Posted by Joey Peters on May 26, 2025
In Star Trek fandom it is accepted that Star Trek V is the “bad” one. The odd numbered movies were all dogs while the even numbered movies are all cinematic successes. It was directed by William Shatner because of a most-favored-nations clause in his contract, the Leonard Nimoy directed the last one. It is fully dedicated to inflating Shatner’s already bloated ego. He literally has Captain Kirk kill god! How could it be more obvious? The movie is a punching bag and a laughing stock.
The truth is a little more nuanced (and also it’s really funny how Star Trek fans don’t realize that actually it’s Spock who kills god, but that’s beside the point). It’s pretty rare that you’ll find a Star Trek fan for whom this is their favorite Trek flick, but I have run into it in the wild.
There’s two main ways of thinking about what a “good” Star Trek movie is. In the first the question is: Is this a good movie? Does it convey the meaning it’s trying to convey? Is this an effective form of media? The other way to think about the quality of a Star Trek movie is: is this movie good Star Trek? Does it convey the meaning of Star Trek well? Is it an effective sub-piece of Star Trek?
All of the original six Star Trek movies have their defenders. In fan culture there is this idea that the even numbered Star Trek movies are good, and the odd numbered Star Trek movies are stinkers. At first blush this makes sense. Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek IV: The One With the Whales, and Star Trek VI: The One With Shakespeare in the Original Klingon are the heavy fan favorites. Meanwhile it is understood that Star Trek: The Motion Picture is in reality Star Trek: The Motionless Picture. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock is creatively empty. Star Trek V is a complete mess.
You could make an argument for this back when these six movies were the whole cinematic wing of the franchise. In the late days of Star Trek: Nemesis and Star Trek: Suicide Squad this is a much harder argument to make. And the fact that there still are redeeming attributes in Star Trek V illuminates what makes the TNG movies and later so execrable.
The original six Star Trek movies each embodied a type of episode of Star Trek. Star Trek: the Motion Picture was a good match for the episodes that tried to evoke a ponderous self serious tone about grand science fiction, especially of the type written by Gene Roddenberry himself. I compare it in my mind to Charlie X, Where No Man Has Gone Before or The Devil in the Dark. It suffers the same pitfalls as those, but at a grander scale. The Wrath of Khan is a classic for a reason, and evokes the same sense as Balance of Terror, The Galileo Seven, or The Doomsday Machine. There is a grand tense battle with great stakes. In particular it evokes the submarine movie feeling of Balance of Terror. The Search for Spock echoes the mythology heavy episodes, such as Court Martial, Amok Time, or Mirror, Mirror. These episodes are about fleshing out the world Star Trek takes place in. The Voyage Home evokes the light hearted comedy episodes that actually landed; The Trouble with Tribbles, I Mudd, and this is going to be a hot take, but Spock’s Brain, another underappreciated classic. And finally The Undiscovered Country evoked the political thriller style of episode, Journey to Babel, A Private Little War or The Enterprise Incident.
That brings us to Star Trek V. It too evokes a classic type of Star Trek episode. Maybe a type that is a little regrettable, but if you want to adapt Star Trek it is a type you need to contend with: the episode that thinks itself deep and momentous but is actually a complete mess. This is probably the most common type of episode through the original series’ run, but to name a few: The Naked Time, Miri, The Squire of Gothos, Who Mourns For Adonais?, Catspaw, A Piece of the Action, Bread and Circuses, Spectre of the Gun, Plato’s Stepchildren, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield or Whom Gods Destroy. But more than anything, Star Trek V evokes The Way to Eden, having almost exactly the same premise.
The first six Star Trek movies are good Star Trek.
Whether or not they are good movies is a bit of a different discussion. They are products of an earlier era of movie making. I think the main way to analyze a piece of art is to examine if it fulfills the things it sets out to do. The other question is whether or not the things it sets out to do are worth doing. Birth of a Nation was built in a high level of craft but in the purpose of abhorrent views. You do not have to hand it to D.W. Griffith.
