ie, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
Summer kicked off on May 24 with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, followed by Clint Eastwood’s newest movie, the masterpiece known as Pink Cadillac . After that was the new Robin Williams pic Dead Poets Society (and OMG, I made the mistake of paying to see No Holds Barred that weekend instead. What an idiot I was.), then STV . The following week was Ghostbusters II (ok of times :) ) with Batman AND Honey, I Shrunk the Kids the week after that. Like you, krad, I couldn’t understand why HB tried to blame TNG when the film’s position on the release schedule was CLEARLY not in their favor for a long run even if the movie was the greatest Trek film EVER. There was just too much anticipation for GBII and (especially) Batman. There would have been only the 1 good weekend and maybe a hope for a sorta close 2nd place the following week against GBII. The week after that with Bats waiting in the wings? Fuggedaboudit.
@23/Matthew Rigdon: Roddenberry did write in a production document about Spock that Vulcan males were supposed to have an innate hypnotic power over women (as a way of overcoming the frigidity resulting from their emotional suppression, which is creepy as hell), which was how he was able to remotely influence the Yang woman in “The Omega Glory” to give him a communicator, and is implicitly why Nurse Chapel and Leila Kalomi were so helplessly in love with him — although he normally tried his best to resist taking advantage of that power.
Leaving that unfortunate idea aside, though, we did see Spock remotely influencing people in “Glory” and in “A Taste of Armageddon,” so it can be done. Diane Duane’s and J.M. Dillard’s novels proposed (and TNG sort of suggested in “Gambit”) that pre-Reform Vulcans used their mind powers more aggressively, as weapons. I alluded to this idea in Rise of the Federation: Uncertain Logic, suggesting that the 22nd-century Vulcan culture’s prohibition on mind melding was an overly absolutist reading of Surakian teachings against the harmful and exploitative uses of melding.
@25/cosmotiger: I sometimes hear people suggesting that the movie might be better if Shatner had gotten to make his rock-monster sequence, but I think that would’ve made it even stupider. I like the idea of the God Entity being this unseen, intangible thing, something a lot less prosaic than a rock monster. Sometimes what you don’t see is scarier than what you do see.
@@@@@27. MaGnUs, that is clearly a Unicorn :)
@27 I was at a convention where Nichelle was a guest just before the release of the movie. Judging by the way she laughed when asked if she would sing in the movie I don’t think she had any problems with the fan dance. I could be wrong.
I’ve always imagined Uhura telling Kirk, ‘I’ll distract them!’ as she pulls off her uniform jacket and continuing to strip while describing her idea to an embarrassed Captain who can’t decide where he dares look or not.
And of course, also coming out in the summer of ’89 was UHF, Weird Al’s movie. : -)
Can’t believe you used the phrase “big giant head” so much in this and didn’t make any mention of Shatner playing the role of Big Giant Head in Third Rock From The Sun.
> “What does God need with a starship?”
This line is the sole redeeming feature of this movie, and it isn’t even that redeeming. It was funny for me and my friends only because it was said in precisely the tone of voice used by a regular member of my gaming group, who asked just those kind of questions.
Tom: because explaining a joke makes it less funny…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
As I recall I was rolling with it, I’m a pretty uncritical viewer, until it was explained that we were going to Sha Ka Ree to ‘find God’. Seriously? What kind of idiot believes God can be found in a physical location?? Not even I could get passed that.
Shatner’s movie is bad, but it’s not as bad as the press conference that preceded it.
So if you’d like to see our beloved Star Trek actors in costume at the corporate equivalent of a kid’s birthday party (balloons included), then behold this monument of awkwardness!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgLobm_cbvc&t=441s
@30/ Christopher: No, I don’t see a rock monster as being an improvement either.
The ending does bother me, but it’s not due to a lack of rock monsters. It’s such an un-Star Trek like conclusion. The being is irretrievably evil, so we blow it up, the end.
There should’ve been some attempt to reach out to the being and come to terms before resorting to violence. It is true that the god being lashes out first, but in the past we’ve seen situations where Kirk has been similarly provoked by powerful entities and he does not immediately escalate to photon torpedoes,.
This movie was horrible for many reasons, but I’ll note a few things that really make me say ‘huh?’
1. Sulu is gay, right? Then why is he perving on Vixis every bit as hard as Chekov? (yes, I know Sulu being gay is from the Kelvin timeline and all that, I just don’t like the inconsistency). The “minor” characters were horribly served by this drek.
2. Ever notice that the Enterprise just happens to have the right piece of tech at the right place at the right time? Like the oh-so-convenient catch net in the shuttlecraft bay that holds the shuttle ‘ ‘ this far from the wall. First off, why would you put the catch net that far inside? Put it at the midway point. And why does it even exist? Shuttles don’t land at speed and wouldn’t need a catch net anyway. If anything, I would expect an air bag or similar on the shuttle itself.
3. Piggybacking on #2, why would there be an emergency transmitter on the observation deck? Why not put it where you might actually need it in an emergency, like in the emergency/auxiliary/battle bridge? I used to be an aircrew and we didn’t keep the emergency gear where you couldn’t get to it in a, you know, emergency.
4. Yeah I get it, Spock is smart. But the best person to test the brig would have been a criminal. And where does Spock get the time to do all these things he does? Testing the brig wouldn’t be something you do over a lunch break. Spock writes research papers, studies every subject you can name, and probably has a hobby knitting socks for people as gifts.
5. So this Klaa guy goes out looking for trouble, blows up Federation property on the way to Nimbus, then follows the Enterprise around with mayhem in his eyes and we’re supposed to believe that a drunken loser like Kordd can just order him to stand down? Please.
6. Uhura’s dance. Oh god, why? As plans go, its just stupid. Not to mention undignified, embarrassing, and plain wrong. (and its not about Nichelle’s age or anything, she was in her mid-50s and was still a damn good-looking lady) It was just . . . icky.
7. The whole movie is Shatner’s masturbatory fantasy come to life. The other cast members already hated him, this just added fuel.
It’s not a great movie by any means. However its more fun than the Motion Picture and way better than Nemesis. Now that was a terrible Trek movie. I’ve always enjoyed the comradery around the campfire. And really who are we kidding? In cinematic features you rarely get the opportunity to flesh out a lot of characters. I will give you the Uhura dance number on the horizon, that was indeed terrible. Still though, I enjoy the movie. Its cheesy, ridiculous and absolutely over the top in a way that only Shatner could have done.
I’ve always loved this movie (still do) but I can’t refute any of the complaints. I loved Dillard’s novelization for filling in a lot of the gaps (and she was my favorite Trek writer back in the day.) And Jerry Goldsmith’s “The Mountain” is probably my favorite piece of music from any movie soundtrack; just absolutely beautiful.
This was the first Star Trek film I saw all the way through and I loved it. And you know what? I’m still oddly fond of it. It has its flaws but frankly its biggest sin is wasting David Warner. (At least the next film makes up for it, even if it doesn’t give him any more screen time.) For all the horror stories about William Shatner, many of which are probably true, this film more than any others focuses on the friendship between Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Because yes, they may have blood relatives out there, but that’s very different from having a family, and this film demonstrates that the crew have become a family. (As awkward as Kirk ignoring the fact that he really did lose a brother is, the sentiment is clear: He and Spock will always have each other. There’s a reason why Spock stays with his “true” brother after Sybok has offered him catharsis.) Maybe it does poke fun at the characters but Kirk is as goofy as anyone else and you have to respect something that has the confidence to laugh at itself.
I guess the idea is that Sybok’s pain-taking inspires loyalty and a belief in his quest. I don’t think Scotty ever succumbs: It’s very significant that while everyone else is staring rapt at the screen, he’s still being Scotty, tinkering with the transporter because that’s what’s important to him. Calling Sybok the villain is a bit reductive because, in a series of films that kept trying to top Khan with more and more OTT grandiose villains, here we have an antagonist who’s actually very sympathetic and who doesn’t get casually blown up in the last act. (Well, okay, he does. But he agreed to it.) Oh, and the plot synopsis misses out the beat that we don’t initially know the Klingons are there to rescue Kirk when they blast “God” at the end. Spock turning round in that swivel chair is a great moment.
@39: Well, Sulu’s sexuality is a question for four rewatches’ time, I believe. So I’ll just say that George Takei disagreed with Beyond’s decision because he’d always played Sulu as straight. And then draw your attention to the Mirror Universe as evidence that these things aren’t consistent across the multiverse. (Especially if you take into account all the novels where Sulu is very heterosexual.)
I mostly agree with the rewatch, but the film is also a big character assassination of Kirk. He behaves like the worst kind of thrill-seeking teenager when he risks his life for fun climbing a mountain, he’s shouty and aggressive (“Spock, shoot him!”), and he makes stupid plans – what would they have done if they hadn’t accidentally found some horses on Nimbus III? And wouldn’t the Kirk we know refuse to bring Sybok on board of his ship?
Oh, and by the way, I don’t believe that “each man hides a secret pain”.
@38/cosmotiger: Except that defeating “gods” by blasting them from orbit is exactly what they did in “Who Mourns for Adonais?” and “The Apple.”
@39/ragnar: How is it inconsistent? Maybe Sulu is bi. And many people’s sexuality is fluid; they may have different preferences at one point in their life than in another. Sexuality is a continuum, not a toggle switch. And, heck, maybe he really was just admiring Vixis’s muscle tone.
Also, if Sulu is younger than Kirk, that means he was born after the timeline divergence. Sexual preference is believed to be determined not by genetics, but by epigenetic factors during development, like hormone exposure levels in the womb. So the two versions of Sulu could’ve undergone different prenatal development and had different sexual inclinations as a result. Heck, it’s less of an inconsistency than Chekov being four years too old.
Seen “The Menagerie” lately? ;)
And would Pioneer 10 be “Federation property?” It was launched by NASA 189 years before the Federation existed. Presumably it would constitute fair salvage. And it was made with a plaque to be deciphered by any aliens that came into possession of it, suggesting that the makers relinquished any property claim to it.
I realized as I read this that I haven’t actually watched the whole movie in years (like a decade). Any time I watch through the Star Trek movies (what used to take a day, now requires a little more planning….), I essentially watch from Kirk on the mountain through the campfire, “Shut that d–n light off.” I take that as my cue to shut that d–n movie off, and proceed to Undiscovered Country.
Answering ragnarredbeard’s points in #39 one by one…..
1. First of all, the only thing we know is that Sulu is married to a man. He could be bisexual. Second of all, it’s absurd to ding this movie for a decision that won’t be made for another 25 years……
2. The netting makes sense in the abstract, for emergencies, but its placement is, as you say, bad planning.
3. Actually having a transmitter there makes perfect sense for exactly this situation: the ship has been taken over by hostile forces and you need to get a message out. In such a situation, the auxiliary bridge may not be available.
4. No argument. Honestly, the tendency to turn Spock into the best at absolutely everything is a tendency of Trek writers that I have always found tiresome.
5. Um, yes. Because Korrd is a general and Klaa is a captain of a tiny cruiser. If Klaa disobeys Korrd, the general would be within his rights to shoot him and put Vixis in charge. Klingons are very big on the chain of command.
6 & 7. Indeed.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Giving this a ‘1’ was kind. What a disaster of a film. I had mercifully forgotten the appalling fan dance until just now. Gack, what a nightmare.
Didn’t someone say that this is the movie where Kirk and God compare egos, and God loses? Wise words.
viqqi: as I said in the rewatch, it only got as high as a one because of the revelations about McCoy.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
BTW: In one of the most improbable cultural crossovers over, 2Pac actually sampled Sybok in a song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppFi_dFRpcc
Surely one of the only times Star Trek appears in rap, and it’s one of the franchise’s lowest points….
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the comment by Kirk at the end, that pretty much confirmed that his character is an atheist (or retconned him to be one – I’m not as well versed on the old TV show as most). It may not seem a big deal now, but as a teen, it floored me. That was something you didn’t mention at all in the Midwest town I grew up in if you didn’t want to receive hateful stares or worse.
The bald beetle browed alien was named J’onn. I never imagined anyone involved with this film would have read a single comic book with the Martian Manhunter. I guess I am wrong.
Anyway, the only thing to like about this film is David Warner’s voice. And we can get that elsewhere. But at least “stupid” is not the same as “dull.” TMP just barely edges this one out for least favorite Trek for its dullness.
Scotty opines in his log that the ship was assembled by monkeys
Well, I guess that explains the floor numbering in the turbolift shaft. The astute watcher will notice as Kirk, Spock and McCoy ascend upwards they pass, in turn, level 35, level 52, level 64, level 52 (!!), level 77, level 78, and level 78. (Did someone order an extra 78? Guess so.)
