Sci-Fi Movies of the 1990s

Total Recall

1990 Carolco Pictures

+ paranoid future/Mars action

color

Premise: Memory implantation as a substitute for vacation travel. Of course, what if you get all confused as to what is real? And what if the movie won’t let you settle on a conclusion?

Mars is home to some serious mutant humans, who are mistreated by the powers that be, whereby the social commentary. And there is a lost ancient race of aliens there, to boot.

Sci-fi points include:

• Space flight to Mars and Saturn are commonplace.
• Very nice spaceships! (only briefly shown, though).
• Wide flat-screen TVs. (But they still have bulky CRT monitors.)
• Nice full-body X-ray machine.
• Self-driving cars with cute android drivers.
• You can put on like a skin of another person (but it’s evidently uncomfortable).
• Depressurization, and getting sucked out by the pressure differential, on Mars. (This gets a lot of mileage.)
• Terraforming.

They used some of the most elaborate miniature scenery in the history of motion pictures to show the surface of Mars. They used CGI for the novel full-body X-ray scene.

Furthermore, a lot of glass gets broken, and people fly through windows a lot.

The film was re-made in 2012 — why, I can’t imagine. (A lot of lack of imagination is going around.)

“Hope you enjoyed the ride!”

Tremors

1990 Stampede Entertainment

OK underground mutant monsters comedy

color

Premise is that pollution made certain critters grow monstrous, and they’re hungry. End of sci-fi.

The rest is a comic horror flick. But as these go, it’s pretty fun. The scary bits are pretty scary, and there’s always a laugh.

Delicatessen

1991 Constellation U.G.C.-Hachette Première

++ post-apocalyptic fine dining

color

French

It’s a post-apocalyptic future (I guess… did they say exactly what happened? Maybe it’s an alternate present?)

Is it science fiction? That’s a harder question. Technology abounds, and has to do with the action, but it is the technology of the 1930s or ’40s or of dreams. I say: it involves science, so it’s sci-fi. Anyway, it’s all that 1991 gave us.

This is a horrid and lurid and wonderful world. Almost every character in the big cast brings something very weird and hilarious — a few of them bring several things. Most of the people are not very likable. Nonetheless, the protagonist Luison is sympathetic to them. It’s visually rich and textured, almost every scene has a new joke, a new oddity.

Jurassic Park

1993 Amblin Entertainment

++ dinosaurs brought back to life!

color

The sci-fi here is that a scientist manages to pull DNA out of fossil dino’s to recreate them, and nonchalantly makes an amusement park with them. What could go wrong?

This is the best dinosaur horror movie to date. The dinosaurs are just great, and the people are not so likeable that you’re sad when they get what’s coming to them. (Or rather, the dinosaurs get what’s coming to them.)

Five direct sequels by various directors have appeared. Each has its moments, but the first is by far the most moving.

12 Monkeys

1995 Atlas Entertainment, Classico

++ paranoid time travel

color

Is he really from the future, or is he “mentally divergent?” Should it be an either/or question?

Date: present is 2035. 1990 is the past, but it’s the wrong past. 1996 is also the past, but that’s the right past. Whoops! 1917 is also the wrong past.

There are loads of great characterizations here. My complaint is that they go by much too fast (along with everything else).

Brad Pitt as mental patient Goines is just precious. But there are many others.

This is really a great movie. There’s a lot that appears in no other movie, and it’s awfully fun to watch. But it’s certainly not for everybody, for several reasons.

In my case, I’ve watched it twice now, and remain unsatisfied that I caught most of the connections. I may watch it again, to give it another shot. I’m not sure that there is a resolution, or that it is anything that might satisfy me.

I’m a little torn about recommending it. What does my rating system mean? Does a good rating mean it’s great sci-fi? In that case, I’m not so sure — the movie explores the time-travel question somewhat, but that is obscured by the personal dramas and the sheer style of the work. Does it mean everybody who likes cinema should watch the movie? This is the inanity of rating such a complex thing as a movie with a single number. OK it gets a ++, for all the great parts.

La cité des enfants perdus
[The City of Lost Children]

1995 Canal+, Centre National de la Cinématographie, Eurimages, France 3 Cinéma, Televisión Española

++ gothic struggle for dreams

color

French

Perhaps the less said…

Just to get started: somebody who can’t dream is kidnapping street urchins, to steal their dreams. That’s just the beginning. It gets much weirder.

