After the success of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Paramount quickly greenlit
Star Trek IV. Harve Bennett was kept on as lead producer, and Leonard Nimoy was hired
to direct after William Shatner, who shared a Most Favored Nations clause with Leonard
Nimoy in their respective contracts, declined due to obligations with his television show
T.J. Hooker.
Shatner was initially reluctant to sign on at all, and for a brief while, Bennett and Nimoy
considered producing a prequel set in Starfleet Academy, with young actors replacing the main cast.
However, Paramount eventually came to an agreement with Shatner for an increase in pay
and an assurance that he would be able to direct any potential Star Trek 5.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home released on November 26, 1986.
It received a surprisingly warm reception from critics, who enjoyed its fun tone and applauded
it for its appeal to non-Trekkies, and it earned $133 million in worldwide gross,
making it one of the biggest earners of the year.
Paramount would consider this the best-performing Star Trek film until
the J.J. Abrams reboot two decades later.
Out of a neglected wasteland where hope goes to die walks a being like no other, a Vulcan
heretic convinced of the existence of a divine creator and an eternal paradise, common beliefs
of all the religions of all the cultures of the known universe. With a flock of dedicated
followers, this man, Sybok, manages to hijack the Starship Enterprise and plot a course
for the center of the galaxy, where he hopes to unlock the greatest mystery of existence,
to come face to face with God. Can Kirk, Spock, and McCoy overcome the threat this zealot
represents, and what will they really find beyond the Great Barrier?
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let's get back to the subject at hand.
With Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home proving to be the franchise's biggest hit to date,
Paramount was eager to move forward with a new film in the series. William Shatner, who
had already secured the job of directing, became fascinated with televangelists and
the cult-like following they inspired. He used this to create the story of Star Trek
V, which would be about a religious fanatic taking over the Enterprise, alienating Kirk,
and then going to the center of the universe in search of God only to find Satan.
After getting a greenlight from Paramount head Frank Mancuso, Shatner created a film
treatment and took it to Harve Bennett. Bennett had grown tired of Star Trek by this point
and was vocal in his desire to leave the franchise behind, but Shatner convinced him to stay
for at least one more film. Bennett, however, was pretty critical of Shatner's story, warning
that its theological subject matter and portrayal of a Judeo-Christian Satan would alienate
audiences. The pair then reworked the story, changing Satan to an imprisoned alien pretending
to be God and adding more adventure elements to the plot.
When Gene Roddenberry got hold of the story, he was unimpressed and borderline offended
by it. Though he'd written a very similar treatment for the first Star Trek film, called
"The God-Thing," he didn't think it was wise to include such weighty theological ideas
in the Star Trek universe.
"What does God need with a starship?"
Moreover, he was very critical of the idea that the Enterprise crew--especially Spock
and McCoy--would be "converted" to the villain's messiah complex at the expense of their loyalty
and friendship to Captain Kirk. He wasn't alone in that, either, as both Leonard Nimoy
and DeForest Kelley raised similar objections. The studio was also nervous about the subject
matter, but it was even more concerned about the escalating budget, with the entire cast
becoming far too expensive for the more economical approach Harve Bennett had taken with the
previous films.
Knowing that the script needed help, Bennett and Shatner approached Nicholas Meyer, but
he was much too busy with The Deceivers and Company Business to wade back into Star Trek.
After Meyer turned them down, Bennett suggested David Loughery, writer of 1984's Dreamscape,
who had several ideas for how to solve the script's thornier problems. Unfortunately,
in the middle of working on Star Trek V, he had to step away as a result of the 1988 writer's
strike, which went on for five months and remains the longest strike in WGA history.
This ground things to a halt, and to make matters worse, Leonard Nimoy, who'd been dealt
a series of personal tragedies including the recent passing of both of his parents, stepped
away to work on The Good Mother, which proved to be a box office flop. Around the same time,
he also directed the Fantastic Voyage-inspired theme park ride Body Wars at Walt Disney World's
EPCOT, but I can't tell if that happened before or after Star Trek V. I just have to include
it, though, because I think it's a fun bit of trivia.
Despite these delays, Paramount wanted to move forward as quickly as possible--
"Let's go to work."
--worried that the momentum from Star Trek IV wouldn't last much longer. They fast-tracked
the production as soon as the writer's strike came to an end, and a lot of script changes
were made by Loughery behind Shatner's back. Shatner made Loughery remove some of these
changes, but with pre-production already well underway and Paramount demanding significant
cuts to keep the budget manageable, there wasn't a lot of time to clean up the script.