BTW, meant to say earlier, I believe it was actually the Okudas who named Admiral Bob as Robert Bennett in The Star Trek Encyclopedia. (A bit beyond their remit but at least they explained what they’re doing.)
@52: Huh. Curiously, I never interpreted it like that. It seemed to me that what Kirk says was a very Christian idea, that God isn’t remote on some distant planet, he’s in each other of us. (Not that I’m saying that’s a uniquely Christian idea, just that that was the belief I shared.) So I was slightly bemused when I first saw people putting a humanist spin on it. But hey, IDIC.
Mind you, you can never go wrong with the interpretation offered by Mystery Science Theatre 3000: “Maybe God isn’t out there, Bones. Maybe he’s standing right in front of you!”
When I was in college, just in the early stages of becoming a Trekker, this movie came on HBO. I only had a 12″ black&white tv with low picture resolution, so I couldn’t see how bad the visual effects were. I found it to be a halfway decent, but not great, story. As a result, I have an easier time tolerating it today. Notice I said tolerating. The movie is definitely deeply flawed.
@10/CLB:
“So much of the dumb stuff in Trek goes away if you look at it as an imperfect dramatization of the underlying reality.”
That takes way too much responsibility off the shoulders of the filmmakers. It’s their job to get as much correct as possible. If you have to do so many mental twists and backflips for the movie to work for you, that’s a BIG problem. Why would you even want to make the effort?
@22/CLB:
“As I recall, Dillard explained how Sybok modified the shields to get through the Barrier (using plans sent to him by The One), but she didn’t explain how they got to the center of the galaxy so quickly.”
Been a long time since I’ve read the novelization, but I believe Dillard also established that Sybok had a formula that increased the ship’s warp capabilities. It’s hard to believe she wouldn’t have addressed something like that, having explained so much else.
“it’s also a continuity problem, because the starship it’s in is the same refit design introduced in TMP, and in TMP we clearly saw that its shuttlebay interior looked completely different and was part of a much larger, open cargo complex that filled most of the secondary hull. So why would a ship of the upgraded design revert to an earlier type of shuttlebay?”
Presumably the Enterprise-A is not the same exact refit design as the TMP Enterprise.
That’s my rationale for why Scotty bonked his head–it’s a new Enterprise, and he doesn’t know it yet as well as he thinks he does.
There’s no reason why Starfleet’s designers couldn’t have come to the conclusion that the original design for the shuttle bay worked better.
(Real-world explanation: Shatner and co. were likely far more inclined to look to the original TV episodes for guidance than to TMP, which none of them was overly fond of.)
@24/Cybersnark
Some really good ideas!
“If you ask me, and you haven’t, I think this is a bad idea.”
They should have listened to Bones.
Bobby
@57/Amy Bisson: I never quite understood the perception that TFF’s visual effects were awful. True, they weren’t as good as the ILM work in the previous few movies or the Trumbull/Dykstra work in TMP, but by the standards of movies in general at the time, I would’ve called them average. They did the job adequately, without any glaring mistakes that I noticed.
As if the movie wasn’t already bad enough, they also used a cheap special effects house in New Jersey instead of ILM and it shows.
Set decoration was also laughable on many levels as they made such a poor attempt to disguise the Enterprise-D sets or match what we already knew about the previous identical ship.
I did a fairly lengthy and detailed rundown of Star Trek V (and I really did run it down) over at my blog a few years ago, so if you want to check it out:
http://glenngreenbergsgrumblings.blogspot.com/2011/11/star-trek-through-fresh-eyes-part-nine.html
In response to Keith’s review—I think he makes a very fair and accurate assessment. No real dissent from me.
I can’t defend the movie, and I can’t (and won’t) make excuses for it.
And yet, I also can’t bring myself to hate it, or to pretend it doesn’t exist. (And shame on The Autobiography of James T. Kirk for writing the movie off as a “fan film.” That just seemed very petty and mean-spirited to me.)
I’ll always feel a certain degree of affection and gratitude for the movie because it got me through a rough patch in my life, helping me to forget my problems for a couple of hours. So in that respect, it did its job.
And when all is said and done, it’s a visit with some old and beloved friends. No, it’s not the GREATEST visit with them, but let’s face it–not EVERY visit with old and beloved friends is going to be as good as the very best one.
Random thoughts:
* There was actually a great little moment in the script that was presumably filmed, and for some baffling reason, it got cut out of the movie. At the end, during the party scene, McCoy basically says to Spock, “Has it occurred to you that the barrier was put up not to keep us out, but to keep that thing in? Doesn’t that suggest the existence of a higher power?” And Spock replies, “I will say this, Doctor: we have yet to reach the final frontier.” Whoever made the suggestion to cut that bit out should be sent to the brig.
* I think back to how mature and dignified all of the regular characters came off in the previous movies, especially in The Wrath of Khan, and it’s hard to reconcile that with how they’re portrayed in The Final Frontier. They’re goofy in Star Trek V. They’re silly. They’re screw-ups. They come dangerously close to being cartoonish.
* I wasn’t offended by Uhura’s naked fan dance. Sure, it came about 20 years too late, but given the context of the scene, I felt it worked well enough.
* I also wasn’t really bothered by the strongly implied romance between Uhura and Scotty. Why not? Sure, it seemed to come out of nowhere, but it’s certainly wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.
* William Shatner did some of his best acting work ever in the previous three Star Trek films. But when he’s not reigned in by his director, his performances tend to be hammy—overblown, overdramatic, and overly stylized. He ends up providing fodder for everyone who lampoons him. Star Trek V features Shatner’s least effective performance as Kirk in any of the movies, because with himself as director, he’s off the leash as an actor. It’s not a terrible performance, but it hardly ranks among his best. He looks great though—he really got himself into shape.
* The special effects—oh lordy lordy lordy. I’m surprised Keith didn’t unload on them. But I get it—there was so many other things to address.
* Jerry Goldsmith—YAY! Shatner’s very best decision for this movie. It put a big smile on my face to hear the main theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture associated with the original crew again. I remember one movie reviewer stating that Star Trek V was so creatively bankrupt that it even stole the theme music from The Next Generation in a desperate attempt to somehow attach itself to its far better younger sibling and therefore latch on to its growing success. I felt like writing to this reviewer, “If you’re going to make an accusation like that, at least know what you’re talking about.” Goldsmith’s score, from start to finish, is absolutely great.
* The novelization by J.M. Dillard is one of my 15 favorite Star Trek novels. I bought it before the movie came out, plowed through it quickly, and enjoyed the experience thoroughly. Based on reading the novel, I was convinced that the movie was going to be one of the best in the series. Dillard did a masterful job adapting—and improving upon—David Loughery’s screenplay. Maybe Dillard should have written the movie, and Loughery could have done the novelization. (And yes, I thought Dillard was a better novelizer of the Star Trek movies than Vonda McIntyre was. Dillard had a better feel for capturing the Star Trek universe in prose. I would have loved to see her takes on II, III, and IV.)
@61/ChristopherLBennett, the shuttlecraft crash into the Enterprise landing bay is pretty awful from a special effects standpoint. It includes several continuity errors, as well as the appearance of the shuttle dramatically slowing in space while supposedly at full acceleration. I haven’t watched the movie in 25+ years, but that still sticks out in my mind. Overall, the entire movie had an air of cheapness about its special effects, though some were not as bad as critics claim (others, however, were every bitas awful as the critics claim). Furthermore, this is by far the worst Trek movie ever made
On an unrelated note, I was in Yosemite the day that the infamous “Kirk falls down the mountain” scene was filmed and recall that there were people in the park that day who reported a hiking accident after seeing the dummy (*no Shatner jokes please*) falling through the air.
The camping scenes are charming. That’s about it for this one, for me.
I have to be honest and say that I have always really, really hated the “What does God need with a starship?” line. It’s supposed to be devastatingly clever, but I find it to be a bit like asking, “What does God need with a Jewish maid in First Century BCE Roman Judea?” If you believe in such things (personally, I don’t, but live and let live), God might well have all kinds of mystifying but essential plans beyond the ken of mere mortals. “What does God need with a starship?” Maybe everything and nothing; maybe He just needs His children to make the effort and show their worthiness by showing up in one, because He’s God. God needs what God needs, baby.
So that bugged me. I went to see this one in the theatre with a friend who didn’t think it was as bad as it was and liked that line in particular, but the line bugged me.
“Row, Row, Row Your Boat” didn’t, however.
@64/zeeman2020: I don’t think they used a dummy. In fact, it’s actually listed in the film’s end credits that Ken Bates, the stunt double for Shatner in the El Capitan sequence, set a United States record for the highest-ever stunt fall using a descender — a cable rig that lets a stunt performer free-fall for most of the descent and then slows them safely before hitting the ground.
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Ken_Bates
@65/eric: I think you’re missing the point of Kirk’s question. The God entity’s conversation with Sybok made it clear that the entity was unduly interested in the starship as a way to “carry my power” beyond the Barrier. “God” didn’t need the ship for some abstract, unspecified use, but for the explicit purpose of leaving Sha Ka Ree. So Kirk recognized what that meant: that the entity was unable to leave without a starship. Which made it unlikely that it was actually God; it was just another of the many God-impersonating aliens Kirk had dealt with over the years. So “What does God need with a starship?” was not a theologically naive question about God in the abstract — it was a challenge of the entity’s claims. He was confronting the entity and letting it know he saw through its lies.
What annoyed me the most was that for once, the Enterprise was not the only Starfleet asset available, because there were other ships in the sector, and yet it never occurs to the admiral to send another ship as backup. That way, he could put his experienced captain in charge and have a functioning starship with a transporter. Does Starfleet have some sort of secret directive that precludes ever giving the Enterprise any help?
@66/ChristopherLBennett – thanks for that clarification about Ken Bates doing the stunt, as opposed to a dummy being thrown. Quite an impressive stunt. He deserves a hell of a lot of credit for having the nerve to take that fall. I either never knew or forgot in the ensuing years (I have tried to forget as much as I can about this travesty). From where I was in the park that day, all we saw was a black shape falling in the distance. Nobody traveling with me knew a movie was being filmed, as we had only arrived in the park that morning and in those pre-Internet and pre-cellphone days, entertainment gossip wasn’t a focus of most people’s existence; nor could we get instant information updates. The film shoot may have been mentioned in the local paper, but we didn’t see it. Nor apparently did the other groups in our vicinity, as everyone was talking about “the climbing accident” immediately afterwards
@67, a variant of that idea would be to simply put Kirk in temporary command of a different ship much like we saw with Commodore Decker or Captain Jellico. This, of course, does not happen because of, um, reasons. Of course, even that’s giving too much credit to the idea that Kirk specifically (excuse me, an “experienced captain”) is needed for the job. Given that the mission has diplomatic implications and Kirk’s recent history with Klingons, he’s probably among the worst choices for this mission. If we want to be more generous than this movie deserves, then perhaps we can assume good old Admiral Bob is with the faction that wants a war with the Klingons and hopes sending Kirk into the fray will cause one. That doesn’t quite work out, so the events of the next movie happen…
@66/ChristopherLBennett: No, I completely get that that’s what it’s supposed to be. The problem is that I really don’t think it works. Even in the context of Sybok’s exchange with the entity, the entity’s obsessions and request aren’t necessarily less “reasonable” from any of the things Earth deities have demanded from their followers over the course of human history.
The point of the scene is to establish that Kirk is far more clever than anyone else in the scene because he’s caught something Sybok and the others have missed–a perceived weakness or limitation of “God” that “God” shouldn’t have if this is really an omnipotent being. (One of the flaws of the movie, of course, being that much of it is about how Jim Kirk is wiser, smarter, sportier, fitter, and just generally-all-around-better than everyone else.) The problem here–again–is that the question isn’t actually that clever if you consider the possibility the entity is God (of course it isn’t, because Kirk is smart and wise, etc.), and compare the entity’s demands with, say, demands for a bull without defect, the blood of which shall be sprinkled around an altar, the bull to be skinned and cut into pieces and then the head and fat to be burned while the entrails are washed before also being burned so that God can enjoy the smell, f’r’instance; Earth’s gods have a history of making strange and specific demands and needing things you’d wonder why they’d ever need.
In the counterfactual where the entity is God, His questions about whether the starship can take him away might be some form of testing. Or just God being a jerk.
