Birthday treat

One of the traditions around here is that the birthday boy or girl gets to watch a rented video on that special day. Since the younger kids have virtually no experience with videos and the older ones can barely remember and aren’t real interested, we usually end up renting Chicken Run for the younger and a Star Wars installment for the older. In a few days I’ll turn 53, and I’d joked in the past that I wanted to make my rental Galaxy Quest. Now, in fact I’d just as soon not watch a video at all, but everyone remembered the joke and there were lots of reminders this week that I needed to rent a copy while in town. So I did.

I used to watch movies a lot, but mostly old (pre-1965 movies) since I got married, and hardly any recent releases at all in the past fifteen years. But Galaxy Quest was one of those few, and it is by far my favorite of them, even beating the Lord of the Rings trilogy because it does a better job of meeting and surpassing its (much more modest) goals. It approaches perfection in the same way that Groundhog Day approached perfection, taking a small but important truth and going deep with it, carefully avoiding the many, many opportunities to strike a false note.

We watched it last night, and it was as good as I remembered. It does a masterful job of poking loving fun at science fiction fans, at small-time actors who milk past fame for all it is worth, at craftsman who conjure cheesy fantasies out of plywood and Christmas tree lights (and audiences who go along with them). And then it hits a home run by showing that even in this there is goodness, truth, and beauty at the core—couch potato ideals are still ideals, and true heroism can result when we try to measure up to them. A modest truth, but one you can live by.