...this is what we get. A long, cheesy, terrible episode of the television show. You know the odd numbered rule about the Star Trek movies? It really applies to this movie. This was just absolutely horrible. The plot, the effects, the conflict, the unfulfilling ending...man. Horrible. But I'm not going to spend this review talking about how bad this movie was. I'm going to talk about how it could have been good, and how they wasted so much potential.
The movie starts off with a guy riding through a desert on some horse-like animal. He comes up to a little bald guy defending some holes in the sand. The stranger gets off the horse thing and tells the bald guy to "share your pain with me". The bald guy starts crying because he has absolutely no hair at all. The stranger, whose name is Sybok, is then revealed to be a Vulcan. When the bald guy comments on this, Sybok starts laughing like a nut. We then cut to William Shatner trying to scale his own ego. He, Spock, and Bones are on shore leave and have decided to spend it camping. They have a scene where they try to teach campfire songs to Spock. Many people hated this scene, but I thought it was kind of funny. This is interrupted, however, because a hostage situation has developed at Nakatomi...uh...some planet. The Vulcan from the opening scene has captured the capital city, and has captured three important officials, a Romulan, a human, and a Klingon. Enterprise has been ordered to take direct action, even though the new ship is literally falling apart. The admiral says that they need an experienced captain to settle the problem, no matter what the status of his ship is. This felt kind of contrived to me. If they wanted an experienced captain, why didn't they just beam Kirk over to a ship that was working properly? Because then we wouldn't have had all that suspense with them having to do their jobs in spite of the ship's problems.
So they get to the planet and fight their way into the Vulcan guy's city. They get to the hostages, but it turns out that the hostages have all "shared their pain" with Sybok, and are now loyal to him. The whole thing was a plan of Sybok's to capture a starship which will aid him on his "quest". We don't know what that is yet. So the boarding party is forced to fly the shuttle back to the Enterprise. You see, the transporters on the ship aren't working. Also, a Klingon commander is after the Enterprise. He wants Kirk. The Klingons still have a grudge against Kirk for blowing up the Klingons when they were trespassing on his ship. So the shuttle makes it into the hangar just before the klingon ship attacks them. I know many people hate this scene, but I actually liked it. As they are getting off the shuttlecraft, Kirk jumps Sybok. Sybok overpowers him, but Spock grabs a gun and has a chance to kill Sybok. He does not, however. Instead, he allows Sybok to take the gun from him he is recaptured.
Now let's review here. At this point, I thought the movie was okay. You have a pretty interesting conflict going on. A Vulcan who appears to be delusional is in possession of the Enterprise. And he and Spock appear to know each other. Spock refused to kill him, which makes him a very personal enemy for Spock. We don't know exactly what Sybok wants with the ship, but they could have made him a crazy terrorist leader or something. They could have made this about Spock having to overcome his feelings towards Sybok and help Kirk take over the ship. At the very least, they could have made it a dumb action movie about terrorists taking over the Enterprise and Kirk and Spock trying to defeat the terrorists by themselves. Instead, out of the blue, we get Sybok trying to find GOD.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Spock says that Sybok is his half-brother, in one of the biggest plot contrivances I've ever heard of.
Spock: Sybok is my brother.
Kirk: I know for a fact that you don't have a brother.
Spock: Well, I have a half-brother.
What? Like I said, contrived. So the rest of this movie is too painful for me to go into too much detail on. Sybok persuades them to assist him on his quest to find God. They decide to the center of the galaxy and through the Great Barrier. Which might mean something if we had ever heard of the Great Barrier before. They get through the barrier, and they go to the planet. It turns out that the thing on the planet is not God, and Sybok sacrifices himself to allow the others to escape. Suddenly, the Klingons (why are they even in the movie?) attack the Enterprise. Spock convinces General Korrd, the Klingon hostage, to talk the Klingons down. Korrd succeds, and the klingons beam Kirk off the planet. Everyone is saved, and the audiences walk out of the theater cursing Shatner.
Most people would say that the movie in it's entirety is bad. I disagree. As I stated before, I thought the first half was pretty good. The second half was terrible. The plot just didn't know what it was doing in that half. One minute the movie is about terrorists taking control of the Enterprise, then all of a sudden it's about God, then it's some kind of demon and not really God, then the Klingons are thrown into the mix (why not?) then the movie just kind of ends. I want to talk about the effects for a minute. The previous four Trek movies were not very big on the effects. But they were all better than this one. I know there was some confusion with Industrial Light and Magic working on the Back to the Future sequels instead of this, but man. These effects were bad. This was the only Star Trek movie that reminded me of the TV show. The effects, the plot, the terrible ending, and the heavy-handed message were all very reminiscent of an episode of the series. Star Trek 5 was a failure for many reasons, not the least of which was the directing job done by one Willian Shatner. The plot, the effects, the story, the conflicts were simply terrible. This is not, in my opinion as bad as Star Trek the Motion Picture, but it is close.
I decided to post a link to a rifftrax clip of this movie. If you don't know what rifftrax is, it's the same thing as MST3K. If you don't know what that is, just click the link anyway. The clip his hilarious.Get more detail about Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
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