Among the most significant changes were the inclusion of a controversial familial connection
between Spock and the villain, Sybok, which made the conflict between Spock and Kirk more
believable, and the decision to not have Spock and McCoy betray their captain. Whereas Shatner
had originally intended for Sybok to win the crew over to his cause by virtue of his own
charisma and force of will, this never quite worked, and so his powers of persuasion were
turned into a largely unexplained bit of psychic brainwashing.
A lot of the regular Star Trek cast members were uneasy about the script, but they signed
on anyway, no doubt influenced by significant pay raises all around. The only actor who
needed extra convincing was George Takei, who didn't like the idea of working under
Shatner's direction. The biggest challenge, though, was finding somebody to play the role
of Sybok. In the early stages of development, the character had been written for Sean Connery,
who was too busy with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The mythical planet of Sha Ka
Ree was given its name as a little nod to the actor.
"Fascinating."
After briefly considering Max von Sydow as a replacement, Shatner then found the lesser-known
Laurence Luckinbill, an actor, playwright, and director who'd done a number of one-man
shows including one in which he played former president Lyndon Johnson. It was for this
latter performance that Shatner contacted him to play Sybok, and Luckinbill enthusiastically
agreed to do it. If you ask me, Luckinbill is perhaps the single best thing about Star
Trek V, and he infuses Sybok with the charm and gravitas the character needs, knowing
when to chew the scenery beside Shatner and when to tone it down for emotional effect.
"I want your respect. Are you afraid to hear me out?"
Several other actors were brought in to play much smaller roles, including David Warner,
who'd previously appeared in sci-fi classics like TRON, Time Bandits, and Time After Time,
George Murdock as the face and voice of the quote-unquote God, stuntman Todd Bryant as
the Klingon captain, fitness enthusiast Spice Williams-Crosby as his lieutenant, Charles
Cooper as Commander Korrd, William Shatner's daughter Melanie as this poor yeoman, and
Harve Bennett himself as a Starfleet commander known only as "Fleet Admiral Bob."
A lot of filming was done at Yosemite National Park, where Kirk's free climb of El Capitan
was faked with a clever fiberglass wall and the use of several stunt performers; at the
Trona Pinnacles and other areas of the Mojave Desert, which proved a logistical nightmare
for transportation and dust management; and of course in and around the Paramount lot,
where the Enterprise bridge once again had to be rebuilt from scratch. Some of the corridor
sets and the sickbay set were borrowed from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was
filming at the same time. In total, principle photography was done in just under three months,
from October to December of 1988.
Though a rough cut was screened for the Paramount studio heads to high praise, it didn't include
the visual effects. Industrial Light and Magic, which had worked on the three previous Star
Trek films, was unavailable due to commitments on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and
Ghostbusters II. Finding another visual effects house in a short period of time with a restricted
budget proved incredibly difficult, and so all involved settled on Bran Ferren, who'd
done work on Altered States and The Untouchables. The big problem with Ferren, however, was
that his company, Associates and Ferren, was based in New York and New Jersey, whereas
the film was being made on the other side of the country.
With Shatner demanding pre-approval of every effects shot, the back and forth between east
and west coasts was time-consuming and laborious, not to mention expensive. Ferren was forced
to cut corners in order to meet Paramount's budgetary demands and the absurdly short three
month time window, and even then, several shots and sequences were nixed by Paramount
before Ferren could even make proper pre-test versions. As a result, some effects shots
were recycled from previous films.
Perhaps the most significant effects cuts, though, were to the climax of the film. Shatner
had originally envisioned a battle between Kirk and a horde of demons conjured from the
depths of Hell by the false God. In the final script, these demons had turned into so-called
"Rock Men," and Shatner had commissioned several suits to be made. Paramount's budget eventually
limited the number of suits to just one, and when Shatner finally saw test footage of the
Rock Man in action, he was deeply unhappy with it and ultimately had to remove the entire
sequence, replacing it in post-production with a lot of editing sleight-of-hand.
For the music, Jerry Goldsmith returned for the first time since Star Trek: The Motion
Picture. This time, he incorporated Alexander Courage's original Star Trek theme with the
one he'd created for that earlier film, which was also being used on television screens
as the theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Goldsmith's work is a highlight of the film,
and though it doesn't stand out as much as some of the other Star Trek film soundtracks
and though I wouldn't call it his best work in the franchise, Goldsmith was wise to not punctuate
the humor or overdo the dramatics.
Even with all its edits, Shatner's first cut ran just over two hours, which was too long
to ensure Paramount's targeted number of screenings. Test audiences were pretty negative on the
film as well, and so Paramount made Bennett remove several scenes to cut the film down
to under one-hundred-five minutes. Shatner, Bennett, and the studio then bargained to
get a few more minutes put back in, but Shatner was never happy with the cuts, believing that they
took away essential parts of his finished film. Not too long ago, Shatner lobbied Paramount
to let him produce a director's cut, akin to the special edition of Star Trek: The Motion
Picture, but Paramount refused.
