Galaxy Quest is a 1999 film, written by David
Howard, whom apparently does not really exist. It was directed by Dean Parisot, a name you
know from directing 4 episodes of Justified, Red 2, Fun with Dick and Jane and a bunch
of other TV shows. He gets a lot of work and generally it’s
quite admirable. Whoa, slow down with the hyperbole there,
Neumann. “Their work is generally quite admirable.” That’s like the new “have a gr8 summer.” Though, he directed an episode of Reading
Rainbow in 1989 so he must be pretty cool. Hang on, this movie came out the same year
as The Phantom Menace? I’m not sure why that feels weird to me
but it feels weird. It might be because the Phantom Menace feels
like somebody turned a coloring book into a film … it was a good year for that. Honestly, I don’t really know how Galaxy
Quest happened. ‘Classic’ is a term I don’t throw around
all that often, especially as it pertains to comedies because I just don’t think there’s
that many comedy classics. The reason being that I think there’s a
lot of sort of personalized criteria for everyone as it pertains to that word. A comedy classic to me seems to consists of
a list of criteria I just invented (yup, that’s fair that’s how it works okay cool I love
you guys): 1) A genre picture, choosing to ground their
film in a crafted universe and reality. 2) The jokes and comedy are timeless in execution
without an over-reliance on pop culture to drive your humor. 3) The film is cinematic in scope and actually
uses the format to make a piece of art. 4) The story and the dangers inherent to it
are real to the characters within it. Comedies deserve real stakes. 5) Generally it involves an ensemble cast
that perfectly captures exactly what the film is going for. I’ll be up front and say that I think Ghostbusters
is as close to my criteria of a ‘classic’ as possible. I used to watch it every day when I was 5
years old but I didn’t think it would still be one of my favorites as an adult. Plus, it’s shot on 70mm, which makes a pretty
bold statement about cinematic aspirations. I’m gonna discuss this film based on those
criteria. That’s fun! That’s a fun afternoon activity for us to
do together … Apparently, I’m your stepdad now, all of you. How’s your grades and let’s play Putt
Putt sometime. Don’t tell your mamma I gave ya a beer. That got real and weird and I’m sorry. -ONE-
Galaxy Quest is a genre picture through-and-through. In fact, their world building is second to
none. I mean, you want to talk about being ahead
of the curve, this film was incorporating fandom as a b-plot (perfectly executed b-plot,)
long before conventions and fandoms were appearing in any form of media. Obviously, the allusions to Star Trek and
its fans are not accidental, but instead of just sending up Star Trek as a straight spoof
would do, generally just recreating scenes like Friedberg and Seltzer would do. Oh, sorry, those are the assholes that made:
Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, Vampires Suck, The Starving
… Games – holy shit, they’re still making this crap? On behalf of everyone, ever, speaking from
a position of authority and strength: stop hurting us. No, this movie tells its own story with its
own characters in a way that might resemble Star Trek, but it still feels like its own
thing. The only thing that really feels lifted from
a Trek film is that some of the scenes are pulled from beats from a Star Trek story. Sure we have scenes like where Gwen has to
repeat everything the computer says, but it is a send up of gender-politics on television
shows in the 60s through the 80s. They created a television show in a specific
time period and decided to tell the story of people who don’t feel like they have
a place in the world. There were on TV and now they’re not, so
at the moment the Thermians take them, they’re given purpose. It’s not punching down on Trek and fandoms,
it’s saying, it’s okay if you structure a life around the entertainment that you love
and meet like-minded people to pursue your idea of happiness. What makes this particular comedic example
so potent is that the actors and the characters they played on the television show are pretty
much polar opposites. Captain Taggart is smart, fearless, and the
perfect leader that never lets his crew down but Jason Nesmith is a hack, alcoholic frathole
of a man that lets all of costars down constantly. Lieutenant Madison is a subservient, manufactured
sex object who is supposed to do everything that Taggart say, no questions asked, but
Gwen DeMarco always speaks her mind and generally is the captain on the ship for more than half
the film. Also she looks at Jason as a sex object, which
is a nice role-reversal. Dr. Lazarus is a hyper-intelligent alien that
has a broad reach over technology and anatomy whereas Alexander, the consummate actor, doesn’t
even know how to hold his tricorder-thing correctly. And, of course, the foremost engineer in the
universe, Tech Sergeant Chen, is a nervous moron named Fred Kwan who when attempting
to digitize a target to teleport to the ship, well, this happens. But that’s the characters’ arc in this
film. Only when Jason, acting as a captain, does
a pep talk for Fred, leading to him believing in himself enough to teleport him back without
turning inside out and exploding. Which is when the punches start landing. Before we have a moment to breathe and think,
maybe these guys have a chance, we learn that Jason possibly-maybe got the entire Thermian
