Worst SFX No.23: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

Martin Anderson

Published on Jan 6, 2009

Altered States FX-meister Bran Ferren was the cut-price choice when Paramount had its hands tied about letting Bill Shatner have the reigns of the hugely successful Trek movie series in the 1980s. Leonard Nimoy had delivered two huge hits (Search For Spock and The Voyage Home) and the Shat was getting restless for the helm, but his yarn about a search for God had everyone twitching, and rightly so. To make matters worse, virtually every SFX house in Hollywood was booked, and there wasn't much global farming-out happening yet in the field of visual effects. One potentially very exciting sequence involves our heroes having to re-board the captured Enterprise in a shuttlecraft without any braking power. Unfortunately the model-work and motion-control are extremely poor and - in Shatner's defence - he was hamstrung by the studio's meanness both in this sequence and in the sequence where the crew gazes in wonder on…a mouldy old bit of desert (supposed to be a heavenly environment at the centre of the galaxy, but the FX bill turned out to be too much). That said, Final Frontier needed more than that to save it from being a star turkey. The shuttle sequence has been very slightly tarted-up for the special edition re-release, but there wasn't really any money available for that either.