Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This month, we’re departing spacedock with Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, winner of three Razzies and near-killer of the entire Star Trek film franchise.
First of all, a fair warning: I am going to try really hard not to turn this column into a long, meandering trip down Star Trek Nerdery Lane. I know there are non-Trekkers amongst you, dearest readers, and I want this to remain accessible to you. But there are going to be times and places where I simply cannot be other than what I am. It is very difficult to talk about a Star Trek movie without keeping it at least somewhat in context with all the other Star Trek properties. It is physically impossible to do so when talking about – and especially when ardently defending – Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
This is McCoy erasure and I will not stand for it.
Usually, I pick my Raspberries at random. This month was my birthday and I do what I want. It’s time to tackle my shameless shame, my guiltless guilty pleasure, the gaudy red-blue-and-gold feather in my cap of movies I love that everyone else hates. Let us explore how this bizarre, misshapen, beautiful little baby came to be born.
The impetus for The Final Frontier dates back to the heyday of the original Star Trek, when co-stars and rivals William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy – Captain Kirk and First Officer Mr. Spock – had negotiated “favored nations” clauses into their contracts. Basically, to ensure that they remained equals in the eyes of the network, any perk or bonus that was offered to one man had to be offered to the other. Fast-forward to the 1980s, when Nimoy had directed two successful Trek films: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). When contract negotiations with Shatner for the latter of those two films were threatening to fall through, Paramount remembered the “favored nations” clause and promised Shatner that he could direct the fifth film in the series; Shatner enthusiastically accepted. Star Trek V was underway.
And at first, things looked promising for Shatner’s turn in the real-life director’s chair. He had an idea for the film, inspired by having come across a televangelist on his TV one night and finding himself both repulsed and fascinated. He developed a strange and ambitious story in which Kirk would face off against a charismatic space mystic-zealot named Zar, who brought people to his cause with a powerful, psychic form of faith healing. Zar’s power would cause everyone, even Spock and Trek’s third musketeer Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley), to turn against Kirk. The showdown would result in the discovery of God – actually, the devil disguised as God, the center of the galaxy, and would culminate in Kirk and Spock having to rescue McCoy from an army of Inferno-esque hell demons. It…honestly sounds kind of awesome. Stupid, but awesome.
What could have been.
But let’s all say it together now: problems arose almost immediately.
The first set of problems came from within. Shatner’s preferred screenwriter, fantasy-thriller novelist Eric van Lustbader, wasn’t interested. David Loughery instead took over writing duties with assistance from Shatner and producer Harve Bennett, but a Writer’s Guild strike meant that his first drafts were delayed by months. Paramount didn’t care for Loughery’s script, and insisted on a lighter mood and added jokes to bring it closer in tone to the comedic Voyage Home, the most financially successful Trek film. Comedy under duress is usually about as funny as a funeral; nevertheless, Loughery submitted the requested rewrites. But in the meantime, Shatner was also butting heads with his co-stars Nimoy and Kelley, who insisted that, faith-healing or no faith-healing, Spock and McCoy would never betray Kirk. And Star Trek creator/militant atheist Gene Roddenberry was stewing in the background, furious that Shatner would make the God of Abraham an official part of the Trek universe. He threatened (but never took) legal action against Shatner, and refused to have anything to do with the film. More rewrites followed. By the time production began, the script resembled Shatner’s original idea – or any sort of coherent story – about as much as Benedict Cumberbatch resembles Ricardo Montalban.
The problems didn’t end when production began. A truckers’ strike meant that the team had trouble transporting their equipment and had to contract police escorts to ensure its safety. Work conditions on location, especially in the sun-baked Mojave Desert, were brutal, and production had to be stopped often as cast and crew members suffered heat exhaustion and dehydration. Paramount continually slashed the film’s original (admittedly extravagant) budget. Industrial Light and Magic, which had done the effects work for the previous three Trek films, was busy with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, so a newer and less expensive firm, Associates and Ferren, was brought on – and immediately given the impossible task of replicating ILM’s previous work in three months with almost no money. The result is, uh, well, we’ll get to that.
It’s the Cowardly Lion in space!