Set in a sort of Verne-esque world, a mixture of technologies and styles from the late 1900s through the 1910s, ’20s, ’30s, and nightmares. A cast of circus performers, and outright monsters, and little children more streetwise than they should be.

Gadgets: the dream stealing machine, the brain in the vat, cyclops guys with artificial eyes and ears, the trained poison fleas controlled by a hurdy-gurdy.

The guys who brought us Delicatessen, with their masterwork. This is a must-see.

Screamers

1995 Fuji Eight Co., Ltd, Fries Film Company, Allegro Films

OK killing machines vs. space militias

color

Date: 2078
Place: planet Sirius 6B. Some nice depictions of planetary systems and surfaces.

Robots: “screamers”, are self-replicating, artificially intelligent killing machines. Mostly they aren’t seen until it’s too late, as they attack from underground.

Mercenary soldiers working for two rival mining companies are in battle, but have to deal with a world full of screamers. And the screamers won’t stay the same.

The screamers quickly evolve into different forms. It’s unclear how this happens. As to why it happens… the story becomes a question of who can you trust.

I read that the production suffered from budget problems. It shows.

The music often doesn’t fit the action well, sometimes pop or disco music being played in gritty military scenes. There’s some explanation for this, but it doesn’t work for me.

The actors do as well as they can with the script, and the special effects aren’t bad for the time. But the screenplay feels really choppy, with so many different concerns, such as soulless evil political mega-corporations, a scary monster story flipping into a who-can-you-trust, and pointlessly and unconvincingly developed soldiers. Somehow it all never gels – like, if you blink, you’re watching a different movie.

It’s OK for a gory military action flick with a couple of sci-fi themes done in a new way. It could have been better.

A sequel released in 2009, had an even smaller budget.

Moebius

1996 Universidad del Cine

++ metro mystery, mysticism and mathematics

color

Spanish

Place/time: Buenos Aires / present.

A subway train has vanished, with its passengers. In looking for it, workers find that they can’t understand the tunnels. Too complicated. Where are the plans, anyway? And the stop/go lights in the subway have gone crazy.

So they call in the topologist!

Most of the characters are great, real gente. That is, excepting the main character, Pratt, who is overly-pretty, pale, and exotic, with his overcoat flying theatrically behind him.

One problem with the story: the young girl, Abril, follows Pratt around, and, for reasons unexplained, he takes her to creepy dark places: a carnival at night, an abandoned subway station — then leaves her there. He also gives her precious documents, and tells her not to go anywhere, then walks away — it would seem to be a poor idea. Well — she reappears, again alone, still playing with a toy purported to give insight, just as the old professor is saying something profound about personal relations. OK — it’s a mystical connection.

There is a version on-line with English subtitles, in which, unfortunately, the subtitles repeatedly mistranslate the word ‘topologia’ as ‘topography’. The word means ‘topology’, a field of mathematics — it’s mathematical science fiction.

In the topology class, the professor immediately switches to some blither about space-time. (In reality, topology classes do not mention physics topics very much. They tend to discuss things that are far too weird for physics.) Look, I’m just thrilled that topology gets mention at all.

Pratt wanders through a station with a sign ‘Borjes’. This is in fact a station in Buenos Aires. But of course this is a hat-tip to the author.

This is a quite well-made movie that maintains a tense and creepy mood, is mostly believable (for those who never attended a topology course). It invokes science as a groundwork to make a mystical, fantastical plot. It may not be very hard science fiction, because it veers out of the realm of physical possibility. (But the movie explicitly denies that we know what that is!)

Mars Attacks!

1996 Tim Burton Productions

+ space invasion spoof

color

Vehicles: flying saucers. Metallic with a spherical middle section, spinning, gyrating, menacing.

Aliens: Martians, skinny little brutes whose heads are all brains, skulls and little red eyeballs, whose language possesses subtleties beyond the comprehension of humans, and whose motivations, if inscrutable, are plentiful.

Weapons: besides the heat rays carried by the saucers, individual Martians wield rifles that look very much like kid’s ray guns, but which turn people into skeletons, and pistols that work likewise. The skeletons are color-coded according to the color of the ray that renders them. A giant attack robot driven by a single Martian. Oh, and there was a big pointy ray thing the Martians were pointing at grandma…

Gadgets: the Martians like to experiment on Earth life, and have a lab full of scary looking equipment for doing so. The Martian girl carries an eyeball on her ring. The Martians defend themselves with an atomic-explosion-sucking power-hitter.