An interesting tangent to this is that Roddenberry himself almost certainly would have loved the idea that the unreasonable demands made by the deity of the Old Testament were evidence for that entity being “another of the many God-impersonating aliens.” This was basically the premise of “The God Thing.”
I’ll stand by the assertion that it’s a theologically naïve bit of scripting. Not the worst example of theologically naïve scripting in a science fiction film (I’m thinking of a movie whose title rhymes with “Mommy see us,” ahem), but I still think it’s pretty lousy.
My thoughts at the time
1. Wait god’s real? and you can FIND him?
2 their gonna try to deal with THAT in two hours? Well someone has guts.
3. Spock has a brother? Oh dear that smells a role-playing game character.
Personally I did’nt like it as much as 4 but MUCH better than 3.
@70/eric: As I already said, I don’t think your analogy works, because the entity wasn’t asking for a starship for some mysterious, arbitrary, and arcane reason. It explicitly stated what it needed the starship for, namely to carry its power beyond the barrier. And it’s not just what it said, but how. It took such an intense, probing interest in the starship that it was pretty clear the entity had a desperate need for a starship — for a means of escape, specifically — and wasn’t very good at cloaking that need.
Besides, Kirk was being skeptical, which is what intelligent, rational people do when faced with an extraordinary, unproven claim. Saying that his skepticism wasn’t clever because he wasn’t blindly credulous is contradictory. That’s the whole point of skepticism. Okay, yeah, sure, hypothetically, an actual God could make such an arbitrary demand as a “test,” but that hypothetical is not proof, because a fake God could just as easily make the same request. Just saying “Well, it could be” doesn’t rule out the alternatives, so it’s basically meaningless. Skepticism, demanding evidence, is how you choose between the possibilities.
After all, the purpose of asking a question is to prompt a response — to gather more information. That’s why asking questions is good, sometimes even if they’re “naive” questions (sometimes especially then). In this case, the entity’s response to Kirk’s simple question was to get defensive and hostile, attacking Kirk to silence him, which provided further evidence that it was deceitful — since an actual god wouldn’t feel so threatened by the slightest challenge to its story.
I’ve found this film to have its moments, and I like the premise, but there’s one plot hole that, if addressed, might have made a much better film:
Why didn’t Sybok just ask the Federation for a ship?
It’s on record that Vulcan telepathy has great reception if the sender is powerful enough (Hi V’Ger!), so I could see Sybok approaching the Federation with a report of having contact with a being that may or may not have connections to the legend of Sha Ka Ree. Framed right, he might have gotten a starship to go on an exploratatory mission to see if this legend might have some basis in fact. And what better ship and crew than the Enterprise?
We could have had some dramatic tension if Sybok had to hide his belief that said entity was God, and was discovered partway through their mission. Sybok’s “secret pain removal service” might have been useful in winning passage through areas of space that might not otherwise let a Federation ship go waltzing through – and might have added more conflict over the ethics of such an ability; especially if Sybok believes he’s doing people a favor by removing their pain. Heck, if you wanted the Klingons, just the news that Kirk was back in action would have brought glory-seekers out of the woodwork.
BoxOfficeMojo’s data claims that Trek V’s bookings were identical from week 1 to week 2 — when GHOSTBUSTERS II came out — and only down slightly in week 3, when BATMAN was out. There’s a case where the official numbers definitely mislead, because I know that of my half-dozen or so first-week Batman viewings, several were in rooms that one of the other movies had been yanked out of. (That was the first time I ever heard of the practice of letting the filmstrip snake down the hall between rooms when another print couldn’t be rented.)
1989 was as high-octane a summer as I can remember for franchise films; I have a feeling that even if V had been a much better film, its ceiling might not have been much higher.
Fan dance: My mom thought this was great because she’s Nichol’s age, pretty much. So I guess it never entered my head to be offended by it. It’s that whole “nudity is empowering” conundrum.
I liked the Bones and Spock flashbacks, as well as Kirk rejecting the “sharing” – but I always did wonder what his secret pain would be.
But a lot of the criticisms seem like there is a lot of rationalization around the fact that this is a straw man attack on God. They set it up as being some kind of transculturally valid deity and then do the regular hubris deflation Star Trek thing that makes for the most boring episodes.
I only started to dig Q after he had complications on Voyager (or, possibly, being in the Voyager series made even Q relatively interesting to me?) Because unbounded phenomenal cosmic power is about the most boring thing I can imagine. It removes any possibility of meaningful conflict.
Maybe it was a faster trip to the center of the galaxy because of gravity. :P
When I was a teen watching these movies, I guess I didn’t vastly prefer IV over this one because they both screamed cultural agenda. Though IV had a lot more funny one liners. My favorite as a kid was III because of the Spock/… uh, can’t remember the character’s name anymore, but Robyn Curtis.
One thing I liked about this movie were the Klingons.
I almost want more adventures of Captain Klaa in novelization.
@63/Glenn: “And shame on The Autobiography of James T. Kirk for writing the movie off as a “fan film.” That just seemed very petty and mean-spirited to me.”
And it doesn’t even make sense, because how would someone from tbe Roman planet know about the uniform change, for example?
I’ve been wondering why the author didn’t simply ignore the film. After all, that’s what he did with the third season (except The Enterprise Incident) and TAS.
@75/pooka: I think Kirk’s secret pain is something that happened on Tarsus IV. He must have experienced terrible things there, and he obviously doesn’t like to talk about it.
The movie is William Shatner writing fanfic with Kirk as his Mary Sue. I’ve never touched the novels “written” by Shatner on the assumption they’re the same thing.
But for all that, I like the concept of Sybok. Not Spock having a never before mentioned half-brother, but the idea that there are Vulcans out there who reject Surak’s teachings and believe pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories. It really brings the smug bastards down to Earth.
I also like Kirk’s “I’ve gone left when I should’ve gone right” speech. As ham-handed as it is, it gets to the heart of Star Trek: We are the product of our experiences, even the bad ones. Just as Picard’s career would’ve stalled if he hadn’t made the mistake of fighting a Nausicaan, so would Kirk’s life be completely different if he hadn’t witnessed Kodos the Executioners reign of terror, or seen the crew of the Farragut get slaughtered by an alien. And that’s why the Abrams films drive me crazy — Kirk grows up in completely different circumstances and becomes captain without any of those formative experiences, but he’s still effectively the same person because, as Spock explains, in the JJ-verse you’re just born that way. For all its flaws, TFF at least gets the philosophy right.
@krad: I am pretty confident Final Frontier was released in the midst of TNG’s second season. The movie opened in June, and they were still airing new episodes in July thanks to the writers’ strike the previous year which delayed the whole season.
Of course, there is no way Harve Bennett could pin the blame on TNG regardless. It was the fifth film, and it was going up against Indiana Jones, a Ghostbusters sequel, a Back to the Future sequel, a new James Cameron blockbuster, and top it off freaking Batman!
….and a Lethal Weapon sequel, which I’d forgotten.
I enjoy watching this. It’s not perfect but it has enough interesting moments, like the campfire scene, the jailbreak and the entire observation deck scene. mccoy and his father’s scene is one of my favourites in all of trek. i love additions this film gave to the universe, like the commando team, the shuttle, those rocket boots which i bloody love in the turbolift. yeah it’s numbered wrong but there’s always something wrong with ship internal continuity between films or even the same film. same with getting to the centre of the galaxy. TOS ships were a lot faster before TNG and it’s offspring made up new rules. i feel the same way about this film that i do about The Phantom Menace, is that it was okay but was one rewrite away from being a pretty great film, but at the end of the day I’m happy that it exists.
I’ve been waiting for this one as it’s easily my favourite of the original cast Star Trek films. Like Generations, I think it’s most reminiscent of the TV series it’s based on.
I’ve never understood the hatred for this film. I know it has its flaws, some of which are documented above and elsewhere in great detail, but there’s a lot to enjoy about this. The film looks and sounds fantastic and it’s a tremendous showpiece for – unsurprisingly – Kirk, Spock and especially McCoy.
Speaking about flaws, why does everyone complain about the Enterprise reaching the centre of the galaxy so quickly? The original Enterprise left the galaxy back in Where No Man Has Gone Before, an episode which explicitly states that there are “Earth bases” just several days’ warp from the edge of the galaxy.
@75/Pooka: There’s a lot to be said about the Uhura fan dance, but my first thought when I saw this was how interesting it was that Nichelle Nichols was doing the sexy-distraction-dance rather than a random crewperson in his or her twenties. Not that this mitigates the problems with the sequence, but in most other films the sequence would either be played for laughs or using a much younger dancer.
So – pity about the execution, but isn’t that the underlying story of Star Trek V? Nice ideas, pity about the execution. I do wonder how differently this film would have been received had some of Shatner’s original ideas been kept. Presumably it would be much more polarising had the god-alien actually turned out to *be* God, but did that film really have any more chance of being made than Gene Roddenberry’s original “In Thy Image” did? Shatner’s “Star Trek Movie Memories” details his original ideas and his anguish as more and more was cut and changed. It also suggests another reason for Roddenberry’s dislike for this particular film – essentially, Shatner was being allowed to make the film Roddenberry hadn’t been. For an alternative take, try George Takei’s “To the Stars” for an idea of how some of the other cast members felt…
Is it a good film? Star Trek V makes me feel like I’m watching Star Trek in a way that most of the other Star Trek films don’t, so I’ll rewatch V before any of the other Star Trek films. After all, I don’t want my pain taken away. I need my pain!
(PS: After all Spock’s guff about not seeking command, he’s quick to try and bump Kirk off by distracting him during a free climb!)
@83/Moorkus Rex: In the TV series, the characters were competent and nice, Kirk had a loyal crew, and they were explorers – nobody accused them of being afraid of the unknown.
I can’t figure out how Sybok came to believe they needed to fly to the centre of the universe. Penetrating the barrier thing bugged me too, the foreshadowing flopped on that one. And Klaa … worse Klingon villain ever? I was more excited to see how that confrontation turned out than whatever was waiting on the planet, but it fell out even more lame than the giant head.
I liked Peter David’s answer to the question: “What does God need with a starship?”
It’s the same answer for: “Why did the chicken cross the road?”
@78/SeanOHara: “And that’s why the Abrams films drive me crazy — Kirk grows up in completely different circumstances and becomes captain without any of those formative experiences, but he’s still effectively the same person because, as Spock explains, in the JJ-verse you’re just born that way.”
I don’t think that’s fair. Yes, Kelvin Kirk has the same potential that Prime Kirk has, but he’s in danger of failing to fulfill it, and the first two movies are about his journey to outgrow his rebel-without-a-cause arrogance and recklessness and learn how to be a better leader, with Pike and both Spocks guiding him in the right direction. Sure, the first movie rushes him into the captain’s chair way too quickly, but the second shows how that hasty promotion leads him to get cocky and make mistakes, and its events humble him and force him to grow up more. It’s only in Beyond that he’s finally become essentially the same man we know from Prime, and that’s because of the experiences he went through in the first two movies.
@79/Eduardo: You’re right — TNG’s second season continued into the week of July 17, 1989. However, ST V came out during a roughly one-month gap between “Up the Long Ladder” in late May and “Manhunt” in late June. So it was during the season, but there technically wasn’t simultaneous competition during the first couple of weeks of the film’s release.
@83/Moorkus Rex: “Speaking about flaws, why does everyone complain about the Enterprise reaching the centre of the galaxy so quickly? The original Enterprise left the galaxy back in Where No Man Has Gone Before, an episode which explicitly states that there are “Earth bases” just several days’ warp from the edge of the galaxy.”
Since the galaxy is disk-shaped and spaceships can move 3-dimensionally rather than being stuck in a flat plane, Earth is only about 1000 or so light-years from the nearest face of the thin stellar disk. (Rather, that’s its scale height, the distance at which its density has decreased by a factor of e, or about 2.7. There is no actual edge, just a progressive thinning out with distance. Travel 1000-1300 ly perpendicular to the galactic plane, and you’ll find the stars nearly 3 times sparser. At twice that distance, they’ll be about 7 times sparser. And so on, exponentially.) But Earth is 25-28,000 light-years from the galactic center.
