Star Trek V - The Final Frontier
Or, "How to make BAD SCIENCE look GOOD with a $Gazillion Special FX Budget"
Synopsis? It's Stardate 8454.1 or 2287 AD. Bad Vulcan hijacks the Enterprise. Goes to Sha Ka Ree - Vulcan for "Heaven". Fights God. The End.
Now, a few things along the way don't sit well with me...
- At the beginning of the flick, Kirk is climbing a mountain at Yosemite Nat'l Park. Spock flies up to Kirk's vertical position using jet/rocket boots, distracts Kirk, Kirk falls. Problems?
- Kirk apparently changes clothes twice on the way down... His outfit changes noticeably. I know, probably just poor editing. However, I like to think they were showing blueshifting since :
- Kirk fell for 17 seconds! My own Fizzoids can calculate that, with regular air resistance, he reached terminal velocity and is traveling at about 250 km/hr or 160 MPH AND :
- There IS NO AIR that day at Yosemite. All the way down, both Kirk and Spock, show absolutely NO effects of slicing thru an air mass. Like moving hair, ruffling sleeves, or even a shirt collar flapping...
- Now, Spock catches up with Kirk and grabs his ankle and saves him just in the nickel of a dime... However,
- His grab occurs just feet off the ground in an instant of time. Even if Spock, needing to have a velocity LARGER than Kirk's in order to catch up to him, the semi-superman he is, could stop that quickly, Kirk's own momentum and inertia would have dictated that the rest of his body would have continued to fall. Spock would have been holding ONLY Kirk's foot looking at a large red spot on the ground that used to be Kirk saying raising one eyebrow and saying, "Interesting."
- Spock holds Kirk at arms length by the ankle while both their bodies are vertical! However, center of mass would be directly between them and they would have rotated so that Kirk's mass would be directly below Spock's.
- Notice the needles on the pine tree in the foreground at the moment Kirk is saved. They are hanging to the left! Is gravity wrong in Yosemite or is this an obvious sign they shot this scene sideways?
- This scene is reminiscent of the final fall of Batman (Keaton) and Whatsername (Kim Bassinger) in the original and only good Batman movie. They fall off a building, changing centers of mass, even changing sides, for 19 seconds, making the building 1800 m high, that's 6000 feet high, more than a MILE, dwarfing every other building in the world, stop IMMEDIATELY when Batman shoots a grappling hook straight up to the roof where they fell from that miraculously hangs a left just when it gets to the top and hooks on to the inside wall. Is this a run-on sentence? Not this one, the one before this one... Eh, forget it!
- In no other instance did Kirk and/or his crew give up so easily! They almost invited Sybok, the megalomaniac Vulcan, to the bridge! From that moment, I found the storyline hard to swallow.
- It is mentioned that Starfleet HQ is in the same timezone as Yosemite. However, when Spock, Kirk, and Bones beam up from Yosemite at night after chatting a bit around a campfire, they talk to a guy at HQ where it is suddenly daytime.
- Sybok gets a haircut while going to the shuttle from the bridge! A full-service starship...
- The Great Barrier was placed there to keep all powers and being OUT of the vicinity of this "God" being. How did the puny Enterprise make it through when it was called "absolutely impervious" several times?
- At the end of the movie, Spock starts playing his Vulcan Flute thingee. Kirk recognizes the song after only TWO NOTES! Now, I used to watch the old show "Name That Tune" where contestants would try to identify a tune in the smallest number of notes. "I can name that tune in FOUR notes..." TWO notes was virtually impossible. However, when you consider the song Kirk recognized, "Row, Row, Row Your Boat", it is distinctly impossible since the first THREE - maybe even FOUR - of this song's notes are the same! How could he know? I guess he read the script earlier, huh?
- A few good lines?
- "I know this ship like the back of my hand." - Scotty just before he bangs his head on an overhanging hunk of equipment and falls unconscious. Coincidentally, that overhanging thing wasn't there later when Sulu found him.
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