Galaxy Quest, 1999, dir. Dean Parisot. Streaming at home, Sunday, October 23.

…as a parody of Star Trek, it works a lot better if you’ve seen Star Trek. Now that I’ve seen Star Trek, and three seasons of The Next Generation, I appreciate many of Galaxy Quest’s jokes more, but now the trouble is that the movie has such a sharp script (David Mamet considered it one of “four perfect films”, which is a typical overstatement from that buffoon, but makes the point), executed almost perfectly, that it reveals how shitty Star Trek’s scripts always are. Always. Even the decent ones. There is literally no episode of Star Trek, in any iteration, that has a scene that matches the emotional intensity of Quellek’s death, or the humor, the heroics, and the battles in this excellent film… everything.

Star Trek would be the greatest series of all time if only they could’ve got their scripts tightened up. And they never did.

Also: Enrico Colantoni is a genius. Don’t believe me, believe everyone who worked on Galaxy Quest.