This Movie's Underrated: "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier"

So, my roommate jokes constantly that I think every movie is underrated. This is not true. For example, I feel like the "rating" of Twilight is pretty much right on the dot, and even that might be overrated.

 Pretty much...hits the nail on the head.

But I think the miscommunication  is that when I say "underrated", that doesn't mean "great" or even "good". Indeed, an "underrated" movie may average out to "bad". But it may be more important than people realize, or have very specific redeeming qualities.

And nowhere is that more true than in the movie I've wanted to do in this column for a long time... Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

 I swear to God...Paramount hired DARPA to develop the most awkward tagline 

that human nervous systems could make.

The Final Frontier's one of those movies where you look at it and ache for the possibilities that lay dormant within it, ultimately unrealized. It's one of those movies that has the potential to be at least the sum of its parts, and more, but never quite coheres, and actually starts to disintegrate into a pasty mess.

Now, some of you may doubt that there was anything but metric tons of turd comprising this film...I'm here to tell you that you are actually wrong, and it gives me no small amount of pleasure and relief.

See, when I was a kid this was one of my favorite movies. For fuck's sake, how could it not be? Let's break it down: starts out with Kirk climbing a mountain, no rope. He slips, true, but shiiiit...Spock's got his back, and saves him with rocket boots. ROCKET BOOTS! Since man could DREAM he has yearned for such a future!

Then, there's a hostage situation. Some Vulcan renegade has kidnapped diplomats: human, Klingon, and Romulan. The Enterprise is really in no condition to mount a rescue, but Starfleet insists on sending her anyway because they have no other experienced crews in the area. Now...you might call this a plot hole...especially because (as it did NOT occur to my 9-year-old mind) they could have just transferred Kirk or some of his staff to ANOTHER ship. But this movie makes sweet, sweet love to that plot hole by sending Kirk down in a shuttlecraft with a platoon of heavily armed and heavily turtlenecked SPACE MARINES.

"This is gonna be fucking awesome. I fucking love you guys."

Eventually, it's revealed that the Vulcan renegade is Spock's half-brother, who rejected the tenets of logic and is on a quest to the center of the galaxy to find God, who he maintains has sent him visions of a planet there where he waits beyond the Great Barrier.

"Sorry...go back for a second?"

The thing is, as much crap as it gets for its plot, I don't think it's THAT BAD. Star Trek's always had a tumultuous and spotty record when it comes to tackling religious issues. Hell, people bitch about this one...an episode of the animated series had them finding God at the center of the galaxy and actually having it turn out to be Satan. So really, the core of this plot isn't that bad. Madman takes over Enterprise, brainwashes people, Kirk's gotta stop him before they reach a purportedly destructive barrier at the center of the galaxy. Sorta like Die Hard on the Enterprise. It's the "God" thing, I think, that makes people squeamish, but I actually kinda like that they go on a literal quest for God. The most romantic aspect of Star Trek, for me, has always been its love of pure exploration. And this movie sees the crew we know and love thrust into a quest bigger than any of them have ever dealt with. 

And yet, the big three of Kirk, Spock, and Bones never lose their skepticism, never lose that sense of human intelligence that made the original series so great. They're fully willing to believe in the "God" that they find, but at the end of the day, they keep their common sense and their wits about them. And when the "God" they find demands that he make use of the Enterprise to carry him off the planet and into the stars, Kirk lets loose with one of cinema's greatest armor-piercing questions: "What does God need with a starship?"

That's why I can't understand why Gene Roddenberry of all people hated this movie so much. He's a longtime atheist, and this movie is one of the greatest balances between full-blown atheism and a bit of inspired deism. As cheesy as Kirk's line about God really being inside the human heart is, it's kind of a refreshing thing to hear science fiction say: 

"Look, we've all been raised to believe in a giant bearded man in the sky. And hell, he may be out there (and we may need to fire torpedoes at him until he explodes). But maybe we don't have to find him. All we have to do is look."

Now, even if you think the plot's stupid, and there are some very stupid parts of it, I think that 3 things elevate The Final Frontier into "underrated" status. They are The Villain, The Big Three, and The Aesthetics.

Number 4: motherfucking marshmelons.

I personally think Sybok ranks among the top villains in Star Trek. And it starts with his introduction. Everybody, not just Star Trek fans, knows that Vulcans don't laugh, and aren't supposed to have emotion. So we see this guy come up to another guy, in the desert, and basically console him psychically. This psychic mastermind takes off his hood, and we see he's a Vulcan. So far so good. But then...he starts laughing his ass off. 

Uh...I am vaguely unsettled.

