Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

(Second Viewing, On Blu-ray, December 2019) I’m not going to pretend that Star Trek has always been smart or good, but Star Trek V: The Final Frontier plumbs the depths of the series. Very few things work in this very episodic instalment. At the time, real-world factors such as a budget cut, a writer’s strike, a special effects house unable to deliver and the heavy-handed influence of William Shatner in the director’s chair meant that the project was already off to a rocky start. But that’s downplaying the wobbly foundation of the film in a script with an inane premise (let’s go see… God?) and keeps compounding this nonstarter mistake with one dumb sequence after another. Never mind the surprisingly unconvincing special effects—watching the film, I kept being reminded how stupid the whole thing was through one false note every few minutes. This is the movie that has Pioneer 10 used as target practice by a cartoonishly evil Klingon, an ensign carrying a circa-1989 laser printer on the bridge, flirting between Uhura and Scotty, Uhura doing a half-naked fan dance to distract enemies, Scotty knocking himself out on a very visible beam somehow in the middle of a corridor … it just doesn’t stop. Those may be minor issues, but the point is that the overall story of Star Trek V, with its complete lack of thematic foreshadowing of the search for God announced more midway through, just makes it impossible to like the film either at a high or low level. Even the halfway-interesting moments (such as the unusually dramatic scene between McCoy and his father) are in no way earned by the rest of the film and feel either pretentious or hilarious. (And I won’t even discuss the comic relief.) As an individual movie, Star Trek V was bad enough that it has been essentially ignored by its follow-ups: the central idea of going “to the centre of the galaxy” in a blink blatantly flies in the face of later-Trek positing an entire series on being too far from home. Even the use of the various alien races seems drastically off-key, with little to distinguish the Vulcans from the Romulans from the overly typed Klingons. It’s just a mess, and it clearly shows the even=good/odd=bad pattern of the early Trek series. I will, however, reluctantly concede one thing: As irritating as Star Trek V can be, it perversely kept my interest throughout, which is more than I can say about later instalments such as Insurrection or Nemesis.