TNG, DS9, and VGR all consistently asserted that Starfleet ships would take decades to cover galactic distances, typically on the order of 1000 ly/year (e.g. Voyager needing c. 70 years to travel 70,000 ly). TNG: “The Nth Degree” established that the Enterprise needed an advanced space-folding drive to reach the galaxy’s central bulge; if they could’ve done it with normal warp drive, the events of the episode would’ve been unnecessary. Granted, this would put the nearest “edge” of the galactic disk maybe a year or more away from Earth, but the Enterprise in TOS was usually quite some distance from Earth to begin with. And it’s long been unofficially assumed that actual warp velocity varies depending on local space and subspace conditions, so along some routes it would take less time to cover that distance than along others. I tend to figure that heavy warp traffic in a given region affects local subspace in ways that “smooth it out” so that well-traveled routes would allow faster journeys than uncharted routes. It helps to justify why Klingon, Cardassian, Romulan, etc. ships in DS9 were able to travel between each other’s territories so much faster than they should’ve been able to.
@87, that “subspace smoothing” is an intriguing idea. If true that suggests a civilization that has been warp-capable for a while would find it quite challenging to defend their homeworld. Every time warp is used in your system, it’s just a little bit easier for an enemy to show up with an unexpected armana. That may help explain just how, during the Dominion War era, the Breen were capable of pulling off a surprise attack on Earth.
According to Leonard Nimoy’s autobiography, I Am Spock, Shatner wanted to make Kirk even MORE heroic by having Spock betray Kirk to follow Sybok, so that Kirk would be resisting Sybok single-handedly. Nimoy refused to play that, saying that Spock would never betray Kirk, and not only had this been very well established during the TV era, but how weirdly ungrateful would Spock have to be to betray Kirk right after Kirk risked his career for Spock in order to bring Spock back to life. Evidently Shatner was willing to destroy the character of everyone but himself, as long as it made him look heroic; thank heavens Nimoy stood up to him, or this movie would have been even worse Trek than it already was.
In his book Remembering Leonard, Shatner tries to blame Nimoy for the failure of this movie, saying that Nimoy wouldn’t allow Shatner to do whatever he wanted with Spock, so he didn’t get to fully implement his vision. Well, Shatner, that’s because Nimoy GOT Star Trek … and you obviously don’t (or at least, didn’t in 1989).
I was shocked, not just at how bad this movie is, but at how mean-spirited the movie is towards its characters. Spock misuses a common word — Spock, who knows pretty much everything? Scotty doesn’t know the ship — Scotty, who rebuilt the damned thing with his own hands? Sulu and Chekov get lost — Sulu and Chekov, who’ve made lots of “no one but you could have done that” maneuvers with the ship? It’s as if Shatner wanted to tear down every character but his own, the better to glorify his own self.
Shatner really did do an excellent job of portraying Kirk during the first two seasons of TOS. And even in the third season, he mostly hammed it up when the script was terrible, thus making the bad episodes more entertaining than they might otherwise be. But with this one movie, he confirmed all those stories from his co-stars about how focused on self-aggrandizement he was.
I compare this to the first movie Nimoy made — in which each character was given something important to do — and the contrast is stunning. Nimoy was generous with the minor characters, and Shatner was nasty to them.
Kirk is a both a great captain and an excellent human being. Sadly, Shatner … isn’t.
@45/ Christopher: Who Mourns for Adonis was actually one of the episodes I was thinking of in contrast to STV. True, Kirk eventually phasers Apollo’s temple from orbit, but only after an entire episode (a few days time for the characters, I believe) spent trying to understand what the deal is with this alien being. In STV, Kirk calls for the torpedoes after about five or ten minutes.
While It is very much true that the non-violent approach often failed with the various “gods” Kirk encountered, I think he has an obligation as a Starfleet captain to do his best to resolve the situation non-violently, and he sure doesn’t seem to try here.
@45 – Chris: Do remember that it has been stated (I think it was Pegg) that the changes in the Kelvin timeline rippled forwards and backwards from the divergence point. I stand by your analysis, though.
@53 – Simon: The “J’onn” thing might very well be mere coincidence.
@63 – Glenn: The problem with Uhura’s dance is that it’s the (as far as I remember) only thing of worth she does in the movie. This is a character that has shown to be capable in many things, and she’s reduced to that. It’s sad, and it would have been as sad 20 years earlier.
@80 Eduardo Jencarelli: BTTF II didn’t come out until autumn. I have very vivid memories of that summer because my father was in the Army and had just been assigned to the US for the first time. He had a month’s leave before he had to report to duty, and we went to see every major movie that summer — Star Trek (I made sure that was our first movie, even though my uncle told us we should avoid it), Ghostbusters II, Batman, Indy, Parenthood, Karate Kid III, Honey I Shrunk the Kids. We were settled into our new home and I’d started elementary school before BTTF II came out.
#89
I don’t think Shatner was being mean-spirited in the way he wrote the characters in TFF; I think he was trying to repeat the comedic beats of TVH (and therefore its success) and he failed miserably due to the shift in context. Whereas the comedy in TVH came from the crew being out of their element, in TFF they’re very much in their element and it just ends up making them look stupid and clumsy.
Everybody reacts to bad movies differently, depending on age, familiarity with the characters, the type of badness, etc. Star Trek V is very bad, and not really defensible, but it’s bad in such a way that I’d rather watch it than many of the other bad Star Trek movies. I agree with the poster above that defends V and Generations as being the most like their respective TV shows (ignoring the character assassination). Maybe it is because of that, but I find that both movies are bad in a more enjoyable way than TMP, Insurrection, Nemesis, or STID. Those movies are just utter trash.
— Good Tier—-
Wrath of Khan, Undiscovered Country, Voyage Home
— Mediocre Tier—-
First Contact, ST09, Search For Spock
— Bad Tier —
Generations, Final Frontier
— Trash Tier —
TMP, Insurrection, Nemesis, STID
(haven’t seen Beyond)
I remember reading an interview with DeForest Kelley in 1989 in which he said he had been strongly against filming the scene with McCoy and his father. Kelley said he felt the scene was antithetical to what the character was about — that a doctor as dedicated as McCoy would never, ever aid in the taking of a life. ( I disagree strongly, and feel as krad does that it’s one of the best parts of the film.) Kelley said he had ultimately “found a way to play” the scene — which I always assumed must have been roughly commensurate to the “way” Roger Daltrey had “found” to sing “My Generation” on The Who’s first farewell tour after having initially rejected the idea as ludicrous: closing his eyes and counting the money.
Eduardo: You are correct, and I was wrong. However, The Final Frontier was released during a break in airing new episodes, as the week before its release was when “Manhunt” aired, and then there was a break until the end of June when “The Emissary” was broadcast. So Paramount actually synchronized things nicely.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@@@@@94. Drunken5yearold, check out Beyond. I actually put it in the “Good” tier. I put First Contact there as well, so take that for what its worth.
Steve: I have all the respect in the world for Kelley as an actor, but that anecdote is a reminder that he was an actor and not a writer. The whole point of that scene was that that was why McCoy became the doctor we saw. Kelley was seeing McCoy as always being a great doctor all the time just because, but that’s, well, not that interesting. Learning that he had that experience as a younger man shows what drives him to be the doctor that he is now. It’s illuminating to his character, and I’m glad he “found a way” to play it, because it’s one of the character’s best moments, and that’s up against some very stiff competition……..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Did anyone here read the novel “Mutiny on the Enterprise?” It has a similar concept: an alien comes on board and turns the crew against Kirk (in the novel it was through “sonic persuasion”).
@13 KRAD: I read an interview with Shatner where he blamed the poor box office on “Batman.” I never bought that, either. Eighteen years ago, movie tickets weren’t as expensive as they are now; I never heard of SF/Fantasy/Adventure fans attending one movie and not the other, if they were interested in both. Even now, we’re not talking Broadway musicals here.
I never knew they wanted Sean Connery for Sybok. Someone I saw the film with thought it WAS Connery.
@CLBennett: I agree that it was good to hear Goldsmith’s music again. I also do like the fact that this film had them exploring, even if the details were (extremely) scientifically problematic. I think in general the series got too into politics and too far away from exploration (the next film being part of that problem, though I enjoyed it at the time). So I have to give it props for that.
But there are indeed many problems, especially the dialogue (“gravity is foremost on my mind!”). In the biography of Roddenberry by–I think–David Alexander, it details GR’s correspondence in which he tried to get Shatner to abandon or change it (especially not making Kirk the one smart guy), and GR also complaining to Asimov and Clarke about it.
I do remember enjoying the novel, especially for some expanded memory sequences and Klingon scenes (though KRAD’s IKS Gorkon segments unquestionably are much better).
As far as box office, I’m trying to remember: By 1989, how widespread would a film’s opening actually be? I grew up in a relatively small town in MN, with only two theaters with five screens between them in the 1980s, and I know that, e.g., the original Star Wars didn’t actually open in my hometown until July; and the even smaller MN town where I went to college around the time STV came out only had one theater with one screen, so you can imagine the delays there.
As for STV itself, I don’t remember how I felt when I saw it in the theater, but these days I find it darned near unwatchable — give me TMP any day of the week, month or year.
@93/CaseyJones: I agree, although I don’t think the shift in context was the only problem. From what I’ve heard about Shatner, he seems to be rather fond of silly jokes. So when he tries to do comedy, the result is bound to be something like TFF. And as I wrote in comment #44, he destroys Kirk’s character just as much as everyone else’s.
#102
Right, he does have a goofy sense of humor.
The movie also makes Starfleet look much more incompetent than any other movie or episode. Not only are their decision making skills suspect (typical for admirals), but their technology can barely hold itself together. The Enterprise is a lemon—perhaps borrowing a page from The Empire Strikes Back and the Falcon’s tech problems. But even the captain’s log recorder device is a piece of junk! How does that happen?
Can a post-scarcity society suffer budget cuts? ;-)
For me, the highlight of the film was Jerry Goldsmith’s score. Separated from the film, it’s my favorite Trek score and when I’m in the mood to listen to a film score album, this is usually my go to pick. It’s such a shame the great music wasn’t better served with a better film. I love the action pieces and the sheer beauty of the epic score over the opening credits. I think Goldsmith’s later scores for the TNG films just felt like way too many recycled themes and lacked originality, but here the return to his TMP theme meshed well with the new themes at play in this film feeling fresh and gorgeous. Easily one of my favorite places to enjoy this score is in the car.
Additionally, I loved the look of the bridge set. It was definitely influenced by the more warm and inviting look of the TNG bridge and I wish it’s look had carried forward into ST:VI.
@101/hoopmanjh: By 1989 I think pretty much everything was opening wide; we’re well into the multiplex era by then in the cities and I remember larger films heading further into the hinterlands.
Interestingly, BoxOfficeMojo says Search for Spock, The Voyage Home, and Generations had the second-widest openings in 1984, 1986, and 1994 respectively — behind Beverly Hills Cop I, II, and III respectively. Paramount’s distribution network was powerful indeed.
(I remember writing a paper in 1990 about how Paramount was trying to force all the dollar second-run houses to charge at least $3.50; never did find out how that wound up.)
(Incidentally, that’s no error above with Voyage Home’s year — it was a 1986 holiday holdover and appears to have had the second-most bookings in 1987. In 1986 it was third behind two Stallone films.)
I meant to say “that’s AN error above.” Third best in 1986, second best in 1987. Sigh. It’s Friday…
Gotta admit, I like this film. I just don’t love it. Yes it is very flawed, but still more watchable than The Motionless Picture.
Some definite high points. Jerry Goldsmith works his usual orchestral magic turning in what is possibly his finest score for a Trek film (and my personal favorite). The humor this time around IS more forced than before, but there are some gems. McCoy’s lament that he liked Spock better before he died, or Kirk’s observation that the reason Spock’s rocket boots fail to keep them aloft while making an escape “Must be all those marshmellons” are genuinely funny and played well.
Plenty of lows though too. Cynthia Gouw is laughable as Romulan Rep Caithlin Dar, the 23rd century equivalent of London Tipton from Disney’s The Suite Life of Zach and Cody, and most of the Klingons in this film come across as overly-muscled schoolyard bullies. David Warner is wasted in his role. Thank God he was redeemed in The Undiscovered Country.
It is clear that Paramount decided to cheap off on this film, and the effects budget was hardest hit. Unable to afford Industrial Light & Magic, Shatner was forced to rely on a more modest effects house and it shows. While the effects are not terrible —save for the less than spectacular effects of the “God thing” at the films climax— they just do not hold up to the usual ILM standards we came to expect from the last few film entries.
I may be one of the few, but I’ve always liked the Scotty and Uhura flirtation in this film. It’s pretty cute, and the idea that people who’ve known each other a long time and been through a lot together might develop feelings for each other works a lot better for me than a lot of the other original series attempts at romance.