And he's not that bad of a guy! Throughout, he never seems like the "terrorist" the Federation believes him to be. He actively works to avert bloodshed. He does, however, brainwash people into euphoric little Xanax minions without pain (or any other emotion, it seems). And call me crazy, but it's genuinely unsettling seeing him turn all of Kirk's crew and friends into smiling puppet people.

And yet, you can't help but be kind of taken in by him. He's charismatic, he's charming, and his ability to influence even Bones and Spock give him an air of unmistakable power and menace. And in the end, it's almost a tearjerker watching everything he's believed in be stripped away from him, watching him confront his vanity and pride, realize it, and spend the last few seconds of his life sacrificing himself so his brother and his friends can save themselves. He even manages to make his therapy catchphrase seem BADASS in his dying moments.

Thanks, TV Tropes!

And I'm gonna put it out there: the scene where Sybok attempts to convert the Big Three into joy joy cultists has some of the strongest acting in Star Trek, courtesy of the late great DeForest Kelley.

And that brings me to the second thing that elevates this movie into "underrated" status: The Big Three. The fact is, for my money this movie comes closer than any other to capturing the spirit of friendship, struggle, and camaraderie that Kirk, Spock, and McCoy shared in the original series.

It's true that Kirk becomes a bit of a Mary Sue in this movie, and no small amount of fault for that can be placed on William Shatner. He climbs fucking rocks without ropes, he leads a strike team of space marines, he torpedoes Space God in the face, and he's the only one to question both main villains. But Kirk has always been a larger-than-life character, and it's hard to find the difference between Shatner's indulgences and just actual things that Kirk would probably do. 

And the thing is, the interactions between these three friends are just wonderful in this movie...joking with each other...lamenting, and then later taking joy in the fact that they're basically all the family each other has. Fighting, and arguing, but at the end of the day, always respecting each other. And the character development in the movie is simply...fascinating.

"My sensor readings indicate quite clearly what you did there, Captain."

Going back to McCoy's epiphany...sweet tapdancing Christ, can DeForest Kelley act. His confrontation of his guilt over euthanizing his dying, suffering father is one of the biggest tearjerkers in all of Trek. It's a powerful scene that Kelley absolutely owns, and for one brief set piece we see some of the scars that made Bones into the gruff old doctor he is.

Spock's birth is a little narmy, a little hokey, but it's sad to see him still feel a bit of insecurity about not being fully Vulcan. His really awesome character moment comes when he tells Sybok off for trying to recruit him, telling him how much he's changed since they parted ways as two outcast boys. It's a moment where we really see how far Spock has come as a character, not just since his resurrection in Star Trek III, but over the entire Star Trek franchise, starting as a Vulcan who could barely control his emotions, and realizing that controlling his emotions was only controlling himself. In this movie, he gets the balls to tell Sybok that yeah, he realizes logic isn't all there is. He knows emotion's got some merit too. But what Sybok's doing is just insane in the membrane. And seeing Spock take that stand is awesome.

Now on to the last of the triumvirate. Kirk, as I said, is a bit overloaded with awesome in the movie. He gets all the good plot-moving dialogue and action. But after seeing McCoy and Spock get basically pacified by telepathy, he offers a surprisingly unhealthy, and yet refreshingly frank and human take on pain, healing, and sadness. He barks at Sybok that he needs his pain...that it makes him who he is today, that every loss and heartache has shaped him. 

And even though, again, he's the only one to stand up to Sybok, one of my favorite Kirk character moments is in this movie, where he confides in his two friends over the campfire: "I've always known...I'll die alone".

This is James T. Kirk. Women want him, and men want him more. He torpedoed Space God in the face.

"Thy will GET FUCKED-"

To have Kirk humanized like that...to have Kirk admit to how terribly lonely it is being a god among men who launches into voids where others shrink in terror...to have him basically admit that who he is and what he does means his friends will one by one get left behind...

Well, that kind of precision characterization deserves a better movie.

But that's why I think this movie isn't as bad as people think. It brings some new, fresh, insightful stuff to the table, which only makes it more tragic that it's also full of so much derp.

But one thing that I will put out there as absolutely loving and will defend to my dying day as awesome are the  aesthetics of the movie: the costume work, the production design.

The original series had terribly 60's production design. I'll just come out and say it. It sucked. Aside from the costumes and the very general idea of a round bridge and a central captain's chair, it was terribly cheap and outdated almost instantly. I know they had no budget. I don't blame them for that. But every time we revisit the same sets in subsequent shows, they still have that boxy, beepy, blinking aesthetic that screams "WE ARE FROM THE 60'S WE DO NOT KNOW HOW COMPUTERS WORK". The bridge from The Next Generation, despite the hotel carpeting and earth tones, still looks good today and the controls still look futuristic.

