I once read a book review in which the reviewer, the professor and critic Benjamin de Mott, expressed anxiety about effectively conveying the impressiveness of the work at hand: “I find myself nervous, to a degree I don’t recall in my past as a reviewer, about failing the work, inadequately displaying its brilliance.”
This is how I feel, at the start of this essay about the 1999 movie Galaxy Quest, worried that I won’t effectively capture how brilliant the movie truly is. Possibly worse, I worry about overselling it, about seeming so enthusiastic that my praise seems to be a reflection of me rather than the work itself.
These dangers are real, because (I’m just going to say it) Galaxy Quest is a perfect film. It’s a perfect film, a masterpiece, a flawless and triumphant cinematic achievement. It’s better than the vast majority of movies that have ever been made. If Orson Welles had seen Galaxy Quest, he would probably have been rendered speechless from both delight and jealousy. Either you agree with me on this, or you haven’t seen the movie.
Directed by Dean Parisot and written by David Howard and Robert Gordon, the film is about a group of actors who once starred on a Star Trek-style television show in the early 1980s, Galaxy Quest, about crewmates on a spaceship, the Protector, run by an organization called the National Space Exploration Administration (NSEA). Two decades after the cancellation of the show, their acting careers consist of little else besides signing autographs at conventions.
Gwen DeMarco (Sigourney Weaver) is long frustrated by her underwritten former character, the sexy but virtually useless shipmate Lt. Tawny Madison, whose job on the spaceship was to repeat whatever the computer said. Alexander Dane (Alan Rickman), a classically-trained actor who loathes his Spock-esque character, the alien scientist Dr. Lazarus, bemoans constantly that he once had a thriving career doing Shakespeare. “I once played Richard the Third,” he laments. “There were five curtain calls.” Tommy Webber (Darryl Mitchell), who played a Wesley Crusher-style child-genius spaceship pilot named Lt. Laredo, and Fred Kwan (Tony Shalhoub), an ethnically ambiguous actor who played the ship’s token ethnically ambiguous character, Tech Sgt. Chen, have spent their subsequent careers coasting.
Only Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen), who played the ship’s beloved Commander Peter Quincey Taggart, is still excited about his role in the show. A hammy, attention-seeking showman who is a little too addicted to the glory and niche fame that his original role had bought him, Jason has long been a source of vexation to his castmates.
But then a group of real-life aliens (Thermians from the Klaatu Nebula) come to earth, and request the actors’ help in saving their civilization. They had previously mistaken the Galaxy Quest television show for records documenting actual space exploration and intergalactic warfare, and modeled their entire society off the aesthetics and morals of the television show. When their leader, Mathesar (Enrico Colantoni), beams a hungover Jason up to the ship, Jason is shocked to find himself effectively inside the television show he helped make. Mathesar, and the rest of the Thermias, believe they are in the presence of a great galactic leader, certainly not a washed-up C-list celebrity, and certainly not an actor. They don’t even understand what “acting” is.
Eventually, the rest of the crew joins Jason on the ship. They are joined by a former extra, Guy Fleegman (Sam Rockwell), whose single appearance on an episode (number eighty-one) was as a nameless crew member who gets eaten by a lava monster before the first commercial break. The actors find the experience of truly inhabiting a world they had once only pretended to inhabit, to be something of a head trip. But that’s before they internalize the danger of their situation; Mathesar has explained that the Thermians need the crew of the NSEA Protector to defeat a dangerous, reptilian intergalactic dictator, Sarris (Robin Sachs), who has begun laying siege to the Thermians’ fleet to steal the cargo that the ship is carrying; a powerful weapon called an “Omega 13.”
Jason and the crew remember the Omega 13 from an episode, but they have no idea what it does. The series had ended before the writers could figure something out. The Thermians, who have built everything according to the precise dimensions and specifications suggested by the television show, are hoping that the actors (rather, the space crew they don’t know are actors) can finally add the magic ingredient that can turn their meticulous recreation into an indomitable fighting machine. The actors, of course, try to flee when they realize the stakes of what they’ve walked into. But soon, they find themselves slipping into their own former roles, truly becoming the characters they once portrayed, this time growing them from within.
