Movie Notes: Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier

May 10th, 2009

= 1 star

Starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley
Directed by William Shatner

Synopsis

Shore leave for the Enterprise crew is interrupted when the emotional, cult-leader Vulcan Sybok takes several ambassadors hostage with the intent to commandeer a starship for a spiritual journey.

The Good

• One interesting scene where Sybok forces McCoy and Spock to revisit suppressed pain from their past. Yeah… that’s it.

The Bad

• The characters we’ve grown to love over the years are abused in shockingly insensitive ways, mostly by a weak script which has everyone behaving out of character. The list is nearly endless: a hinted romance between Uhura and Scotty that never existed before, Sulu and Chekov get lost in the woods and fake a blizzard, Uhura performs a nude feather dance, Scotty hits his head on an overhanging beam and prat falls down, Sulu can’t fly a shuttle craft properly, Kirk wears a t-shirt saying “Go climb a rock,” and Bones, Spock, and McCoy resort to singing “Row Row Row Your Boat” (not Shakespeare). All this stuff is surely meant to maintain the levity from Star Trek IV, but the humor there was based in the characters (Bones griping about the primitive medicine he sees).
• Endlessly ridiculous situations come across like a Trek parody: The Enterprise is sent on a mission with inoperable transporters and the bridge an uncharacteristic, chaotic mess (nonsensical humor), Nimbus III features a space cantina with a humanoid cat (even more ridiculous than the bar in Star Trek 3) Sybok’s religious cult takes over the Enterprise with hardly a fight, and then we’re hanging with God on the other side of the barrier.
• Completely incompetent and non-threatening Klingons (one looks like David Crosby) — yawn.
• Canon inconsistencies: In just one scene, Spock has flying boots (never existed before), the Enterprise goes up to some ridiculous number like deck 79, and Spock can’t calculate Kirk and McCoy’s weight despite being able to estimate the extremely more complex velocity needed to sling shot around the sun in Star Trek 4.
• Shatner — who came up with this story — seems to have deliberately written manly stuff just for Kirk. Our beloved Captain rock climbs up the face of El Capitan with no ropes, rides a horse, and demonstrates hand to hand combat skills with the aforementioned cat creature, doesn’t reveal past pain to Sybok, and talks back to God.
• Sub-par special effects — ILM, who worked on previous installments, was busy with other films.

Conclusion

Star Trek V’s biggest head scratcher is how Shatner, who spent so many years playing Captain Kirk, seems out of touch with the characters, and serves up a stock adventure plot that could be another Beastmaster. Skip this awful and often unintentionally funny installment entirely and voyage to the far superior Star Trek 6.

IMDB: Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier
Wikipedia: Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier