Seven great space operas

In theory, the space opera should be the most wild and imaginative sub-genre in cinema, but it tends to be quite the opposite. Almost all made post-1977 have one eye on George Lucas’ Star Wars series, which is in itself derivative of the B-movie Flash Gordon serials that Lucas used to devour as a kid.

Despite this recycling, space operas continue to prove hugely popular. The highest grossing film ever (James Cameron’s Avatar) is one, while Disney paid George Lucas a cool $4 billion for the rights to Star Wars, which looks like a shrewd investment given that The Force Awakens and Rogue One, the first two films from Disney’s Star Wars extended universe, brought in $2 billion and $1 billion at the box-office respectively.

Success in the space opera game is by no means guaranteed, however. For every Avatar there are many expensive flops, from Brad Bird's John Carter to Eddie Murphy vehicle The Adventures of Pluto Nash to David Lynch's Dune. When they work, however, the space opera can provide the kind of sugar rush the big screen was made for. Ahead of the release of Luc Besson’s beautiful and bonkers Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, here are our favourites.

Galaxy Quest (1999)

Dir. Dean Parisot

We’ll start with the greatest sendup of the sub-genre. Like all spoofs, it works because the people making Galaxy Quest clearly love the films they’re taking the piss out of. We follows several actors from a hugely successful Star Trek-style television show who are slumming it on the fanboy comic-con circuit. Just as they’re trying to work out when their acting careers went down the toilet, they’re sucked into an intergalactic space war by a race of credulous aliens who’ve been intercepting the TV show on radio wave from earth and believe it to be a documentary.

The script is winning and the cast are game, with Tim Allen as the Shatner-like space commander, Sigourney Weaver as the sexy linguist and, best of all, Alan Rickman as the Shakespearean actor who’s found himself typecast as the show’s alien science officer.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

Dir. Nicholas Meyer

The big screen outings of the Starship Enterprise were just as fun as the 60s TV show, despite the crew being far too old for this shit by the time the franchise was resurrected in the late 70s off the back of Star Wars' massive success. In fact, the crew's growing waistlines and failing eyesight were often woven into the narratives and added plenty of pathos to the movies.

By far the best of the original line-up's big screen adventures was this delightful dose of cornball tomfoolery concerning a centuries-old genetically modified beefcake (the eponymous Khan, played by Ricardo Montalbán) with a penchant for quoting from Moby Dick, out for revenge against Kirk and his crew for leaving him for dead on a barren planet in one of the TV episode. The film’s spaceship battles are more like chess games than dog fights, and the ending has a moment of noble self-sacrifice that should reduce even non-Trekkies to tears.

The Last Starfighter (1984)

Dir. Nick Castle

At first glance, this 1984 space adventure might look like a blatant Star Wars rip-off, but it has a lo-fi charm all its own. The saga begins on Earth, where a disaffected teen living in a trailer park takes out his frustrations on his favourite arcade game Starfighter, which is revealed to be an elaborate recruitment device used to find the greatest starfighters in the galaxy to join the ranks of an intergalactic battle.

The computer-generated effects (among the first used in movies) look a bit ropey now compared to the practical effects of the era, but The Last Starfighter has plenty more going for it, including some genuine laughs that are usually absent from these type of self-serious space sagas.

Jupiter Ascending (2015)

Dir. Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski

The Wachowskis are among the finest pop filmmakers working today, with films like Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas delivering massive sugar rushes while also managing to ask lofty questions about the human condition. They pull a similar trick with Jupiter Ascending, a trashy, daft kitchfest that’s also a sly reworking of the Cinderella story – in this case we follow a Russian immigrant who scrubs toilets in Chicago who turns out to be intergalactic royalty.

The Wachowskis have been peddling a similar theme since the Matrix: that people should fight to be who they feel they are inside, rather than who the world has told them to be. Given that the Wachowskis have revealed themselves to be transgender women, it’s clearly a theme close to their hearts, and they run with it in the most imaginative way possible in this batshit space odyssey.

Starship Troopers (1996)

Dir. Paul Verhoeven

Paul Verhoeven knows how to make a gooey, gory sci-fi movie (Total Recall, RoboCop), and with this wild space adventure that doubles as a hilarious war satire, he’s at the peak of his powers. Based on the writings of right-winger Robert A. Heinlein, Verhoeven turns the crypto-fascist story into an not-at-all veiled attack on American foreign policy (made six years before the second Iraq War, it would prove precient).

The story follows a group of ridiculously good-looking teens (played by ridiculously good-looking 20-something TV actors, including a young Denise Richards and Neil Patrick Harris) who sign up to join Earth’s war effort to squash an entire race of giant insects from a nearby galaxy. Verhoeven's irony was hardly subtle, but many critics at the time didn’t get the joke, which made it all the more subversive.

Forbidden Planet (1956)

Dir. Fred M Wilcox

Shakespeare gets a sci-fi twist with this 50s classic, which follows an Earth spaceship (helmed by Leslie Nielsen before he found his funny bone) that comes across a strange planet inhabited by Dr Morbius, his daughter and their robot Robby (whom those familiar with the Bard will correctly read as The Tempest’s Prospero, Miranda and Ariel respectively). 

The film then takes a swift shift from Shakespeare to a proto-Alien shocker as members of the crew begin to go missing one by one thanks to a creature that turns out to be Freud’s worst nightmare. All the films above owe this inventive space opera – that complete with big ideas, romance, eye-popping design and comedy – a debt.

Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953)

Dir. Chuck Jones

Looney Toons’ perpetually apoplectic antagonist, Daffy Duck, gets a cartoon adventure of his own free of his nemesis Bugs Bunny, but he finds equally wiley opposition on Planet X, where his pompous space adventurer Duck Dodger is in search of the elusive Illudium Phosdex (aka the shaving cream atom). Marvin the Martian has just landed on Planet X too, and claimed it as an enclave of Mars. A battle of wits then begins between the pair (which Daffy inevitably loses).

By the end of the short they are both aiming weapons of mass destruction at each other and end up vaporising the planet they desperately covet. Made in 1953, with Cold War paranoia at its hight, it’s one of the sharpest visualisations of the futility of the nuclear arms race put on film. Seven minutes of pure genius.

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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is out on DVD and Blu-Ray on 27 Nov