home planet destroyed by being hung over and not taking the villain’s threat seriously. He was possibly just responsible for the death
of billions. And the movie balances that, giving all of
them their moment to shine in this context. It reincorporates elements from all over the
movie into its climax, like any good episode of a science fiction show would do. The rock monster returns to wreak havoc on
their enemies. They beat the superior ship that has them
outgunned by outsmarting it. Jason even gets to say one of those awesome
captain one-liners cuz YO HE DRAGGIN MINES, THOUGH. Think about this: Dr. Lazarus has the stupidest
catch phrase of all time, spending a fair chunk of screen time basically showing you
how dumb and reductive it is, only to switch that shit up in the third act and make the
phrase mean enough to make you actually cry. Damn, Alan Rickman, you are missed, friend. I mean, look how many episodes of this show
he’s appeared in. That’s not a thing I planned, that’s just
how often he pops up in films that I happen to love. -TWO-
This movie is funny, hilarious even, monumentally so. Something comedies often use as a crutch is
off-setting their budget with product placement, which can date a film in a matter of years. Making references to popular culture and the
like can set a film in a time period so concretely that it might not even be funny to people
even five years later. It’s something that happens with a lot of
that those Judd Apatow-era improvisational comedies. When you’re making up the jokes on the spot,
while often hilarious in the moment, tend to die on the vine the longer they’re out
in the ether. It starts to falter big time. I mean, how often are you throwing the 40-Year
Old Virgin and Knocked Up into your DVD player? And this isn’t accidental. No one wears logos on their shirts, no one
has any brands or anything in their houses and rooms. It’s designed to be as funny now as it was,
-you’ll want to sit down for this- 17 YEARS AGO. This film creates comedy in so many ways. It’s got physical comedy, dialogue comedy,
visual comedy, inside-out lettuce-dog monster comedy—you know, all the good kinds of comedy. I don’t move to demonize making fun of brands
and trying to create entertainment out of poking fun at things that exist in our world
– lord knows Kris and I have pretty much built a following on that – but I think
for a comedy to achieve the height of modern classic, it’s gotta be able to hold up almost
20 years later. -THREE-
Comedy and the art of film haven’t always been the nicest of bed fellows. I’m not saying that a comedy film needs
grand cinematic aspirations to be funny or have value, but I do think that comedy films
are better when they’re measured on the metrics of the art form. When things are made well, we tend to like
them more. Heck, even the decision to shoot the movie
in 2.35:1 sort of forces you to care about framing in a way that traditional 16x9 wouldn’t
force you to. By constricting your frame, you force the
film to have a grander scope. BUT DID YOU KNOW
In the original theatrical version, the film was shown in THREE aspect ratios, not the
two seen on the home video release. The full-frame television stuff is still there,
but every scene that takes place on earth before Jason gets to space was in 1.77:1 (16x9). As the doors open, showing him the vast universe
before him, the curtains widened and spread out to cinemascope, allowing the audience
to feel what Nesmith is feeling: awe. I think one of the easiest ways to illustrate
comedy through the lens of cinema is to look at a film like Tropic Thunder. I mean, that movie is crazy as hell, but it
looks like a 1970s-era war film, because that’s part of the joke. Which is kind of how I see this show. At its heart, this is a comedic look at films
I love, but it doesn’t make me stop trying to make art and put it out into the world. Comedy can be absolutely be art, and I think
it’s loftier (personally) to dream in those terms. And this would be the part where’d I’d
bring up Edgar Wright again and fawn all over his cinematic artistry like a middle schooler
at a Jane’s Addiction concert. That joke didn’t even make sense to me. -FOUR-
Character stakes that mean something to an audience. We believe in these characters and their goals
because their successes and failures have value to an audience. Cringe comedy is kind of the logical antithesis
to this, or the idea that you can be be funny be consistently making your audience hate
your characters and squirm in their seats as they take their clueless hate-farming to
a relentless and off-putting extreme. This is Danny McBride-slash-Jody Hill playbook. Observe and Report, Eastbound and Down, and
Vice Principals are all fruits of this team-up. The characters never learn shit and their
whole purpose is to exist to make every other character on screen feel uncomfortable and
the comedy is rung from the stone in that way. Now. I like all of those examples but they can
be really hard to watch sometimes because, and I think this is pretty true of most humans,
our humanity will at some point get in the way because we’ll be attempting to use normal,
human empathy to relate to the characters on screen instead of laughing at them. Every person has a threshold for how much
we can watch characters endure before we give up on the whole thing, comedy or not. There’s other examples. The Office is easily the best example, and