So one of the things that separates the original six Star Trek movies is that they tried to be about something. I think this is where the separation into odd and even Star Trek movies comes from. They all tried to be about something, but the even movies succeeded in conveying their attempted meaning while the odd movies flailed around. The Motion Picture can’t decide if it’s about meeting God or something, or about refusing to let go of your youth. Neither theme is fully formed so narratively there’s something you instinctively miss in the movie. Wrath of Khan, on the other hand, is about the consequences of your youth coming back and appearing in your middle age. Everything in the movie is reinforcing this theme, so it works. I think what Search for Spock is trying to be about is sacrificing for your friends, but the movie is a little confused and ends up making the sacrifices feel contrived. The Journey Home is about trying to recapture your youth. The Undiscovered Country is about coming to terms with the fact that the world changes irrespective of who you are and what you do, and you have to adapt.
Star Trek V is trying to say something profound about the dangers of belief in something bigger than you and outside you, but it’s a mess.
Even this is better than the later Star Trek movies.
For the Next Generation films Star Trek: Generations is about trying to smuggle the legacy of the Star Trek films to a new and different crew. First Contact actually does try to have themes and shit, and even succeeds at them, but the theme I want from Star Trek: The Next Generation is not “you can’t heal from trauma and revenge is cathartic.” I think Insurrection is trying to be about trying to recapture your youth and technology is bad. It’s confused and a mess. Nemesis is really where the franchise hit the wall and the message it’s trying to convey is “dune buggies are cool.”
The theme of Star Trek 09 is: “Wouldn’t it be cool if we made a regurgitated pop culture slop version of Star Trek?” The theme of Star Trek Into Darkness is, “Do you remember Wrath of Khan? What if we did that but bigger and dumber and less thought out.” Star Trek Beyond felt like it was trying to have a theme, and that theme was somewhere along the lines of “uh, what if we did Star Trek?” But when you are born in the undifferentiated Hollywood content slop it’s hard to drag yourself out of the slop.
And the theme of Star Trek: Section 31 is “Oh fuck, we have Michelle Yeoh under contract. Quick, what do we do?”
The first prelude to Star Trek V manifested during the run of the original series when Shatner and Nimoy renegotiated their contracts and got a “most favored nations” clause inserted into them. If one got a pay raise the other got a pay raise. If one of them got some special treatment the other had to be offered it. Decades later Nimoy was selected to direct Star Trek III and given Star Trek IV for good measure. When the time came for Star Trek V Shatner felt like he had developed enough creatively to direct a feature film. After seeing what a good job Nimoy did with the previous movies Paramount was happy to accept.
The production ran into constant problems. The script was delayed by a WGA strike, Paramount rushed it into production anyway, just as Industrial Light & Magic was too busy working on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to work on Star Trek V. But despite all the problems Shatner managed to piece everything together and got the movie finished.
The movie begins on Nimbus III, the planet of galactic peace at the center of the demilitarized zone between the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingon Empire, and human Federation, the three most major powers that dominate this area of the galaxy. The planet is a desert shithole. A weird guy in a robe shows up and scares a fucked up looking farmer guy, but reveals himself to be some kind of wizard. He tells the farmer guy to share his pain and grow stronger in the sharing. The farmer seems quite comforted.
And then we get hit with the Jerry Goldsmith theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It was recycled roughly contemporaneously with this in Star Trek: The Next Generation and it always hits me in the feels.
The story moves at a brisk pace. Doctor McCoy is at Yosemite National Park (confusing, because evidently Earth still has nations?) watching Captain Kirk free climb El Capitan (har har), then Spock flies up on rocket boots and distracts Kirk, which caused him to fall but the green blooded bastard catches the captain before he hits the ground.
You can’t really deny that the movie is ludicrously self indulgent. There’s an extended scene of Shatner flicking between himself and a muscular dude whose face you can’t see free climbing. Kirk, McCoy and Spock eat beans and sing “Row Row Row Your Boat.” The most ludicrous thing in the scene is that Spock reveals a little machine that slowly dispenses exactly one marshmellow—that he calls a marshmellon to McCoy’s great amusement. It feels like the movie is showing inside jokes that the audience can’t possibly understand.
What actually happened here is that this was going to be a running joke where McCoy reprogrammed the ship’s computers to give Spock slight misinformation to prepare for their camping trip. This was dropped for time, leaving us with the mystery of the marshmellons.
We return to Nimbus III. There is only one settlement on the planet, Paradise City, which is a Mad Max strip club. A human diplomat and a drunk Klingon are hanging out when a new rep from the Romulans arrive. Then a bunch of farmers attack, led by the wizard guy.
