Star Trek derp derp

I saw Galaxy Quest a few days a few days ago. It’s an extended parody of the Star Trek franchise, a comedy geared towards the Trekkie fandom. I’ve never had any interest in Star Trek, so you can treat this article as if it’s your grandparents reviewing the internet. HEY LOOK I’M THE 100,000th VISITOR I’M SO LUCKY ON THE WEB!

The setting emulates that of the situation of the Star Trek franchise in real life. The epic, popular, inherently geeky scifi tv show has been canceled long before, leaving behind an obsessive fandom and a jaded cast who are mostly sick of being forever chained to space paraphernalia and cheesy lines. The one person who isn’t, is Jason Nesmith, Galaxy Quest’s mirror of William Shatner (who played Captain Kirk in the real Star Trek). The other cast members of the original ST series are mirrored too, as are common elements of that show and even real-world things to some extent etc. you get the idea, it’s a big parody.

The opening twist is that an alien race thinks that the tv show Galaxy Quest is real, and the good aliens bring in the cast of the show to negotiate with the evil aliens. Nesmith, who played the Captain in the tv show (and weirdly acts like the captain leader guy in real life too), makes a mess of the negotiations, entangles the rest of his old cast members in galactic warfare, hilarity ensues. This movie is straight-up and devoted to parody – even supposedly emotional scenes are all some sort of callback to something from Star Trek.

If you’re a Star Trek fan, I don’t know if you’ll appreciate all these references to the original series or if you’ll seethe with rage at the disrespect to imagined galactic crisis management. You’ll still get the subtler gags if you’re the sort of person who notices patterns across cheesy television shows, or if you read TVTropes. Like how the leads tend to tear their outfits a lot, token archetypes, improbable macgyvering and all that. If you’re not a fan though, you should still find this flick rather funny, if relentlessly simple. I’m pretty ambivalent towards Galaxy Quest, though I can’t say that it’s boring or lousy. The movie knows what it wants to do and does it, which is more than I can say for halfway hack-ups like District 9.

Written by Chen Sing Yap