Review of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) by Data B — 27 May 2010

SCORE: 04/10.

BUDGET: $28 MILLION (EST*).

GROSS REVENUE: $70 MILLION.

BOTTOMLINE: A RATHER FASCINATING PREMISE IS SPOILT BY A POOR SCRIPT, SFX AND OVER-TOP HUMOUR!

I have heard some people, including fans of the series blame William Shatner (Played Capt. James T. Kirk) for the huge failure of this fifth installment. I don't agree that Shatner should take so much blame as a number of factors contributed to a poor finished product. The SFX were seriously poor even for a film made in the late 1980's and this was the result of ILM not taking charge of this (used for the second, third and forth movies). It was a part of this movie which could not be ignored, and fans would surely have noticed the convenient presence of the corridor sets used extensively in TNG. I hate this with a passion because this is not the Enteprise D - its apparently the Enterprise A - and no matter what the designers of this movie thought, it was silly that they should believe fans would not notice.

Sybok is actually played rather (thankgod the planned presence of Sean Connery didn't come to fruition because he would have injected even more humour to an already bloated movie which is full of the stuff).

There are moments to savour though. The camp fire scene displayed the great chemistry which exists between Shatner, DeForest Kelly and Nimoy playing Kirk, Bones and Spock and provided arguably the movies most accomplished scenes. The actual backdrop to the campfire is also very good.

The new Enterprise bridge isn't great and is fairly similar to the one shown for the old Enterprise, although somewhat brighter in tones and lighting. The scenes involving scotty and his gripe with this new Enterprise were funny at first but it did become a little tedious at times.

The search for god "At the centre of the galaxy" (And it sure didn't take too long to reach that point in the galaxy) was not realised properly in my opinion and could have been better realised by an academically sound 12 year old, I am absolutely sure of this. It looked, and felt rushed in places and the concept of god at the centre of the galaxy, although not totally 'un-realistic' is arguably quite ridiculous. The audience seem to be treated with no dignity and this is a shame.

The movie is literally a joke could be considered a mockery of the franchise at a time when paramount should be trying to take TOS cast seriously with the TNG already in it's second season - hiatus (summer break between second and third season) during the theatrical run of this movie. It is true that most popular franchises have at least one poor or bad movie and this is probably Star Trek's bad movie.

I still don't believe the whole film is terrible, and I have seen much worse than this movie. However the other Star Trek movies make the fifth installment a disappointing piece of work which will forever be a critical failure. As I said - in places it can become quite interesting and I was especially pleased with the camp-fire scenes which displaced powerful chemistry which was the high point of an otherwise under-par adventure which could be the worse outing of TOS cast of characters.

At least they had a proper send-off two years later with the much improved and polished sixth movie - "Every cloud really does have a silver lining" - I rest my case.