Double Bill: Saturn 3 and Starcrash

(Contains some spoilers)

Saturn 3

One of the things I love most about Sci-fi is the amount of ideas you can incorporate into the genre. The amount of different tales you can tell in a completely different environment. You can have horror, romance, action… you can tell stories about humanity, war, change, utopias, robots, love… it’s endless.

Saturn 3 starts off with brutalist architecture on a space ship with everyone in silhouette and an extremely violent death, and by the end of the next scene Harvey Keitel is popping little blue pills while he watches Kirk Douglas having sex with Farrah Fawcett and then proceeds to build a robot to share his fantasy about her with… what other genre can you do that?

I really enjoy films about a happy couples life being turned upside down by a stranger. It’s one of those tropes which just works on the screen for me. The danger off it. How unsettling it is. Dead Calm was one of my favourite movies when I was younger, and Saturn 3 was nine years before it.

The performances are all a little weird, but that just adds to the texture of the movie. Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett don’t have great chemistry, but that plays into the idea of their idyllic hideaway, especially as you learn she knows very little of the outside world––It makes you ask some serious questions (none of which are answered).

Harvey Keitel plays an anal scumbag really well, but again, it just feels odd and plays into the script as he relentlessly pursues Farrah Fawcett like her sleeping with him shouldn’t be in question.

And that’s one of the things I find most interesting about Saturn 3… the world building. While a lot of it is a little underserved, it’s nonetheless fascinating. We know food supplies are running out, that space travel exists, there are robots, that humans share partners now (at least according to Harvey) and while the idea of sharing partners seems free-loving there’s something extremely authoritarian about the presentation of the main ship at the beginning. The future is clearly fascist, so no wonder Kirk wants to hide away on the dark side of a Saturn moon with Farrah Fawcett––I think we’d all make that choice.

I enjoyed the sets, the ships, overall environment. I think for a 1980’s sci-fi it looked great. The most impressive thing for me was Hector the Robot. He looked amazing. I loved the armoured rib cage which made him look like a badass Terminator, mixed with the little diddy eyes. When he clamps Harvey’s hand off and then walks about with gore hanging from the end of his claws for a few scenes… amazing.

Overall, it’s not a perfect movie and skips a lot of storytelling. The tension could have been built better, and by the sounds of it there was some developmental hell as the director was replaced and the script changed, but I really liked it. It’s a good looking sci-fi with bright ideas and a style to it. Plus, the whole way Hector works with the AI learning, that seems pretty relevant now.

Starcrash

Now this is the good stuff. I love these kind of post Star Wars space operas where you can clearly see the influence (aka the entire 3rd act) but they also try a few interesting things themselves.

Starcrash has everything I enjoy from this period of Sci-fi… Miniatures, models, rear projection, stop motion golems, amateur stunt-work, awful dialogue, scantly-clad sci-fi babes, Hoff with a lightsaber, and so much more.

The story is the kind of set-up you expect from the sub-genre of an evil empire trying to take over the universe, and it doesn’t try to be too clever with it. Instead, the film just wants to be fun. It’s colourful through-out, has Amazons on horsebacks, a redneck robot, giant samurai ninja golem thingys, and every line of dialogue is so exposition heavy or wooden it makes me smile.

My favourite scene had to be the dogfight in space half-way through the movie where every line of dialogue didn’t match what was going on in the fight. The maths was all over the place. They’d say there’s only one left and then show three. They’d say there was six and only five left after killing four. It was amazing. And it kept going. The math did not math.

The film was largely its own movie for the first half of the flick but then did dive head first into becoming Starwarsploitation. From the moment the ‘savage’ Ewoks tied Stella Star––what a name––upside down to the pole there was Star Wars everywhere. If I ever write that post Star Wars film book I want to write Starcrash will defintely be one of the featured movies.

But as I mentioned, Starcrash also had plenty of its own ideas. The chase at the beginning and the hundred stars thing was cool, I liked the make-up of the crew which I think clearly inspired my beloved Space Raiders. Firing armed soldiers into the enemies ship via torpedo was definitely inventive even if the science might be a little janky. And the finale itself with the space city was incredible even if we basically just saw a bunch of yogurt pots getting blown up by fireworks––God I miss those sort of effects.

The movie was ambitious, while also being a cash-in. It constantly tried to punch above its weight and the effects probably looked pretty bad even at the time, but it gave it a shot. Everyone seemed game (with the exception of Christopher Plummer) and knew what kind of movie they were in. I can’t help but like these sort of things. It fits right in with New World Pictures, and that’s my jam.

There are much better sci-fi and space operas than Starcrash, but in my opinion, it definitely has its place.