The Final Frontier came into theaters with guns blazing, but attendance fell like Shatner’s mountain-climbing stunt double as word-of-mouth spread that this new outing just wasn’t very good. Critics, too, savaged the film, calling it poorly crafted and nonsensical. And everyone was all too happy to lay the blame at Shatner’s feet. The official story of Star Trek V was now the story of William Shatner’s bloated ego, his hubris at thinking he belonged on the other side of the camera, leading to the very worst of the Trek films. The Razzies, which fancy themselves the punishers of hubris, happily obliged, bestowing upon the film the Razzie Awards for Worst Picture, Worst Director, and Worst Actor (also Shatner).
I’m not even going to frame it as a question this time. The Final Frontier and William Shatner have both been victims of great injustice. Not only is the film far from the worst Trek film – looking at you, Insurrection – it’s a straight-up good Trek film. Let us break through the Great Barrier and set the record straight.
THE STORY
When last we left our heroes in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, it looked like things were on the up-and-up for that old stalwart crew of the USS Enterprise: Captain James T. Kirk (Shatner) led a successful rescue and rebirth of Captain Spock (Nimoy), they defeated some dastardly Klingons, they saved the world a time or two, there were hijinks involving Catherine Hicks and humpback whales. They even have a brand new ship, the Enterprise-A, to replace the one that got exploded back in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
A hostile standoff between opposing parties.
Now everybody is settling in for some much-earned back-to-nature downtime. For chief engineer Scotty (James Doohan) and communications officer Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), that means staying on their new ship, working round the clock to patch up its many, many quirks and defects. For Kirk, Spock, and chief medical officer Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley), that means a leisurely camping trip in Yosemite National Park, where we are treated to many loving, caressing shots of Captain Kirk doing a foolhardy free solo of El Capitan. But it’s not to last. As all Trek fans know, the main cast taking shore leave is a guaranteed trigger for an interplanetary diplomatic crisis.
The instigator of this crisis is a mysterious Vulcan…priest? Mystic? Cult leader? Guy in thrift-store Jedi robes? named Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill), who has been drifting around the quadrant gathering followers. He performs a faith-healing ritual of sorts whereby he “takes away [their] pain,” which then prompts them to give themselves over, instantly and single-mindedly, to the unexplained cause of his “Galactic Army of Light.” Sybok has arrived at Paradise City on the planet Nimbus III and taken three diplomats – a human, a Klingon, and a Romulan (David Warner, Charles Cooper, and Cynthia Gouw) – hostage. Sybok, you see, wants a starship. For reasons. You know who has a starship? The Enterprise crew, that’s who.
You have a blue unicorn. The hell you want with a crappy starship?
The Enterprise-A is in no shape to pursue Sybok, but the Federation Admiralty insists that they need Captain Kirk for this job; at no point is the possibility of Kirk pursuing Sybok in a non-Enterprise ship raised, because Kirk doesn’t cheat on his wife, I guess. But by the time our crew arrives at the scene of the crisis, the three hostages have joined Sybok’s side, and it’s not long before he gets his mystical claws into Uhura, helmsman Hikaru Sulu (George Takei), and navigator Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig) too. Now, Sybok can finally explain his cause: he needs a starship to take him beyond the Great Barrier at the center of the galaxy, where one can find (he believes) Sha Ka Ree, the point of origin of all creation and the purported stomping grounds of God Himself. So now Kirk and Company are going to take him there, and maybe find out in the process what God might need with a starship.
Sybok is also Spock’s half-brother. No, no one had ever mentioned Spock having a brother before. Yes, this struck everyone watching the film as weird. Yes, Shatner knew it was weird too. Just accept it.
Oh, and in the background, a renegade Klingon captain named Klaa (Todd Bryant) is in hot pursuit of the Enterprise-A because taking down Kirk will bring him glory. You could remove every element of this subplot from the film and the only thing you’d miss would be a few eye-meltingly awful special effects.
THE BAD
The complaints about The Final Frontier divide nicely into a Venn diagram of “complaints about the actual filmmaking” and “complaints from Star Trek fans.” I’m not saying the complaints in the second category are invalid, but they are beyond the scope of this column. Look, it sucks that the supporting cast never got as much screen time as they should have, and it sucks that the actors felt like their characters all got shoved into corners to make room for William Shatner’s ballooning ego. But let’s be brutally honest and admit that the supporting cast is the supporting cast, and that people did, in fact, watch Star Trek and Star Trek movies mostly to see the stars of the show. They also don’t care all that much about Spock’s established canonical family history or whether Gene Roddenberry believed in God. So calm down, nerds.
