STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER

JERRY GOLDSMITH

Rating:

Original Review: Star Trek has always been a source of excellent music, right from the earliest incarnations of the classic TV series back in the 60s through composers like Alexander Courage, Gerald Fried, Sol Kaplan and Samuel Matlovsky. However, after hearing it almost every week for seven years as the opening title to Star Trek: The Next Generation, I often forget just how damn good Jerry Goldsmith's now-legendary theme is, especially when it is performed by a 90-piece film score orchestra. Brought back into the fold a decade after his first Trek outing on 1979's Motion Picture, Goldsmith endowed the fifth Star Trek movie with one of the best scores of the series, teeming with memorable themes.

The film itself, directed by William Shatner, remains the poorest instalment in the series. In a rather confusing and disjointed plot, It brought together the crew of the Enterprise with a gang of Zen-like mercenaries led by mysterious Vulcan preacher Sybok, who takes them on a journey beyond the Great Barrier at the centre of the universe, beyond which he hopes he will find a paradise-like planet and, ultimately, God.

Beginning with a bombastic recapitulation of the main theme, the music leads into the majestic 'The Mountain', the cue which introduces the score's first new theme - a pastoral, sedate string fugue which accompanies the panoramic vistas of Captain Kirk ascending Mon Capitan in Yosemite National Park, with the help/hinderance of Spock, simply "because it is there". The second major theme, which first appears in 'The Barrier', is a reverential but unusually child-like synthesiser-led melody which acts as a recurring motif for the film's search for God, Eden, Sha Ka Ree and Vor'ta Vor. It gets a further, noticeably emotional rendition in 'A Busy Man'. Throughout the score, these two new themes combine with and complement the familiar older ones through a series of wonderfully evocative and enjoyable cues. Of these, 'Without Help' marks the first welcome re-appearance of Goldsmith's dark and pulsating Klingon theme from Star Trek TMP, a wonderfully malevolent brass line accentuated by clacking percussion, synthesiser effects and an inventive tick-tock beat.

'Open The Gates' and 'Let's Get Out Of Here' are two of Goldsmith's continuously superb action themes, while 'An Angry God' - my own favourite cue on the album - begins by presenting a suitably awe-inspiring recapitulation of the "quest theme", but turns sour and frightening shortly thereafter as the true nature of the God-like being becomes apparent. The forgettable song, 'The Moon's A Window To Heaven', is nothing more than a space-filler, but it does feature in another of the film's more ludicrous scenes, where Uhura performs a supposedly a sultry dance to it atop a sand dune on the "Planet of Intergalactic Peace", Nimbus III. This is merely a small blot, though, on what is otherwise an almost perfect musical landscape.

Track Listing: Running Time: 42 minutes 26 seconds

Epic Soundtrax EK-45267 (1989)

Music composed and conducted by Jerry Goldsmith. Orchestrations by Arthur Morton. Features music from the Star Trek television series, composed by Alexander Courage. Recorded and mixed by Bruce Botnick. Edited by Ken Hall. Album produced by Jerry Goldsmith.


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