50 films: 1980 - Battle Beyond the Stars

I decided before watching it that Battle Beyond the Stars was going to be the film that Star Wars could have been - on paper it seemed so promising:

• It was based on Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai - the planet was called Akir so it's residents were the Akira!
• It's screenplay was written by John Sayles - who I think will likely be responsible for 1987's film in this series.
• It was a Roger Corman film so we can presume that he'd make the big (by Corman's standards) budget go a long, long way.

It had a quite promising start, sure it looked a little ropier than Star Wars, but that's because Corman's budget had apparently mostly been spent on Robert Vaughan and George Peppard, but the story was nicely established and the magnificent "seven" rounded up "samurai" were smartly varied and nicely realised.

But then the bad guys came back, and it lost all promise - we had no insights into the characters, no explanation of the battle strategies, no story development - just 40 minutes of shooting, and dying, a bit of sacrifice, and a painful "romance" between the two lifeless leads.

By the end it became hard to care about anyone, even the ship's self-sacrifice that was supposed to be the heart-rending victory was meaningless.

Sad, it should have been better, after all it had a story with a well proven track-record but, but it was just a disappointment and certainly not the film that I hoped it would be.

Also, hilarious ship with breasts!

(play on YouTube)

OK, in an effort to actually make it through 50 films I've decided to give up on doing them sequentially, partly because 1966's film is in the post but mostly because it's easier to find films this way.