Eugenia: Oh, a relationship between Scotty and Uhura would be fine in theory, but it was just so totally out of left field and nothing was done with it after, either. It was just weird……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@108/authorjjmadden
Actually, ILM was just unavailable, so Paramount had to go with an alternative (much worse) effects company. It really, really shows.
I think part of the reason I don’t mind V is that I haven’t really seen any of TOS, so I don’t care about the things that seem off to other people. I kind of like the goofy fun and jokes, even if it is a bit forced. I think it’s way better than watching endless, boring CGI. Also, I did watch TNG, which might be why I find some on the sins in Insurrection and Nemesis less forgivable than here.
Also do All starship captatins do dangerous things on their time off? Maybe Kirk spends his time looking for the best coffee and chicken sandwich.
The fan dance was very important and had to happen, cause otherwise Futurama couldn’t have mocked it years later. They were just planning far ahead…
@@@@@112. ChocolateRob, the Temporal Cold War strikes again…
The Final Frontier was the very first Star Trek production I’ve ever watched, back when I was a kid.
Given my age, I was appropriately wowed by what I saw. A captain climbing a steep rock face with no equipment, a crew going from a campfire (with a vulcan using the coolest rocket boots, no less) to boarding a state-of-the-art starship to flying towards the center of the galaxy to meet a potential god? It floored me back then.
Ever since then, you could say I’ve seen more Star Trek, and have formed a more defined opinion. It’s not as strong as it once was, and it has its flaws, especially compared to other films and especially the shows.
Having said that, I still enjoy the film to this day.
If there’s one thing I feel Final Frontier gets more right than any other film is the Kirk/Spock/McCoy friendship triad. None of the other films spend significant time with the big three together as a functioning unit. The Motion Picture had Spock going a journey of his own, and Kirk was consumed with taking the ship from Decker. Wrath of Khan keeps Spock apart from Kirk and McCoy for much of the film, with only Carol’s Genesis presentation as an excuse to have a scene with all three. Voyage Home did have McCoy questioning Kirk bringing Spock back to duty so soon, but it otherwise kept McCoy apart for most of the journey. And Undiscovered Country didn’t have Spock interacting with McCoy at all.
To me, this is the one film that mostly remembers their TOS dynamic, how they function as a unit. We have the campfire scene, which is essential. We also get their attempts to regain control of the ship, and for once we get Kirk taking the adversarial side on his relationship with Spock, and McCoy being forced to be the mediator. Not only does Spock betray Kirk, putting a dent on their friendship, but Sybok actually manages to break through to his brother and McCoy, literally driving a wedge between them and Kirk. To me, this is why the movie works.
Another major advantage this film has is Jerry Goldsmith. I consider it to be his most mature and complete score, every bit as memorable as his TMP and First Contact tracks. It ranks up there with his best work. To me, the main theme is the definitive Trek theme, even moreso than the Alexander Courage TOS theme. The scenes of the landing party exploring Sha Ka Ree are some of my favorites due to that theme.
While I feel the crew gets a bit shortchanged, there’s probably more material concerning them buried in editing. Shatner’s was aiming for a longer cut, and Harve Bennett slashed entire scenes to please the studio’s demand for a short runtime. It’s one of the shortest Trek films in existence thanks to that misguided decision.
Regarding Uhura’s fan dance, it comes across as gratuitous, but i doesn’t seem as if either the character or Nichelle Nichols had much of a problem in doing so. One could argue it’s a form of empowerment, even if it seems too sexist.
I never had much of a problem with the visual effects. Bran Ferren’s work isn’t up to the usual quality of Doug Trumbull or ILM’s efforts, but I still feel it’s perfectly adequate for 1989. If anything, I’ll take this film’s visual effects over any of the Ghostbusters films (not counting the new one, for obvious reasons). Plus, Zimmerman’s visual design and Laszlo’s cinematography really put this film far ahead of the previous entries. This is the first one that actually looks like a feature film since the original one (and parts of Voyage Home).
And then we have Sybok. It’s easy to use the brainwashing argument the way McCoy initially does. Shatner was supposedly going for the televangelist angle when developing the character. Here’s the thing: Sybok is completely believable. To me, the character truly believes in his cause, and in what he is preaching. He behaves as someone truly committed and who never once displays a shred of false intentions. At the same time, he seems to be in complete peace with his own emotions, unlike any other Vulcan. Does he truly take away their pain? I can’t really tell, but he gives them the necessary comfort and support. And they promptly follow him, regardless of their beliefs. I find this to be far more complicated than simple brainwashing. An issue I feel could have been further explored, had the movie been 20-30 minutes longer.
And when he finds out the truth about what lies in the heart of Sha Ka Ree, his despair and feeling of betrayal are palpable. While Connery would have been an interesting choice to say the least, I applaud Shatner for going with Lawrence Luckinbill. He nails the role and brings it the necessary gravitas, emotion and conviction. He even brings some much needed nuance. The scene where Kirk accuses Sybok of being mad is priceless because for a moment it seems as if he’s actually questioning it himself.
And then there’s James T. Kirk. This is a broken person. The movie never tries to hide it. McCoy said it clear. These are very lonely people, who only have one another for company. Spending a lifetime in service of Starfleet ought to do that.
And at the same time, Kirk has made a lot of mistakes in life, and accumulated a lot of regrets. Losing his brother, losing Edith, losing Spock, losing David, losing his command, his ship. The list goes on and on. After a lifetime of cheating death, Kirk refuses to take yet another easy path away from the pain. To me, this is one of Kirk’s better moments. It’s also him at his most flawed.
And needless to say, the movie reveals an awful lot about McCoy and what he is the way he is. The euthanasia reenactment gets me every time. It’s too bad Harve Bennett wasn’t able to get Starfleet Academy made after this film, since this McCoy plotline was going to be a part of it.
The Klingons aren’t particularly deep in this film, but they get the job done. And you get to see what Cooper was going for in General Korrd, and how that performance of a broken old man would ultimately inform his second role as K’mpec.
It’s not a perfect film, and there are plenty of galaxy-sized holes, but I do admire its sincerity and willingness to explore these characters. Plus, it gives us the rare instance of having the crew actually explore the unknown. The only other film to do so this directly was the first one.
@114/Eduardo: “Bran Ferren’s work isn’t up to the usual quality of Doug Trumbull or ILM’s efforts, but I still feel it’s perfectly adequate for 1989. If anything, I’ll take this film’s visual effects over any of the Ghostbusters films (not counting the new one, for obvious reasons).”
I’m surprised. The first Ghostbusters‘ visual effects were done by the company founded by ILM veteran Richard Edlund after he struck out on his own. I felt they were quite excellent for the time, up to the same level as ILM. I don’t remember having a problem with the sequel’s FX either.
“The scene where Kirk accuses Sybok of being mad is priceless because for a moment it seems as if he’s actually questioning it himself.”
Oh, yes, I loved the way Luckinbill played that line. He could’ve done “Am I?” in the classic cackling-villain way, as a defiant rhetorical question, but instead he showed doubt, a willingness to question himself. That was one of the most important things that made Sybok a nuanced and sympathetic character.
@116/Christopher: My problem with that first Ghostbusters is that the effects feel rather cartoony and out of place. Some of the NYC shots look very much like built models or matte paintings. And then there are the ghosts themselves. They look visibly animated and superimposed. Maybe that’s what Edlund was really going for, given the tone of the film itself, but for me it felt jarring and artificial, especially being released after Return of the Jedi, which I felt really raised the bar for visual effects you couldn’t quite tell whether they were real or not for the most part. And I also feel the second film doesn’t really improve on that regard.
Maybe it’s the fact that they used a lot of old-school animation techniques to create the ghosts. I actually feel the use of computer animation benefitted the recent third film in this regard, in which they feel more realistic in spite of losing the cartoony feel of the original films.
The ghosts in GB are supposed to look cartoony and artificial, or rather, not natural, as in, supernatural. I remember the effects for both films being top notch for the time.
@116/Eduardo: Edlund was the visual effects supervisor on both Return of the Jedi and Ghostbusters. They were consecutive projects by the same guy, although they had different people doing the stop motion and matte paintings. I didn’t really see that much difference in quality between them.
And yeah, movie FX back then looked like models and matte paintings and animation. That’s what they were, and that’s what they looked like, and that was their charm. Nobody would ever confuse a tauntaun for a living animal. But it performed enough like one that audiences were willing to suspend disbelief.
At the time, Ghostbusters‘ effects were anything but “old-school.” They were state-of-the-art, and the movie was a 1985 Oscar nominee for its effects, along with 2010 and the winner, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. After all, digital FX at the time were primitive; perhaps you’ve seen the video game-like CGI in The Last Starfighter, a movie that came out a month after Ghostbusters. They weren’t even able to make rigid objects look realistic yet, let alone animate anything fluid or spectral. (Although a year later, Young Sherlock Holmes would break ground with a CG-animated hallucination of a stained-glass knight coming to life.) Computers were used in visual effects, but mainly for motion control, to make sure that the camera moved consistently on multiple passes so that there could be a moving viewpoint in composite shots.
And MaGnUs is right — this was a comedy movie in which the creature effects represented unnatural entities, so they weren’t trying for a prosaic, realistic look. The cartooniness was a design choice.
@109/Eugenia Doran: “I may be one of the few, but I’ve always liked the Scotty and Uhura flirtation in this film. It’s pretty cute, and the idea that people who’ve known each other a long time and been through a lot together might develop feelings for each other works a lot better for me than a lot of the other original series attempts at romance.”
Yes! I liked it too, and for the same reasons. I can easily imagine that Scotty and Uhura have become gradually closer in the years before this film. They are the ones who have never been away – Kirk, Spock and McCoy all have left Starfleet at some point, Chekov was away for the last years of the five-year-mission and later became the Reliant’s first officer, Sulu raises a daughter and is perhaps already interested in his own captaincy. But Uhura and Scotty seem to be content to just do their jobs. They also share common interests – Uhura sings, and Scotty plays the bagpipes. They are both fond of their respective cultural heritage, judging from the way they adorn their cabins. And Uhura seems to be technically inclined too, given the scene in “Who Mourns For Adonais?” where she repairs the communications console.
I’d say that Uhura gets the best treatment of all the characters in the film. She doesn’t fall off a rock, or get lost in the woods, or bump her head, or have silly dialogue. She’s competent, friendly and on top of things throughout. Even the fan dance isn’t supposed to ridicule her, it’s supposed to ridicule the guards. The only misstep is that she falls under Sybok’s influence. Which brings me to my next point:
@89/Corylea: “According to Leonard Nimoy’s autobiography, I Am Spock, Shatner wanted to make Kirk even MORE heroic by having Spock betray Kirk to follow Sybok, so that Kirk would be resisting Sybok single-handedly.”
I recently had the thought that this could actually have improved the film, if it had been done well (i.e. not as a means to “make Kirk even more heroic”). Spock and McCoy resist Sybok so easily, it makes the rest of the crew look bad in comparison. If everybody who had his pain taken away, or whatever it is Sybok does, had become his follower, the situation would have been more like “This Side of Paradise”. It could also have explained why Kirk is the only one who questions the god creature – not because he’s the smartest or the least respectful, but because at that point he is the only one who doesn’t see the world through Sybok’s eyes.
@114/Eduardo: “And then there’s James T. Kirk. This is a broken person. The movie never tries to hide it. McCoy said it clear. These are very lonely people, who only have one another for company.”
Is that really true? Kirk has been portrayed as having lots of friends in the TV show – collegues, former lovers, people like Tom Leighton (okay, he died). He also has a nephew, or three. Spock is more reserved, but at least he has his parents and Saavik, and the knowledge that Scotty, Uhura, Sulu and Chekov were all willing to give up their careers to get him back. I think it’s fitting that it is McCoy, and not Kirk or Spock, who complains that “other people have families”. Although even he has a daughter.
@115/JanaJansen: The way I see it, Kirk’s had colleagues, acquaintances, and other officers he’s been friendly with. All professional, all part of the job. And of course the flings and love affairs. But in terms of real friendship or companionship, I’ve never seen Kirk manage to live an actual life beyond the mission. Therefore his attachments have been limited to Spock, McCoy and the Enterprise itself. They’re the only ones to whom he can express his deepest feelings and doubts.
Broken may be a harsh adjective, but I feel Kirk truly sacrificed his personal life because he no longer knew how to settle down or learn how to do so (not unlike Picard). Having spent all these years in space, serving Starfleet, definitely changed him. That’s actually a plot point in Star Trek Beyond. Kirk becoming an Admiral was an attempt to try and reclaim that sense of routine and normalcy you don’t get when you’re so far away from home. It’s also the reason Carol asked him to keep David away from his life, which he honored.