if you watch it through again you’ll realize that it clicked with an audience in season
2, and what happened in season 2? Michael Scott, human dumpster fire, became
the foil, not the main character. By shifting the focus of the story onto Jim
and Pam and their continuing will-they-won’t-they struggle, suddenly Michael can play the part
of the foil, allowing us to root for characters we can actually empathize with. If we can’t empathize with your story and
characters, then we’re probably not going to remember it as anything other than disposable
comedy. And our characters in Galaxy Quest are up
against a whole lot. We grow out empathy organically. The Thermians are silly life forms that are
off-putting to an audience by design. As we spend time getting to know them, in
some cases watching them get hurt by their own naivety, it engenders within us a compassion
for them and their struggles. We watch them sacrifice, and die, and fight
to exist. By the end of it, we love them. We care about the stakes in the story because
they feel entirely real the characters within in. Stakes absolutely matter in a comedy. -FIVE-
My god the cast of this movie is a tangerine dream from heaven floating down a river of
chocolate fondue and an assortment of sugary marvels. I bet there’s a few in here you’re gonna
be like, holy shit, what. Hey, Tom, do you have that music I was telling
ya—yup. You know my jam son. This film stars:
Tim Allen fresh off the success of Jungle 2 Jungle, The Santa Claus, For Richer for
Poorer, and Meet … Wally Sparks. What the f—seriously, are these real movies? These look like the fake movies in the background
of Judd Apatow movie—no, I understand. Sigourney Weaver, who is an absolute dream
in this movie and is totally game for anything this movie throws at her including
BUT DID YOU KNOW In the scene where Gwen is freaking out about
the crushers in the hallway, she says “Oh, screw that,” and we move on. But if you watch her mouth, you can tell she
said something else and they got scared about droppin’ an f-bomb in what is otherwise
a pretty all-ages-appropriate film. And we get to Alan Mother F***ing Rickman. He’s perfect. Everything he says in this movie is quotable
until the end of time and by Grapthar’s Hammer, you will be missed. Truly. Tony Shalhoub at this point had done a few
television appearances, as well as his stint on Wings, but he was more of a call-in character
actor at the time. Ain’t nobody know that he was gonna come
in to this movie, seemingly throw away all direction or logic for how his character would
say any lines and basically turn every single thing he says into comedy gold. Seriously, think about his lines in this movie
as if they were to be delivered off the page by another actor. They’re pretty much all straight-man lines
to push other people’s comedy and he hijacks literally every scene like a champ. Tony Shalhoub is amazing. I’m not sure Monk would exist if he hadn’t
done this movie. Sam Rockwell before he’d done damn near
anything of merit. With this, and Charlie’s Angels not too
long after, it pretty much put Sam Rockwell on the short list for pretty much anything
he wanted. Do you wanna be friends, Sam Rockwell? I have Pop-tarts and Bagel Bites and Diet
Blackberry Shasta and – But here’s the ones you probably forgot
were in this movie. How about
None other than Veronica Marseses Dad himself, Enrico Colantoni. Or you, know Rainn Wilson aka Dwight Schrute
Or pre-Macintosh ruined-his-life Justin Long who got the Macintosh gig because of this
movie, ergo, Galaxy Quest ruined Justin Long’s life. #ripmacboy
Or Kevin McDonald. This film has so much going for it. Movies like this come along once in a blue
moon, generally all trying to make a film in the vein of a Ghostbusters, but more often
than not, you end up making Evolution. And how often has somebody brought up that
movie? I’m not even sure the people in it remember
making it. -Movies with Mikey-
Score one for the Touchdown boys because it took me a bit to really figure out the angle
I wanted to attack this film from. Sitting down to watch it again, I realized
that the angle I wanted to hit it from was what I really thought of it. It’s a classic comedy film and I think it
should be remembered as such. Thanks for checking out our channel. If you’re new here, here’s some thoughts
on what to check out next: Obviously there’s lots more episodes of Movies with Mikey to
check out, but if I could recommend Local 58 Kris Straub’s epic Youtube horror series,
there’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a radio play that I re-adapted back into the this
format. If you wanted to ever see what it would look
like if I made a film, then I would suggest you check that out because … it’s what
happens when I make an animated film. Also we have animated shorts. Also also we have the fantastic Portscenter. Basically our channel is awesome and you should
check all of it and like, subscribe, and tell your friends this is where the damn party
is at. Because it is. ONTO THE VOTING! Oops, just kidding, the next video is THIS
Which you would have known last month if you followed me on Twitter. Go do it. I’ll wait. I post all Movies with Mikey-related news
there. Everyone that follows me is cool to all their
friends because they have the inside skinny on Mikey and his movies. @mikeyface
Go send me a message. I’ll probably reply to you if you do. I mean, I’m not really doing anything. Jesus this was a long one okay bye
