- Directed by Jimmy T. Murakami
- July 25, 1980
A farm boy from an isolated planet recruits an eclectic group of rogues to stop an interstellar warlord and save his people.
I first saw this particular movie in the wake of Star Wars on network television in my extreme youth. It captured my imagination and was a fond childhood entertainment memory. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it is certainly something special. It’s derivative of the original The Magnificent Seven and the first Star Wars and thus by extension The Seven Samurai. It manages to re-package and reuse all of that stuff in a way that doesn’t feel like a bad rehash.
The special effects are adequate. Even for the time they were passable. They didn’t have a Star Wars budget so they used much older techniques than the pioneering work of the original Star Wars film. The ship Nell (Lynn Carlin) is designed to look like the torso of a woman but the limitations of their budget and effects kept the camera on it in such a way that it looked like a scrotum. Seriously! Just take a look.
But those effects combined with the story and aided with the amazing musical work of James Horner makes it all comes together and raises it up several notches. James Horner was a film music genius. If you listen to the soundtrack here you can detect plenty of elements that were used in his classic work for the Star Trek films. The man knew how to highlight a scene or simply tell a story in music with what he did. That is the reason for music in movies. He could make things feel epic and grand and that’s exactly what happens here.
But there is a mystery. Why does Sador (John Saxon) feel a strong need to conquer the nothing planet of Akira is never explained. It certainly follows the template as established in The Magnificent Seven but in the story it is just, well, because. You could come up with several dozen reasons this galactic conqueror wants an obscure planet but none are hinted at in the narrative.
Sador is dangerous yet hammy as a villain. You don’t feel as if Saxon is phoning it in or his character is meant as a joke. He’s just the perfect amount of mustache twirling evil. He does evil things to be evil. He is all ego and as such gets undone because of that.
If you think of this as a mockbuster then the similarities between Sador’s stellar converter and the Death Star are obvious. And you cannot help then but notice how much Sador’s ship looks like the Tantive IV from Star Wars-just darker in color. For me this was highlighted the first time they show it as it struck me as similar to the first sighting of the Tantive IV.
There is an aim towards the weird and just plain fun. Our Luke Skywalker standin of Shad (Richard Thomas) takes it upon himself to find help. He goes straight to an individual named Dr. Hephaestus (Sam Jaffe) who is all about getting his daughter Nanelia (Darlanne Fluegel) pregnant for grandchildren to inhabit his space station. It’s one thing to want grandchildren. It’s another thing to kidnap the first random human being that you come across in order for your daughter to have kids.
Speaking of weird, they never explain why Sador needs the arm from the one Nestor. There’s no reason given. Reportedly Corman would come along during production and rip out random pages to get things back on schedule. I am betting that explanation was in one of these pages and nobody thought to fit it in elsewhere. It provides for an interesting scene later but without explanation it’s confusing.
The Akiri have a religious text that they follow. It provides an interesting wrinkle in the story, but only as spoken of in a particular scene. I’m not sure if there is a great deal of thought put into (it most likely not). Some thought could have improved things but this was a Corman production and he wanted a profit before greatness. There seem to me to be one or two inconsistencies such as it allowing for the taking of life to save life, but also implied is that they were to avoid violence at all costs even at the cost of life.
Much like The Magnificent Seven the mercenary characters in the story find something worth fighting for rather than fighting for the petty reasons that they have been. Nestor (mostly Earl Boen) is probably unique among this as he is a collective entity and fighting for the experience, but even it embraces things as a good fight.
This is certainly a Corman film and as such corners were cut and the budget was kept small. That means limited if any retakes. One thing that jumps out at me as an adult is the inconsistency of the use of the planet’s name. It’s a nod to Akira Kurosawa who was behind The Seven Samurai but it doesn’t use his name straight up yet some characters use Akira rather than Akir-the planet’s actual name.
We have a large and talented cast featuring Richard Thomas, Robert Vaughn, George Peppard, John Saxon, Sybil Danning, Jeff “Never Young” Corey, Marta Kristen, and Julia Duffy. Certainly a bit eclectic and all given a little something. I just wish some of it had been better looked at. Lux (Marta Kristen) and Space Cowboy (George Peppard) but it barely gets touched in. Or what about Cayman of the Lambda Zone (Morgan Woodward) whose people were exterminated by Sador? When you introduce genocide you cannot gloss over it but they kinda did here. But ultimately that does not matter.
Despite any shortcomings the disparate parts come together for what amounts to a fun and exiting movie even if Battle Beyond the Stars is imperfect. It is a Cult Classic of the finest caliber and something you should check out definitely!
Warren Watched A Movie 