One of the reasons Galaxy Quest has such a devoted following is its loving pastiche of numerous generations of Star Trek programming. At a 2013 Star Trek convention, Galaxy Quest was included in the official list of Star Trek movies that guests were asked to rank, the only non-franchise film permitted. Patrick Stewart reflected, “I had originally not wanted to see [Galaxy Quest] because I heard that it was making fun of Star Trek and then Jonathan Frakes rang me up and said “You must not miss this movie! See it on a Saturday night in a full theatre.” And I did and of course I found it was brilliant. Brilliant.” George Takei called it “a chillingly realistic documentary,” and said it left him “rolling in the aisles.”
But Galaxy Quest does more than collect and rearrange references; it mounts an argument about the power of entertainment. Some critics have read the film as a loving testament to fandoms; in Galaxy Quest, help comes to the actors not from astronauts but from fans of the show, specifically a geeky teenager named Brandon (Justin Long, adorable in his film debut), who, back on earth and communicating to the actors remotely, gives them details about the ship that only a fan could know, details which help save the day. Matt Miller apostrophized in Esquire on the film’s twenty-year anniversary in 2019, “Watching this movie today is a reminder of a simpler time when fans were simply excitable dorks who took a TV show seriously. If anything, it’s a depiction of what fandom should and could be. Why can’t fans be more like Brandon and his friends—respectfully enjoying a franchise?”
Other critics, like Roger Ebert, were interested in how the show parodies television itself. Or, not even parodies, but identifies (and then finds something to love about) the kinds of cliches that litter TV shows of this ilk. “The movie’s humor works best when the illogic of the TV show gets in the way,” he wrote in his original review. “There is on board, for example, a passageway blocked by alternating vertical and horizontal clappers that smash back and forth across the passageway. Negotiating it could be fatal. Why are they there? No reason. Just because they look good on TV.” Indeed, when Sigourney Weaver’s Gwen sees this dangerous, nonsensical trap, she screams, “We shouldn’t have to do this! It makes no logical sense! Why is this here?” before shrieking in conclusion, “This episode was badly written! Whoever wrote this episode should die!”
Moments like this have a tremendous effect, placing the subjects of the film in the position of the spectator, rather than (as is more common) the other way around. That a character encountering an obstacle is upset by the narrative failure that brought her to this moment reveals a deeper understanding of what it means to watch TV, to such a deeper degree than its litany of nods and references can convey. Galaxy Quest is a movie that knows what it feels like to yell at a TV screen, to turn to your friend and predict (out loud) imminent, obvious plot twists, to argue with your friends about if a scene was necessary or not. In this way, Galaxy Quest has been compared to Wes Craven’s 1996 Scream and its subsequent sequels, for its meta-textual and knowing approach to its own genre. Indeed, Galaxy Quest emerged as part of a flurry of self-aware genre comedies in the late 90s.
As a text immersed in conversations about genre, form, and entertainment, Galaxy Quest contains multitudes. I could go on all day, close-read it to its studs. But it is most effective, I believe, as a piece of empathetic art, as a register of the emotionality that goes into being a viewer. Not a fan of a specific franchise or property, but a watcher of movies and television.
I’m not a trekkie in the least. I’ve watched episodes of the original Star Trek series for the same reasons I’ve tuned into Batman reruns: I like old TV. If something was on in the 1960s, I’m going to watch it. But that’s all. I can’t chalk up my love for Galaxy Quest to nostalgia for a franchise or appreciation at its most successful burlesque. Instead, I love Galaxy Quest the movie for the same reason that the fans in the movie love the Galaxy Quest show: I just do. I love it because it understands what it means to love television and movies. It’s a thematic oroborus of the highest order.
You might think I’m being hyperbolic, and that’s because I am. Loving something deeply is the hyperbole of love. Galaxy Quest is about loving a work so much that you allow it to shape who you are and what else you love. I want to come to your house and put it on for you. I want you to love it too.
