Review of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) by Christopher A — 14 May 2013

Like every long running series, everyone of them gets a lackluster entry at one point. The Final Frontier fits that category for Star Trek. The Star Trek universe was becoming much more popular with the success of The Voyage Home and The Next Generation (have yet to watch any of that show). Leonard Nimoy got to direct the previous two. Now, William Shatner is directing the movie. Big mistake.

The movie opens on Nimbus III, where Vulcan Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill) is building an army to invade the only city on the planet. We then find the Enterprise (now rebuilt) crew on short leave. Captain Kirk (Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and McCoy (DeForest Kelley) are beside a campfire in Yosemite. But then they receive orders from Starfleet that they are to rescue hostages taken captive by Sybok. But they are also pursued by Klingons led by Captain Klaa (Todd Bryant).

Despite a promising beginning, once we find the crew camping out, it goes downhill from there. What turns into rescuing hostages eventually turns into the search for God (a plotline that was sort of part of The Motion Picture, but for a creator instead of God in particular) and Eden. The Motion Picture may have been boring, but it presented the search for a creator better than The Final Frontier did. The finding later in the movie fares no better. The Eden found is more of a barren wasteland than the Paradise described in the Bible.

The action scenes are rather perfunctory and lack excitement. Since Industrial Light & Magic was occupied with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Ghostbusters II, visuals designer Bran Ferren had to do his own effects. The results are not very good. The visuals in this are stale and not convincing, like the scene of where Kirk is falling from the mountain with Spock trying to save him early on in the movie. The musical score was fine, though.

The original actors return for a fifth time, but most of the time they seem a little bored to be in this movie. Kirk and Spock had some nice scenes in the movie, but they are hardly compensations for the rest of the movie. Laurence Luckinbill was all right as the villain and had different motivations than other Star Trek villains. Klaa was a useless character and had really poor motivations (just finding a worthy opponent). George Murdock wasn't very convincing as playing the entity that was being searched for.

The Final Frontier is a poor and by the numbers Star Trek movie. It wasn't an outright terrible movie, but it was really weak.