Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

[phantom000]

I was a little surprised there was no thread for this movie, and after watching the review for it I felt like talking about it.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is a mess, because the script doesn't know what story it wants to tell. The only thing I will say in its defense (which barely qualifies as a defense) is that it does have some good ideas but has no clue what to do with any of them. It feels very much like two, maybe three, different films which each could have worked on their own but are stitched together in the most haphazard manner possible. Overall the story seems to lack any kind of focus because nothing is properly explored or developed.

What the film needed was a solid script that was focused on a single idea that it would delve into instead of trying to touch on all these different themes which why most of the film seems to go no where.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

But why is he climbing the mountain? To become that mountain. To envelope that mountain.

[clearspira]

I have to say, ''Row-Row-Row Your Boat'' is one of my favourite Star Trek scenes period.

What has a lifetime of career and heroism brought these three men apart from loneliness? They saved not just the Earth but dozens of worlds from destruction. Billions of lives owe them a debt. And yet here they are. Vacationing together. No ''outside work'' friends. No woman by their side. Not even a dog.

And whatever this film's problems, this leads perfectly not just from the thread started by TWOK but it also leads perfectly into ''Generations''. I've heard it said that Kirk's Nexus fantasy should have been him on the bridge of the 1701 about to start a new five year mission. And whilst that argument has merit, Star Trek 5 shows us WHY Kirk would dream of a log cabin with a wife - because that is a life he never had but probably wanted. (Although it should have been Carol and David not Antonia but there you go).

I also think that meeting Demora Sulu cut him far deeper than it seemed at the time. Because Hikaru Sulu too was vacationing with Chekov just as he vacationed with Bones and Spock. And then what did Hikaru do? He found time for a family whilst Kirk sat and moped about it.

I think Star Trek V has its place in the ''movie'' plot of Kirk. Of a man facing his age and demons. Its just a shame it sucks so hard.

[Beastro]

It's main thematic strength is it's the first real bit of Trek that was a downer (in the DS9 sense and it's darker aspects).

You see the failed colony and how the cast go into their demons. Spock and Bone's facing their past troubles is touching. Kirk refusing healing because he wants his pain to keep driving him is very anti-Roddenberry Trek and more Coon Trek by embracing flaws to make us better rather than seeking the former's obsession with perfection.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I love the whole camping bit, but the movie itself is mostly just a plot about Spock and his brother right? Leave it to Spock to be the most beloved while having a family that fans are, for the most part, indifferent to.

[Beastro]

I love the whole camping bit, but the movie itself is mostly just a plot about Spock and his brother right? Leave it to Spock to be the most beloved while having a family that fans are, for the most part, indifferent to.

Am I the only one who hates the camping bit?

For me, a lot of Trek is based around them being strictly professional with the TOS crew being the most extreme example. In the series and most of the movies they are united in a intimate, but cold friendship by their mutual professionalism of being wedded to their careers and all seem to maintain them to the exclusion of private and intimate influences. The best bits with the TOS crew are revealing bits of themselves in brief moments during the various crises they face like military servicemen do here and there.

This ties perfectly with the Age of Sail/Western influences that were behind the creation of TOS where the crews had little of a private life stuck out on their own respective frontiers where their job was their life. If they ever did anything off duty for prolonged periods of time they'd go off to their own different lives outside of maybe Kirk and Bones hanging out with Kirk being the loner just waiting to get back out into space.

This did wane with TNG and how they forced the civilian dimension into the Galaxy Class, but the only series that had real organic ground for this was DS9 due to it being based around a space station. I do know the most annoying bits of TOS to me were the private things.

The best is when it was always used in Trek for dramatic tension when the private intrudes and potentially throws things out of whack.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I love the whole camping bit, but the movie itself is mostly just a plot about Spock and his brother right? Leave it to Spock to be the most beloved while having a family that fans are, for the most part, indifferent to.

Am I the only one who hates the camping bit?

For me, a lot of Trek is based around them being strictly professional with the TOS crew being the most extreme example. In the series and most of the movies they are united in a intimate, but cold friendship by their mutual professionalism of being wedded to their careers and all seem to maintain them to the exclusion of private and intimate influences. The best bits with the TOS crew are revealing bits of themselves in brief moments during the various crises they face like military servicemen do here and there.

This ties perfectly with the Age of Sail/Western influences that were behind the creation of TOS where the crews had little of a private life stuck out on their own respective frontiers where their job was their life. If they ever did anything off duty for prolonged periods of time they'd go off to their own different lives outside of maybe Kirk and Bones hanging out with Kirk being the loner just waiting to get back out into space.

This did wane with TNG and how they forced the civilian dimension into the Galaxy Class, but the only series that had real organic ground for this was DS9 due to it being based around a space station. I do know the most annoying bits of TOS to me were the private things.

The best is when it was always used in Trek for dramatic tension when the private intrudes and potentially throws things out of whack.

I feel like that's more of a serial effect, where you walk away from each episode knowing that they're about to get back to business as usual. Especially with the way it cuts out; from TNG you get 2-4 minute scenes that conclude the episode with the characters reflecting on what happened, kinda like when you play Marvel vs Capcom and get a little complementative story-graphic at the end based on the two characters you team up.

This is all really fitting considering they started TNG in 1987, a year after Voyage Home and a few years prior to The Final Frontier. While TNG would conclude with the personal ramifications at the end, Final Frontier would show at the front of the movie the personal connections.

[Beastro]

I feel like that's more of a serial effect, where you walk away from each episode knowing that they're about to get back to business as usual. Especially with the way it cuts out; from TNG you get 2-4 minute scenes that conclude the episode with the characters reflecting on what happened, kinda like when you play Marvel vs Capcom and get a little complementative story-graphic at the end based on the two characters you team up.

This is all really fitting considering they started TNG in 1987, a year after Voyage Home and a few years prior to The Final Frontier. While TNG would conclude with the personal ramifications at the end, Final Frontier would show at the front of the movie the personal connections.

Maybe. I feel the Age of Sail vibe there where the constant demands of running the ship and their professionalism keep people at a distance, especially officers and seamen and the captain and everyone else.

See the movie/books around Master and Commander for what I mean. Aubrey is very much a Kirk and even his most private moments speaking with Maturin have the spectre of his duty hovering over the conversation that come out once provoked.

This is very much the popular archetype drawn from this era. Nelson was the embodiment of it and was a man who had no life but the sea from the moment he joined up at 12 until he met Emma Hamilton. It was her effect on him that seems to have made him realize what he was missing in life that destroyed his career. He was happy with that and he would have had a very different legacy had war resumed and he attained martyrdom at Trafalgar. Until then he was seen as a brilliant man who threw everything away for love (The negligence of his duties in Sicily was gross and inexcusable).

In that, one could see Kirk's longing in the Nexus for the same reasons, but I personally always felt Kirk was simply uncomfortable back in known space. He was only happy when out on the fringe of the known.

[Fianna]

I'm not sure if that "married to the job/no private life" thing was meant to be an aspect of the characters in TOS, as opposed to the episodes just being very plot focused, and anything not relevant to the plot at hand wasn't shown. Like how we never see the characters going to the bathroom, but that doesn't mean they never do.

[J!!]

well, they might not. they do have teleportation tech, after all.

i know at least one transporter chief who's dealt with more than his share of shit.