Captain's Blog pt. 29: The Final Frontier

At the end of the chapter on The Voyage Home in Shatner's Movie Memories, he writes, "A lifelong dream was about to be realized. I was going to direct a film. The crew of the Enterprise was about to meet God after taking a short detour through Hell..."

Easily among the most reviled projects of the entire Trek pantheon, The Final Frontier opened in the summer of 1989. After the mega-success of The Voyage Home, it underwhelmed at the box office. I don't know what the math is now, but the conventional wisdom at the time was a film had to make about $14 million over its budget to be considered successful. The Final Frontier cost $30 million, so its domestic gross of $52 million (with another $17 million overseas) made it a very modest success.

 

 

I'd love to tell you that it was unfairly panned or that subsequent re-watches have unearthed a hidden gem, but... I can't. It's still a pretty bad movie. I don't hate it the way I hate, say, the Black Eyed Peas or something, i.e. it doesn't invent a new way to suck/ for people to embarrass themselves, but it's still a lackluster effort at best.

Shatner started off with laudable intentions. The original story he set out to film rested on two pillars: fracturing the trinity/friendship of Spock, Kirk and McCoy along lines we've never seen them fractured before and then repairing them, and literalizing the very concept of God/ the devil in a whole new way: "Essentially, I was trying to say that while man conceives God in his own image, that image changes from generation to generation, allowing manmade gods, pretenders, their foothold. Since we'd come face to face with the devil, we could infer that God does exist, most tangibly and understandably, within the heart of man."

That's an admirable line of inquiry, but as Harve Bennett mentioned in Movie Memories, Shatner had first-director syndrome: the story was overwhelmed in "making everything huge," from the interpersonal conflicts to the theme to the production. As each got slowly whittled down to size (and then some,) it's interesting what changed/ what was created to accommodate:

1) Nimoy and Kelley refused to participate if their characters joined in with any cult/ quest that would require their betraying their oldest friend. At this point, the character of Sybok was created. Nimoy said the sudden appearance of a brother was lame. So, they decided to make it even lamer (but protect the continuity of Spock never having mentioned him before) by having him be a renegade half-brother from Sarek's previous marriage. No one was happy with the compromises, here, but it all came about as an attempt to assuage Nimoy's and Kelly's concerns. (Kelley's concern netted him the deathbed scene with his father, which comes off a bit better.)

 

 

2) The production didn't run smoothly (few productions do) so most of Shatner's elaborate camera moves and sequences were unable to be filmed. By the end of the shoot, shots that normally took hours to set up were given minutes. A lot of this had to do with first the writers' strike causing chaos with the script, and then a Teamsters' strike. (Which resulted in on-set sabotage: the trucks hired to ferry the cast and crew back and forth were "mysteriously" blown up in the middle of the desert.)

3) The quest to find God/ the devil/ the deity in the heart of man/ turns out to be just an alien or a malfunctioning computer, etc. = overused Trek trope at best, quagmire-of-predictable-failure at worst. As a concept, it is guaranteed to offend at least someone, which isn't always a bad thing; art should be provocative. But it was never something the studio was going to get behind. "Provocative" and "lighthearted franchise hit" are mutually exclusive. So while Shatner set off with the best of intentions, there really was no way he was going to be able to make 2001 or even The Motion Picture; at best, he'd end up with what he got, a severely Harrison-Bergeron-ed version of the original idea.

I feel kinda bad for him, but as Shatner's fictional-real-self says in Free Enterprise re: his idea to film "Julius Caesar" with himself playing all the parts: "It's the definition of hubris." Maybe it's better to shoot for the stars and fail then shoot for the lower stratosphere and fail, but a failure is a failure is a failure.

Added to all of the above, Industrial Light and Magic was either unavailable or too expensive, according to whom you believe, so a relatively untested private fx company (Applied Minds) was hired, and they failed to deliver usable fx, necessitating the deletion of most of the third act.

Originally, angels and demons were supposed to assault Kirk, but they were changed to more budget-conscious "rock men." Alas, the fx returned proved unworkable. (It all sounds a bit silly, but the rock-guys from Galaxy Quest looked pretty cool onscreen, so maybe it could've worked, had they a bit more money and time.)

As Nimoy says of the film/ his friend's directorial debut, "He was riding a bad script, and what was on the page was what we shot."

For more tidbits and trivia, click here. Personally, the best thing to come out of this film is this fan-made Shatner-on-the-Mount video:

Bless you, internet.

