Keep on Trekkin'
Galaxy Quest is an exhilarating and affectionate parody of all things
Roddenberry.
On
the face of it, it wouldn't seem too hard to do an effective parody of Star
Trek. Certainly many have tried; who can forget Jim Carrey in In Living
Color's "Wrath of Farrakhan" sketch, the William Shatner
impersonation that Kevin Pollak has practically built an entire career on, or
Shatner himself infamously telling fans to get a life on Saturday Night Live?
The only problem is that most of these parodies get hung up on dated costumes,
melodramatic acting, and the obsessive nature of the show's fans, often coming
off as mean-spirited and shallow. (It's also tough to come up with anything more
ludicrous than Leonard Nimoy singing a ballad of Tolkien's Hobbit Bilbo
Baggins, complete with tuba solo, which he did on a record released during his Trek
heyday.) Still, Gene Roddenberry's old warhorse of a sci-fi franchise is
looking rather shallow these days, producing such pale shadows of its former
glory as Star Trek: Insurrection and the weak TV spin-off Star Trek:
Voyager, a show that crassly added a busty female in tight clothes in order
to get anyone to watch. The moneymen at
It's ironic, therefore, that
Roddenberry's dream remains alive and well in Galaxy Quest, a film that
simultaneously satirizes and pays homage to its roots. The film begins at a
sci-fi convention populated by many fan-boy geeks in full-on alien attire, all
of whom are there to see their favorite stars from the canceled '80s TV series Galaxy
Quest. There's Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen), the Shatner-esque egomaniac whom
all the other actors resent; Gwen DeMarco (Sigourney Weaver), a woman
frustrated by years of being a token sex object; Alexander Dane (Alan Rickman),
a British thesp in the Patrick Stewart/Leonard Nimoy mold who wants to do
Shakespeare and resents being best known for playing an alien doctor; Tommy
Webber (Daryl "Chill" Mitchell), an attitude-laden former child star;
and Fred Kwan (Tony Shalhoub), the Scotty-style miracle mechanic character. All
of the actors are out of work, and the only one who even seems to enjoy his
cult following is Nesmith, although even he all but parrots Shatner's "Get
a life!" speech when confronted by techno nerds who want to discuss
discrepancies in the fictional starship's tech specs. When a group of
particularly weird fans corners Nesmith and asks for his help, he mistakenly
thinks they're going to pay him for another special appearance; instead, he
suddenly finds himself zapped all the way across the galaxy, where he is
worshipped as a hero by an alien race who think the
canceled TV show represents Earth's actual history.
When Nesmith returns to Earth,
his fellow cast members naturally think he's delusional, but they play along on
the off chance that he's actually talking about a paying job. Soon the entire
crew, with the addition of a glory hound named Guy Fleegman (Sam Rockwell), who
played a crewman on one episode, are onboard a real-life version of their
fictional starship Protector, fighting for their lives against an evil
Klingon-Predator hybrid named Sarris (a character purportedly named after film
critic Andrew Sarris). The central joke of the film, along with the Three
Amigos-in-space premise, is that the alien culture has used all its advance
technology to create a starship whose science works exactly as shown on the TV
series, even down to a series of utterly useless death-trap mechanisms that
were used to create suspense in a particular episode and a self-destruct
countdown that always stops with exactly one minute left. Even the real-life
perils that await them on alien worlds mirror the conventions of the show
somewhat: A fight with an alien rock creature conveniently causes Nesmith to
lose his shirt and expose his muscular hairy chest, DeMarco only seems to
sustain damage in areas that reveal more cleavage, and a race of Teletubby-like
aliens look ridiculously fake until they suddenly bare their fangs and begin to
eat one another.
And yet while the film
acknowledges just how silly some of this stuff is, it nevertheless endorses the
core Trek values of tolerance and teamwork and brings up the point that
anything that can inspire such devotion, even if it's a seemingly cheesy TV
show, is a worthwhile cause. Director Dean Parisot (Home Fries) obviously
knows his source material well, as some scenes are direct homages to the first Star
Trek film, notably a slow-motion sequence when the ship first enters warp
drive (or whatever this movie chooses to call it). David Newman's score is as
close as one can get to previous Star Trek movie scores without being
subject to a lawsuit, and comic book fans will be happy to note that
fan-favorite artists Berni Wrightson and Simon Bisley did some of the
conceptual designs and even happier, perhaps, that a fan-boy computer whiz
saves the day by explaining to the befuddled actors how the ship's technology
actually works.
The casting is also better than
it might appear on the surface. Tim Allen hardly seems like the best choice to
do Shatner, but even Shatner nowadays has lapsed into extreme self-parody.
Allen thankfully jettisons his Home Improvement schtick and plays it
like a TV star with a bit of an ego, albeit one he realizes he's actually going
to have to live up to, scary as that might sound. And if you think Sigourney
Weaver's too serious an actress for this kind of role, consider this: She stars
in the Alien movies, so you better believe she knows all about obsessive
sci-fi fans. Rickman, who has evolved over the years from action-movie villainy
to lighter work, is perfect as the one "serious" actor of the bunch.
Best of all, perhaps, is Sam Rockwell as the equivalent of one of Star Trek's
"redshirts" (Trekker jargon for the unnamed ensigns who would always
beam down with Kirk and Spock only to be killed in the first 10 minutes).
Knowing his role on the show, he remains in constant terror that the same fate
awaits him in real life and, unlike a Kevin Williamson character,
he isn't a big smart-ass about the whole thing.
It's hard to achieve the right
balance in a film like Galaxy Quest: It could easily descend into smarmy
self-indulgence like Scream 2 or remain on an inane surface level (Mafia!, Spy Hard,
and just about every other Leslie Nielsen movie since the first Naked Gun).
Fortunately, the makers of this film are clearly fans, and they've put more
heart and genuine humor into this piece than