When they got a huge budget for the first Star Trek movie, they had the opportunity to update it, along with all the other production designs and the costumes. Unfortunately, it was the 70's. You know what happened next.

JESUS CHRIST MY EYES-

With The Wrath of Khan, the costumes got awesome. But the bridge was still stuck in the 70's. 

But in The Final Frontier, we got the awesome cold, clean, touch-screen sensibilities of TNG combined with just enough of the classic Enterprise (and this is me being the biggest nerd in the world, but I always preferred Frontier's blue and green touchscreens to the weird yellow and purple touchscreens of TNG). And we still got to keep the awesomely-designed movie Enterprise, the only good redesign to come out of The Motion Picture. 

And that's not even getting to the other production designs! First of all, I loved the shuttlecraft in this movie. Clean and sleek on the outside, rough and spartan on the inside. But the design I love most from this movie is the new phaser design.

This raygun has an ammo clip. According to Shatner, your argument is invalid.

The fact is, Star Trek V took a lot of interesting chances with the franchise. Shatner pushed for a more realistic design aesthetic, a more based-in-reality look to Federation technology. And this new phaser design, badass, grounded in reality, yet unmistakably futuristic, is symbolic of that. It doesn't look like the delicate, graceful things you see in most other Star Trek media. It looks mean...it's got an ammo clip. This phaser will fuck you up. And that "realistic" aesthetic, that "flawed" aesthetic, also shows itself in the plot.

Where Gene Roddenberry wanted a perfect Utopia full of people who never made mistakes (or suffered from boredom, apparently), William Shatner wanted a Star Trek with a shitty, deserted planet full of disenfranchised settlers and an Enterprise that actually had to have a shakedown cruise before it worked perfectly. He wanted a Starfleet that sometimes had to send in the Marines dressed to kill (or stun), that had more dirty secrets and failures than you saw in the TV adventures.

And if nothing else, I think this movie deserves credit for that, especially because Deep Space Nine and even shows like Babylon 5 later ran with the idea rather successfully.

Now, I've spent this whole review elucidating exactly why this movie deserves a second chance. Here's why it doesn't:

The special effects are horrendous. You know when someone says something really racist? Something where you're like, "I can't believe that can happen in this day and age"? That's how you'll feel when you see some of the model work in this movie:

It could have been a really exciting sequence! It still kind of is! But not when they're being chased by stop motion! The special effects really do a number on suspension of disbelief, and ruin a bunch of sequences. They're reminiscent of the original TV series, in the worst way possible.

And I could go on about occasionally clunky dialogue and plot holes...but really, the thing that utterly scuttles Star Trek V: The Final Frontier... is the "humor".

See, the previous movie (the one with the whales) was the most successful Star Trek movie to date, and it's the one people are bound to have seen even if they aren't fans. And a lot of that had to do with the fact that the movie is almost a straight comedy, and a very good one.

Unfortunately, studio executives tend to have very Frankensteinian thinking about producing movies. "People like tits! Let's take tits and shove them like a tumor into every movie we can, even the period pieces." In this case, it was, "The last movie had jokes! People like jokes. Put jokes in this one, even where they're completely inappropriate and awful."

And they are. 75% of them. Because it's a movie about hostages and terrorists and finding God and dealing with pain. We don't need Scotty to hit his head like a moron.

Some of the humor is genuinely funny and heartfelt. This is usually when it's subtle, or in character. For instance, when Kirk muses in the elevator that he could use a shower, and Spock's only reaction is a matter-of-fact, "Yes." Or when Kirk, overcome with emotion over Spock saving him from certain death, starts to embrace him. Spock stops him and sheepishly mutters, "Please, sir...not in front of the Klingons."

But who to blame for this shoe-horned humor? A lot of blame is leveled at Shatner. Let's be honest, when we think of a "director" or an "auteur", we don't think of Shatner. But a lot of the blame can really be leveled at the studio, who slashed the budget and pushed for more stupid jokes. And a lot can simply be blamed on fate. The movie happening during a writer's union strike and all the major special effects companies were completely booked during filming, so Shatner had to go to a more cut-rate establishment. Granted, his story can be hokey at times, and he does make Kirk into a bit of a Heroic Paragon, but he can't be blamed for everything that went wrong with this movie, and not for the terrible humor.

And I think that's what most people remember about the movie, and why most people have condemned it (rightfully so). But this movie's more than its awful humor, and it's more than the plot holes. It's better than people remember it as, if only barely so, and there's more going on here than people give it credit for.

 And that's why Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is underrated.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go hole up in my apartment and wait for the coming Internet shitstorm.