The Final Insult
Whilst the Enterprise is in for repairs, Kirk and the crew take advantage of some shore leave heading to Yosemite with Spock and McCoy. But their leave is cut short when news that a renegade Vulcan on Nimbus III has taken hostage a human, a Klingon and a Romulan. With orders from Starfleet Kirk and the skeleton crew along with a damaged Enterprise head off on a rescue mission but then are not the only ones as the Klingons have also sent their own ship commanded by the evil Klaa (Todd Bryant).
As I have mentioned before in my reviews of the earlier Star Trek movies, I am not a Trekkie and so my interest in the Star Trek movies is purely out of looking to be entertained. Now a movie doesn't have to be good to entertain, bad movies entertain as well and having read how derided "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" was I thought that maybe if it didn't entertain for the right reasons it might entertain for the wrong ones. Sadly it did neither and the only thing that "The Final Frontier" achieved in doing was to leave me bored which is a disappointment after the entertaining 2nd, 3rd and 4th movies in the franchise.
So where does it go wrong then? Well it would be far too easy to poke the finger of blame solely at William Shatner who steps behind the camera to direct but his directing is part of the problem. Part of the trouble seems to be almost a case of ego as in the early scenes which are suppose to show Kirk doing some climbing in Yosemite as not only do these scenes plod on longer than needed but they fail to convince for a single second. But it is also Shatner's directing style which unfortunately fails to cover up for budget limitations and the effects and model work stick out like a sore thumb.
But that is not the worst of it as an attempt to deliver the satirical tone of the last movie fails time and again with some of it being painful. A scene in Yosemite where Kirk, McCoy and Spock attempt to sing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" falls so flat that you begin to question how this could have been passed as okay. But the biggest issue is simply the storyline which is so uninteresting that you kind of find yourself drifting off as it skirts around for a while before bringing in the doozy which is the search for God, a concept which fails as badly as the humour.
What this all boils down to is that "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" is sadly a bad entry in the Star Trek franchise and sadly feels like a movie made because of a studio wanting to make money off of the popularity of the series rather than because it needed to be made whilst at the same time it sadly highlights how old the original stars now looked.
