William Shatner’s first film as director has Kirk, Spock and McCoy sitting round a fire talking about death, and that scene is worth keeping. The rest is a hijack plot that does not hold, poor effects and jokes that do not land.
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier opens with Captain Kirk (William Shatner) climbing El Capitan in Yosemite without a rope, falling off it, and being caught a few feet from the ground by Spock (Leonard Nimoy) in rocket boots. That is the film in miniature. Shatner, directing for the first time, wrote the story with Harve Bennett and David Loughery, and what they wanted was a film about three men who have stopped pretending to be young and a Vulcan who thinks he knows where God lives. They got that film for about half an hour. After that it is a hijack picture with poor effects and worse jokes.
The campfire is the reason anyone defends this film, and they are right to. Kirk, Spock and McCoy (DeForest Kelley) sit by a fire in the dark, McCoy tries to teach Spock about marshmallows, they attempt “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” as a round, and Kirk admits he has always known he will die alone. Andrew Laszlo lights it from the fire, low and orange, and keeps the three of them in one loose frame; Jerry Goldsmith stays quiet. It got to us more than we expected. Kelley in particular has a way of being cross that reads as love. This is the one thing Shatner had to say, and he says it plainly and well.
Nimbus III is nearly as good to look at, a desert town that Herman F. Zimmerman and Laszlo treat as a western, all dust and orange light. Three ambassadors drink in its saloon: St. John Talbot (David Warner), General Korrd (Charles Cooper) and Caithlin Dar (Cynthia Gouw). Then Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill) rides in and takes them hostage. Luckinbill is the best thing in the film after the fire, a zealot who is delighted to meet you, and Nilo Rodis-Jamero puts him in a plain robe and lets the actor do the work. His trick is to find a person’s worst memory and talk them through it, and those scenes have more feeling than the plot around them deserves.
The trouble is everything joining those pieces together. Loughery’s screenplay needs Sybok to get hold of a starship, and getting him one takes forty of the film’s 106 minutes, business that Peter E. Berger cannot cut into a shape: a fight in a stable, a rescue on horseback, a run of comic bits that land on the supporting cast like bad weather. Scotty (James Doohan) announces he knows the ship like the back of his hand and walks into a bulkhead. Sulu (George Takei) and Chekov (Walter Koenig) get lost in the woods. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) is handed the worst of it, and we winced for her; the script asks less of an actress who has done more for this series than most. Captain Klaa (Todd Bryant) turns up every twenty minutes to remind us he is coming.
Then there are the effects, which are poor in a way that matters. The film has been promising awe for an hour, and there is a minute, as the ship nears what the film calls the Great Barrier and Goldsmith’s music promises something on the other side of it, when we sat forward and thought it might arrive. It does not. What is on the screen cannot carry what the music is asking of it, and the picture goes flat at the moment it most needs to open up.
Against its own series the film comes off badly. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) knew exactly how long a joke could run and what these people were for. Shatner knows what these people are for; he has no idea how long a joke should run. Goldsmith, back for the first time since the 1979 film, brings his old theme with him and writes a new one for the mountain, and the score does a good deal of the work the pictures should have done.
Most critics have written the film off, and we cannot quarrel with their number, only with the tone. This is not a lazy film. It was made by people who meant every word of it, which is rarer than it sounds and not the same as making it well. Watch the first half hour, in which nothing much happens and three old friends talk, and decide then whether you have the patience for what they do once they are given the ship.
