Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Our Review

The one where they look for God and find a disappointed fan. William Shatner directed The Final Frontier, and the result is the shabbiest, most hubristic entry in the franchise: Sybok, Spock’s emotional half brother, hijacks the Enterprise to fly through the Great Barrier at the center of the galaxy and meet the creator, who turns out to be a cranky space entity who wants a starship. The premise is lunacy, but the film’s real sin is being cheap and lazy about it, with effects shots that look like screensavers and a script that undermines every character it touches.

The infamous bits are infamous for a reason. Uhura’s fan dance, Scotty bonking his head on a beam he should know by heart, Spock saving himself with a rocket boots deus ex machina, the list goes on. The central idea, a charlatan who releases people’s pain by sharing it, deserves a better movie: Laurence Luckinbill plays Sybok with a genial, dangerous warmth, and the scenes where he converts the crew by emptying McCoy’s guilt over his father’s death are the only ones that approach real drama. David Warner does what he can with three lines.

What redeems it marginally is the trio chemistry, the campfire scene where they sing row row row your boat is goofy in a way that feels like family, and Jerry Goldsmith’s grand score doing overtime for visuals that do not deserve it. The mountain free climb opening is beautiful and irrelevant. Four out of ten, one point of which is sympathy for the strike gutted effects.