"Understood. Kirk out."
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier released in June of 1989, in the middle of a record-breaking
summer of blockbuster films. It received pretty poor reviews, with critics calling it a massive
step down from the previous entry. Despite this, it was expected to earn as much as two
hundred million dollars and managed to have an opening weekend of seventeen point four
million, making it the best opening weekend of any Star Trek film to that point. Alas,
poor word of mouth and a crowded summer release schedule lead to a very quick drop off, and
the film only ran wide for ten weeks and only earned a total domestic box office of just
under fifty million dollars.
Sufficed to say, it was a massive disappointment for Paramount and nearly killed the film franchise.
It won three Razzie Awards for worst actor, worst director, and worst picture, and Harve
Bennett was given the initial go-ahead to work on the prequel film that had been floating
around for a few years involving a younger cast at Starfleet Academy. Fans don't tend
to look back on Star Trek V too fondly, Roddenberry himself disavowed it, and it frequently finds
itself at or near the bottom of every Star Trek ranking list on the Internet. Even Shatner
eventually admitted its flaws.
In all honesty, it is a bit of a mess, with its production difficulties readily apparent
on screen. The characters aren't treated particularly well by the brainwashing elements of the plot
or by the story's refusal to acknowledge their readily apparent age, and the humor feels
forced and cringe-worthy in several places. The choreography is lazy, and the editing
is distractingly choppy, especially during the hacked-apart climax. The sets and effects
look painfully cheap, and several actors are wasted in minimal roles that serve little
purpose. The Klingon subplot also goes nowhere, despite an excellent set-up in the previous
film, and there is plenty of fodder for Trekkie nitpickers who want to find reasons to complain
about how it treats the overall continuity.
It would be very easy to lay blame for all the film's problems at the feet of its director.
Indeed, many Trekkies have done just that, accusing Shatner of letting his own excesses
take the helm. However, after researching the movie and reading Shatner's own account
of the production (which can be found in Lisabeth Shatner's book, Captain's Log: William Shatner's
Personal Account of the Making of Star Trek V), I don't think that's completely fair.
According to fellow cast members, including one or two who aren't usually disposed to
defend him, Shatner was an excellent director who did a good job juggling the behind-the-scenes
madness without letting it affect the shoot itself.
Sure, some of the film's biggest problems can be traced back to Shatner's original story
treatment, but in the end, I think the majority of the blame for Star Trek V's failure lies
with Paramount, which had been pushing the franchise into ever-more-ludicrous constraints
following the excesses of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. All of the subsequent original series
films were rushed, but none so badly as Star Trek V, and I believe a little more time and
money for script development and effects work would have gone a long way to making this
a worthy entry in the franchise.
That's because Star Trek V: The Final Frontier has a good premise that could have been executed
well. Shatner's story needed more work to hammer out some of the plot contrivances and
to tighten things up, but the idea of a Vulcan heretic leading a crusade that involves the
hijacking of the Enterprise in order to search for God is compelling. Of all the films in
the entire series--including the ones with different casts and crews--this one, I have
to admit, feels more like the original television series than any other. While part of that
is because of its episodic nature--along with its obvious budget and production shortfalls--part
of it is also the story, which deals with many issues that Roddenberry himself wasn't
afraid to tackle and ends with a reveal totally in keeping with the show's mission statement.
Brainwashing aside, I like how it handles the core trilogy of characters--Kirk, Spock,
and McCoy--and the movie is at its strongest when it elaborates on their relationship in
novel ways. Shatner's idea of trying to tear them apart in order to test their bond could
have been the touchstone to an excellent character study, and even though I hate sitting through
their two renditions of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," I have to admit the bookends of them
camping at Yosemite are endearing. And even though it's cliché and sentimental, I do appreciate
that, in the end, they realize they are a family as strong as any other--
"Please, Captain, not in front of the klingons."
--and that God, as Kirk puts it, resides in the human heart.
And that's all for today, my fellow Earthlings. When was the last time you tried to give Star
Trek V a fair shake? Let me know in the comments, and while you're there, don't forget to like
and subscribe if you haven't already. If you'd like to support what I do even more, consider
joining my Patreon to get access to bonus content, vote on future video topics, and
more. You can also check out my website at emagill.com, where you'll find written reviews
of plenty more sci-fi classics in both film and literature. Until next time, though, when
we'll learn to be cautious of routine surgical procedures, this is The Unapologetic Geek,
telling you to never be ashamed of what you love, as long as you're not hurting anybody.
"I don't want my pain taken away. I need my pain!"