I guess you would need to have seen at least one episode of 'Star Trek' to even begin to get this - I haven't, and so was slightly bewildered as to what was going on, why many people already consider it a classic. I enjoyed it because some of it was funny - the silly accents of the Tertians; the moving bravado of the washed-up Nesmith; the performance of Sam Rockwell as Guy, his name signifying his function as a kind of everyman link between the different layers of reality the film portrays. The visual effects, supposed to be tacky, still rise to some spectacular moments: the desert ghost world where the crew seek berillium, intensely orange after all the uniform grey; the climactic scene where Nesmith and Gwen must run through a corridor of huge rapidly punching lever-things.
As the film moves towards its climax, it is difficult to gauge the tone. It clearly starts out satirising the imagination-defeating banality of nerd-conventions - the fans dressed as aliens unable to tell the difference between a tacky show and reality, or who have willed it into a reality, are mirrored by the aliens who mistake the show for historical documents, and despite their scientific brilliance (like their human counterparts) are dubiously figured as mentally retarded, with their stupid laughs and jerky movements.
If we have gotten reckless or intellectually threadbare enough to call 'Being John Malkovich' Borgesian, than the same epithet can more validly be applied to 'Galaxy Quest', where a whole series of times, realities and representations, initially separate, conflate, leading to the bizarre finale, as the space heroes return to another Convention, this time genuine adventurers - the difference between actors and roles; actors and their roles of 20 years ago; actors who must play, and indeed become their roles of 20 years ago; fans who create an actual reality from a non-existent fantasy; fans from the real world who become indispensible figures in the fantasy which is now a real world (phew!).
The end is quite mind-boggling, where it is impossible to untangle the boundaries of reality and fantasy. So what began as satire of a phenomenon synonymous with being a loser, and almost fascist (the military parade that first greets the actors in the Star port), becomes a celebration, not really of losers redeeming themselves, but of the place of fantasy in everyday life, and its power to transform it. I don't mean politically restructure society; just the old post-modern ideas of reproduction and illusion. After all, we live in a 'real world' where a non-existent, fantasy language, Klingon, can now be studied at universities, as a 'real world' mode of communication. The real world has no place for heroes and goodness, but we can still pretend these things exist.
As the film moves towards its climax, it is difficult to gauge the tone. It clearly starts out satirising the imagination-defeating banality of nerd-conventions - the fans dressed as aliens unable to tell the difference between a tacky show and reality, or who have willed it into a reality, are mirrored by the aliens who mistake the show for historical documents, and despite their scientific brilliance (like their human counterparts) are dubiously figured as mentally retarded, with their stupid laughs and jerky movements.
If we have gotten reckless or intellectually threadbare enough to call 'Being John Malkovich' Borgesian, than the same epithet can more validly be applied to 'Galaxy Quest', where a whole series of times, realities and representations, initially separate, conflate, leading to the bizarre finale, as the space heroes return to another Convention, this time genuine adventurers - the difference between actors and roles; actors and their roles of 20 years ago; actors who must play, and indeed become their roles of 20 years ago; fans who create an actual reality from a non-existent fantasy; fans from the real world who become indispensible figures in the fantasy which is now a real world (phew!).
The end is quite mind-boggling, where it is impossible to untangle the boundaries of reality and fantasy. So what began as satire of a phenomenon synonymous with being a loser, and almost fascist (the military parade that first greets the actors in the Star port), becomes a celebration, not really of losers redeeming themselves, but of the place of fantasy in everyday life, and its power to transform it. I don't mean politically restructure society; just the old post-modern ideas of reproduction and illusion. After all, we live in a 'real world' where a non-existent, fantasy language, Klingon, can now be studied at universities, as a 'real world' mode of communication. The real world has no place for heroes and goodness, but we can still pretend these things exist.