Review of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) by Tero H — 16 Oct 2012

This was the Star Trek movie that I least liked of the first six Star Trek films. It seems to concentrate too much on Kirk, making the other cast members look too silly. Scotty behaves like a clown, the "bad guy" Sybok is way too shallow to be what Spock describes him to be, and the idea of finding God from the center of the galaxy is, although not entirely terrible, still rather a silly idea in the sense that it it could fail in so many ways.

The special effects looked pretty bad, occasionally like someone had cut the space ships and titles and planets out of cardboard. I remember reading from some science fiction magazine that the budget had ran out of money. The plot didn't proceed fast enough even though this wasn't a particularly long film. It just got tedious about third into the movie. Too much talk, and the action was too silly. Attempt to inject more humor into the storyline made the cast seem dumb.

Expectations were not fulfilled. The movie began actually quite well, and became interesting, but a movie almost two hour should have more than occasion musings and jokes by the same characters all over again to keep the story interesting. If the "great barrier" was just an illusion, wasn't it quite silly to assume that no space ship of any culture whatsoever had ever even accidentally flown through it and reported what was inside? I was left wondering what the creature was that they found from inside the barrier, it wasn't explained to the watcher, if I remember correctly. The 'god-creature' thing looked silly with lightning bolts coming out of it, and the Enterprise took it out with a photon torpedo although the heroes of the story were standing close by, withou inflicting any damage on them.

The cantina scene looked a little like a ripoff from Star Wars Return of the Jedi as well, with the chained dancers and an attempt to create humanoids by mixing human and animal parts: aka woman with a cat's tail.

I was left with the impression that the whole story had been invented in one evening. I was given the impression that something cool would happen, but then when nothing cool happened - or rather, the cool turned out to be not so cool after all - that was a letdown.

The mountain climbing scene at the beginning was quite cool. There was quite a lot of physical action scenes, meaning fast movement. I felt that the movie could have been much better than it turned out to be. I went to see it in the movies when it came out, and watched it later on a vhs video casette. The music is probably the only thing in the film that I thought was great when I first saw it. I found out at the movie theatre that it was directed by William Shatner. The characters are the usual Trek type except for the problem that Too much comedy makes it into 'the Three Stooges' in outer space.

There's something wrong with the way that the story goes forward. I mean, I put some thought into this and I have reached the conclusion that the storyline could have work really well. What could be more awesome than find a closer connection to God in outer space? Its not really the God-part here that fails, its the scenes where the story doesnt seem to go forward. Those scenes where the viewer wonders what is going on and is that leading somewhere? There are a few of those scenes, like the desert planet scenes, which, except for Uhura's dance of course, seem unnecessary.

I probably repeated myself in this review full of typos, so I just state its shortly at the end of my review: Now that I have seen this over the decades or so, I think that the friendship of Kirk, Spock and McCoy can be felt there and for a Trekkie, those scenes are the best part of the movie. It's not an awful film, just has some scenes that make the film hard to follow and seem pointless when they happen, and go this and that way without a clear direction. I emphasize the word clear.

All the roads lead to the God at the center of the galaxy, but what happened in between was quite a mess!