Movies - Space Mutiny

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	Movies - Space Mutiny

Space Mutiny is a 1988 action/sci-fi film about a mutiny aboard the spaceship known as the Southern Sun. It is probably best known for being featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Plot

The Southern Sun is a seedship, or a spacefaring vessel which contains all of humanity (According to this film) whose mission is to colonize new worlds. It is suggested during the movie that the voyage is longer than a human lifespan, which means that the crewmembers on the Sun were born on, will work on, and will pass their entire lives on the ship without setting foot on solid ground. This does not please the antagonist, Elijah Kalgan, who makes his move once he discovers that the seedship will pass near a pirate-infested system named Corona Borealis. Kalgan hatches a plot to disrupt the Southern Sun's navigation systems and use the Enforcers, the ship's police force, to hijack the ship and direct it towards this system.

Kalgan sabotages a key part of the ship just as an important professor's shuttle is on a landing trajectory. The loss of guidance control causes the ship to explode; the pilot, Dave Ryder is able to escape, but the professor dies in the explosion. This sabotage seals off the flight deck for a number of weeks, which gives Kalgan the opportunity to attempt to wrest control; he holds the Enforcers in his hand, and with the deck out of commission, no one can enter the ship to subdue him, and no one can leave to escape him.

The movie's stars were Reb Brown, Cissy Cameron, Cameron Mitchell and John Phillip Law. The spaceship effects were lifted wholly from the original Battlestar Galactica. The engineering areas of the ship are obviously filmed in an industrial building on a planet (Brick walls, windows and concrete floors), while the bridge appears to be nothing more than an office (Using extremely outdated computers, including one with a 5¼ inch floppy disk drive as an ID card reader).

The most noteworthy criticisms of the movie are the massive continuity error where a female cast member can be seen working at her computer console despite being killed by the villain in a previous scene, and the amazingly slow-paced and suspense-lacking chase in what look to be floor polishers in the end. The vehicles move incredibly slowly, but when two of them collide, they cause what would be a tremendously overexaggerated explosion even if they were twice their size.

MST3K

The movie was later lampooned on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. The movie's careless editing, stilted dialog, and amateurish execution lended itself well to the MST3K treatment, and it has proved to be one of the more popular episodes, having already been released on DVD by Rhino Publishing.

Despite comments made during its airing as an MST3K episode, the movie was not made in Canada, but rather in South Africa during the apartheid period. This has led some viewers to consider the all-white nature of the cast as racist rather than coincidental.

Many viewers found it odd, in the MST3K airing, that Mike and the 'Bots made no mention regarding the footage from Galactica. While no explanation has ever been given, they do admit that they did not. Therefore, most assume that, for whatever reason, they simply pretended not to notice.

Trivia

John Phillip Law, who appeared in this movie as the villain Elijah Kalgan (who is mocked mercilessly by the MST3K cast as his name's pronunciation resembles that of the commercial water softening product Calgon), would show up later as the star of Diabolik
, the last movie to be riffed on MST3K.

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