After I watched this movie the second time, I was reminded again of what an utter waste of time Independence Day was. It and any other aliens-destroying-Earth have to measure themselves against this colossus of mad otherworldly mayhem.

For a heapin’ helpin’ of green alien brains, pull in to a theater near you, and get a load of this. If you have an itch for exploding monuments, this is your scratcher. If you just know they’re up to no good, here is your proof! if you would pay to witness much of the gentry of 1990s Hollywood being vaporized, squashed, burned up, and inhumanly experimented upon, drop your dime here. If you’ve prayed for the voice of Slim Whitman to save the world, and the music of Tom Jones to be its healing force, this is your movie!

And if you think things could never really get weird, consider the opening scene, showing the World Trade Center dominating the Manhattan skyline!

Is it funny, though? Errr, not very. I’m afraid Burton had his hands full, cramming the script with Hollywood elites. Even actors who made careers being funny (Black, Short, DeVito, Fox) just aren’t given any room to work. Laughs must come from elsewhere; mostly, they come at the expense of old sci-fi movies.

There are lots and lots of characters that should have gone somewhere, but just couldn’t.

The one thing that Burton really treats with respect is Ray Harryhausen’s lovely creations of The Attack of the Flying Saucers.

The best joke is the sheer look of the thing. That is masterful.

“Ack” “Ack!” “Ack Ack Ack Ack Ack Ack Ack Ack!”

Men in Black

1997 Amblin Entertainment, Parkes/MacDonald Productions

++ aliens as aliens spoof

color

Vehicles:

• bug ship, a small flying saucer,
• Arquillians battle cruiser,
• flying saucers from the New York State Fair,
• The MiB souped-up, tricked out Ford LTD.

Aliens: everywhere, taking all our jobs.

• whatever Mikey is,
• “cephlapoid”,
• “Arquillians”,
• “bugs”,
• whatever the tentacled baby is,
• the guys hanging out in the coffee room,
• whatever Jack Jeebs the pawn shop owner is,
• whatever Frank the pug really is,
• the twins.

Weapons:

• various pistol-like blasters,
• carbonizer with implosion capacity,
• the “noisy cricket”,
• big rifles, used as ground-to-spaceship weapons.

Gadgets:

• neuralizer,
• tiny CD,
• a crazy bouncing ball from the Great Attractor.

It pokes fun at sci-fi, and at American society, in places that nobody has poked before. (Take tabloid news, for example.) So many great lines, delivered with strictly governmental straight faces.

There’s so much good about this movie, all the characters are so rich. My favorite is Beatrice — she’s not supposed to be an alien, but she’s almost as weird as any of them. But Edgar, golly.

As of this writing, three sequels have appeared.

Contact

1997 South Side Amusement Company

++ aliens make contact; rationality prevails

color

This was the final project of the famous astrophysicist Carl Sagan. It touches on many of his favorite topics, including

technical projects

ham radio operators, Arecibo radio telescope, SETI project, VLA radio telescope

academic and political

working scientists vs those climbing for prestige, counterproductive government actions

science and religion

different religious reactions to science

Aliens: do not appear directly. The message is completely positive.

Vehicles: CGI VTOL aircraft, a floating headquarters, the Mir station.

Gadgets: the best, biggest is the transporter (or whatever it is) whose plans the aliens send. It’s big, it’s strange, it’s scary. The sense of scale isn’t badly done.

After scientists publicize the detection of an alien signal, the hoy-poloi go nuts, culminating in a massive party of flaky persons. My favorite was the one selling “UFO Abduction Insurance”.

The dialog has lots of talk about wormholes, or something. The alien talks about it a little, to say that it had been built “millions of years before we got here.”

The movie isn’t so much about the aliens. It’s about the protagonist’s search for something, a connection. Thus, the title.

And it’s about science as a human activity, about the social difficulties that really face science, about the personal difficulties that really affect scientists.

A tentative complaint is that the many side-stories and characters clutter the plot. On the other hand, each of them lends something to the main story of the protagonist’s drive through many obstacles.

The romance angle is quite sweet, if only a small side-story. It also functions to present a resolution of the stress between science and religion.

The Fifth Element

1997 Gaumant

+ future space action

color

Date: (of some scenes) 1914, (others) 2214

Vehicles:

Mondoshawn spacecraft, very odd looking, seen landing in Egypt.

Earth battleship

flying cars, flying Chinese take-in restaurant,

Mangalore fighters,

Zorg’s personal spaceship,

Flohston Paradise resort ship

Aliens:

Mondoshawn — benevolent and philosophical, and they really mean it. Seen only in very odd, eerie, ungainly space suits. These are among the stranger aliens I’ve ever seen.

