GALAXY QUEST: DELUXE EDITION (Paramount, 1999) D: Dean Parisot, w/ Tim Allen, Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver. Rating: NNNNN DVD package: NNNN Rating: NNNNN
There’s more than simple parody going on here. Galaxy Quest works on enough different levels that you don’t need to like Star Trek (I don’t) or know much about it to have a good time.
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Self-centred jerk Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen) is 15 years past his glory days as star of TV series Galaxy Quest. Now he and his former cast members (Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman and others) are reduced to working fan conventions and store openings. Aliens who don’t grasp the concept of fiction lure the actors into deep space to save them from a marauding warlord.
Summarized, it sounds ludicrous, but smart writing and a cast that takes it seriously makes it work. The script spoofs the actors, Star Trek and its obsessive fanboys.
The stars have a lot to work with. Everyone gets to satirize their profession’s pettiness, do some bad TV acting and, at the centre, portray ordinary people striving to rise to the occasion in several ways. At the same time, the movie delivers a credible Trek-type episode and validates the fanboys.
Rickman has the plummiest role as a once-great thespian now filled with self-loathing, but everyone is funny. Keep your eye on Enrico Colantoni as the alien leader. Truly weird.
Colantoni and his aliens get a making-of doc all to themselves. Like the other four, it’s funny, informative and mostly new material.
EXTRAS Five retrospective making-of docs, deleted scenes. Widescreen. English, Spanish, Thermian audio. English, French, Spanish subtitles.
