We all know there was a plethora of sci-fi films in the late seventies and early eighties or so, many of them more or less trying their hardest to rip off Star Wars. Among the throng was 1980’s Saturn 3, which went a bit more ham than its counterparts as well as copying other sci-fi films. Just a bit. Released by Lew Grade’s ITC Film Distribution, which brought us Raise the Titanic and The Muppet Movie, Saturn 3 is one of the more polarizing science fiction movies of the early eighties.
It opens at a research base on Saturn, where Adam (Kirk Douglas) and Alex (Farrah Fawcett) are living quite happily while they research hydroponics. Earth is overcrowded, and people are starving, but there’s an active network of off-planet traffic, where research and various forms of commerce are happening.
Meanwhile, Captain Benson (Harvey Keitel, voice dubbed by Roy Dotrice) is on his way to the Saturn 3 base for some reason. We never really find out what it is. We do, however, know that he’s a baddie, because he murders Saturn 3’s real visitor, Captain James (Douglas Lambert) on the way to the base. Benson then takes off in his little shuttlecraft, which looks like a cross between a fly and a Wacky WallWalker, and wastes no time jetting off to the base’s landing pad.
Adam and Alex are a bit skeptical of Benson at first, partly because he keeps offering them Blue Dreamer pills, but mostly because they can’t for the life of them pin down why Benson is there. It also cramps their style a bit–for one thing, Alex can’t run around in the buff anymore.
Oh yeah, and then there’s Hector, Benson’s robot, who Benson unveils without much ceremony, telling Adam that Hector is the wave of the future and Adam is obsolete. He’ll run the base without any hitches and be way less high-maintenance than any human being. Adam is unimpressed.
The other thing is that Benson is undeniably creepy. He inserts himself into Adam and Alex’s romance with an unbelievably unsubtle line about wanting Alex’s body, adding that Hector wants it, too. So much thought put into this dialogue, right?
Things deteriorate very quickly. Benson goes crazy, Hector goes crazy, Hector rips Alex’s little dog to pieces, Hector starts shooting small projectiles, Hector gets dismantled for going after Alex, and then Hector, who manages to come together again, finally turns against Benson and rips him apart. It’s now a race against time to see who will be left standing at the end, and Adam and Alex hatch plans that seem worthy of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, namely, they try to trick Hector into walking into the garbage pit.
UK sci-fi magazine Starburst seemed hopeful about Saturn 3‘s prospects, but like most industry publications, quickly turned on the film, elegantly labeling it a hack job. We’ll get back to that in a bit. Charitably, though, the magazine ranked the film above The Black Hole but below Alien.
Other reviews were more blatantly negative. Roger Ebert called Saturn 3 “awesomely stupid, totally implausible from a scientific viewpoint, and a shameful waste of money.”
Variety was downright humorous in its criticism:
Somewhere in deepest, darkest space, Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett jog around through a space station that looks suspiciously like Bloomingdale’s after closing. The pair are scientists doing important work, when bad guy Harvey Keitel shows up…Life goes on in this shopping mall of lights till Keitel builds Hector, the mad robot, whose tubes and hubcaps develop goosebumps for Farrah. Best scene in the entire effort is Hector’s resurrection after he has been dismantled for being randy. The parts find each other and reconnect which is more than this film does.
Got that right. Audiences seemed to agree, because Saturn 3 brought in a paltry $11.4M at the box office. No one who sees the film is ever indifferent to it.
The biggest criticism is, of course, besides the clunky story and bad dialogue, is that Saturn 3 rips off a plethora of its fellow sci-fi movies. Star Wars is featured most blatantly in the first shot, when we see a very lonnnnnnng passage of a ship going towards Saturn. It’s also got the used future look, there’s a transport ship that looks almost identical to a shuttle from the George Lucas universe, and it’s got Hector, the seemingly versatile and helpful robot, although he’s a bit taller and a lot less chatty than C-3PO.
However, it more blatantly rips off the 1972 Bruce Dern film, Silent Running in that it’s about humans going to outer space to cultivate and research plant life, not to mention it’s got cute little animals running around. Well, there’s Alex’s dog, anyway.
2001: A Space Odyssey gets a nod, with the really obvious I’m Sorry, Dave angle of Hector going nutso, only Dave never ripped people’s faces off, and there’s not much time for goodwill before things go sideways. Clearly Hector didn’t get Isaac Asimov’s memo about robots not harming people. At least the Elmer Bernstein score stacks up nicely to 2001‘s Strauss waltzes and tone poems.
As the ever-helpful Starburst Magazine pointed out, there are also several vigorous nods to Forbidden Planet, again because of Hector, but also because of Alex’s deeply-rooted innocence. Only Hector is like Robby’s doppelganger, because, again, Robby would never rip people’s faces off.
The final (metaphorical) ripoff, and I do mean final because it’s pretty hard to top it, is when Adam and Alex try to get rid of Hector by putting a fake floor on the garbage pit so Hector falls in. Some have compared it to the Tarzan movies, but Looney Tunes had their share of these traps as well. Heck, Looney Tunes was probably paying tribute to Tarzan when they used that gag. Swiss Family Robinson used it as well.
Other than that, there’s not much to recommend this movie. The visuals look great until we get to the Saturn station, and then it all looks unbelievable spacious. Credibility gets stretched to the limit, not just with the fake floor trap, but Adam and Alex’s May-December romance, which is ironic considering Kirk Douglas’s son, Michael, would go on to marry Catherine Zeta-Jones, who is twenty-five years his junior. The chemistry between Kirk and Farrah is more “We’re all each other has,” as opposed to “We’re all each other wants,” and getting into one’s birthday suit doesn’t make up for that.
In sum total, Saturn 3 is pretty boring and too long. Unfortunately, Lew Grade either didn’t learn much from its failure or else he was on a roll: Raise the Titanic would release just two months later.
Coming up in August (click the banners for more information):
Yeah, great minds must think alike, because we have a whopping three blogathons all happening on or around August 29th. It feels like the halcyon days of 2018.
All right, a new Substack recap is on the way next week, so I hope to see you then…
Saturn 3 is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon. It is also free to stream on Prime and Tubi.
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