Film Review - Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier (1989)

Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier is directed by William Shatner and concerns Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock as well as the crew of the Starship Enterprise facing off against a Vulcan called Sybok (Lawrence Luckinbill) who may have a past history with Mr. Spock, his plan to find Shakka-Ri which lies at the centre of the galaxy.

I went into Star Trek 5 with very low expectations having heard how bad the film was over the years since its original release in 1989 but I wanted to watch it anyway so was it really as bad as I’d heard?

Well, it was and more so, this movie simply doesn’t work at any way at all and the blame has to go on Shatner, he doesn’t make anything work and you just sit there scratching your head at what you are watching unfold, the special effects look pathetically put together and the actors for the most part simply come across as having no idea what to do in their scenes at all.

But my biggest problem with this movie is the storyline, it simply doesn’t work as it has irrational shifts in tone from serious themes of life, death, loyalty, comradery and the search for higher meaning in the galaxy to outright slapstick humour and poor one liners that simply aren’t very funny and as if that wasn’t enough the story takes two thirds of its running time to get going meaning that you simply sit there watching a lot of filler scenes to pad out the runtime, that is just not only pathetic but also incompetent.

But I did like one thing about this movie and that is the score by Jerry Goldsmith, it has some very nice themes in it and helps to lift the film out of its doldrums but even then that just sounds like faint praise.

All in all, this movie is an irrational, illogical mess and if a real Vulcan were to watch this movie, they too would turn irrational and illogical and would then want to kill the person responsible for showing it to them in a battle to the death while the national anthem from Decapod 10 plays in the background, humans meanwhile would feel like they have had their own logic and intelligence ripped out of them and stuffed with stupid instead and that would be the one word I’d use to describe this movie, its just made of stupid, 0 out of 5.