He read it in a Chinese Fortune Cookie:
You will one day become a blue floating head.
And, lo! So it came to be.
When it comes movies with elements of disparate quality, Battle Beyond The Stars (1980) is right up there with the best of them, and it’s all enough to make this audience member’s teeth itch. A quick overview: the planet Akir is menaced by Sador and his minions, who give the peaceful inhabitants two choices: submit to enslavement, or be blown up by Sador’s “stellar converter.” The one warship on the planet, an obsolete boat with an artificial intelligence named Nell, is used by the heroic young man who goes in search of allies to help defend the planet, and he returns with a motley collection of spacefarers, each with their own reason to sign up for certain death. Their sacrifice saves the planet. Sounds familiar? Akir is the clue.
On the bad side: a story that is almost totally awful and stilted. Why are the bad guys mutants who are overly incompetent? Not that it’s wrong to suggest the bad guys’ competing self-interest often leads to their collective self-destruction, but this level of incompetence suggests their very first opponent, no doubt a Valley Girl from some obscure backwater planet, could have destroyed them while painting her fingernails.
The space battles. Not the ships themselves, but the story-tellers did a horrible job portraying these battles in any sort of plausible terms. Remember the battle between the Millennium Falcon and the Tie Fighters in Star Wars (1977), how it took your breath away? Not so much here. The overwhelming odds are not conveyed, there’s little scope for cleverness, and the repetition just makes the visuals look cheap.
Disturbingly biological. I’m guessing it’s based on human female reproductive organs. Since those are guns on the outriggers, I’d guess it’s a snide swipe at feminism.
On the good side? Speaking of the battles, the ships themselves, no doubt plastic models on strings, were actually rather charmingly detailed. I enjoyed them for the most part.
More importantly, though, was the cast. I rarely discuss the cast of movies, but from the A-list comes Robert Vaughn as a hard-edged, yet sad mercenary, George Peppard as a romantic from another age who finds himself drawn into this fight against his will, and (perhaps debatably not quite A-list) Richard Thomas in the lead role as the dewy-eyed young protector of the planet, tasked with finding more defenders. From the B-list is John Saxon, as the evil, one-armed Sador, leader of the bad guys, and Sybil Danning, playing an enthusiastic and buxom mercenary. All deliver competent performances that try to lift this shambling story out of the pits it falls into; they fail not due to poor acting, but due to the poor script with which they’re stuck.
My new favorite assassination squad.
“We always carry a spare.”
But which one is it?
While I said the story is awful, there were a couple of fun bits to it, of which my favorite was an inventive approach to assassination which, sadly, fails, but amused me. If the story-tellers had set it up better it could have been more effective, but they don’t tell us how the good guys knew Sador would order the arm of a captive to be sawed off and attached to himself.
So this is a weirdo movie. I almost didn’t survive the first couple of minutes, but it improved just enough to hold my attention during meals and whatnot. If you’re an aficionado of any of the actors listed above, then you have to watch this.
It’ll take a bit of teeth-gritting, but you’ll get through it. And marvel that actors of this quality agreed to participate.
