Spaceballs (1987)

Spaceballs

Director: Mel Brooks
Writer: Mel Brooks, Thomas Meehan & Ronny Graham
Starring: Mel Brooks, John Candy, Rick Moranis, Bill Pullman, Daphne Zuniga, Dick Van Patten, George Wyner & Joan Rivers

Date Watched: March 18th 2016

Verdict: THUMBS DOWN! 😦

Planet Spaceball, led by the incompetent President Skroob, has wasted all of its air. Skroob schemes to steal air from the neighboring planet Druidia by kidnapping Princess Vespa, the daughter of King Roland on the day of her pre-arranged wedding to the narcoleptic Prince Valium. Skroob sends the villainous Dark Helmet to complete this task with Spaceball One, an impossibly huge ship helmed by Colonel Sandurz. Before they can arrive, Vespa herself abandons her marriage and flees the planet in her personal Mercedes spaceship along with her Droid of Honor, Dot Matrix.

King Roland contacts mercenary Lone Starr and his mawg (half-man, half-dog) sidekick, Barf (which is short for “Barfolomew”), offering a lucrative reward to retrieve Vespa before she is captured. Lone Starr readily accepts, as he is in major debt with the gangster Pizza the Hutt. In their Winnebago space ship (Eagle 5), Lone Starr and Barf are able to reach Vespa before Spaceball One, rescue both her and Dot, then escape. Spaceball One tries to follow, but Dark Helmet foolishly orders the ship to “ludicrous speed,” causing it to overshoot the escapees, who land on the nearby “desert moon of Vega.” The escapees travel on foot in a blazing sun and pass out. They are found by The Dinks, a group of red-clad little people, and are taken to a cave occupied by Yogurt, who is old and wise. Yogurt introduces Lone Starr to the power of “The Schwartz.” Yogurt also introduces the audience to the film’s merchandising campaign. Lone Starr and Vespa begin to flirt, but Vespa insists she can only be married to a prince.

Spaceball One, by breaking the fourth wall (obtaining a VHS copy of the film and fast-forwarding to the part where the heroes crash-land), tracks down Lone Starr, captures Vespa, and returns with her to planet Spaceball. Her captors threaten to reverse Vespa’s nose job, forcing Roland to give over the code to the shield that protects Druidia (which is “1-2-3-4-5”). Dark Helmet takes Spaceball One to Druidia, where he transforms the ship into Mega Maid, a giant robotic maid with a vacuum cleaner that begins sucking the air from the planet. Lone Starr, after training in the Schwartz with Yogurt’s help, returns to Druidia, reversing the robot’s sucking action to return the air to the planet.

Lone Starr and his allies enter the Mega Maid to attempt to destroy it. Lone Starr is forced to fight Dark Helmet with “Schwartz rings” (a parody of lightsabers) near the ship’s self-destruct button. Lone Starr manages to defeat Dark Helmet, causing him to accidentally strike the button. Lone Starr and his friends escape the ship, while Skroob, Dark Helmet, and Colonel Sandurz fail to reach any escape pods in time. Stranded aboard the robot’s head as the ship explodes, they land on a nearby planet, much to the regret of its ape population.

With Lone Starr’s debt to Pizza nullified by the gangster’s untimely death, he returns Vespa to Roland and leaves, taking only enough money to cover his expenses. After a lunch break at a diner and a strange incident involving an alien and an astronaut, Lone Starr finds a final message from Yogurt informing him that he is a prince and thus eligible to marry Vespa. He manages to reach Druidia in time to stop her wedding to Valium, announces his royal lineage, then marries Vespa himself.

Thoughts:

I was so looking forward to this movie because although it is by no means a treasure of the cinema, it has a strong cult following and it is heralded as a comedy classic so I expected great things of this film and was supremely disappointed.

This film is the closest I have come to thinking that I could have done a better job of it, all of the jokes are so easy, it’s just copying Star Wars almost verbatum and instead of the iconic scenes replacing them with the most obvious jokes you can think of. Literally seconds after the Darth Vader knockoff appeared I knew that the joke was going to be “I can’t breathe in this thing”, this film is littered with instances like that and at one point I began to question whether these jokes were that obvious or whether I had developed the power to predict the future. You know how when a really popular movie comes out comedians are quick to include stuff they’ve noticed about the film in their act? Well this feels like a collection of the first jokes people ever made after seeing Star Wars, and while we’re on the subject: why the Hell would anyone think to make a movie lampooning Star Wars 10 years after it’s release? I mean I know Star Wars will always have a large following but the golden years had pretty much gone by this point. It would be like someone making a full length parody of Brokeback Mountain today.

Having knocked the humour of the movie there were actually some good things about it which prevented it from joining the list of my most hated movies. I was impressed with some of the effects but also somewhat baffled that any studio would throw so much money into what could have been a knockoff of a well known movie franchise.

Although most of the humour in this film was just by directly knocking off the Star Wars films there were some original gags that did make me laugh such as the “You captured their stunt doubles” scene and I really liked the bit where they break the fourth wall and flick through Mel Brooks’ previous films, Brooks truly is the master of the fourth wall break.
And although I don’t like the film as a whole, for some reason I really like the last half: hour or so the battle, the reference to Alien and Planet of the Apes and the wedding scene at the end so there is some good stuff in the film…it’s just a shame that they left most of it until the very end.

I can see why some people might take to this film in the same way that any small audience might take to a lesser known film but I’m just not a fan (Hell, I’m not a Star Wars fan let alone a film that parodies the damn thing), I don’t think the comedy in this movie is anywhere near Brooks’ best movies, even his later works such as High Anxiety and History of the World Part 1 I have mixed feelings on but I would still rather throw those films on than Spaceballs.

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