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You’ll get a meal and a place to hide with this often overlooked space opera.
By Joshua Tyler
| Updated
The early ’80s obsession with copying Star Wars wasn’t all bad, even if audiences ignored most of it. It resulted in an explosion of sci-fi movies, of all types. One of the people secretly involved in those early Star Wars ripoffs, was James Cameron. He was a key figure behind the scenes of Battle Beyond the Stars.
If you’re looking for something strange to stream, consider a trip to the peaceful planet of Akir, under siege from a vicious warlord and needing a few heroes in Battle Beyond the Stars.
A Classic Hero’s Journey Straight Out Kurosawa
Set far enough in the future that humans have become space truckers, Battle Beyond the Stars follows a farm boy named Shad, sent out into the cosmos to search for warriors who can defend his home planet against the space tyrant Sador and his Malmori army of mutants. He goes forth in the planet’s only space vessel, a Corsair Star Cruiser, which has a fussy personality and goes by the oddly chosen name of Nell.
For Shad and Nell it’s a race against time to find the help they need before Sador returns with his Stellar Convertor and turns their entire planet into a mini-sun. Or rather it should be a race against time, truth be told the movie never actually does a very good job of making it feel all that urgent. Battle Beyond the Stars is far from perfect.
Battle Beyond the Stars debuted at the box office in the still-disco-crazy late summer of 1980. It hit the screen with a bang-up opening sequence, complete with a tremendous score from now-famous composer James Horner.
Battle never tries to hide the fact that it’s a blatant Star Wars ripoff. The flyby of the massive starship in the open credits is a total copycat of the beginning of Star Wars.
The ship itself is a mishmash of the two ships seen in that opening Star Wars shot. The front half of the ship looks like the Tantive IV on which Princess Leia attempts her escape, and the back half looks exactly like the back half of the Imperial Star Destroyer pursuing her.
Battle Beyond the Stars takes a page from The Magnificent Seven and attempts to repurpose Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai into a story set in outer space. If that idea sounds familiar, it’s because Zack Snyder recently attempted the same thing with his two-part Netflix movie Rebel Moon.
Battle Beyond the Stars does it better.
The planet Akir’s name is, in theory, even supposed to be a tribute to Akira Kurosawa. Somehow I doubt he’d feel very tributed. Repurposing Kurosawa doesn’t work out nearly as well for Battle Beyond as it did for Magnificent Seven.
Battle Beyond The Stars Was Always Motivated By Greed
It probably didn’t help that this film’s creation was chiefly motivated by greed. Battle was one of the now-gone producer Roger Corman’s many attempts to cash in on the fervor of the Star Wars craze. Thanks to a script from John Sayles, this one came closest to working.
At least, for Roger Corman, he didn’t try to do it on the cheap. At the time, it was the most expensive movie ever produced by Corman. The budget was reportedly near $2 million; unfortunately, word is that most of that went towards paying actors George Peppard and Robert Vaughn.
That didn’t leave much for special effects, but luckily, they had James Cameron. That’s right, James Cameron.
James Cameron’s Work On Battle Beyond The Stars
If you liked any of the movie’s space sequences or special effects, you can thank James Cameron. He handled production design and art direction on Battle Beyond the Stars, under the direction of helmer Jimmy T. Murakami.
By the end of the film, he was responsible for most of the special effects. This was Cameron’s first significant gig, and he did it working on a typically shoestringy Corman budget. Although he didn’t have the money he needed, Cameron seems to have taken it seriously and improvised using what most would consider garbage.
Those ship corridors? Made out of painted McDonald’s containers. I wonder if the set smelled like Big Macs?
Everyone Needs A Whiskey Belt
Set in a distant future, Battle takes a vague stance on humanity’s potential path. I suppose the best of us is supposed to be embodied by an Earth character named Cowboy, played by George Peppard.
Cowboy’s your obligatory Han Solo knockoff character, but Han Solo taken to ridiculous extremes. He’s more like Sean Connery’s James Bond combined with Burt Reynolds’ bandit. He even has a scotch dispenser in his belt. That’s right, I said a scotch dispenser.
Taking Sci-Fi To Cartoonish Extremes
As demonstrated by Cowboy, Battle Beyond the Stars’ view of humanity’s far-off future is one of cartoonish extremes. And yes, I’m also talking about Sybil Danning’s uh… proportions.
And I guess, also Nell’s propotions?
The Akir, who we’ll assume are human because they look it and the movie never says they’re not, seem to be what would happen if Nixon had found a way to fire all the hippies off into space. There’s a lot of talk about their wealth being in their culture, but there’s no real evidence in the film of a culture that’s worth anything.
Mostly the Akir stand around and talk about not wanting to do anything a lot. Yep, total hippies.
Cowboy, on the other hand, is the lone representative of the people left on Earth, a place which, judging by him, hasn’t really changed very much, aside from the ability to make totally portable, instantly drinkable scotch. Come to think of it, that’s a world I want to live in. Scotch belts for everyone.
Predicting Our PeeWee Herman Future
Though humanity has stayed much the same as a people, in the future of Beyond the Stars, our technology has undergone a massive overhaul. For some reason, humans have decided things would be better if our vehicles were sassier, and Nell’s attitude was, I suppose, a precursor of things to come in science fiction. Flight of the Navigator, with a little help from the voice of PeeWee Herman, eventually did it better.
Maybe space will never become the wild west frontier Battle Beyond the Stars struggles to turn it into, but I’d like to think that some day I’ll be able to hop in my mouthy corsair and find myself in a battle beyond the stars, which actually happens in the stars, but which I’ll call “beyond the stars” because it sounds bigger and better than Star Wars.
Take that George Lucas.