At the end of the previous movie Kirk was demoted from admiral back down to captain and given a new Enterprise-A to command. Since then the original series crew, especially Scotty have been wrenching on all the mechanics to get it into shape. At best it seems like Starfleet gifted Kirk a half complete starship for saving the Earth. Uhura gets a call from Starfleet HQ who want this shitbox jalopy to go deal with the crisis on Nimbus III. She immediately recalls Sulu and Chekov who are off on a boy’s trip and lost in the woods somewhere. Meanwhile, Kirk, Spock and McCoy have ample time to put out their camp fire and go to sleep. Some time during the night Uhura arrives in a shuttle (the transporters are offline because the ship is at best half complete).
Once back on Enterprise, the Big Three watch the hostage video. The human, Klingon and Romulan reps hold up newspapers with today’s stardate on them and the wizard guy demands a starship. For reasons that will be revealed later it’s really weird and coincidental that Starfleet seems so set on having Enterprise go deal with this. Spock explains to Kirk and McCoy that this wizard guy was a famous gifted kid on Vulcan, but when he grew up he became a Vulcan atheist (he doesn’t believe in logic but he does believe in God). He ended up getting exiled. Spock leaves out important context that his comrades probably should know.
But anyway, Scotty wraps a chain around the saucer section and puts a couple extra pints of oil in the engine manifold and the Enterprise is off.
Meanwhile, some random Klingon ship has heard about the crisis and goes to attack any Federation ship that goes to deal with it. That’s a weird subplot. But now in my old age I can kinda recognize Klingon words, so it’s fun to think about the artifacts introduced in the translations.
Kirk organizes a raid on the Mad Max strip club. Meanwhile Chekov pretends to be the captain to distract the wizard guy. Uhura distracts some farmers by dancing in a leotard with some palm fronds, and then the boys steal their horses. There’s a big fight. It’s pretty goofy that Kirk thought it was a good idea to lead the attack himself, along with Spock and the chief medical officer. It’s stated that they’re running with a skeleton crew, so they can hand wave some other stuff later. Kirk ends up inside the strip club and he wrestles with a triple breasted cat-beast stripper and throws her into an underwater pool table, which immediately kills her. Everyone is captured by the wizard and his friends. They take the shuttle back up to the Enterprise.
In the time they’ve been on the surface the Klingon ship has caught up with them. Chekov gets the shield up as soon as they’re remotely nearby, but this presents a problem. The shuttle is going up to Enterprise and won’t make it through the shield. The wizard guy refuses to stop. Kirk calls Chekov gives him a random incomprehensible command, then he has Sulu free hand the shuttle into the ship, so as to keep the shields down for as short as possible. This leads to the shuttle crashing relatively hard but I guess the inertial dampeners are pretty good because everyone is relatively fine.
Once inside, Chekov orders the Enterprise to get the hell out of dodge.
Now, it is known that the wizard guy has control of the shuttle and has the captain hostage. If I were in command of a ship in these conditions I would have every free body that could hold a phaser down in the shuttle bay as soon as possible and blanket the whole area in “stun.” I guess all the security guys went down to the planet for the hostage rescue op? Chekov sends no one to even go check on the violent crash.
Kirk tries to sneak off, but he’s cornered by the wizard. Spock points a weapon at the wizard and Kirk tells him to shoot, but he can’t bring himself to shoot the really shitty gun that has actual bullets. The wizard orders Kirk, McCoy and Spock into the brig and everyone just kind of accepts he’s in command now.
In the brig the Big Three discuss why Spock couldn’t pull the trigger. It turns out Spock couldn’t bring himself to shoot his brother, Sybok. Some Trekkies really do not like this revelation. In my mind it’s one of the few really good pieces of continuity with the original series. Spock hates talking about his family. He has a very difficult relationship with his father at best. Star Trek Discovery struggles in a lot of areas, but I think this is one of the things it did right. One of Spock’s core personality traits is that he avoids talking about his family and his heritage.
