Where is your God now?

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier has an astonishingly negative reputation. I'm not going to say it doesn't deserve it (it does), but I also refuse to dismiss it as quickly as most people.

To give you some perspective and a visual metaphor to work with, imagine that the Star Trek series is a special ed class. The first film is the normal-looking kid who you don't think has any reason to be in there. The fourth film is the kid who's constantly making jokes and you're sort of smiling at him because you know this is as good as his life will get. The fifth film is some sort of Frankenstein monster assembled from the corpses of the special ed children who have been slowly disappearing over the last month. The principle having a mid-life crisis, is acting out his childhood dream of becoming a biologist using the freest resource available at a school: the special ed children. Now this monster of Frankenstein sits in the classroom trying to color in a picture of the happy family he'll never have, as he watches through the window as his creator is dragged into a cop car.

If I lost you somewhere in there, let me clarify. The Star Trek series is already sort of a middling, bumbling little kid who everyone gives a free pass because he's trying. When the series learned to do some comedy, we all patted it on the back. But now this monstrosity, assembled from various parts of the previous films pops up and no one has any goddamn idea what to do with it. We're content to let it sit there and color, but at some point we're going to have to kill it and dissect it like a crime scene.

And so here I am, with my rubber gloves and blacklight ready to figure out what the FUCK happened here.

We open on a deserted landscape, a single alien toiling. A man rides into view, Lawrence of Arabia style. He gives the alien some sort of vision, lifting some existential pain from his shoulders. The alien swears allegiance to the stranger. That's a pretty good way to open a Star Trek film. We set up a sense of mystery and foreboding right off the bat.

Can't have that, can we? Let's cut to the crew of the USS Enterprise, vacationing in Yellowstone like a bunch of weirdos with no real friends. Kirk is scaling a mountain (yeah, fucking right William Fatner, you're not going to convince us that you are in the shape you once were) and McCoy is getting bent out of shape that Spock doesn't understand campfire songs when a distress signal is received. The crew of the Enterprise are summoned back to respond, but the Enterprise is in a state of disrepair. They must contend with the man in the desert but without a fully operational ship, and when the ship is overtaken and the man is revealed to be Sybok, half-brother of Spock, Kirk, Spock and McCoy must use their superior knowledge of the Enterprise's layout to stop Sybok from taking the ship on an obsessive suicide mission to find God.

Combine that with Sybok giving the crew of the Enterprise visions of their most painful memories and a Klingon captain hunting Kirk for sport, you've got what is surely the most compelling story in a Star Trek film.

It's actually a mind-blowing carnival of weirdness, comparable only to a bunch of midget clowns singing Ring Around the Rosey in slow motion, that derails this film. I don't even know where to begin. I suppose I'll start with the good.

The opening scene is one of the better scenes in the last few films. My first impression was that at least William Shatner, who was irresponsibly given the director's chair (although I don't think it's any more irresponsible than giving Leonard Nimoy the position in the last two films), has an interest in imagery and a desire to give these films a distinguishable look instead of "Are the cameras pointed at the actors? Action."

Also, the whole cast gets a bunch of dynamic things to do. They get into their first real shootout, they're chased around the Enterprise, they explore strange worlds.

And that's where the nice things end. I made an effort to like this movie because it was trying so hard, but I can't even begin to understand why Kirk is being chased by a giant, floating 2-D head shooting lasers out of its eyes. I have no idea why Spock spends the whole movie making retarded puns. It's like a kaleidoscope filled with acid.

The whole sub-plot with the Klingon captain starts with him shooting space garbage and then folding his arms and complaining about how there's nothing to do. He then sees the Enterprise on his radar and decides to kill Kirk as revenge for Kruge two films ago. The subplot ends (I wish I were making this up), with his superior officer making him say he's sorry to Kirk.

In fact, this movie's weirdness is absolutely endearing. The way it sets up a story about finding God, THE metaphysical Holy Grail, and then does absolutely nothing with it is almost avant-garde. I'm tempted to take the whole movie as an avant-garde experiment, and I'm not saying this in a snarky, mean-spirited way. I literally suspect that those involved attempted to make the weirdest Trek film possible. How else can I explain a scene as poignant as McCoy reliving the cruelly ironic death of his father sandwiched between scenes of Scott comically bonking his head and Spock making puns about rocket boots?

I don't understand it, but I can sort of love it.

2/10