Many people consider “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier” the worst Trek film ever made;  that if you make somebody sit down and watch it, you’re basically committing crimes punishable by the Geneva Convention.

I, however, am one of those people who can find the good in just about anything. I took it as a personal challenge to find something good about “Star Trek V” because it is so disliked throughout the Trek fandom. I didn’t have a copy of it in my video library, so I went down to the library, put in an inter-library loan request for the DVD and waited patiently. Two weeks later, I received not a basic copy but the deluxe version with several different commentaries, deleted scenes and a short behind the scenes documentary. I was excited…if I couldn’t find the good in the movie, maybe watching it with the commentary track turned on would help me figure out why people consider it such an awful movie.

The film opens on a scene of the vast desert of Nimbus III, called “The Planet of Galactic Peace”. We see a man digging holes in the ground, perhaps he is a miner of some sort looking for salt or precious metals or whatever Nimbus III has that is valuable. In the distance, we see a dark rider, hooded and cloaked against the harsh glare of the Nimban sun. The miner raises a rife of some sort, although weapons are forbidden. The rider (who appears to be some sort of humanoid) gets off his horse-like creature, grabs the miner and begs him to share his pain so that he may gain some kind of strength. The miner, feeling vulnerable, begins to cry and asks the man where got this power to see into his soul. The rider tells him the power was within the miner all along and asks the man to join his quest for the ultimate truth, ultimate knowledge. It is then that the rider removes his hood and reveals himself to be Vulcan. When the miner exclaims at this, the Vulcan begins to laugh which is startling because, Vulcans do not laugh or express any emotion of any kind. And so we are led into the credits, wondering who this strange Vulcan is and what he means by ‘ultimate truth, ultimate knowledge’.

After the credits darken and fade, we come upon a scene set in a canyon at daybreak and we are told it is the beautiful Yosmite National Park. We see a man climbing a very large cliff or rock with no supports, no ropes to catch him should he fall which implies that the climber is very brave or very foolhardy or perhaps both. (As an aside..the music in this particular scene is quite lovely) The camera moves into reveal the climber is, in fact, our beloved Captain Kirk  from the U.S.S. Enterprise. The camera pans out to show us Bones watching Kirk through a set of binoculars and having a bit of a typical Bones freakout worrying about whether or not one of his best friends is about to fall off the mountain. Spock zooms up on rocket boots to have a conversation with the Captain who explains the meaning behind the phrase “He climbed the mountain because it was there”. Which, of course, leaves Spock totally puzzled. Kirk insists he would rather concentrate on climbing and that Spock should go bug the shit out of McCoy for awhile. Kirk slips, falling and we’re certain the Captain is about to be killed within the first fifteen minutes of the movie. However, Spock manages to pull out a Superman like move, diving  headfirst down the side of the mountain to catch Kirk just as he’s about to smash his head like an overripe melon thrown onto hard concrete.

We cut back to a scene in a Nimban cantina where  there are a multitude of patrons of various alien species, including a dancing girl of felinoid origins with three breasts (surely every man’s dream…more to play with!). There is a hooded figure (do we see a recurring theme here? I do.) meandering through the bar to a back room with a table at which a humanoid and a fat, graying Klingon are seated. The figure removes her hood to reveal she is a Romulan, but not as we know them. She doesn’t have the typical eyebrow ridges we’d come to expect by this point, nor is she dressed in military-like clothing and she doesn’t have the chili-bowl-over-the-head haircut that had been pretty much standard for any Romulan by this time. She is breathtakingly beautiful, for a Romulan anyway. I remember watching this in college in the student lounge and some guy muttered, “Hoooooly crap.” when she finally revealed her face.  We are told that the humanoid is a Mr. St. John (a Federation representative) while the Klingon is called Korrd. Korrd does his best to endear the Romulan representative to him by burping in an incredibly gross manner the moment he gets the chance to say something.

Suddenly the miner who was touched by the mysterious hooded Vulcan comes running up to the gates of the cantina, gun blazing. He is followed by various other humanoid-types, some on horses, some on foot, all bearing weapons while back in the conference room, the three representatives begin to discuss how badly things have been going on Nimbus III, which we learn was supposed to be a joint colonization effort between the Federation, the Klingon Homeworld and Romulus. All of a sudden, klaxons begin to sound. The cantina is being attacked by the Vulcan and his followers Lots of smashing into people, throwing people around. You know..typical Star Trek fight scene. St. John and the Romulan run to the nearest transmitter to see if they can get any information and of course, Korrd heads straight for the now abandoned bar to help himself to more liquor. Because maybe if he drinks enough, all this will just GO AWAY. Somehow I don’t think that’s the case as the Vulcan (whose name we learn is Sybok…which is also the name of a cobra-like Pokemon if I’m not mistaken) strides through the bar to declare that they are all prisoners. He tells them he is counting on the governments stopping at  nothing to retrieve them.

