It is the far future and on the planet of Ordessa a mutiny is brewing. The population are each involved with mining to some extent, and the workers detest the harsh conditions they must toil under as ordered to by the authorities, so are beginning to revolt against them. Unfortunately, the management are less than accommodating and when a protest is staged with placards, it is put down with fierce aggression by the android police officers who act as the muscle for the powers that be. Lorca (John Tarrant) is the leader of the insurgents and manages to escape, but overthrowing the oppressors will not be easy, and he will need at least a little help from those he meets along the way...
By 1984, the science fiction subgenre of Star Wars copies was running out of steam - indeed, if this was anything to go by it had sputtered out to a grinding halt. Sure, there were productions attempting to recreate the magic (and major box office) of George Lucas's brainchild that were actually a lot of fun and in the spirit of the space operas of the nineteen-thirties that he had built upon for his blockbuster, but for every Battle Beyond the Stars there were items like Starship that made you want to swear off the form for a while, or indeed for good, at least until something with a modicum of wit behind it showed up. The curious thing was that director and co-writer Roger Christian had been involved in Star Wars originally.
He was one of the Oscar-winning designers on that classic epic, therefore you might have anticipated some of that skill would be transferred to this, but aside from the futuristic setting and trappings everything about this spoke to such a lack of style, never mind zip and energy, that you wondered what Christian had been doing back in the late seventies that he had apparently allowed all that knowledge to go to waste in what was for the most part excruciatingly tedious. How could you mess up such a simple concept, the rebels against the totalitarian regime with robots and spaceships and whatnot? It sounded like a cast iron premise, but somehow this found a method to relate it that drained all the excitement out of it.
Then you may recall the director was also responsible for Battlefield Earth and things fell into place. Maybe it was because we had very little to invest in, since the characterisations were perfunctory at best, even the heroes were so generic that we just didn't care, and giving them the trait that they got a bit bad tempered at times, be they goodies or baddies, was not enough to generate much in the way of compelling personalities. There was a robot sidekick to Lorca, and he was played by Deep Roy, a stalwart of roles that required a very small man to play, though his features were hidden under an immobile mask that for some reason looked more or less like his actual face, giving rise to the question why didn't they just have him use his own phizzog instead? Not robotic enough? Anyway, the sole interesting thing that happened to him was his head falling off after the massive truck he was hanging from crashed.
Don't worry, Lorca reattached it, though the accident made him see in black and white. Riveting, right? We didn't even get much of a look at this carefully crafted (presumably) far off world since Christian was determined to keep his camera trained on extreme closeups of his performers, from the football-helmeted police droids to the largely unheard of cast. Well, not all of them were unheard of, this was filmed in Australia so Hugh Keays-Byrne would be recognisable from a few of that nation's productions, though curiously the biggest stars were seen as holograms in an amusement arcade of some sort where the patrons could play computer consoles or watch Peter Gabriel and Toyah Willcox perform songs written and produced by Genesis keyboard man Tony Banks, who wrote the entire, tinny synth score too. Not that they were worth sitting through Starship to see, there was very little to recommend what didn't so much as feature much space action either, just a bit at the start and a bit at the end, the rest of it took place in darkened corridors and desert landscapes. Possibly the most boring science fiction action flick of the eighties.
