The official trailer for William Shatner's Star Trek V: The Final Frontier arrived in 1989 and conveyed the franchise's most troubled entry with a visual confidence that considerably overstated the film's actual qualities. The central premise, a journey to the centre of the galaxy in search of God, is of such scope that it immediately established the film's ambitions as something distinctive in the franchise's history. The tragedy is that the film itself could not sustain the promise of that premise, and the trailer's effectiveness as a piece of marketing makes the film's dramatic failures all the more acute.
First Impressions
The trailer is immediately the franchise's most conceptually bold, with the journey to the galactic centre and the search for God conveyed with a dramatic weight that places the film's ambitions beyond the series' more conventional action-adventure entries. The Sybok character and the crew's interactions are shown with enough specificity to establish the film's expanded dramatic canvas.
What the Trailer Reveals
The trailer establishes Sybok's charismatic threat, conveys the mission to the galactic centre, and glimpses the film's most dramatic sequences with enough clarity to establish its production scale. The God entity is glimpsed briefly, and the film's central mystery is foregrounded as the quality that sets it apart from its predecessors.
Music and Sound
Jerry Goldsmith's score gives the trailer a sonic grandeur and weight that suits the film's reach for something more serious than a conventional action adventure. The sweeping orchestral textures convey the film's cosmic scope with a musical intelligence that the film itself does not always match, lending the trailer a confidence its source material struggles to sustain.
Most Memorable Moment
The glimpse of the alien entity at the galactic centre is the trailer's most compelling image: a moment of conceptual boldness that places the film's ambitions well beyond the franchise's more conventional entries, even if the film cannot fully deliver on the promise.
Trailer Verdict
A bold trailer for the franchise's most dramatically troubled entry, one that conveys the film's cosmic reach with a confidence the film itself cannot sustain. The Final Frontier aims for something distinctive and falls short, and this trailer is more persuasive about the film's potential than the film proves to be about its own ideas. It remains a curious document of what the original cast series might have achieved at its most philosophically serious.