(Review originally written at 6 September 2007)
Oh man, this movie was toe-cringing bad. Bad look, awful story...the list of good things is shorter than the list of bad things about this movie.
Yes sure it's supposed to be a comedy and all but something tells me that this movie was supposed to be the real deal. The movie most certainly does not start of as a comedy but more as an adventurous movie with fun elements put in it. You can especially tells they were serious with this by the acting, that was in a serious and non-comical way, with the exception of a couple of over-the-top sequences obviously. It seemed to be me that at first they tried to make a real and serious adventurous science-fiction movie, perhaps even a franchise but soon began to noticed how bad it all was and simply decided to insert some more and deliberately overdone comical sequence, to make the movie seem more like a comedy and prevent it from turning into a complete disastrous mess.
The movie is a weird attempt to mix adventurous swashbuckling pirate movies with serious science-fiction action. The movie was obviously inspired by the "Star Wars" movies and its success. The movie isn't even too ashamed to copy entire sequences and even the way the story progresses, sets, characters and robots show similarities. They tried to hide this by putting in some obviously spoofing sequences but I'm not falling for it. So the movie is not even original on its own, despite its original concept. You can say that this movie is a poor man's "Spaceballs", without even really being fully a spoof.
The movie is bad looking, with some video games special effects (in some sequences even literally), awful looking costumes (coat of mail and swords in outer space?). The sound is at times even laughable. Seems like they shot some sequences without sound and then forgot to add all of the required sounds later again in post-production. the mixing is also really bad. They tried to conceal this by putting the sound down to a minimum at times and by tuning up the Bruce Broughton musical score.
At times the movie is so busy trying to make the movie look humorous that it totally forgets to tell the story. It makes the story of the movie seems extremely messy and poorly written, with an almost completely undeveloped main plot. It also doesn't help to make the movie really ever flow. Lots of thing don't get explained and some are even dropped after a while. The movie begins as a 'pirate' movie, who constantly are looking and steal water, since its scarcely and there is only one planet in the entire galaxy remaining with water on it (yeah right!). However this plot line gets soon abandoned, especially in the middle part of the movie, in which the movie seems to become a totally different one, with different motivations. It's just like the one weird and bad, silly sequence after the other, without really making a click. It also keeps the characters way too shallow and uninteresting to care about.
Sad to see that actors like John Carradine, Anjelica Huston and a still young and unknown Ron Perlman were attached to this disastrous movie.
OK I admit that I liked some of the moments, especially the ending when they go through the time-warp was original and fun but really, non of this all was enough to save the movie.
I didn't even liked the movie in a campy kind of way.
2/10
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