New Classic Review - Galaxy Quest

By request, today's review is of the hilarious sci-fi/comedy Galaxy Quest.

Galaxy Quest tells the story of a group of actors from the Star Trek like-tv show of the title. They find themselves assisting an alien race who, believing the show to be a documentary, have modeled their entire society after it.

Tim Allen plays the selfish and egotistical Jason Nesmith, whom the aliens confuse for his über-confident character on the show, Commander Peter Taggart. He is the first to make contact, and is then faced with the daunting task of getting the rest of the cast to believe him. He eventually convinces the others to join him, and they find themselves facing off against the evil Sarris (Robin Sachs). Hilarity ensues.

Allen's co-leads in the film are Sigourney Weaver, of Alien fame, and Allan Rickman, arguably most famous for his turn as German baddie Hans Gruber in Die Hard. The supporting cast includes Tony Shalhoub, Darryl Mitchell, and Sam Rockwell. Everyone turns in fantastically funny performances, straddling the line between straight comedy and parody. Everyone also handles themselves well in the film's action scenes.

Completely underrated in the film is the side-splitting Enrico Colantoni as Mathesar, the leader of the alien race that worships Nesmith and his cast-mates. He delivers his lines in a strange sing-song manner that is half humming, It's difficult to describe, but it's effective as hell.

Also of note is the fantastic special effects the film boasts. Indeed, the shots of the ships battling it out at the end is more convincing that some of the effects in most of the Star Trek films. Part of what makes those special effects and action scenes work is David Newman's rousing score, which at times seems to be written to be overly bombastic and loud, just as the scores in other space movies tend to be.

All in all, thanks to Dean Parisot's excellent direction and a witty, tongue in cheek screenplay by David Howard and Robert Gorden, Galaxy Quest succeeds in being not only a jovial parody of space films, but a decent space film in it's own right. The only negative I see is that the movie was at one time edited to have an edgier PG-13 rating. I think it would have been interesting to see the original cut, which was also supposed to be more serious, to see how the two compare.

Grade: 8

All movies are graded on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being cinematic perfection, and 1 being anything directed by William Shatner.)