Soon after this Sybok makes an announcement to the whole ship. He explains that he has found the Space Garden of Eden and he’s going to go there. One of the holdovers from the original series probably should have brought up that time space hippies took over the ship to go to a different Space Garden of Eden, but no one remembers this. To go to the Space Garden of Eden they have to go through the great galactic barrier to get to the center of the galaxy. This is a plot element taken from the original series episode Where No Man Has Gone Before, where the barrier is on the outside of the galaxy. Weird that it’s either a torus that surrounds a ring through the galaxy or there’s two of them.
What is very funny is that this whole situation is extraordinarily similar to The Way to Eden, an episode from the original series, but melded with aspects of The Magicks of Megas-Tu. That is one of the most bizarre episodes of the animated series. The Enterprise investigates the black hole at the center of the galaxy, which leads through to a portal to a parallel universe where the Salem Witch Trials are happening and Satan is the one on trial. Magic is real in this universe and the wizards from this universe recreated the Salem Witch Trials because uh, that was the last time they visited Earth and they left after being accused to witchcraft? Kirk mounts a legal defense for Satan and gets him acquitted of trying to summon humans to the magic universe and they go home. This episode is the source of that gif of Spock drawing a pentagram to summon Satan. It’s all real.
Scotty breaks the Big Three out of the brig. He does a classic slapstick gag, then Kirk and McCoy start a slow climb through a tall shaft, only for Spock to look directly at the camera and say in a perfect Peter Griffin voice, “Hello Lois. Do you remember that time at the beginning of the movie when I had rocket boots?” Then he uses Rocket Boots to get them to the top of the ship. They try to send a distress message from the captain’s ready room but it gets intercepted by the Klingons, and then Sybok shows up.
We finally get a display of his special power. People trust him because he can bring visions of your “pain” and he helps you bear it. He sends a vision to McCoy of his father in an iron lung in terrible pain begging for death. Finally, McCoy puts an aftermarket flash cart in the iron lung and it crashes, killing his father. But it turned out the next day they found the cure for iron lung disease and his father would have been fine if McCoy hadn’t murdered him. Then Sybok shows Spock his pain. Is it related to their sister who mysteriously disappeared? Any of his various lovers where everything went to shit with? No. He sees his own birth. He comes out the womb as a thirty five year old baby smeared with raspberry preserves. Spock and Sybok’s dad looks at baby Spock and is disappointed that he looks human.
Look, man, if you’re going to be disappointed that your child resembles the species of his mother you should have probably put a rubber on.
Sybok tries to get Kirk to share his pain. From implication I feel like the pain would have had something to do with the death of his son David back in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. That's as far back as this movie remembers. But Kirk needs his pain.
I have been ragging on his scene, but honestly it’s a banger. It’s one of the all time great scenes of Star Trek and it’s in this turkey of a movie.
The Enterprise is approaching the galactic barrier so Sybok leaves to return to the bridge. He thinks he’s mind controlling Spock and McCoy but both of them opt to stay with Kirk.
Everything goes purple for a moment and you worry they’re traveling in time, but no, they’re just going through the galactic barrier. Kirk, Spock and McCoy follow Sybok to the bridge. Once they get through the barrier there’s a glowing blue planet. Sybok is done with mind controlling everyone and he just wants to go down to the planet. Kirk is reluctant but like, come on, going to meet a God is definitely something Captain Kirk is gonna want to do. So the Big Three and Sybok go down to the planet.
Everyone on the ship starts watching the movie on the main viewer. Meanwhile, scanners have picked up the Klingons trying to come through the galactic barrier but everyone is too invested in what’s going on down on the planet.
It turns out the planet itself looks like pretty much the same desert as the planet of galactic peace, and like three quarters of the planets Kirk has seen during his career. He is underwhelmed while the rest of them hike through the desert.
Finally some stone ribs sprout out of the ground and God appears.
Sybok is initially reverent, but it quickly becomes obvious that God only wants to get on a starship and cheese it out of the galactic barrier. Captain Kirk asks God what he wants with a starship, another absolute banger of a scene, and God blasts him with eye laser beams set to knock you on your ass. Spock points out this is a dick move and gets a taste of the eye lasers himself. Now Sybok is forced to confront the fact that his God is an asshole, so he jumps inside God and tries his “share your pain” scam.
Chekov then blows them up with a photon torpedo.