By the time we get to Final Frontier, we get a Kirk who’s faced a lot of challenges, and lost some of the dearest people in his life, including a son he barely got to know. And he’s old, the years passing him by. At this point, I feel all he has is the ship and his two friends. The end of the previous film made it clear he never felt more at home than when he boarded the new Enterprise-A.
Plus, George’s surviving children would be adults by this point, living their own lives. And Kirk would stay away, given the memories of losing his brother.
McCoy had a bitter divorce, rarely visits his daughter or even mentions her. Spock has always sought to be as far away from his father as he could, given his disapproval.
@120/Eduardo: It’s possible to see it that way, but it’s equally possible to see it differently.
Spock has come to a tentative understanding with his father in “Journey to Babel”, and it has been reinforced in TVH. We don’t know if McCoy “rarely visits his daughter” or if Kirk “would stay away” from his nephews. Perhaps he does the opposite, perhaps he spends as much time with them as his job allows.
The Kirk we see in TOS is very sociable and makes friends easily, and the fact that Spock, at that time a misfit who is “at home nowhere except Starfleet” (according to his mother), becomes his life-long best friend says something positive about both characters. Assuming that they spend time together because they have to, because they have no one else left, diminishes their friendship in my eyes. The same is true, to a lesser extent, about the friendship between Kirk and McCoy. It’s true that we don’t see any of the characters interact with anyone outside the main cast in the film era, but that could be because they spend most of their lives between films. All we get are glimpses.
This was my first ever Trek experience at the cinema at age 10 since I had become engrossed in all things Star Trek beginning with Next Gen having premiered two years earlier. I went with my dad. I don’t think I went on the premiere weekend because I recall the theater being relatively empty.
I was super excited to see this film. There was no internet back in ’89 so in lieu of that I had Starlog magazine and Star Trek: Communicator – The Official Fan Club magazine, the advance trailers, and scenes of the movie revealed on the local news movie reviews telecasts to whet my appetite. Even as a relatively easy to please 10 year old this flick was a big letdown. Though I was 10, the humor was still beneath me and more suitable for a 5 year old, the SFX were horrendous, the Klingons weren’t scary, and the whole thing just felt sloppy. The only things I really liked were the set design (because the Enterprise-A so much resembled the Enterprise-D), the wonderful Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack (one of the first ever cassettes I got for myself – remember those?), the Spock and McCoy pain flashback scenes, and Luckinbill’s acting/character. I know there have been rumblings in fan circles about how much this film could use a director’s cut which could probably help the film out at least a little bit like fixing editing mistakes and redoing the SFX, but alas, I don’t think that will ever happen. At least Shatner didn’t direct the next film.
@122/GarretH: Yeah, I never bought the argument that a director’s cut would help, because apparently it mainly would’ve entailed adding stuff like the rock-monster battle at the end, which I think would’ve made the movie even sillier. (I mean, come on, it’s supposed to be a philosophical epic about the search for God, and it ends up with a guy battling a rock monster?) What the movie needed was to have a few things taken out, like the “center of the galaxy” references and the silly turboshaft sequence and the whole Scotty-injury bit.
Apropos of nothing, another incongruity with the Scotty-hits-his-head bit — it’s clearly played for laughs, but he obviously suffers a concussion or some other serious injury, given that he ends up in Sickbay
Scotty banging his head and ending up in sickbay cannot be all that serious. It took McCoy only three minutes to heal Pavel in the previous movie of a much more serious head injury using only a field kit.
I thought I’d posted this already but I can’t find my original comment, so here goes…
I’ve been waiting for this one as it’s easily my favourite of the original cast Star Trek films. Like Generations, I think it’s most reminiscent of the TV series it’s based on.
I’ve never understood the hatred for this film. I know it has its flaws, some of which are documented above and elsewhere in great detail, but there’s a lot to enjoy about this. The film looks and sounds fantastic and it’s a tremendous showpiece for – unsurprisingly – Kirk, Spock and especially McCoy.
Speaking about flaws, why does everyone complain about the Enterprise reaching the centre of the galaxy so quickly? The original Enterprise left the galaxy back in Where No Man Has Gone Before, an episode which explicitly states that there are “Earth bases” just several days’ warp from the edge of the galaxy and at least one lithium cracking station reachable even without warp.
There’s a lot to be said about the Uhura fan dance, but my first thought when I saw this was how interesting it was that Nichelle Nichols was doing the sexy-distraction-dance rather than a random crewperson in his or her twenties. Not that this mitigates the problems with the sequence, but in most other films the sequence would either be played for laughs or using a much younger dancer.
So – pity about the execution, but isn’t that the underlying story of Star Trek V? Nice ideas, pity about the execution. I do wonder how differently this film would have been received had some of Shatner’s original ideas been kept. Presumably it would be much more polarising had the god-alien actually turned out to be God, but did that film really have any more chance of being made than Gene Roddenberry’s original “In Thy Image” did? Shatner’s “Star Trek Movie Memories” details his original ideas and his anguish as more and more was cut and changed. It also suggests another reason for Roddenberry’s dislike for this particular film – essentially, Shatner was being allowed to make the film Roddenberry hadn’t been. For an alternative take, try George Takei’s “To the Stars” for an idea of how some of the other cast members felt…
The novelisation adds several interesting nuances: one example is after Kirk’s “I lost a brother once. I was lucky, I got him back.” line. In the novel, Kirk clearly means Spock whilst knowing Spock and McCoy will at first think of Sam.
Is this a good film? Star Trek V makes me feel like I’m watching Star Trek in a way that most of the other Star Trek films don’t, so I’ll rewatch V before any of the other Star Trek films. After all, I don’t want my pain taken away. I need my pain!
PS: after all Spock’s guff about not seeking command, he’s quick to try and bump Kirk off by distracting him during a free climb of El Capitan.
@126/Moorkus Rex: Your original comment is #83.
@127/JanaJansen: yes, I see it now. For some reason when I loaded “more comments” today it only loaded up to seventy-something even after a few refreshes. I see it now though, apologies for the double.
@84/JanaJansen: in the TV series and the other Trek films, the characters teased and made fun of each other. Are they really so much nastier to each other here? As for (dis)loyalty, the crewmembers who follow Sybok do so after he uses his “share your pain” mind-meld-alike on them. Who knows what that does to people?
@87/ChristopherLBennett: I assumed that the “edge” of the galaxy mentioned Where No Man… was referring to the nearest edge from the point of view of the Enterprise at that time. As you mention above, Kirk’s (original) Enterprise has already explored near the centre of the galaxy and Star Trek V itself makes it clear that other ships and probes have tried (and failed) to penetrate the energy barrier, meaning that not only have those ships and probes made it to the centre but Starfleet/Kirk is aware that they failed. (It’s not mentioned whose ships and probes these are.) Sure, it’s inconsistent with the TNG era’s slowing-down of warp drive, but I’d argue that from a pre-TNG point of view it’s in line with what we’ve seen before. Differing opinions always welcome :)
@129/Moorkus Rex: “As for (dis)loyalty, the crewmembers who follow Sybok do so after he uses his “share your pain” mind-meld-alike on them. Who knows what that does to people?”
That’s pretty much the problem right there — the film never adequately explained why being “freed from pain” would cause people to switch loyalties to Sybok. It was unclear whether that was all he was doing or if it was a cover for something more insidious. So it’s a plot hole.
“Sure, it’s inconsistent with the TNG era’s slowing-down of warp drive, but I’d argue that from a pre-TNG point of view it’s in line with what we’ve seen before.”
It’s a 1989 film, though, so it isn’t quite pre-TNG. In fact, it was only five months later that TNG: “The Price” established that it would take “80 years or so” to travel 70,000 light years. Okay, at the time the movie was made and released, that hadn’t been established yet, but it’s interesting to note that TNG felt free to ignore ST V’s travel time assumptions only months after the movie’s release.
And yes, “The Magicks of Megas-tu” had claimed that the Enterprise had reached the center of the galaxy (though it portrayed it in a way that TFF completely contradicted), but it was still implicit that it had been a long journey. After all, the episode posited that the E was the first Federation vessel ever to reach the galactic center and discover what was there, which means it had literally gone where no one had gone before. So it must’ve been a long journey to get there. Even disregarding “Magicks,” think about all those TOS episodes where Uhura said it would take 3 weeks for a subspace message to reach Starfleet HQ — and subspace radio is supposed to be much faster than warp drive, otherwise why bother to use it? In TOS, destinations in other star systems were usually days away at least, if not weeks. In “Amok Time,” even with Spock needing to get to Vulcan to save his life, it was still several days away at best. So when TFF comes along and claims that it takes just 6.7 hours to get to the center of the galaxy, that’s pretty clearly a contradiction. (That’s according to Sulu’s line after setting course, anyway. The onscreen action from there to the Barrier arrival takes less than 17 minutes and is presented as nearly continuous.)
I always thought the freed from pain thing triggered a huge endorphin rush in the victim’s brains and they sorta fixated on Sybok as the source of their new high. Basically he is getting them addicted to him.
That makes things much worse, doesn’t it?
@129/Moorkus Rex: When I complained about characters not being nice, I was mostly thinking of Kirk being more aggressive than usual.
@131/random22: It would have been more convincing if McCoy and Spock hadn’t resisted Sybok so easily. If they can do it, why can’t anybody else?
@130/ChristopherLBennett: it’s true that it’s never explained exactly what Sybok is doing to these people, but I thought that that was intentional. Is he consciously influencing them or does he genuinely believe that they believe? After watching the film a couple of times I began to wonder if even Sybok himself knows what he’s doing. In the largest sense of course he is deliberately influencing people, but I doubt he (thinks that he) is doing much more than “freeing them from their pain.” He seems too genuine in his beliefs to want to control people if he can instead persuade them to join his cause. Slightly related: Voyager’s “Repression” shows what a Vulcan can do to other people without being consciously aware of it. Who knows what Sybok’s done/doing under “god’s” influence? Ultimately I rather liked the ambiguity, it makes Sybok more than just a villain mind-controlling people to get what he wants.
With regards to warp speeds, I meant “pre-TNG” in terms of when the story is set rather than when it was produced. I absolutely take your point about the journey seeming suspiciously quick, but I maintain that the galaxy seemed a lot smaller and/or the ships seemed a lot faster in TOS. (Not just TOS: the Klingon homeworld is “four days there, four days back” for the NX-01.)
TNG itself doesn’t seem to agree with its own spin-offs: in Q Who the Enterprise D is shoved seven thousand light years away and, according to Data, it would take them two years and seven months at maximum warp to get home. In Caretaker, Voyager is pulled “over seventy thousand light years” but for some reason it’ll take them seventy-five years at maximum warp to get home. Even if the Enterprise’s course was a straight line and Voyager’s was taking into account avoiding certain areas and sticking close to inhabited areas for resupplies and repairs – not that Janeyway has any idea where these areas would be at this point – that’s a hell of a speed difference.
I’m not even going to touch warp speeds in the reboot films :)
@132/JanaJensen: Kirk’s a superhero in this film! He doesn’t need a weapon during the charge on Paradise City and he throws a fully-grown (cat)woman clear across a room! He climbs mountains without any safety equipment! Must be all that testosterone making him aggressive… ;)
@133/Moorkus Rex: Kirk is an idiot in this film. He climbs a mountain without safety equipment, he lands the shuttle one hour away from Paradise City without a plan how to get there, and he allows Sybok to board the Enterprise and then demands from Spock to stop him.
@134/Jana: “he allows Sybok to board the Enterprise and then demands from Spock to stop him.”
To be fair, his plan was to play along until reaching the ship, then get the drop on him with Spock’s help. He didn’t anticipate that Spock would be unwilling to shoot, because he didn’t know Sybok was Spock’s half-brother.
Although aside from that, it did bug me that Kirk’s plan relied on Spock using lethal force. If stunning Sybok had been an option, Spock might’ve gone through with it.
One clear memory of watching this movie in theaters is that when the words “Paradise City” flashed on screen there were a lot of chuckles due to the still-popular Guns N’ Roses song. It didn’t get better from there…
And I thought this movie was going to be so _good_ after the opening scene! You had a Vulcan who rejected Vulcan teaching and was using his mind meld to freakin’ build a cult around himself. I thought he was going to be the best villain ever…sigh.
This is the only Star Trek movie featuring the original crew that I haven’t seen.