Mangalore — Only warriors are shown, having big fish-like mouths and sheep-like ears. Kinda cute, in a brutal, muppety way. Have ability to appear as humans.

Diva Plavalaguna — a singer of unnamed alien species, somewhat humanoid female (?), good singing voice.

Picasso — a pet mole-thing with elephant’s trunk.

Weapons:

Ray guns everywhere.

Dallas prefers a conventional handgun, but he’ll work with whatever he’s got.

But Zorg’s ZF-1 beats all (his sales pitch for it is at least as good as the weapon itself).

Gadgets:

Tissue-reconstruction table rebuilds body from small fragment.

The cast is just amazing, every major performance is a knockout. For visual style and color, for texture, few sci-fi movies beat this one.

Loaded with little visual jokes and nuances. And then, Corben’s unfortunate relationship with his mother — oh dear, and his smoking habit.

For transport into a strange futuristic world, this is the ticket.

It’s imperfect. The plot goes flat about halfway through, devolving into endless fight and chase scenes. There are cute moments, but way too many less-cute ones. Editing would have improved the plot greatly. And it’s pretty clear that the editors cut important scenes — the script leaves many interesting things frustratingly or confusingly undeveloped.

The overall plot held several good ideas, and others that just didn’t work out. The worst is the super-evil entity that just isn’t all that scary, which badly detracts from its nick-of-time defeat (although the means of its defeat is very cute). Again, a good editor would have proved useful.

These are all relative judgments, though: the worst parts are better than the best parts of the average sci-fi movie. There’s so much wildness, so much fun, and even the formulaic parts are superbly done.

—A Mondoshawn, just before he himself ran out of time and life.

Abre los ojos

1997 Sogecine

++ paranoid delusion / future medicine

color

Spanish

Date: (of some scenes) 2145

A paranoid cycle of scenes around the main character César, where he is alternately young and handsome with beautiful friends and a beautiful girl, or in a situation where he gets in with a psychopath and is terribly disfigured, or a confusion of scenes involving a cryogenic “life extension” service.

Something isn’t reality. But what?

This story was re-done in English in 2001 as Vanilla Sky.

Gattaca

1997 Jersey Films

++ future of genetic perfection

color

Date: sometime in the near future

Vehicles: apparently electric cars. There are rockets taking off in the distance, and one view of the interior of the stylized rocket ship, which one boards wearing a suit and tie — we get to see little of the rocket.

Gadgets: lots for determining a person’s genetic identity, and lots more for confounding those.

The settings are all classy and gorgeous and spotless, and succeed in portraying a highly ordered society. Even the gritty back alleys are tidy. Overall, it’s a pretty movie, although it’s like seeing everything through a gold-and-blue matte. The cars take their style from classy cars of the ’50s, the clothes look like the ’30s, the architecture is solidly brutalist, but the look of the electronics is strictly ’90s.

The sci-fi is that of a future in which parents can tailor their children’s genes, to avoid common diseases, and to make them genetically superior. To make them “valid”. A person’s worth in this near future is determined by their genetics. (The only place this becomes visible is in the case of a pianist.) The “valids” assume they’re entitled, and the “invalids” want more than their assumed lot.

The entitlement here is that the protagonist wants to be an astronaut, to go to Saturn’s moon Titan, to find out what’s under its clouds.

Of course, while the technology isn’t an impossibility, this could as well be a story of racism or class-based society (or sexism, for that matter, although they really don’t take that on).

The acting is top-notch, and the story is very good too, a question of who’s fooling who, besides detective whodunnit.

The Truman Show

1998 Paramount

++ your world isn’t what you think

color

We find out straightaway that Truman has been his whole life the unwitting star of a TV show. The TV network has engineered every detail of his life for the viewing public. Millions of viewers have watched every hour of his life. He has had suspicions for some time, but does not know what is going on.

Is it sci-fi? I’ll argue that it’s social science fiction. To build a world for Truman (even without the sky dome and the fake sun) would be at least an engineering wonder. It’s an extrapolation from the “reality TV” of the ’90s, a possible world based on a technology. It is a social science fantasy that society would really allow a thing like this to happen. So it is a fantasy about a possible world based on technology.

I can’t think of another they’re-watching-me movie, whose theme has a scope like this.

There are several remarkable performances here: The townspeople, in their earnest falseness. Harris as the creator and prophet of the project is absolutely believable. And Carrey is the perfect hapless guy in between, groomed for life for the TV camera.