He thinks he’s the reason for the season. He’s right.
On the other hand, The Final Frontier has plenty of shortcomings unrelated to Star Trek politics and infighting. I would describe most of these shortcomings as “times when the movie attempts to introduce stakes.” As long as The Final Frontier is a Star Trek hangout movie, everything is peachy. When it attempts to move its own plot forward, things get weird and off-putting.
Take the film’s opening sequence, for example. It’s clearly meant to be a tone-setter, slow and pained and ominous, with the camera lingering over the desolate wasteland of Nimbus III (played by the Mojave Desert) and a sun-parched lone traveler named J’onn (Rex Holman) practically disintegrating into the sand. And it would perhaps succeed as a tone-setter if it were not intercut with clips of Sybok riding in on a slow-motion horse that look like the ugly bastard children of Gladiator and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
I cannot find still images of the slo-mo, so instead, enjoy this shot of J’onn picking his nose while he waits for Sybok to arrive.
Then there’s Sybok’s entire quest for God. Storywise, it’s toned down considerably from Shatner’s original Miltonic epic, and the budget limitations required toning down even further. The result is a weirdly understated story that reaches continually for grandness and always falls short. The entire revelation that the God of Abraham supposedly resides at the center of the galaxy prompts astonishingly little reaction even from those not under Sybok’s spell. The breaking of the Great Barrier, supposedly a never-attempted feat, happens in about three onscreen minutes; the actual discovery of “God” (George Murdock) is better experienced than described here, but let’s just say the actors don’t look convinced either.
The design elements of the film – I hate to pick on these too much, because everyone knows they’re garbage, but they run the gamut from “unfortunate” to “war crimes.” No doubt their haphazardness owes itself to The Final Frontier’s budget woes, and everything not shot on location looks cheap and ugly. The VFX are a fine illustration of what happens when you give an inexperienced team about half the time and one-tenth of the money they would need to produce something acceptable. There’s no kind way to put it: they look about as good as the effects from the original series, but they’re also interspersed with archival footage from ILM, so they look even worse by comparison. The resulting effect is pathetic in the original sense of the word: it evokes nothing but sadness and sympathy for everyone involved in the process.
Just turn down the lights and no one will notice!
The film’s art director, Nilo Rodis, doubled as the costume supervisor. Rodis is a good art director and an atrocious fashion designer. When not in their official Starfleet uniforms, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy sport tan fisherman’s sweaters that accentuate Shatner and Nimoy’s growing paunches. Not to be topped (har), the hair and makeup team gives Cynthia Gouw an updo that needs a censor bar.
Only The Last Airbender two decades later would top this in the Most Phallic Movie Hairstyle competition.
“Messy” is the best word for…well, everything. It’s a hastily-stitched-together patchwork in which about a third of the patches are missing, and have been filled in by the hopes and prayers of the creative team. If God is real, he wasn’t always listening to the makers of The Final Frontier.
THE GOOD
So it’s messy. So it’s illogical. Boo-friggin’-hoo. So is every single Marvel movie and I don’t see y’all giving out Razzies to those. And The Final Frontier is better than almost every Marvel movie.
First of all, for all the crap he’s taken over the film, Shatner is not that bad of a director., He has a talent for capturing natural beauty, and the location scenes in Yosemite and the Mojave desert are remarkably well-composed. He makes his share of rookie-director mistakes with awkward, jostly blocking, but had he ever tried his hand at film direction again, he might have managed some interesting things.
Then there’s the acting, and especially the two acting standouts. Shatner and Nimoy, despite their offscreen pissing contests, are their usual reliable selves onscreen, the soulful Kirk standing in contrast to the coolly logical Spock. A more exciting energy emanates from Laurence Luckinbill as Sybok. Shatner’s original choice for the role was Sean Connery (busy, like ILM, with Last Crusade), but Luckinbill has a folksy down-home presence that Connery’s immediate familiarity to audiences might have prevented in him. It’s that likeability that makes Sybok a threat, since Luckinbill complements his charm with a manic undercurrent that threatens to send Sybok into a murderous rage if his holy cause is jeopardized. He also has, despite their lack of meaningful dialogue, good chemistry with Nimoy, selling their contrived estranged brotherhood with well-placed glances and silences that speak to years of hurt and misunderstanding between them.