That means that of all the Star Trek movies, this was the one that my parents didn’t bother making me watch. In other words, my parents, and specifically my father, who will defend bad sci-fi (especially bad Trek) into the ground, decided this movie wasn’t worth showing me. So, even my parents must have recognized that this is not a good movie. That’s bad. That’s really bad.
Maybe one needs to have grown up in California for this to land, but I do love that this film about the search for the divine begins and ends in Yosemite Valley. Truly, god’s country.
“He wants to make love to the mountain.” *Shudders*. Damn you, krad!! :)
This movie. It’s funny ( no, not the movie. I can’t bring myself to hate it as much as I should, but nor will I defend it. I guess it’s on the strength of the performances of Lawrence Luckinbill and DeForest Kelley that I don’t fiercely hate this movie as much as some do, but that’s it. Beyond that, I got nothin’. It’s pretty terrible, and the fan dance is unforgivable.
I’m sure that Comedy Central roast of William Shatner was a cathartic release for George Takei when he told Shatner, “Fuck you, and the boat you rode in on.” Certainly it had to be after being directed by Shatner in this craptacular mess. We’re with you, George, we’re with you :
DanteHopkins: In the interests of accuracy, what George said was, “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on,” which a) is the common phrase and b) was funnier because Shatner rode into the roast on an actual horse….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
19 Thanks for the laugh. You liked TFF but hated the previous three movies? Is this Opposite Day or the Bizarro universe?
141 – Gasp, shock, people can have different opinions about movies! ;)
This movie isn’t nearly as bad as I remember, or as bad as its reputation would suggest. It held my attention pretty well, and the general plot actually feels very Star Trek. The crew of the Enterprise was always encountering godlike entities that would try to use the ship or the crew for their own ends. Trimmed to an hour, I could see this easily being an episode of Star Trek.
The film does have flaws, which have all ready been mentioned, but I don’t think its anywhere close to unwatchable.
@119/Jana: I quite like the Scotty and Uhura stuff in this one too! I really got the feeling they were longtime friends, and that maybe as they’ve gotten older and are both still unattached, they’ve begun to find comfort in something more. They’ve probably been working and living very close together in the recent months, so it makes sense to me that their relationship could have depended quite naturally (maybe even after a night of scotch-drinking!). Also KRAD, its not really fair to say their possible romance never went anywhere, since we only had one more TOS-cast movie after this. Scotty and Uhura’s relationship could have easily continued off-screen.
So to anyone who hasn’t seen STV, I think its definitely worth at least one watch. There’s nothing in the film that would break canon, anymore than any number of things from the the other movies, and I for one found it a pleasant enough experience.
@143/dakota_mike: “Also KRAD, its not really fair to say their possible romance never went anywhere, since we only had one more TOS-cast movie after this. Scotty and Uhura’s relationship could have easily continued off-screen.”
It’s entirely fair, because if it doesn’t happen onscreen, it’s not actually part of the stories we’re being told. As with our conversation the other day about an earlier movie, the point is about the reality of the creative process and the decisions made by the filmmakers, not about the nonexistent actions and choices of imaginary characters. If a plot point is picked up on by the storytellers and developed further in later installments, then it goes somewhere. If later storytellers just ignore it and never mention it again, if it’s left to the audience to imagine hypothetical ways to tie off that loose end, then it doesn’t go anywhere within the narrative.
@144/Christopher: That makes it a flaw in the next film, not in this one.
Oh, I forgot to mention Spock has a couple of his most quotable lines ever in the movie continuity, in this film. The first, when the Klingon ambassador is wallowing in self-pity, and Spock says, “Damn you sir, you will try!” and the next when Kirk is going in for a hug with Spock on the BoP’s bridge, and Spock says, “Please Jim, not in front of the Klingons.” Good Stuff!
@144/Christopher: With respect, I don’t see how Nicholas Meyer failing to include a line a two referencing Uhura and Scotty’s relationship in his TUC script, makes the choice in this film any less valid. Meyer was pretty happy to ignore events from previous films, when writing his Star Trek scripts. I could also see the lack of follow-up being a valid criticism of the writing of TFF if we had a bunch more TOS movies, and Uhura and Scotty were never again shown to be this close. Except that again, as you well-know, we only got one more true TOS movie.
The writer of TFF had no idea which elements of his script would be picked up on and which wouldn’t. The Scotty and Uhura relationship in TFF worked for me, and apparently it did for at least a few other people too. So I think its a failure of Meyers, and subsequent tie-in authors, that it was never picked-up on. I believe it was a valid a choice by TFF writer.
@145&146: The problems that many people have with Scotty/Uhura in TFF have nothing to do with TUC, because people had problems with it when the film first came out, two years before TUC existed. It was something that had never been remotely hinted at before (Uhura’s flirtations in TOS were always with Spock, not Scotty, although the censors soon cracked down on any hint of interracial romance), and to many viewers, it just felt like a random, out-of-character insertion. And that’s partly because it had no payoff within TFF itself. It was asserted in one or two scenes and then forgotten for the rest of the film, and it didn’t have any relevance to anything that happened in the film.
We generally appreciated it when the films tried to give showcase moments to the supporting characters, but the better instances of that were the ones where their actions had a connection to the story, like Sulu clashing with the guard in TSFS or Chekov getting captured and hurt in TVH. But Scotty knocking himself out and Uhura suddenly getting romantic with him in sickbay is just a weird digression, a sidebar that adds nothing to the movie and feels out of place within it, like they couldn’t think of a more organic way to give those characters something to do. And it seemed out of character for both of them. Scotty knocking himself out was stupid and unfunny and insulting to his character, which did nothing to endear viewers to the scene that it led to, and then that scene was this weird out-of-the-blue moment attempting to romantically pair two characters who’d never interacted much before.
So the problem wasn’t its failure to connect with other films; the problem was its failure to connect with its own film, or with any prior portrayal of Scott and Uhura. That’s why many fans disliked it from the start. And that’s why Meyer’s choice to ignore it was hardly a “failure.” The general consensus of fandom at the time was that it was one of TFF’s many mistakes and was best forgotten. (In Vol. 2, issue 4 of DC’s post-TFF comic book, written by Peter David, there’s a scene where Scott and Uhura have a talk about that moment in sickbay and agree that it was just a result of Sybok’s influence and they need never speak of it again.)
@147/Christopher: Well, I liked it. And anyway, comments #145 and 146 were in response to your statement in comment #144: “If a plot point is picked up on by the storytellers and developed further in later installments, then it goes somewhere. If later storytellers just ignore it and never mention it again, […] then it doesn’t go anywhere within the narrative.”
If people don’t like the Scotty-Uhura romance, that’s fine. But if they criticise that it “doesn’t go anywhere”, i.e. that it isn’t developed further in later installments, then they are criticising TUC, not TFF.
“In Vol. 2, issue 4 of DC’s post-TFF comic book, written by Peter David, there’s a scene where Scott and Uhura have a talk about that moment in sickbay and agree that it was just a result of Sybok’s influence and they need never speak of it again.”
I’m not surprised. The more I read by Peter David, the less I like his oeuvre. I’m at a point where I have decided for myself that most of the DC comics “really happened”, but none of the ones written by Peter David.
It doesn’t even work. There’s a Scotty-Uhura scene (a very sweet one, in my opinion) where she brings him dinner, and they are clearly a couple, that takes place long before they first set eyes on Sybok.
@147: Eh, I really liked the character development between them. Although I respect that you personally didn’t. To me, it felt like a natural progression of a deep and lasting friendship. Doesn’t feel out of left field to me at all.
The fact that it wasn’t foreshadowed, or tied into the story, doesn’t bother me at all. I just found it a nice touch. As I said before, I can easily envision a scenario where a romantic relationship between them develops over the course of time between SFS and the begining of TFF. There’s nothing wrong with them having a deeper relationship, and so I don’t agree with Peter David “correcting” it. And to be clear, their deepening relationship was hinted at in the beginning of the film, it didn’t just happen after he got knocked out. Although, I do get the sense that Uhura is being even more affectionate than normal because of the after-effects of Sybok’s mind meld.
I’ve never liked the idea that most of our cast don’t get to have lasting romantic and family relationships. Outside of the big three, where them becoming each other’s family is part of the story, our cast of characters shouldn’t need to remain permanently alone.
Everyone gets different things from Star Trek, and everyone seems to like different things. For instance, I love the scene of Scotty getting knocked out! Its a silly and funny moment that comes right after he does something heroic; I don’t find it disrespectful at all. From reading your comments Christopher, I do get the feeling that you are, whether intentionally or not, speaking from a place of higher authority. You sometimes come across to me like an educator teaching us plebs about good writing techniques, or explaining to us what these characters should or should not do. Even though I’m only 33, and I’m not a Star Trek creator, my opinion is just as valid as yours or anyone elses.
And don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy reading your thoughts and opinions, so don’t stop giving them! But I did want to mention the impression that you give me, because I wasn’t sure if you were aware of how you came across sometimes. But to paraphrase the Dude, “That’s just my opinion maaaann,” and I could easily be off-base here.
@148/Jana: Ah, you beat me to the punch! Thanks for mentioning the dinner scene, its a great moment!
@150/dakota_mike: Glad to hear that someone else likes it, too!
This film has so many lovely little scenes in between the cringy stuff. It’s such a mixed bag.
By the way, you just made my day by mentioning your age. It’s nice to hear that old-school Star Trek fans aren’t a dying race (I’m 52 myself).
@151: Glad I made your day! Star Trek runs in my family: my older uncles watched Star Trek when it first came out, and my mom watched it in reruns. I grew up watching Star Trek, particularly the TOS movies and TNG. When I was a little older (like 10-13) DS9 was my jam. I was gifted the motion picture blu-ray set for Christmas, which prompted the re-watch I’m currently going through. I had to wait until I finally finished TOS S3 and TAS, so that I could start on the films.
I’m planning on continuing the re-watch all the way through TNG, DS9,VOY, ENT, and the movies. I want to watch things chronologically in-universe (barring Enterpise, which I will be watching last).
@148/Jana: Forget what I said about “later storytellers” — I didn’t really think that through. As I said in my previous post, the criticism existed well before TUC was made, because it’s not about TUC, it’s about the failure of TFF to connect the Scotty/Uhura scene to anything else within TFF, or to any prior portrayal of Scotty and Uhura.
@149/dakota_mike: “Eh, I really liked the character development between them. Although I respect that you personally didn’t.”
But it sounds like you don’t respect Keith’s point of view on it, because you dismissed his argument for why it didn’t go anywhere. I’ve been trying to clarify what I think he actually meant by that, i.e. that it feels disconnected from the rest of TFF. This isn’t just about “me personally.” Whether I like it or not is beside the point. I’m just trying to help you understand what Keith was saying, because I think your dismissal of his point shows that you didn’t really understand what he meant.
I’m also talking about the general attitudes that existed back in 1989-91 and why they’re relevant to Meyer’s choice to disregard the relationship in TUC. My own opinion is utterly irrelevant to that topic, because Nicholas Meyer never met me or had any idea what I thought of the film, nor would he have been likely to care if he did. It’s the wider public reaction that I’m talking about. Maybe opinions have changed over the decades, but back then, nobody seemed to like the Scotty/Uhura thing much, so there was no incentive for Meyer to follow up on it.
@153/Christopher: Yeah, we’re losing the plot here a bit. Keith wasn’t really making an argument, he just wrote, “For some reason, Uhura and Scotty start acting like a couple. There’s been no hint of it before, and there will never be any hint of it again.” Its a pretty clear statement, and I think I understand what Keith meant by it. If I’m wrong on that, then I’d prefer he correct me on that, because it kinda feels like you’re twisting his intended meaning to fit your perspective. I can also understand why Meyer made minimal references to the events of the previous film, since it was considered somewhat of a failure. I’m fine with the fact that he did his own thing.
My only real point in all this was that there was very little chance for Scotty and Uhura’s relationship to be referred to again. If there’d been more films or series featuring the TOS cast, then maybe it would have been touched on again. And this whole subject is really pretty minor, my statements aren’t meant to be a scathing critique of Keith’s reviewing chops.
As it happens, I do disagree with Keith’s perspective on the Uhura dance. I don’t think its sexist at all, except for the fact that it makes all the men look like sex-starved idiots (which I’m fine with). Uhura is not in fact naked in the scene, she only appears so in backlight. She’s clearly wearing some sort of leotard. Uhura seemed like a confident, mature woman, who got a kick out of tricking the buffoonish guards. I never had the sense she was being mistreated by the scene. Although Nichelle kinda was, since they overdubbed her singing voice with another singer’s. And by all accounts Nichelle’s singing voice was more than up to the task. The whole rescue attempt is pretty bad really, I don’t think Starfleet picked Kirk for the mission so that he could go all SWAT-team on Sybok. I got the sense he was supposed to de-escalate the situation, or at least work out a creative solution. He didn’t really do either.
