Galaxy Quest Blu-ray Disc Review

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Galaxy Quest Blu-ray Disc Review

By brenden ⋅ November 24, 2009 ⋅

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GALAXY QUEST (1999, Blu-ray released November 17, 2009 - MSRP $29.99)

Galaxy Quest Blu-ray Disc Released this week to coincide with the arrival of the new Star Trek film on Blu-ray, Galaxy Quest is the ultimate love letter to the television adventures of the crew of the starship Enterprise. If you’re a fan of Captain Kirk and crew you’re bound to love this film. Even if you’re not, you’re bound to get a kick out of it. And it’s never looked or sounded or better than on this fine, new Blu-ray disc.

It must have been easy to overlook Galaxy Quest in 1999. I remember that year being all about the return of Star Wars and the coming of The Matrix. How was a little sci-fi adventure comedy like this supposed to stand out in a crowd as auspicious and legendary as that?! Luckily, we’ve got home video to rescue little gems like this. Galaxy Quest is a fun film following the post-series life of a group of actors working the convention circuit years after their famous sci-fi television show has gone off the air. Everything changes for the team when a starship full of honest-to-goodness real aliens recruit them to help them save their world from an evil, reptilian dictator!

It’s a pretty silly story. But manages to also be a fantastic commentary on the reality of struggling has-been actors forgotten by the Hollywood machine. Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman lead the gifted cast, all delivering fantastic comic performances. But for my money, it’s all Sam Rockwell all the way. That guy is hilarious! I remember that his performance was the one that stuck out for me when I had first caught the movie in ‘99. And it was Rockwell that made me laugh once again through this viewing of the film on Blu-ray.

Galaxy Quest looks better on this new Blu-ray disc than it ever has on home video. It’s a bit soft in places and you might be able to spot the slightest hint of DNR smoothing things out a little too much here and there, but over all you won’t be disappointed with the presentation. The Dolby TrueHD 5.1 soundtrack is also more than serviceable for the film.

The Blu-ray disc really shines in the area of its special features. I spent an afternoon enjoying the many documentary featurettes, most of which combine old interviews from 1999 with new, ten-years-later conversations (check out a little piece on Alan Rickman below!) There’s a disturbing clip of Sigourney Weaver leading members of the cast in a rap she’s written for her agent’s birthday. Funny but just so wrong…and awkward. Moving from awkward to just plain awful is the “Thermian Audio Track” - the entire film dubbed into the shrieking dying-dolphin language of the films aliens. I made it through about five seconds of that one and instead switched on the deleted scenes! Eight scenes totaling around 12-minutes, all fairly entertaining with one in particular providing a few laughs at the expense of Rickman’s exasperated character. The disc is rounded out by the exhaustive and hilarious “Galactopedia” - a text fact/fiction/triva track crafted by Michael and Denise Okuda, the Star Trek experts who created similar tracks for those discs.

GALAXY QUEST: DELUXE EDITION (EXCLUSIVE): Movie Trailer - Watch today’s top amazing videos here