Director: Dean Parisot
Cast: Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Tony Shaloub, Sam Rockwell
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, come on. What do you think? I saw it opening weekend.
Did I Like It: It’s beloved for the reason. Many people count it among the best Star Trek films, and even a few people place it as number one, ahead of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). That, to me, feels like too much.
The special effects don’t age exceptionally well, yet another casualty of relatively early CGI without a lot of artistry behind them. The space battles and weird phenomena (more on that later) probably wouldn’t pass muster on a Star Trek television series from the same era.
But that hardly matters. The Wrath of Khan is the best version of these films, and large swaths of its VFX footage are pulled directly from the previous film. This film is great great. Every joke lands, and the thought that Tim Allen could give a performance that has any sort of dramatic believability without shielding himself with Pixar’s plastic seems ridiculous, but there he is, making us believe in Nesmith’s anguish at having to be found out as a fraud. The movie absolutely hinges on that scene, and he delivers.
I would say it is inarguably in the top half of Trek films, and just precisely where in the ranking depends on your average. The film precisely hits all of the targets it wishes to satirize, while never looking down on the subject, minus a chomper sequence or two. There are few comedies that work on the same level. A film like Last Action Hero (1993) may aim for the same territory, but struggles to connect on almost every level. The only film I can think of that qualifies is Young Frankenstein (1974). Even Blazing Saddles (1974)* never quite works for me, and I’m imagining most of the world does not want to hear the aggressive shrug I have for Spaceballs (1987).
So why am I not putting it at number 1? Well, primarily, I don’t think I’ll ever let go of my perhaps irrational love of The Wrath of Khan, but more specifically, there is a moment in this film that grates on my nerves and feels like rocks rattling around in my head whenever it plays out. Just at the end, when Tommy Webber (Daryl Mitchell) flies the Protector back to Earth, he says that he has to go through a black hole. Which they then do.
I wouldn’t normally want to reach for the Neal deGrasse Tyson angle of criticism, but that isn’t how wormholes work! Nesmith even asks if there is any objection to going through the black hole, and everyone sort of goes along with it. I do. I have an objection, but they didn’t ask me. Trek and other space opera clearly flies in the face of real science regularly by virtue of its very existence, but that just seemed like a silly moment that doesn’t even function as a joke.
If they had said wormhole, I’d be fine. They edited around Sigourney Weaver saying “fuck,” they couldn’t have fixed this? If it had been, the whole thing might be, as David Mamet of all people claims, one of the few perfect films of all time. As it stands, it is quite excellent.
*Hard to deny that Mel Brooks had a hell of a year in 1974. Regardless of my particular tastes, the only other single calendar year where a single director made two verifiable classics that stand the test of time, is 1939, where both The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind were credited to Victor Fleming. Although the auteur theory was at least two years away from having any undeniable case studies, and he had to abandon the former in order to take over the later. Here’s a good question: why am I spending all of this time on my review of Galaxy Quest talking about this? The world may never know.