Cut to a scene of the Enterprise A in spacedock while Scotty rants that the engines were put together by monkeys. There is a bit of dialogue here which alludes to Scotty making some kind of a romantic date with Uhura. That sly dog..I didn’t know he had it in him, or maybe by the 24th century they have something to GET it in him much like our Viagra and Cialis of today. Uhura presents them with ‘dinner’–two foil packets of dried something-or-other. You’d think that she’d at least have gotten something from the replicators instead of dried out 20th century astronaut food which probably tastes like dried out carboard. The computer malfunctions and Scotty says he just fixed the damn thing, then starts to eat his dinner. Unfortunately, Star Fleet breaks into say there is a problem in the Neutral Zone and that the Enterprise is ordered to recall key personnel so they can take off to save the day as always.

The first people she contacts are Sulu and Chekov who are hiking through the forest and they are totally lost. Uhura says she is going to send a shuttlecraft to pick them up. But why I don’t understand why she can’t just beam them up? However, if the computer is malfunctioning then maybe the transporter is offline. They never say.

We cut to a scene at night of Spock, Bones and Kirk around a fire eating bourbon-laced beans joking and sipping from a flask. The old gang is all together again for one last adventure. Kirk admits he knew he wouldn’t die because he’s always known he will die alone which brings a sudden screeching halt to the jovial atmosphere, turning it darker. Spock pulls out a device which ejects what the captions say is a “Marsh Melon(no I’m not kidding. I’m hard of hearing, so I turned on the captions and the captions plainly read “marsh melon”).  The gang begins to sing “Row Row Row Your Boat” which, of course Spock doesn’t comprehend the meaning of. You’d think that, of course, by now Spock would have heard the song SOMEWHERE since he’s been working and living with humans for most of his adult life.  Didn’t Lady Amanda sing Earth songs to him when he was a kid? They all say goodnight to each other, several times, and fall asleep only to find a shuttlecraft practically landing on the their heads.

Enter a Klingon Warbird captained by the quite ugly (even by Klingon standards) Kaptain Klaa–a lanky-looking young commander who seems to have the typical Klingon thirst to see his enemies driven before him with the lamentations of the women ringing in his ears. He is told by one of his officers there is a target within range, some kind of ancient probe. Klaa says to her, “Alright we’re going to try and hit it. We need target practice anyway.” The eyepiece of his scope comes down and he starts trying to hit this probe, which appears to be some kind of satellite of Earth origin. Boom boom boom, probe is destroyed.

And this is where it lost me…I have to be honest. I couldn’t sit and watch the movie anymore. The plot, whatever it was, seemed to be dragging on and on and on. I checked the amount of time left in the movie which was about an hour and a half or so. I thought to myself, “If I have to sit through another hour and a half of this, it’s going to be torture.” But I was determined to see it through to the end, because that was what I had said I was going to do. I got up, I got myself a little snack, something to drink, grabbed a shawl I’ve been working on and settled down to get through the rest of the film.

I admit, I hadn’t seen ST V in about ten or eleven years, so I had conveniently forgotten how bad this  movie was. I wanted to be able to say glowing, positive things about it…but I just couldn’t. But after half an hour or so I was groaning and going “How much longer is this moooovie?” because I felt like it was going to drag on forever. I couldn’t keep my attention on the movie…my mind kept wandering and I kept pausing it to get up and go do SOMETHING…put laundry in the washer, move stuff from the washer to the dryer, feed the cat, clean the bathroom…anything to get out of watching this movie. So in the end,  it took around 3 hours just to watch it because I kept getting up.

There were a few moments that made me laugh or just go “What the bloody hell?”, like the scene with Spock and the ‘marsh melons”. As well as the scene with the nekkid dancing Uhura, which I found out was actually Nichelle Nichols and NOT a body double as I’d assumed. I’d started reading her autobiography, “Beyond Uhura” and learned she’d been a dancer and a singer long before she ever put on an earpiece and said “Hailing frequencies open, Captain.”

Somehow, I managed to force myself to watch the film not once but three times, hoping that with repeated viewings things would get better. They didn’t…each time I promised myself “Ok..you can have a chocolate bar if you JUST finish this damn movie.” I would equate having to watch this movie with Chinese Water Torture, only that’d be insulting to the Chinese because this was MUCH worse. I’d rather be strapped to a kitchen chair and forced to watch at Teletubby marathon before I’d watch Star Trek V again. Despite my optimistic attitude, I just couldn’t find one positive thing about this movie to comment on, not one thing to redeem it for all the horrible writing, producing and directing.