Review – GalaxyQuest

This one-joke movie starts out as a refreshing change from Hollywood’s stale fare. The joke gets told, complete with punch line, in the first few minutes of the movie: real, honest-to-goodness space aliens mistake broadcasts of a Star-Trek-like TV series for documentaries and enlist the sci-fi-con-dwelling actors to aid them in a battle against evil. What’s unusual here is that even after the gag plays itself out there’s still enough physical comedy and the like to keep the movie moving until the end of the final reel. It even manages to avoid coming down too hard on the Trekkies, cleaning up the language in order to preserve a PG rating and a larger potential audience among the crowd that attends the very conventions lampooned in the film. Some of the jokes require a little genre knowledge to fully appreciate, but even “outsiders” should get a kick out of the effects-intensive slapstick. Mildly amusing