A Brief Guide to Star Trek

Roddenberry. In a later memo to Shatner and Bennett, he explained that in his opinion the suggested story ‘demeans and degrades
Star Trek
with subject matter that it has assiduously avoided in the past . . . Please abandon this story laden with mesmerisation, pop psychology, flim flam betrayal, a lack of power, a lack of humour. Please do something with the ingredient that is the hallmark of
Star Trek
. . . believability.’ Roddenberry even recruited authors Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke to his cause, but it was all to no avail. While Roddenberry could clearly see that Shatner’s storyline for
Star Trek V
was in no way a suitable follow-up to the crowd-pleasing and immensely successful
The Voyage Home
, no one else at Paramount appeared to agree (or at least appeared willing to take on the might of Shatner’s contractual arrangements and considerable ego). Although the script went through many revisions and was improved in Roddenberry’s eyes, the fundamental basis of the storyline was so flawed he felt the film was beyond salvaging.
    There were other pressures on Paramount. The studio was keen to capitalise quickly on the success of
The Voyage Home
with another movie, while the looming 1988 Writers Guild of America strike was threatening to curtail any new film’s development time. They also had a new
Star Trek
TV series in
The Next Generation
to promote and wanted the film to drive viewers to the TV show, and vice versa. The rush into production, with an underdeveloped script and an inadequate budget and time scale meant that the finished film suffered immensely, just as Roddenberry had foreseen it would. The original climax on the ‘planet of God’, Sha Ka Ree, (meant to sound like Sean Connery, the former James Bond whom Shatner hoped would play Sybok) was to feature an attack upon the
Enterprise
crew by a rock monster. The effects used to create the sequence were, however, considered too poor for a major motion picture and this climax was abandoned. Shatner later admitted of his rockman, ‘Our guy in the silly rubber suit ultimately just looked like . . . well, a guy in a silly rubber suit. I realised that the already compromised ending of my movie was now in serious trouble.’ In post-production Shatner attempted to save the scene: ‘My God effect looked cheesy, and the hastily concocted light blob, designed to replace our disastrous rock man, was truly disappointing. Harve [Bennett] and I tried to scrape up the funds to reshoot the ending, but found the studio purse strings tightly knotted. [This] hastily thrown together ending left us dead in the water. It was the ruination of that film.’
    As with the release of
The Wrath of Khan
, the new
Star Trek
movie was up against sequel films featuring Indiana Jones and the Ghostbusters in the summer of 1989. Although upon opening on 9 June
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
achieved the highest opening gross of any
Star Trek
film to that date, taking $17.4 million, the film’s initial success was not to last. With a production budget of $27 million (the highest yet for a
Star Trek
movie, excluding
The Motion Picture
),
The Final Frontier
grossed just $52 million in the US and reached a worldwide total of only $70 million, almost half of the $133 million taken by
The Voyage Home
. Despite this disappointment, the movie was still the tenth highest grossing film of the year.
    A series of very critical reviews contributed heavily to the significant underperformance of a movie Paramount had been privately projecting could gross in excess of $200 million. The
Washington Post
called the movie ‘a shambles’, while the
Chicago Sun-Times
critic Roger Ebert was scathing of Shatner’s directorial efforts: ‘There is no clear line from the beginning of the movie to the end, not much danger, no characters to really care about, little suspense, uninteresting or incomprehensible villains, and a great deal of small talk and pointless dead ends.’ Fans generally regard
The Final Frontier
as the worst of the
Star Trek
movies by far, second only to 2002’s
Star Trek Nemesis
.

    For the final
Star Trek
film to feature the original 1960s cast all together, the man who’d previously saved the
Star Trek
moviefranchise twice was called back into action. After
The Motion Picture
tanked, Nicholas Meyer had revived
Star Trek
with
The Wrath of Khan
. After
The Search for Spock
failed to be as exciting as its predecessor, Meyer had written the screenplay for the most