The film is not entirely bereft of things to like. It's fun to see Morgan Earp from "Spectre of the Gun" return to the screen:

The Klingons are perfunctory but not awful. And the destruction of Pioneer 10 is a nice wink at the whole V-Ger concept. (i.e. not all of our probes went out and mated with some cosmic force; some were just target practice for triggerhappy Klingons.)

The two actors (Todd Bryant and Spice Williams-Crosby) give a fun interview in the DVD Special Features. They appear to have had a fun time, at least, and are humble enough. They did the best they could with ultimately thankless parts.

Kirk's question "What does God need with a starship?" could be a meme of some kind - it's got the moxy but unfortunately not the context to make it relevant.

Spock nerve pinches a horse. I like that.

The Yosemite scenery is, of course, beautiful to look at, as are the attempts to recall a sort Albert Bierstadt vibe at the end.

Incidentally, it was supposed to be Mount Rushmore, with an additional face added, but this was dropped due to fx/ budget. I think it was meant to be a woman with African features, not Davy Crockett, as it looks like in this storyboard.

Sybok is not a bad character, but his quest/ takeover of the ship never makes a whole lot of sense. We're told over and over again why he believes what he does/ what drives him, but (and this isn't a knock on Laurence Luckinbill, who does a pretty good job for what it's worth) I never quite believe or understand.

 

 

Cynthia Gouw plays the Romulan ambassador to (ahem) Paradise City. (The G'n'R song was huge in the late 80s; no one involved thought this might be a bit distracting? It says something about how forgettable this movie is, actually, that no one's made a you-tube mash-up of it. There's a you-tube mash-up for practically every throwaway line or bad pun you could think of for Trek.) She's not particularly memorable or convincing as a Romulan, but she's had an interested post-Final Frontier career. As for the other ambassadors:

David Warner will return in The Undiscovered Country as well as TNG's "Chain of Command."

And Korrd (thankfully apostrophe-free) re-appears a few times as well. (I'm always amused at how many people Kirk runs into who were "required reading at the Academy.")

After Sybok takes the ship through the Great Barrier (more on that in a minute) there is a nice moment where Kirk assumes control and seems like Kirk. It's one of the few times anyone in the cast seems like his or her usual self.

Chekov and Sulu are particularly ill-used.

And Scotty acts like Groundskeeper Willie throughout. Much has been made of the "I know this ship like the back of my hand" business, but okay, cheap laugh, whatever. What's up with every other scene he's in, though?

And what is up with this sudden and inexplicable Scotty/ Uhura romance?

The less said about Uhura's fan dance, the better.

But it's truly a weird moment.

Incidentally, Nichelle Nichols refused to come back as Uhura unless they swore they'd get her out of those dress pants and back into a skirt. I wonder if that's what started the process that resulted in the fan-dance sequence, i.e. Gotta showcase the gams... Whatever the reasoning, I think we all just sort of pretend it didn't happen. As a "lure the bad guys out of position" thing, it's rather ridiculous.

Not to mention more than a little retrograde for the 23rd century.

Most of the humor of the film comes at the expense of the characters, though I do like the turbolift scene. Kirk: "I could use a shower."

Spock: (Beat.) "Yes."

There are many, many other gaffes (including the addition of a few dozen decks to the starship for the purpose of making the "fire the rockets!" climbing scene more dramatic, or something) but let's get to the two biggest remaining problems. I recall reading Roger Ebert's review at the time:

"There was a moment in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier - only one, and a brief one, but a genuine one - when I felt the promise of awe. The Starship Enterprise was indeed going where no man had gone before, through the fabled Great Barrier, which represents the end of the finite universe. What would lie beyond? Would it be an endless void, or a black hole, or some kind of singularity of space and time that would turn the voyagers inside out and deposit them in another universe? Or would the Barrier even reveal, as one of the characters believes, the place where life began? The place called by the name of Eden and countless other words? As the Enterprise approached the Barrier, I found my attention gathering."

 

Alas, he was quickly disappointed, and it's when we get to the Barrier stuff that the film really falls apart:

"After you've seen the movie, ask yourself these questions: 1) How was it known that the voyagers would go beyond the Barrier; 2) what was the motivation behind what they found there; 3) how was it known that they would come to stand at exactly the point where the stone pillars came up from the Earth; 4) In a version of a question asked by Capt. Kirk, why would any entity capable of staging such a show need its own starship; and 5) is the Great Barrier indeed real, or simply a deceptive stage setting for what was found behind it? (What I'm really complaining about, I think, is that Star Trek V allows itself enormous latitude in the logic beneath its plot. If the Barrier is real, what exactly are we to make of the use to which it is put?)"

