produced by Roger Corman, directed by Jimmy T. Murakami
One of the greatest pleasures of today is all the rotten, splendid carcases of B-movies and matinee SF glory days slouching around on the net waiting for vultures like me. You can find all these online gems restored at 4k quality on YT. There are literally tons of forgotten or well-hidden movies online, or even lesser-known classics like this one (mentioned by a favorite science fiction auteur like Adrian Czajkowski as “One of my all time favourite films, lord help me.”). That says something.
As an Internet scavenger, in general, I prefer a less refined and more guilty-pleasure frivolous nutrition from the vaults of YT, even as some might prefer “the Internet Archive, Newspapers.com, JSTOR, Libgen, torrents, online catalogue raisonnés, untapped research archives in raw HTML, even Wikipedia rabbit holes, means of accessing vast stores of information far larger than any physical archive that are sitting and waiting to be utilized.” (Sean Tatol), on top of a juicy quote from Baudelaire.
To call it a knock-off or a spin-off of Seven Samurai (1954) or the Magnificent Seven (1960) would be stating the obvious. It makes much more sense to consider such a sui generis movie. This is what I learned in my Eastern European teenage years – your Metallica or Mad Professor DUB t-shirt, drawn with a smeared ballpoint pen or marker, was the better, the correct degenerate copy. Wear it proudly, bc it definitely felt more real and touchable, and anyway, we could not afford (back then) the production costs or the textile sweatshop labor behind it. In a way, it was totally opposed to the fast fashions of today. What we have to figure out is how we got from that to the fast fashions of today. Battle Beyond the Stars is also probably one of the most unabashedly – shamelessly, one might say, examples of genre hybridizing beyond the borders of commercial success or market-driven hype. Let us consider it an example of horizontal or transversal gene transfer, but also a sign that ‘mature’ SF rarely hides its roots. The result is a tainted ‘space opera’ play that never quite grew out of imperial-colonial dime novels and penny Wild West pulp cradle. And still the copy goes beyond the original.
But let’s put all these petty considerations aside and enjoy this ludicrous piece of 80s cinema. What I miss in the recent spate of Marvel remakes and SW prequels that has gripped the Hollywood industry is the way they score rather poorly on the baloney aspect of a remake and sci-fi spoof. One should push the envelope, but completely try to bend it out of shape. Turn the quantitative into the qualitative. If you do a more or veiled remake, just see what lies beyond. Bring on hive minds, heat-communicating aliens, Valkyrie from outer space in tiny ships, decadent sapphire-studded mercs, and alien reptilians with lucious bodyguards.
Battle Beyond the Stars is what Silicon Valley techbros wanted to transform into but didn’t. They desired to mingle with the freaks and extras on the movie sets where Ed Wood filmed those masterpieces, but ended up glamping in the Mojave Desert. The sad reality is that they maybe dreamt of living a cosmic vaudeville life like the glitter space mercs, the galactic rebel scum, the agorist outlaws, space cowboys and libertarian revolutionaries from Heinlein’s The Moon is A Harsh Mistress, but they eagerly became the new “apparatchiks—this time, holidaying by the makeshift tents of Burning Man rather than at the swanky sanatoriums of Crimea”.
One could be really wicked and say that The Battle Beyond the Stars was very mundane, it was the prospect for the entire actor-president 1980s Reagan era of finding a mate in the other, the Eastern (Perestroika) liberalized other. What does it take to spice up your competition, woo it, and transform it into your trading partner? Is it just about big space guns? In domestic terms (or Melinda Cooper talking about the New Family Values), maybe it was about how to make an arranged marriage for the two protagonists, fairly bland white cisgender heroes, more palatable (erotic, anyone?)? Battle Beyond the Stars is then the Panda show – how to avert the “Great Replacement” by mutants in terms of today’s damaged “volk capital“. Damned it, will they ever kiss, will they ever mate, will they follow the “Varda” scripture against the Social Darwinist imperatives of the empire and its mutant minions? Altough, important point, a lot of early SF was analysed by Jordan S. Carroll (who recently won the Hugo for the Best Related Work category) in his award-winning Speculative Whiteness point to superior mutant leaders (Sador!) as some sort of ubermensch aloof from the masses (“The enemies in many of the early mutant stories turn out to be the masses, who represent primitive throwbacks to the past when compared to the forward-looking mutant visionaries.” – read the interview here)
Hmm, what could be waiting after the 1980s arms race, when the Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative (which Lucas sued for copyright), refuses to gett decommissioned? Nothing else but an AI gendered Voice of Nell spaceship (spaceship with tits) and completely incompetent baddies that, nevertheless (like the eponymous US empire at its zenith), are ready to incinerate planets and suns in order to get new organs or audience ratings from ‘lesser’ species. Batten Beyond the Stars is how solidarity and foreign policy were imagined during the 80s, where every friendly dictator or enemy of my enemy (Mujahideen) is my friend. All my allies have to commit suicide and die a “beautiful death” like a Valkyrie.
TimeSpace Warps 