Star Trek V Is Great Because It’s A Captain Kirk Movie

In 1994, Tupac Shakur casually redeemed the most-hated Star Trek feature film, at least, up until that time. In the opening of his song “Pain,” you hear a voice say with a certain amount of self-aware aplomb: “I couldn’t help but notice your pain.” Just five years after the release of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Tupac was making a deep cut to that controversial sci-fi epic, but sampling a quote from Spock’s (Leonard Nimoy) estranged brother (Sybok), who, in the context of the quote, was talking to God.

Thirty-seven years after its release on June 9, 1989, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier remains the butt of several jokes among hardcore Trek fans, not limited to various jabs in Lower Decks, as well as the epic rant from Shatner, turned into an earworm song in 2009 from Fall on Your Sword, “Shatner on the Mount.” So, with this film nearly 40 years old, the questions about whether The Final Frontier is good or bad, or hilarious, or wonderful, suddenly seem like all the wrong questions. The more interesting truth about The Final Frontier is that today, in and out of sci-fi circles, this strange 1989 flop remains not only charming but unique in its upbeat humanist message.

Following the smash success of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in 1986, directorial reins were passed from Leonard Nimoy to co-star William Shatner. At the time, the idea of Star Trek stars having a huge creative control on the stories was still fairly novel; Nimoy directing The Search for Spock feels like an experiment with mixed results, while the staying power and cinematic brilliance of The Voyage Home is pretty much undebatable. Today, countless Star Trek actors have directed episodes of the various TV series, but other than Jonathan Frakes — who directed First Contact in 1996 and Insurrection in 1998 — the club of Star Trek actors who have directed Star Trek feature films remains a group of three: Shatner, Nimoy, and the aforementioned Frakes. (Brent Spiner and Simon Pegg working on screenplays and stories for Nemesis and Beyond probably deserve honorable mention here.)

But of those Trek directors who are also actors, Shatner’s offering probably gets the most grief, deservedly or not. To put it very simply: Is The Final Frontier worse than Insurrection? Not at all! It’s actually a much, much better film with bigger swings and deeper ideas. But nobody says Frakes is a bad Trek director because Insurrection is undercooked. Had Shatner had another chance to do a Star Trek feature (or episode), our perception of his abilities as a director might be different.

If you’ve never seen The Final Frontier, Shatner’s braggadocious reputation would make you think that this entire movie will be about what a cool guy Captain Kirk is, and how Captain Kirk is the pinnacle of human independence and free thinking. This assumption is 100 percent correct because the plot of The Final Frontier is all about Kirk challenging dogmas, both new and old, and proving that the greatest things about human beings are our abilities to stand up to bad ideas and also that friendship is magic.

When Spock’s kooky half-brother Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill) steals the Enterprise and tries to find God, he also floats a bit of New Age pseudoscience along the way, telling the entire crew he can fix their lives by becoming their Vulcan life coach, as long as they agree to participate in his spiritual quest that mostly involves grand-theft-starship. Here’s the thing: all of this, on paper, is great, and in defense of Shatner, nearly all the best episodes of The Original Series involved Kirk unmasking false gods or proving that his friends were the best. The Final Frontier tackles these ideas in nearly every single scene, and in an interesting counterpoint to the next film, The Undiscovered Country, this version of Kirk feels more like his TV show counterpart, who sort of shrugs his shoulders at the Klingons hanging out and having drinks on the Enterprise. This doesn’t make The Final Frontier better as a piece of art than The Undiscovered Country, but tonally, it suggests that the Kirk of Star Trek V is the only Kirk, in all the feature films, who actually resembles the amazing hero of the TV series. Though Star Trek V is, in theory, about Kirk talking about his own mortality and questioning the nature of the universe, it’s really all the other characters, not Kirk, who lose themselves.

This brings us back to Tupac’s sampling of Sybok in the song “Pain.” What makes that track great is that Tupac knows — just as Shatner/Kirk knows — that great art, and a well-lived life, come as the result of pain. Sybok’s final triumph against the false god of Sha Ka Ree is to use his own BS con-man tricks on said creature, which means, in a sense, Sybok converts himself to the Kirk side of the Force in the end. Because, although Kirk’s famous question “what does God need with a starship?” is probably the most quoted line in the movie, Kirk’s other line — “I don’t want my pain taken away! I need my pain!” — sums up everything that’s great about the movie.

Star Trek’s relevance is often ascribed to its social innovations and bravery in terms of representation and optimism. But Star Trek’s broad popularity is even bigger: Generally speaking, it presents a secular humanism that functions almost as a kind of religion. And one of the tenets of that religion is that flawed human beings are allowed to be flawed, because being flawed is what makes humans great. This is why Star Trek is not really a utopian fantasy at all, but rather, in its best moments, a realistic meditation on the nature of making mistakes and overcoming those mistakes.

Star Trek V’s biggest crime, then, in retrospect, is that Kirk is pretty much right for the entire movie, and everyone else, maybe even Spock, is, occasionally, wrong. This fact probably has more to do with why some fans are uneasy about the film; nobody likes seeing Bones join with Sybok, or Sulu become brainwashed. And yet, the structure of The Original Series often had stories exactly like this — look at “This Side of Paradise,” in which everybody gets hit with the spores and only Kirk avoids losing his mind and sense of purpose. There’s an almost Philip K. Dick sensibility to Captain Kirk in many Trek adventures, insofar as he’s the only guy who’s not crazy, fighting against a rigged system. This isn’t a bug of classic Star Trek, it’s a feature, and something that works very well in The Original Series. That’s because the notion of self-belief, of Captain Kirk-style confidence and decisiveness, as corny as it sounds, is actually fairly profound. In 2022, the finale of Strange New Worlds Season 1 even touched on the idea that the ruminative decision-by-committee command style of Captain Pike (or Picard?) might lead to tragedy.

The legacy, then, of The Final Frontier is that, as Tupac told us, we are “tired of the pain and the strain,” but buried within that sentiment is the basic tapestry of human existence. Without the pain, there’s no adventure. Star Trek-style heroes may not be all that common in real life, but the fantasy of The Final Frontier is that everyone would be better off if they were just one percent more Captain Kirk.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier streams on Paramount+.