Dark City

1998 Mystery Clock Cinema

+ paranoid social whodunit thriller

color

The title reflects the mood and tone, as well as the shade of the movie. The cinematography and story are a lot of fun. There are styles and artifacts of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, with some aspects that are quite Edwardian.

Aliens (or whatever)— strangers, bald guys in long black rubber coats that act real creepy and have glowy multi-legged creatures in their skulls. They “tune” the city nightly as the people sleep, manufacturing the coming day, giving people new memories, re-dressing them and placing them in new surroundings. They can levitate, and sometimes transform objects — but much of the transformation is very hands-on: at assembly lines making props for the next day’s show.

Gadgets — Strangers sometimes travel standing on scooters. But the main gadget is the city itself. As it is “tuned”: whole buildings twist into the sky.

Sullivan’s character is breathlessly oddly paced — he must have taken lessons from William Hurt, who plays his own part relatively straight and personal.

Main complaints: the script explains rather more than really necessary, and… modern superheroics bore me. You’d think somebody would invent something new.

Parables:
Boy meets girl who isn’t really his wife, gives everybody new memories, meets same girl.
What makes us human is in some organ other than our brain.

The Matrix

1999 Village Roadshow Pictures, Groucho II Film Partnership, Silver Pictures

OK alternate-reality kung fu shoot-em-up fashion show

color

Different people like different things. To each their own, certainly! I concede that they put a lot of fancy effects into it, and picked a pretty boy to play the part, and pumped up the hero doll. Evidently, most people liked it. And it is essentially a science fiction movie. But I did not like it. Watching it again to review it was a chore.

Premise: Humanity gave birth to AI, which got troublesome. We “scorched the sky” to cut the power to the AI (this is never depicted). The machines used the power produced by human bodies, plus some fusion power (?) for themselves. (I’m goin’ “ummmm”…) Morphius says: “The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built… in order to change a human being into this:”, and he holds up a DuraCell CopperTop C Cell Alkaline battery. (This is where I lost it.)

But it gets better: he’s going to beat the machines because his virtual kung fu is better than their kung fu.

It’s a special effects bonanza!

The scenes of the “real world” with the machines caring for the incubated humans is pretty scary and cool.

Some effects made popular in this movie have become staples in the fantasy movie world:

• Japanese letters dribble down a green-screen, supposed to represent computer code.
• People jump up, time stops, the camera rotates around the scene, and super-fast kung fu cuts loose. This was entertaining the first couple of times; thereafter I felt my time was being wasted.
• Bullets slow down, so they fall out of the air or can be ducked (or does our hero just go real fast?). Again, entertaining the first couple of times; after that I wished the bullets would just get on their way and finish the job.

The lady ducks behind a wall so fast the air whooshes. And of course, the swooshing is a long-time staple of martial arts movie. The whoosh sound is just one of many prods this movie uses to alert the inattentive viewer that something exciting is happening. There is an awful lot of swoosh in this movie. Cuz they expect the audience may have failed to notice that the action was exciting. Oh well, brainy, it was never.

We get to imagine what it would be like shooting everybody, at will, innocent or bad alike with limitless rounds from automatic weapons! Because we’re the good guys, and they’re all just computer programs anyway or something! And cuz, isn’t that what every American kid dreams of anyway? Bloody mayhem?

Ohmygolly it’s got spoon bending apprentices. Uri Geller taught us well, Grasshopper!

Is he the One? Yes, he’s the One. No, he ain’t the One. Yes, he is the One. And score yet another messianic role for Reeves!

The Oracle, to Reeves:

This movie has a sci-fi idea as its main premise, and it was very popular, and some production values are good. But the story is a mess of formula, the characters are cartoonish, and for all the fancy effects, the action is all familiar.

It’s a sunglasses and black coats fashion runway. It’s a sci-fi kung fu style show. It’s not my cup of coffee cola tea.

Just don’t think about it too much — the writers didn’t.

The Iron Giant

1999 Warner Brothers Feature Entertainment

++ robot from space, animated

cartoon

Date/Place: 1957 / Rockwell, Maine

Robot: He came from space, but has lost the memory. He doesn’t handle electricity well, and becomes self-aware. Evidently he was intended as a weapon, but he decides he’s “not a gun”.

Gadgets: Sputnik 1, F-86 Sabres, Polaris missile (an anachronism: these weren’t deployed until 1961, several years after Sputnik 1).

