A daft piece of sci-fi hokum renowed for its troubled shoot (original director, Star Wars designer John Barry, died two weeks in) and for the script being done by celebrated British author Martin Amis. The best you can say for its prattling about sexual politics and daft sci-fi foibles is that it musters a campy quality born of its crackpot contrivances, and there is an icky bit where Fawcett nearly loses her eyeball. What was clever-soul Amis thinking? Was it that he was young, and didn’t know better? Although there is a delicious candidness to Benson’s chat-up line: “You’ve got a great body, can I use it?”
It starts off as a dumb love triangle, then the robot joins in (not something even the freakiest of fetishists are going to stomach). Character motivations, especially Kettle’s evil Benson, remain foggy, giving the film no sense of why events are happening. Is this really a film about everyone wanting to shag Farrar Fawcett? In space. Who knows, the film, absent of logic, is not about to tell us. Then, when it turns into a chase movie, as the robot Hector, evidently a man in a suit, goes whacko.
Much is made of the hardware, as if they had aspirations to the Kubrickian warnings of technology run rife (not sure he had this in mind), but the effects are painfully clunky and it has Fawcett in a leading role. Douglas and Keitel just look embarrassed. As they should.