Personally I liked the idea of Scotty/Uhura and was disappointed it wasn’t followed up.
@152/dakota_mike: If you keep commenting here, perhaps I’ll resume my abandoned DS9 watch (not re-watch, because I’ve never watched it before, only TOS, TNG, and VOY). It’s more fun if there’s someone to talk to.
@153/Christopher: Okay!
@154/dakota_mike: I agree about Uhura’s dance, and also about the rescue attempt. The admiral tells Kirk that he doesn’t need just anyone, he needs Jim Kirk, and then Kirk botches it like that. It’s one of the things I dislike about the film, that all these usually smart people behave like idiots. But at the same time I find it endearing that they all behave like idiots except Uhura. Not sexist at all, or perhaps reverse sexist.
@156/Jana: Yeah, the plan is to eventually get to DS9, even if it might take a while. And I’ve been enjoying checking in on here during my rewatch/watch. Its more fun watching when I can read other people’s perspectives, and discuss different elements of the films and episodes.
Some good moments in this film, even watchable at some times, but too much just doesn’t do it for me overall…Perhaps the worst portrayal of the Klingons, I mean Klaa going after Kirk because he was simply bored…please. His only punishment seemed ft be forced to apologize by a disgraced General, hardly the Klingon way. The conflict with the Klingons was anti climactic to say the least (even if however unintentionally set up STVI). One thing that’s always bothered me was with Sybock’s reveal as Spock’s’s long lost half brother, a cliche more worthy of a Daytime Drama…KRAD you may have provided the most rational acceptance I’ve seen for Spock’s explanation for not revealing the info before BUT…To me it struck me as a Cop Out, maybe if it was written better, or Nimoy delivered the dialogue in a stronger manner I would’ve accepted it easier…Then again much of the reveal seemed to be much like an Abbott and Costello routine. And yes, from the standpoint of a professional/working relationship made sense for Spock not to tell Kirk about a brother, but it would be the type of thing shared among close personal friends. Also, it’s not like Spock’s parents, particularly Sarek, were personas non gratis throughout the franchise’s canonical (and noncanonical) history…We find out Sarek had a wife prior to Amanda, but it’s cut to the chase, and nothing is spoken of or followed up on the revelation again (full disclosure I have yet to see Discovery so don’t know if the topic came up there) From what I understand the revelations regarding Sarek was among the issues Roddenberry had with the film as well.
@158/capt_paul: “One thing that’s always bothered me was with Sybock’s reveal as Spock’s’s long lost half brother, a cliche more worthy of a Daytime Drama…”
No worse than Spock suddenly getting a fiancee he’d never mentioned before, or Kirk getting a son we’d never heard of. Star Trek was a ’60s TV show, after all, so it’s not like it was somehow above the tropes of series television.
“And yes, from the standpoint of a professional/working relationship made sense for Spock not to tell Kirk about a brother, but it would be the type of thing shared among close personal friends.”
Yet Spock never told his closest friends that his father was Ambassador Sarek until Sarek was literally standing right in front of them. And Sybok had been disowned by the family, so he would’ve had even less reason to reveal that.
“We find out Sarek had a wife prior to Amanda, but it’s cut to the chase, and nothing is spoken of or followed up on the revelation again”
But it’s entirely logical, given the fact that Vulcans are traditionally betrothed in childhood, and that Sarek was surely at least 50 years older than Amanda. If anything, giving Sarek a previous wife makes perfect sense and fixes a plot hole that had existed before. People are so fond of hating ST V that they unfairly object to the parts of it that work.
@159/Christopher: “No worse than Spock suddenly getting a fiancee he’d never mentioned before, or Kirk getting a son we’d never heard of. Star Trek was a ’60s TV show, after all, so it’s not like it was somehow above the tropes of series television.”
This doesn’t invalidate your point, but the ’60s aren’t to blame. Kirk only got a son in the ’80s. And Data and Worf got long-lost brothers too, and Deanna Troi got a secret dead sister. The longer a show runs, the worse it gets.
@159/CLB Fair points, as I noted a lot of my dissatisfaction was on the way it was all revealed…I did come to figure that Sarek would have been originally been betrothed to the Vulcan Princess and upon her death later marrying Amanda, still, Sarek being something of a high profile public figure such biographical information may be made known, particularly to a Starship Captain hosting a traveling party he leads (Heck, in This Side Of Paradise Spock revealed to Kirk about his father being an ambassador, which Kirk could have put two and two together)
@160/JJ Kurn somehow made better sense since Worf was known to be orphaned (and seperated from his biological family) at a young age…Thought you meant Nicholai at first, but not exactly long lost as he was at least mentioned early in the show…
@161/capt_paul77: “Heck, in This Side Of Paradise Spock revealed to Kirk about his father being an ambassador, which Kirk could have put two and two together”
I imagine that there are a lot of Vulcan ambassadors at any given time, dealing with the many civilisations in the known galaxy.
“Kurn somehow made better sense since Worf was known to be orphaned (and seperated from his biological family) at a young age.”
Hmm, perhaps. I had assumed that Worf had no biological family left, and that was why he had been adopted, so I was rather incredulous when Kurn claimed to be his brother.
@161/capt_paul77: “still, Sarek being something of a high profile public figure such biographical information may be made known”
Again, the family disowned Sybok. He was the black sheep that they didn’t talk about and officially severed any connection with. And Vulcans are very private about family matters in general, even without something like that.
@162/Jana: It was explained when Kurn was introduced that his survival had been kept secret and he’d been raised by a friend of Mogh’s as his own son, so that he wouldn’t be in danger from Mogh’s enemies.
I think Final Frontier has some solid ideas. It’s just that the script seems like a first draft of those ideas, and the poor execution amplifies the flaws. Kind of like an episode from the third season.
But I never had a problem with Sybok. Maybe that’s due to the actor. I mean, this movie has a lot of problems, but Lawrence Luckinbill’s performance isn’t one of them.
@163/Christopher: Oh, right. If I remember correctly, I didn’t believe him, and I was surprised that Worf did.
@164/Spike: That’s a good comparison.
This is how I rate this movie (0-10, 10 being the highest):
1. Plot: 1
2. Acting: 3
3: Dialogue: 3
4. Scientific Accuracy: 1
5: Production (including SFX): 5
Total Score: 13 out of 50
I first saw this movie in the cinema as a sneak preview before all the effects shots were finished. The audience laughed out loud at some of the temp shots (admittedly, some of them were less than stellar). I had higher hopes for the theatrical release, but the final vfx shots just weren’t that impressive. By the way, the effects from films of the photo-chemical-optical era were ALWAYS a pain to get looking good during the transfer to video. The contrast levels for the individual elements were dialed in for film, which is why colors might look off, or you’ll see garbage mattes etc. in the home version you never see on the screen. Always best if you can catch one of these films on the big screen to see it as it was intended.
The film does have its moments for me, though. The movies allowed McCoy to curse they way we always imagined it in our heads. I also enjoy Spock’s line to the Klingon General, “Damn it, sir you will try!” & his line to Kirk, “Please Captain, not in front of the Klingons.” We’d been with this crew for so many years, it was always fun for one more romp, even if you could feel we were getting closer to the last one.
Nostalgia’s a helluva drug. This movie came out when I was 9, and I probably watched it a couple of times on VHS. Going back through the films in 2020, I was pleasantly surprised, not because this is in any way a good movie, but simply because I enjoyed all the silliness back then.
I’m with #114 in that I originally saw this as a kid and enjoyed it and still enjoy it to this day. Yes it’s a flawed film. But it captures the spirit of adventure of TOS, has great character moments with the trio (Kirk, Spock, McCoy), Lawrence Luckinbill is good as Sybok and has a great score by Jerry Goldsmith (he seems to get stuck putting good music on bad Star Trek films). The opening scene with Sybok is a great teaser.
I also love the idea of Nimbus III, “The Planet of Galactic Peace” being a barren rock out in the middle of nowhere. It sounds like something a bunch of smug diplomats would do and pat themselves on the back and then forget about after the ribbon cutting ceremony and the press release.
Well, that was… something. Uhura’s nude fan dance has to be the single biggest “what the fuck!?” moment I’ve had yet in my Star Trek journey. I liked that Nichelle Nichols’s hair was quite visibly grayed though; Uhura gives no fucks about her age! A pity she didn’t have a better role.
What’s there to say that hasn’t already been said!
Actually, I watched a brief interview with George Takei, where he said (or claimed) that all the stars and co-stars thought each film could be their last one. He said “We thought the Motion Picture would be it for us, but that film made a ton of money. We then thought Star Trek II would be the last one, but that film made a ton of money.” The same with III and IV, almost word for word. But, he did not say “Star Trek V made a ton of money” (ouch!), he simply said “We thought that would be the last one, yet here we are, doing VI.”
Something is keeping the universe’s fastest-moving particles from entering the center of our galaxy.
The map revealed that something near the center of the galaxy appears to be accelerating particles to mind-blowing speeds — very near the speed of light — and creating an abundance of cosmic rays and gamma-rays just outside the galactic center. However, even as the galactic center blows a constant storm of high-energy radiation into space, something near the Milky Way’s core prevents a large portion of cosmic rays from other parts of the universe from entering, the team reported Nov. 9 in the journal Nature Communications.
Yeah, it’s not very good, but I can’t hate it, since I enjoyed it as a kid. Admittedly, a lot of my enjoyment came from the fact that I read J M Dillard’s great novelization before seeing it in theaters. Watching it now, over three decades later, it’s easier to see how awful many of the scenes are. I feel like part of the problem is it’s often trying to be a comedy, like its hugely successful predecessor, but whereas Star Trek IV is a fish-out-of-water comedy, this just goes for slapstick gags, and most of them just feel out of place. Still, I think there are some great moments, usually when the film tries to take things more seriously.
I realize after grabbing several lines to quote that, as brevity is the soul of valor and discretion the better part of wit, I should just say that I agree with the vast majority of the review. (Or not share anything, perhaps, but I’ve commented on all four of the previous films’ posts, so…) I will add that, rewatching for I believe the first time since I saw it in theaters, I still find the camaraderie of the camp-out scenes by far the best part of the movie, although I enjoy the performance of Sybok a heck of a lot more than remembered.
I’m watching this right now with my children. It’s bad, but I do think it does the Kirk/Spock/McCoy relationship better than the others. I like the conversation about how Kirk always knew he’d die alone, with the callback to that when Spock rescues him on the Bird-of-Prey (of course, Generations went and ruined that scene).
I can’t say this is the worst of the movies, because if nothing else it has music from Jerry Goldsmith. That covers a multitude of sins.
@175: I agree – bad movie and I think it feels a bit cheap (like the VFX) and a bit sloppy (the editing in the turbolift shaft escape scene. I also agree that the music is excellent. I bought it as a cassette tape way back when I was 10 and gave it many a listen. Such a beautiful, sweeping score. I though Luckinbill put in an excellent performance and Sybok remains a fascinating character (so much so that I’m excited SNW has hinted at exploring him further). And there were some exciting and dramatic moments such as when Sybok and Kirk battle it out in the shuttle bay and when Sybok delves into the emotional pain of McCoy and Spock. It’s just not enough fortunately. Too bad Paramount never saw fit to give Shatner a budget to make a director’s cut of the movie. It could improve the film at least marginally.
garreth: Director’s cuts are for directors who feel their vision was ruined by editing. I don’t think that’s really the case here……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@176/garreth: You brought up the possibility of a director’s cut back in comment #122 exactly 6 years and 2 days ago, and I offered my opinion on that in comment #123.
@178/CLB: Ha! I forgot I had previously commented. At least I’m consistent!
It’s a long time since this rewatch. Perhaps time for another if you can bear it? I remember thinking this one was such a stinker when it came out. Strangely all the movies look a bit better to me after 30 plus years. Except WoK. Liked that one less.
I’d like to just add a trivial point and say I was really glad not to see the absurd and ugly security uniform that appeared in the preceding films. Can’t understand why it was ever designed or how anyone wanted to re use it several times.
@180/lunnunis: How is the movie-era security uniform “absurd?” It’s the only Starfleet security design prior to the current era that actually makes sense as a security uniform, incorporating body armor instead of just bare cloth.