Rhapsodies

I finally got around to watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It was about what I expected, stupid and fun at the same time with some good special effects. In short I found myself comparing it to a nice big piece of chocolate cake, very tasty but in the end nothing but carbs.

Nevertheless this inspired me to look into the glut of space operas that tried to cash in on the success of the first Star Wars film.

Space Opera has always been my favorite subgenera of science fiction. Though these films definitely  put a crimp on that.

The first film of my selection, Galaxina, was also the worst. It’s the story of a  the incompetent and useless crew of of the Intergalactic Space Police cruiser Infinity  and the ship’s android, Galaxian. They are sent to a prison planet to retrieve a priceless gem… and other than a few jokes about ugly alien prostates, restaurants with humans on the menu and Harley worshiping barbarians that’s about it.

Galaxina claims to be a parody but anything I found humorous were definitely not intentional and what was apparently intended to be funny were just tired overused tropes. As for the rest of it, The production values and acting was so bad I kept being surprised there wasn’t any gratuitous sex.

My second film,, Battle Beyond The Stars, I had nostalgic memories of the half hour I’d seen in my childhood. This Roger Corman production recreates the Magnificent Seven in space making it different and  much more interesting than most of the boiler plate Star Wars ripoffs that came out that year. (Faint praise I know, but it made watching it bearable.) 

For the most part the film did a good job in the first act of the film gathering all of the mercenaries together to protect the village planet of Akir from mutant invaders, with special mention given to George Peppard as the Space Cowboy and Robert Vaughn almost literally repeating his performance as Lee from Magnificent Seven but after that it falls flat, with the battle for the planet in the second act falling flat.

But all in all the effects were fairly good for it’s budget and it had charm and I suppose my choices could have been worse… I could have picked the Turkish version of Star Wars.