The cartooning is just gorgeous, and the writing and characterizations are totally fun and kind of brilliant.

The script pokes a lot of fun of cold-war and space race nuttiness, and 1950s sci-fi monster movies.

There is a nod to Bambi.

The G-man is from the “Bureau of Unexplained Phenomena”.

“Frankly, I’m not at liberty to reveal the particular agency that I work for, and all that that implies.”

Being John Malkovich

1999 Gramercy Pictures, Propaganda Films, Single Cell Pictures

++ surreal mind-transfer comedy

color

Our hero is a gifted puppeteer — what are the chances he’ll find a puppeteer job? Wait till you see the job he finds.

Although he’s a puppeteer, his colleagues are way weirder than he is.

And he summarizes his art as the desire to get into other people’s skin.

Now — is this going to end well?

Is it science fiction? He calls it a “portal”, but he also says it’s kind of supernatural. Later, the script sort of explains it, like there’s a technique. So I’m torn. You could call it “psychological science fiction” — if you’ll accept psychology as a science. Well, if this showed up in a science fiction anthology, I wouldn’t have batted an eye (after batting an eye a few times about the story itself).

The only thing in the movie that rubs me wrong is the romantic relationships. I don’t buy any of them. They’re only props for the story anyway.

Otherwise: Bwa ha ha ha ha!

Galaxy Quest

1999 DreamWorks Pictures, Gran Via Productions

++ space TV show spoof

color

It’s a sci-fi story inside a drama about a sci-fi story. But it’s got everything:

aliens:

• “Thermians” (from planet Thermian in the Klatu nebula),
• “Fatu-Krey”,
• cannibalistic blue baby creatures,
• “pig lizard”,
• rock creature

Vehicles:

• starship NSEA Protector, which contains:
  • ducts,
  • chopper/crushers,
  • the Omega 13,
  • liquid interstellar transmission "pods”,
  • blue and red particle cannons, gannet magnets, pulse catapults,
  • “turbo boosters”,
• a space shuttle,
• Sarris’ starship.

Gadgets:

• transporter,
• hand communicator,
• hand beam weapons: (pistol, rifle),
• beryllium sphere,
• digital conveyor (not yet successfully tested),
• hologram communications.

Premise: there really are aliens flying around in space, and that the actors really interact with them. However, the aliens have mistaken the actors, and their television world, for a historical reality.

The notion that an alien race might have no concept of untruthfulness — especially the untruthfulness of theater — isn’t an everyday idea, and I think the script deals pretty well with the egos of aliens who have a very different world view.

The primary aim of the fun is of course the Star Trek franchise, but while many aspects of the story bear a resemblance to Star Trek, they took care to change every detail. The thing about shirts, though: it is a notable fact of the original Star Trek series that the captain did lose his shirt a lot, and also, that crew members wearing red shirts became gratuitous victims in many episodes. This just begs for parody!

A comedy is naturally going to address social issues, and this one plays with everything: gender roles, obsession, depression, and alcoholism.

It pokes some fun at the usual but very dubious notion of romance between beings alien to one another, and the common super-evil character. This on top of the usual sci-fi theme of war between worlds in space, which is just background.

(I want to defend Star Trek here, on one point. Although the incorrigibly super-evil enemy is common to a lot of sci-fi movies, it was unusual in Star Trek scripts, where the enemy was typically complex. That, for me, was one of its charms.)

It pokes special fun at the phenomenon of “Trekkies”, who revel in their divestiture from real life for a television show make-believe. I suppose I could complain that it encourages self-destructive behavior, because in the end, the most deluded Trekkies are “right”. But who cares?

The Thermians are wonderful: Mathesar’s speech patterns, and the crazed portrayal of Laliari (who I thought was at her best when her translator was broken). Their quadrupedal gait was just precious. And it is their stupendously naive world view that provides the premise.

The actors playing the actors do wonderful jobs. Everybody liked Sigourney Weaver’s portrayal of the actress who seethes about not being taken seriously, but who can’t help but pose all teeth and bosom whenever a camera points at her. I particularly liked Fred, who, in contrast to the others, fit so effortlessly into the alien world — until he has to take personal responsibility.

The special effects were absolute top-notch, in some ways better than anything from the Star Trek franchise, and often just beautiful. For instance, to show the buffeting of the ship by mines or attacks, the entire bridge set was really moved, so, unlike in the main target of the spoof, there was nothing to suggest that the actors were throwing themselves around.

My DVD has an option for Thermian language audio!