Movie Reviews:GalaxyQuest

Well its a slow day, and since I saw GalaxyQuest last night, I figured I'd pop up and write a quick review of the film. The quick summary is that it stars Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman, and it is a sort of parody/lampoon of Star Trek, Trekkies, and the whole Trek phenomenon. The quick rating is that if you've got a sense of humor, you'll enjoy it. Read on for more stuff, and hopefully with minimal spoilers.

Allright truth be told, I'm a not a super trekkie. I'm right on the border. I mean sure, when I first got the sci-fi channel last may, for like 2 months I tuned in every night at 7pm and watched an episode of the original series, and I enjoyed it. But over the years the series has come and gone, and repeated itself. Voyager is mediocre, but sometimes great. DS9 had potential and then turned into a soap opera. TNG was fun, but oh so preachy. And about half of the movies are absolute crap (My favorites are in order, Kahn, Spock, First Contact and Undiscovered Country. The worst are Generations and last fall's total crapfest, Insurrection).

So the truth is out. When Trek is good, its great, and when its bad, its horrible. I think even the most die hard trekkie can accept that. And I also think that even the most die hard trekkie can accept the healthy lampooning that they take in GalaxyQuest.

Tim Allen play the Captain, Alan Rickman plays a surly Spockish role, and Sigourney Weaver plays the largest breasted crewman who's primary job is to repeat whatever the computer she says... and even she knows that its a stupid job.

Essentially, these 3, along with the Scottyish charachter (who has the best lines and scenes in the movie) and the "Extra" who died and was forgotten in some episode way back when are washed up actors from the early 80s television program "GalaxyQuest". These days they get by making personal appearances and GalaxyQuest Conventions where Questarians pay fifteen bucks a pop for autographs.

At one of these cons, a group of wacky looking costumed kids asks captain Tibbit for a 'Personal Appearance' (and yes, they get the requested limo). Of course you've seen the trailers, they turn out to be aliens who intercepted the signals of the bad 80s space adventures, and interpretted them to be "Historical Documents" of a real band of space heros. They then modeled their society after them: complete with building an exact replica of the Protector. Now that they are in conflict, they need help, and they retrieve our heros to save the day.

So thats the plot. Comedy follows. The range the spectrum of "Good trying to look Bad" all the way to just bad, to pretty dang cool. The acting is all great... the aliens are quirky and naive tenticled beings that squeeze laugh after laugh just with crazy facial expressions. The cast themselves are right on the money, parodying the conventions that the original Star Trek series created (the running gags about the "Extra" dying are just great... he's the red shirted guy with no last name: he's destined to die, it happens every episode right?).

And of course there are the Trekki-I mean, the Questarians. Geeks who ask technical questions about contradictions between episodes, or scientific questions derived from badly written episodes of a low budget television program. You know these guys. I know these guys.

The truth is that this movie was lovingly crafted by people who obviously knew their stuff about the star trek world, and the bizarre cult that has sprung up around it here in the real world. They've seen that its crazy, and they've had a lot of fun with it. This isn't the greatest parody in the world (Mel Brooks pretty well has a lock on that between Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Spaceballs) but its more than a parody of a movie or a genre, its a parody of something that has surpassed the small screen and the big screen, and become part of lives in a way that few programs have. Its about the show that causes people to dress up with pointy ears, or write a book so that others can learn the tongue of a fictitious warrior race.

See this movie. Hell, its better than half of the Star Trek movies.