The Big Three cheese it back to the shuttle but find it’s inoperative. Luckily, the transporter has finally been repaired, but Scotty has bad news. Due to dramatic tension he can only beam up Spock and McCoy. Then as soon as that happens the Klingons show up and attack Enterprise, and God reforms and tries to attack Kirk.
Kirk runs from God as best he can.
Meanwhile on Enterprise Spock recruits the Klingon hostage as part of a scam.
After a merry little chase God corners Kirk and he’s about to blow the shit out of him with more eye lasers.
The fun part is that in the original draft of the movie God was supposed to be attacking with angels and demons, and when the studio balked the shooting script had Kirk fighting a rock monster. But the rock monster looked so shitty they decided to just do more God laser beams.
Then the Klingon ship shows up and kills God, for real this time. Kirk is pretty sure he’s next, then he gets beamed on board the vessel. Now the Klingon hostage is in command and Spock was the one who fired the kill shot that took out God.
Kirk tries to comfort Spock by looking directly in the camera and in a perfect Peter Griffin voice saying, “Hey, Lois, remember that time my brother died?”
Spock replies with “Yes, captain. On Deneva. In the episode Operation--Anihilate!"
“Who?” says Kirk, “I meant you, ya goober. Ya got better, didn’t ya?” He winks. Everyone (including Spock) breaks out into laughter. Smash cut to credits.
Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country are fucking bangers of movies, both on their own and in the context of Star Trek. Star Trek IV: The One with the Whales is an excellent take on a comedy episode with some heart. I won’t kid you, Star Trek V doesn’t live up to those highs.
Star Trek V is not great cinema. You’re not going to learn about filmmaking by watching it (unless you buy into Alan Moore’s theory that creators should be consuming bad media and analyzing why it’s bad). But there are genuinely compelling moments here and there. The pace is fast. The action is kind of goofy. It’s fun and dumb. It led to the stupidest piece of Star Trek merchandise ever, the Kraft marsh mellon dispenser.
And, if I have to cite something as genuinely good from the movie it’s Laurence Luckinbull. He is electric as Sybok. He is a crazy idea for a character that should not work, and yet he works beautifully. You believe he can mesmerize everyone in the movie because you buy into his stupid plan to find God.
So is Star Trek V a good movie? No. But does it blow the pants off all of the TNG movies, the reboot movies and Section 31? You bet your fucking ass it does. Yes, including First Contact. I went there.
The TNG movies were the slow transition from where the Star Trek franchise existed in the 90’s, creative works that try to say something about the human experience with vegetarian space socialism, to souless empty content slop. You can make the argument that First Contact and maybe even Generations beat Star Trek V, those at least have decent levels of craft behind them. Insurrection I think did try to say something, but the craft was slipping by then, and Nemesis was trying to say nothing with badly incompetent craft. The only good attribute of Nemesis being the director thought Geordi was some kind of outer space potato man (yes, really, this is not a joke).
The reboot movies were creatively empty. The first one was garish and decently constructed for a big dumb action blockbuster. It was about nothing other than looking directly at the camera and saying in a perfect Peter Griffin voice, “Hey Lois, remember Star Trek?” The sequel was like if you ate that movie and Wrath of Khan, then horked up both into a churning, stomach turning morass. The third one tried to be more than an empty action blockbuster but never quite got there. I’ve already said my piece about Section 31. At least it’s not as bad as Nemesis.
I think it ends up reviled because Shatner is a self absorbed asshole, and it has a goofy tone at odds with the pompous God stuff. But release your grip on the self serious understanding of the franchise. Going to find and kill God is quintessential Star Trek. And it’s really fun to watch.
I have a soft spot for Shatner. I enjoy “his” series of novels where Captain Kirk comes back from the dead and beats up everyone from TNG and DS9 and then the evil universe version of Voyager and singlehandedly kills the Borg. Yes, it’s goofy. But the thing I find fascinating is that it’s an insight into Shatner’s thought process. I would love to see the outline he sent to the writers that actually wrote those novels, his outlines for the TekWar novels, or the treatments for Star Trek V. The weird creative decisions are the parts I love. Why do we see enough to clearly see the cat stripper is dead? Why is most of the compositing done with rear projection, even though it looks like shit? Why does the Enterprise-A have so many hundreds of decks? How shitty must the rock monster costume have looked if they weren’t willing to use it in the final movie?