The art of the spoof is a tricky one. You have to have some sympathy for what you’re ripping off to make it work; there has to be a sense of recognition in those chuckles. Mel Brooks has devoted himself to spoofs for years, with diminishing returns: his High Anxiety (taking off Hitchcock) and Blazing Saddles (westerns) were a great deal more fun than his recent rip-offs of such movies as Star Wars and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and none came close to his original 1968 comedy, The Producers. Leslie Nielsen’s Naked Gun series of private-eye parodies just got sillier and sillier, dwindling into ever smaller circles of recycled jokes.
And some movie franchises start inadvertently parodying themselves as they go on – look at the Airplane sequence. The first TV series of Star Trek, of course, which is spoofed in Galaxy Quest, regularly came close to self-parody. Yet the cheap sets, the not-so-dazzling special effects, the plastic aliens, the costumes that looked like they had been tarted up from thrift-shop relics, detract not a whit from the allure of Star Trek – in fact, they contribute to its lasting appeal.
Galaxy Quest plays most amusingly with all that, as well as with the whole Star Trek phenomenon of fanatical followers treating a TV show like holy scripture – holding conventions and discussing the lore of the show in minute detail while wearing preposterous outfits. Some Trekkies have even gone so far as to learn Klingon, the language of one set of Star Trek aliens, and have developed dictionaries and grammars for this purely imaginary tongue. On this point, the advocates of Esperanto are entitled to sigh with despair.
Tim Allen, Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver, Daryl Mitchell and Tony Shalhoub are the stars of a long-gone show called Galaxy Quest, dragging themselves around to various Questerian events, getting dressed up in their old outfits and uttering their old catchphrases one more time. Allen’s egocentric Commander Taggart gets off on it, but Rickman, who plays the Mr Spock character, is most unhappy. “I used to be an actor!” he moans, alien prosthesis glued to his head. The casting of Weaver, the iconic heroine of the Alien series, as a bimbo condemned to repeat whatever the computer says, is a sly masterstroke.
These semi-hasbeens either humour or deride the fans who believe the whole Galaxy Quest universe to be real, but there’s the rub: it is. Soon the bewildered actors are being teleported to a galaxy far, far away by a bunch of aliens in Gary Numan drag. Their help is needed in a war against the fearsome Sarris (named for the famous film critic Andrew Sarris, proponent of the “auteur theory”?). Sarris is a kind of walking armadillo-lizard berserker with earrings and tattoos who looks like he’s just stepped out of a reptilian remake of Mad Max.
It’s all a lot of fun, trivial though it may be. Even Star Trek fans will smile at it, knowing it shares their affection for the original show. Beam us up!