Before it was surpassed in fandom’s collective opinion by Star Trek Into Darkness, 1989’s Star Trek V: The Final Frontier held the ignoble distinction of being almost unanimously regarded as the worst Star Trek movie ever. As Roger Ebert put it, the film features “not much danger, no characters to really care about, little suspense, uninteresting or incomprehensible villains, and a great deal of small talk and pointless dead ends.†And that was a two-star review; you can imagine what the people who really hated it thought. Now, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, William Shatner, who both starred in and directed the film, has named it the piece of work he’s most sorry he had a hand in creating. As he explains, the film’s terrible ending was mostly someone else’s fault:
I got the chance to direct a several-million-dollar movie, Star Trek V, and I did not get the help I needed in allocating my budget, so when it came to shooting the ending — needing a good villain and lots of computer graphics — I had run out of money. Sorry about that. [Laughs.] I had to use footage that I had already shot — and spit on it a lot. I wanted to give [the audience] earth-breaking granite monsters spewing rocks and fire. Instead, I had a few pebbles in my hand that I threw at the camera.
At press time, Shatner had not yet apologized to the National Park Service for sullying the image of Yosemite.