Starring 5th Trek

This is widely considered as rubbish. As one of my friends says "Oh no, God is an American!" and then "That's all right, so is the Devil!"

After staging a takeover on the planet of peace, Sybok finagles his way onto the Enterprise-A, and uses the ship to penetrate the barrier at the centre of the galaxy. There, he finds a being that is god, only it turns out god needs a starship, and what does god need with a starship?

Clearly, I skipped over the entire interaction with Kirk and co., but that's not necessarily a bad thing... okay, let's cut to the point. This movie is 1 hour and 45 minutes, and 1 hour and 25 minutes are great. There are a few comedy moments with Scotty that we could have done without, but the rest is great drama and character moments. Sybok's ability to embrace the pain is a powerful character motivator, and you can easily believe that people would 'convert' to his side. And where else do we get the moments with Spock and McCoy, and then Kirk whining about wanting to keep pain as that's one of the few things that defines him.

But then we hit the final twenty minutes, and the movie dives into complete crap. Why does the shuttle land so far away? Especially as (rather old!) people manage to pop around the landscape without problems. And then the exciting moment of jabolite exploding through the floor. And this is after the whole night darkening moment that feels straight out of Ghostbusters. It just fails on many levels (okay, I'll give the evil version looks like Sybok, that's a nice touch).

One other touch I will give is Kirk still rails against the Klingons right at the end, continuing that character arc. This continues well into the books, although the whole 'I'll die alone' thing doesn't really pay out at the end (unless that continues into the books too, I never finished the series Shatner wrote).

So, mostly good, but that ending sours everything.

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