Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Galaxy Quest!

Theme: Phasers on Kill - Screeching Weasel

These are the trips of the space vessel Project. Its half-decade task: to look for novel fauna and uncontacted societies; to confidently venture where noone has yet essayed.

Since we can all agree Star Trek the Motion Picture was barely a Star Trek movie, the best Star Trek movie is of course 2000's Galaxy Quest, which also isn't a Star Trek movie (no, there aren't really any good Star Trek movies). Tim Allen, Alan Rickman and Sigourney Allan Weaver head up the cast of has-been actors from the fictitious TV show Galaxy Quest, which we are told aired in the 1980s but in 1999 or so remains popular enough to sustain a convention circuit just like Trek, where the most unwashed of autismos go to soyface over their devoted fandom, in the presence of the burned-out, jaded cast.

Me meeting any of my many fans (not you, though. You're my favourite).

But their world is TURNED UPSIDE DOWN when one particular group of awkward NERDS turn out to be IRL ayylmaos in real life in the movie (not in the show in the movie) and have an actual ship built after the specifications from the TV show, which they believe constitutes actual historical documents of real events. You might think little details like the credits would serve to disabuse them of this notion, but go away, it's a fun premise. It doesn't actually matter that movies make sense, only that they make enough sense for the type of movie that they are. If you get hung up on the details here, you might as well put Road Runner cartoons on blast because you can't really walk off a cliff onto thin air until you look down.

I like the one that makes SOME sense.

Anyway, once in spehss, our not-actually-heroes soon run into trouble with Stan Winston Workshop's finest creation since the Predator, stock villain Sarris:

All I want in life is to be a stock villain with an evil claw hand.

Sarris wants to kill the NERDS for some reason, who cares. WILL the TV stars bluff their way to victory? WILL Alan Rickman's ayy prosthetics last the entire runtime? WILL Sigourney Weaver's costume? FIND OUT, but it's no.

There's no blooper reel on the DVD I got from the charity shop, indicating against all odds that their deadpans held out longer than either.

The movie is FUNNY, parodies entertainment clichés out of love, not faux-superiority, and still plays more like a real movie than today's tentpole blockbusters, because the requisite emotional beats were still there and the filmmakers had the confidence not to undercut them with bathetic interruptions like Jar Jar Abrams and similar Josh Sweden imitating HACKS. Take, for instance, the scene where the captured has-beens must finally reveal to the ayys who they really are:

In honour of this forgotten level of taste and restraint, I won't even spoil the moment by pasting that fat guy that cries at trailers' face over the ayy.

I'm a little bit surprised Galaxy Quest isn't more widely known and referenced by YouTube critics, for were I, say, Disparu, I'd use this clip reliably in every other video:

Me watching anything at all.

But those are just my thoughts, what are yours? Like and subscribe to Khoomei Masterclass on YouTube Dot Com, stay hydrated, look both ways before crossing the street, put your left foot in, your left foot out, do the Bartman, never give up, never surrender, and I'll see you next time, and as always, don't eat yellow snow.