Additionally, they are 28,000 light years from the center of the galaxy at one point. At warp 8, that's 52 years. They make it in less than a day. Even with the deleted scenes of Sybok "modifying the engines," I mean, come on.

No mention is made of "Where No Man Has Gone Before," either; it was only the series' freaking pilot...

 

It is recalled, I suppose, in this one shot of a plaque in the observation lounge, equipped, as you can see, with an Age of Sail-era steering wheel.

And God, of course, turns out to be... what, exactly? Just an imprisoned alien? There's potential in such an idea, especially if it is the god or the devil of Earth/ Klingon/ Romulan/ Vulcan lore. But... we don't really find out, nor is the mystery ever satisfactorily exploited. Compare it to "Devil's Due" or "The Chase" from TNG, and you see ways the story could have gone that aren't even hinted at, here. Hell, even keeping the idea literal, i.e. Kirk fist-fights Jehovah, or Spock out-maneuvers Yahweh, there's a lunacy there I can get on board with. But what we get is far from exciting. Reheated Klingon drama and pointless character squabbling, and ending with one of the more unforgivable flubs in Trek continuity, i.e. Kirk's telling Spock he lost a brother once but lucky for him, he got him back.

RIP, George Samuel Kirk!

This was corrected in Peter David's adaptation of the film for DC. I don't mean to inflate the importance of Kirk's brother; he's barely ever mentioned again after he dies in TOS. But isn't there somebody on staff to correct this sort of thing? Then again, if Spock can forget he had a brother, maybe this was a result of Shatner's/ Nimoy's "favored nations" clause. (Hey, it's better than nothing)

AFTERMATH

If TMP is the series finale that we never got, STV: TFF is the bloated mash-up of "Way to Eden," "By Any other Name" and "This Side of Paradise" that we really never needed.

Gene Roddenberry (according to Susan Sackett) didn't participate much in the making of the film. "More than anything, it was the story that distressed him. His own script ("The God Thing") had been turned down by the studio years before, and he was still smarting from that rejection. He felt that Trek V did a much poorer job of portraying an encounter with God than his own story, that it was less imaginative, limited in scope and depth. (...) He found the raw footage so depressing that he stopped attending screenings."

(Also, 100% less nude-oil-wrestling.)

Harve Bennett blamed the film's failure partly on Trek fans not having to store up their appetites for the bigscreen adventures anymore; every week brought a new episode of TNG as well as blockbuster/ sequel fatigue: Lethal Weapon 2, Indy 3, Back to the Future 2, Ghostbusters 2, not to mention Batman, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, and The Little Mermaid. It was a banner year for the box office, with each of the ten highest grossing films bringing in over 100 million, but I'm not sure I ultimately agree. It's true that an abundance of small-screen Trek might keep some people away from the movie theater, but Trek fans are a particularly ravenous lot. If The Final Frontier had been anywhere near as fun or as epic as the previous films in the franchise, I imagine it would have made even more money than The Voyage Home.

TFF was the last Trek film to be produced by Harve. It wasn't its lack of box office muscle that led to his departure, though, but the new head of Paramount's resistance to doing his "Starfleet Academy" script. I'm planning a "Trek That Never Was" sort of post somewhere down the line and will cover the plot of that therein. Paramount offered him a rather insulting contract, which he declined to sign. Harve Bennett, after four films and roughly $325 million at the box office, was out. Says he: "We all have a false sense in our worlds, no matter what they are, that by doing the things we are asked to do, by making successes, by making other people money, (that) we're going to be a permanent party in the world we live in. That didn't happen (...) and I encountered the crushing recognition that I'd been jobbed."

Can't help but feel badly for Harve, here. His Starfleet Academy idea was essentially what Paramount did in 2009, so in hindsight, he was 100% correct. Had it been done in lieu of The Undiscovered Country, one wonders how things would have played out. At any rate, things change, Harve was out, and the Trek franchise was momentarily without a head for its bigscreen adventures.

NEXT: Joyland, I swear! Maybe The Plant and Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, as well. Maybe even Duma Key, Redux! Then on to either TNG Season 5 or The Undiscovered Country.