Here’s another one of those movies that I saw as a kid and, despite being an average film, managed to completely mesmerize and captivate my imagination. I have read so many unfair reviews that I needed to speak out, so I’ll try to give you a detailed analysis of this interesting piece of Sci-Fi.
THE FILM ITSELF. Obviously the producers of SATURN 3 wanted to cash in the then current craze on Sci-Fi movies that STAR WARS and subsequently ALIEN helped launch. The film deals with a food research lab on Saturn’s third moon (hence the title). Two food research scientists (Adam, played by Kirk Douglas and Alex, played by Farrah Fawcett)and their pet dog live all alone in an isolated space station full of weird corridors. They are working on alternatives to food, to feed earth’s hungry. But the company they work for decides they need more help and send in Captain James, not before being torn to pieces by wacko peer Benson (Harvey Keitel), who takes the Captain’s identity and flies to Saturn 3. With him, he carries several cargo loads of what appears to be a dismantled robot plus a container holding what looks like piles and piles of brains. Right from the start, Captain James behaves strangely and rapidly develops an obsession for Alex. But Alex is doing fine with his fellow science AND bed partner Adam, even if he looks like he were her father. Captain James the proceeds to assemble HECTOR, the robot he brought with him. HECTOR is the 1st of the “demigod” series, an advanced cyborg capable of learning human logic by means of “direct input”.To make this part of the review shorter, HECTOR also develops an obsession for Alex, since he is being programmed by demented Captain James. In a short while, Captain James and his robot go berserk and unleash mayhem on Saturn 3.
THE ACTING. If you think Keanu Reeves is a “wooden actor”, you have to see Harvey Keitel here. The veteran actor in one of his earlier movies acts as a lifeless man. To make matters worse, his voice was overdubbed and some of his lines are really annoying. It almost looks like he’s THE robot, not HECTOR! And Farrah Fawcett’s Alex is the living definition of a space bimbo. For a supposed scientist, she acts like a 12 year old girl. I don’ know if this was intentional or if Mrs. Fawcett’s acting skills at the time were limited. And Kirk Douglas just goes through the motions. Being older and supposedly wiser should have tipped him off at having a psycho in his space station.
THE RATING. I’m a bit confused by the rating. There’s more sex and violence on your typical PG rated JAMES BOND movie than on SATURN 3. Hell! Even RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK is way gorier. As for the sex, we see more skin in TITANIC that on this one. There’s small glimpse of Farrah Fawcett’s right breast and you get to see Kirk Douglas’ naked butt for 8 seconds. That’s all the sex you get. There’s no profanity. There are no “F” words or any obscene remarks. On the violence side, there are only 3 or 4 blood related scenes. We get to see a man blown to pieces when he is sucked into space, an amputation, a decapitation and squashed animal. Not too gruesome (except for 2 scenes). The sex was always more implied than visual.
THE MUSIC. Elsewhere here it says that Bernstein wrote 44 minutes of music and the only music we hear is a the beginning and at the end. WRONG. The score is pretty chilling. Combining classical with some weird synth sounds, Bernstain creates a pretty chilling score. It’s an utter shame that there is no Soundtrack CD for this interesting score.
THE ROBOT AND FX. HECTOR, the ominous killer robot is still a marvel to watch. It’s not conventional in any way. Instead of having a proper head, like say, C-3PO, he has what appears to be a probe with two light bulbs as eyes and an antenna. His structural design implies some logic behind it and to this day, it remains one of my favorite film robots. As for the rest of the FX, some look extremely dated. Like the air close ups on the space station; they definitely look like a model. The ship at the beginning looks a bit weird and it will take you a while to figure out its shape. There are air ducts all over and the lighting on these halls is real neat. The Special Make up FX we see during the blowing up of the actual Captain James and the Decapitated head look realistic and well done. But the real star will always be the Robot, Hector.
FINAL COMMENTS. Had this movie been directed by its actual intellectual creator, John Barry, it would have been probably one of the best Sci-Fi films of 1980. Remember that in that year, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK blew all other SF movies away, with only ALTERED STATES having something more interesting to offer mature audiences. It’s a shame that Barry died soon after he was “fired” from HIS project. That’s something that I’ll never understand. SATURN 3 is in no way “the worst SF movie ever”. It certainly isn’t among the best either, but THERE ARE others far worse. I hold this one dearly for nostalgic reasons but I know that it is not a perfect movie. The sadly “Out of Print” DVD is the only way you can see this movie again. It still angers me to see so much trash given DVD “special edition” treatment and other movies, such as this one, being totally ignored. SATURN 3 is still fun to watch and I’ll say it again, HECTOR is really a cool looking robot, one of the best I’ve ever seen in a SF movie.
Essentially the story of Genesis set on one of Saturn’s moons, this film is a complete shambles from beginning to end. How Sir Lew Grade could take a story from the most widely-read book of all time and destroy it is a marvel to behold. This project was started by John Barry and polished off – literally – by Stanley Donnen. The buzz is that, when Barry saw the final cut, he was so outraged that he demanded that his name be removed from the credits; a man of principle, at last. Nothing about this picture is in the least bit convincing: the matte paintings look like paintings, the models look like models, the dialogue is sappy and frankly outrageous (ex. Keitel to Fawcett:”You have a marvelous body. May I use it?”), and the direction is amateurish. The only, and we mean ONLY, saving grace to this otherwise execrable film is a brief shot of Fawcett’s breast. That’s it. Well, okay, that and Hector, the Demigod-series robot, didn’t have any lines but did march around late in the film with Keitel’s head stuck on top of it’s, er, “head”. This unintentional disaster of a movie totally wasted the talents of both Kirk Douglas (who really should have known better) and Harvey Keitel. The talent-wasting index of Farrah Fawcett is a debatable point, but at least she did what she does so well: that of playing a sloe-eyed, apparently none-too-bright full sized Barbie doll, a role that she executed flawlessly in “Logan’s Run” (itself a terrible picture) and, later, in the TV series “Charlie’s Angels”. Bottom line: if a friend gives you this film, give it back. Then, get some new friends. On a scale of 1 to 10, “Saturn 3” redefines ZERO.
