In many ways, deciding what Star Trek movie was the worst is easy. The Final Frontier had the dubious distinction of following up The Voyage Home, at that point the most successful Trek movie yet released. It was also William Shatner’s feature directorial debut, and despite the Captain’s ample experience working on a budget and directing several episodes of TV (10 episodes of his series T.J. Hooker to be precise), the film still went over-budget, and suffered from a weak, meandering script. The shame is that the story was highly ambitious: the crew of the Enterprise go in search of God, but instead of a theological exploration through the lens of Trek, we get scene after scene of Laurence Luckinbill as Spock’s never-before-heard-of brother Sybok asking people to share their pain with him, a sentiment more likely to be heard in a Hellraiser movie than a Star Trek one.
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