The area in which The Final Frontier most deserves the few-and-far-between accolades it receives, however, is in its use of that most underrated and underappreciated of Star Trek performers, DeForest Kelley as Dr. McCoy.
Is Sybok the chief medical officer now or something?
After commandeering the Enterprise-A, Sybok performs his pain-taking ritual on McCoy, taking him back to one of the worst moments of his life: the moment he made the decision to euthanize his father, who was suffering from a then-incurable disease. McCoy, we learn, harbors tremendous guilt from this decision, for a cure to his father’s illness was discovered only weeks later. Kelley, an old stalwart of Westerns and stage shows who almost never got the chance to explore his full potential as an actor, is electrifying in this scene, a twisted, hunched mess of long-concealed agony and rage. From an acting perspective, it’s one of the best scenes in the whole franchise.
I’m an actor, not a doctor!
Jerry Goldsmith’s synth-heavy roller-coaster score is also an emotional marvel, recovering the film’s tone in places where it should be unrecoverable. Heavily reliant on low brass and woodblock percussion, Goldsmith combine the familiar musical themes of the series with new quasi-operatic themes fitting for a holy crusade. An etheral four-note leitmotif from a Synclavier serves as a leitmotif for Sybok and anchors much of the emotional storytelling, complementing but never commandeering the visuals. It’s a terrific soundtrack, and it deserves more recognition than it has gotten.
Okay. Now that I’ve argued for the merits of the film qua film, y’all need to humor me for just a moment, because Shatner’s underappreciated eye for a good shot is not actually why I will defend The Final Frontier until I die.
People, why do you think I fell in love with Star Trek in the first place? I assure you it was not the hard, precise science fiction or the breathtaking special effects; the puppets and models of the original series look goofy now and they looked goofy when they first came out too. It also wasn’t the nuanced and subtle social commentary; Trek’s ventures into politics and culture usually feel like I’ve been locked in a padded room and forced to listen to “Imagine” on repeat for 45 minutes. No, I fell in love with Star Trek, and the original series specifically, because of two things: the creators’ plucky determination, and the relationships between the characters, especially the three leads. Of all the Trek movies – and yes, there are Trek movies that are far superior films to this one – The Final Frontier is unmatched at capturing those two elements. Sure, Shatner made some pretty boneheaded decisions in the story and from the director’s chair. Other boneheaded decisions were made for him, and he tried his darnedest to bring his vision to life anyway.
But Shatner – and Nimoy, and Kelley – also understood that the lifeblood of the original Star Trek was the relationship between the three leads. So yes, I do want to watch Kirk, Spock, and McCoy dick around aimlessly for hours on end. I do want to listen to them muse and reflect on what they mean to each other, and what it means for them that they have foregone so many of the usual things people seek to give their lives purpose and fulfilment. I do want to hang out while they sing stupid campfire songs and toast marshmallows and love one another in the prickly way that older men who know each other too well often do. I do want to bear witness to their struggles, their triumphs, and their questions about what it would mean to come face-to-face with the divine. In fact, I want to watch this far more than I want to watch Kirk snarl ineffectually at a one-off bad guy in a hippie wig. Don’t get me wrong; Wrath of Khan is a great movie. But The Final Frontier is a lovely, serene movie, contemplative and thoughtful and vulnerable.
Of all the Trek films I have encountered in my travels, The Final Frontier is the most human.
Just ignore the stupid repeating deck numbers like I do.
Quality of Movie: 3.5 / 5. It’s no cinematic masterpiece, but y’all need to stop with the smack talk because the Trek people are listening to you and that’s why Star Trek is no fun anymore.
Quality of Experience: 4 / 5. Don’t be a bunch of Negative Nancies. It’s sweet, it’s often well-crafted, and if you give it a chance, it’s a good time.
You can read Tim’s review of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier here!
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.