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Galaxy Quest |
  Tim Allen as Commander Taggart  Sigourney Weaver Galaxy Quest Director : Dean Parisot Principal cast Tim Allen Sigourney Weaver Alan Rickman Tony Shalhoub Sam Rockwell Daryl Mitchell Enrico Colantoni Photo : Courtesy of DreamWorks. |
By C. Antonio Romero REDWOOD CITY, 26 January 2000 - Even those who like Galaxy Quest, the current science fiction spoof splashed across American movie screens, do well not to say too much about it, as the film's central theme is about how to maintain the appropriate degree of perspective on the boundary between the fictional and the real. The has-been cast of 1980's TV series Galaxy Quest - led by Tim Allen, a great, swaggering shatner of a mediocrity, blind to the loathing of his former castmates (crew?) - play out the aftermath of their careers doing appearances at science-fiction conventions; surrounded by people who are themselves inhabiting to varying degrees fantasy identities crafted from hints given in the series. Allen's "Jason Nesmith as Commander. Peter Quincy Taggart" sometimes takes his own fame and his own fictional identity too seriously. The action picks up as the cast is abducted (from an appearance at the opening of an electronics store) by a group of aliens who, having no real grasp of the concept of fiction, mistake the series for a historical record, remake their own society along the lines outlined in the show, and ultimately, in a moment of military crisis, turn to their role models to bail them out. The film's conceit is not entirely original - a 1970's story placed the three principal actors from Star Trek on the bridge of the real Enterprise following a transporter accident - but the creators of Galaxy Quest mine the comic potential of this situation in a way that their more-or-less-deadpan predecessors never did. Much of what ensues is insubstantial but clever, and full of eye candy (not the least of which is Sigourney Weaver's miraculous special-effects cleavage). Most of the cast does creditable work - beyond the scene-stealing Rickman and Weaver, we have Tony Shaloub playing a man playing the ship's engineer, Sam Rockwell as a formerly expendable (and expended) security crewman turned convention-circuit hanger-on, Daryl Mitchell as boy-navigator child actor all-grown-up and Enrico Colantoni as the leader of the aliens. Allen - aptly, given the distribution of talents among the original cast of Star Trek - is probably the weak spot in the cast, somehow not quite measuring up to Weaver or Alan Rickman. On the whole, though, the movie works well - and even better, for those at all versed in the lore of Star Trek and its aftermath. Besides a number of in-jokes drawn from specific Star Trek episodes, the movie plays extensively off of Star Trek's clichés and its subculture - expendable security crewmen, meaningless technobabble, the commander suddenly and gratuitously shirtless, celebrated conflicts among the cast members. At times, the writing is not quite as smart as it might be - but a movie like this, about the dangers of taking a popular entertainment too seriously, doesn't really need to be substantial, as long as it's deftly done, which Galaxy Quest mostly is. Anyone who loved Star Trek, anyone who's ever heard of Star Trek - even anyone who's seen the former Captain James T. Kirk swagger and gloat his way through his bizarre spoken-word-performance ads for Priceline.com - can't help but laugh their way through this film; the same could be said of anyone who loves acting. If you're looking for Alan Rickman in Richard III you're wasting your time, but if you're looking for a good light entertainment full of laughs, Galaxy Quest should scratch your itch. Best moment: the Commander is left alone with a group of smiling children... |
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