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It might not seem advisable, or even possible, to drag a "Star Trek" lampoon out any longer than a "Saturday Night Live" sketch, but director Dean Parisot, who before doing the goofy Home Fries worked his way up through the television ranks on such shows as "Northern Exposure" and "ER," has fashioned something that sets the new standard for sci-fi parody. Okay, so it doesn't have much to compete with besides Mel Brooks' slapstick Spaceballs, but Galaxy Quest is a nonstop, warp speed riot that's even funnier than the entertaining documentary Trekkies, and almost as funny as William Shatner's off-key, self-parodying commercials for Priceline.com.
Plug Tim Allen into the Shatner role, then scatter Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Tony Shalhoub, Daryl Mitchell, and Sam Rockwell ("the guy who dies to prove the situation is serious") as various none-too-thinly disguised other Trek character composites from both generations. Drop them into a plot where, two decades after cancellation, their exclusive subsistence on fan conventions ("Questerians") and mall openings is interrupted by real aliens who mistake the show for historical records of bona fide heroism and draft them into an interstellar civil war, and there's your high concept.
From a couple relatively new screenwriters who obviously respect their source material without venerating it, and know the mythology well enough to shoot it full of holes, Galaxy Quest is good-natured fun from the git-go. Sure, Allen isn't the greatest actor, but in this bigger-than-life, egotistical yet likable part he doesn't need to be; with help from the rest of the cast he almost atones here for all the awful movies he's done. And the special effects are just about the most natural, unobtrusive, un-self-conscious fun you'll ever see anybody have with costumes and computers (the head bad-guy looks just like the sick fish from Deuce Bigalow). I'd say more, but I don’t to ruin any of the gags, except to offer that I'll bet Mr. Sigourney Weaver, when the kid's been put to bed and the lights turned out, cautiously asks wifey if she'd mind getting out that blond hair and prosthetic chestware so they can boldly go into the vinyl frontier. B+
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