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<\/p>\nHe wants his shirt<\/i><\/b>
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It seems to me that it would be far more interesting to twist the game a little, mix it up, maybe make things more interesting. To this end, I propose a new scale for measuring movie greatness, based on the 1999 film Galaxy Quest<\/i>. According to my scale, this modest little comic homage to Star Trek<\/i> fandom is perhaps the greatest film ever made. Allow me to explain.<\/p>\n
When you enter a movie theatre, you arrive with certain expectations. Maybe you’ve read a positive review of the movie, or a friend has told you they liked it, or perhaps you’ve only heard what folks in Hollywood like to call the “high concept”. This is where the entire film is reduced to a single phrase, ideally one you can blurt out to a potential funder over hors d’oeuvres<\/i> at the Chateau Marmont in less time than it takes the poor bastard to escape, once he’s realized that you crashed the party just to pitch your screenplay. An actual example of high concept: “Three Jews on a Dude Ranch”. See? Now you don’t even need to see City Slickers<\/i>. You have just experienced the entire movie in six words.<\/p>\n
But what if you arrive with no expectations? What if you know the film is going to be atrocious, an utter waste of your time? Your decision to see it has merely been a clever ruse for getting out of the house on Christmas day, while trying to find someplace, any<\/i> place, where you can get away from those annoying Christmas carols. You are walking into this one with your eyes wide open, knowing full well what perilous fate awaits you. All of the ominous signs are there: It stars Tim Allen, it’s some sort of Star Trek<\/i> parody, and the previews have led you to expect that it will be painfully cheesy. On the other hand, it does have Alan Rickman, and that’s promising, although you remember that in the trailer he was wearing some kind of alien thing on his head that made him look vaguely like a turtle, which can’t be good.<\/p>\n
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But you go anyway, settle down with your jumbo sized popcorn and strawberry Twizzlers, and prepare for the worst.<\/p>\n
One hundred and two minutes later you emerge, amazed, enthralled, reeling with disbelief. It was funny and clever and actually had a plot with parallel character arcs that really worked and theme and back story and timing and great comic performances and just the right rueful sense of irony and Rickman was in utterly top form and even Tim Allen somehow got the whole “yes, I may be William Shatner but it’s ok because I know<\/i> I’m William Shatner” thing and …. which is about the point where you realize you are hyperventilating and you go to find a chair in the lobby and sit down to think.<\/p>\n
And that’s about the time, to make sense of what has just happened, you are going to need a little thing that I call the Galaxy Quest Scale<\/b> (GQS). It is a rating system for movies that works like this: You assess your expectation going in of how good a particular movie could possibly be, given what you know. And then you assess your opinion of the movie after you’ve seen it. Divide the first number into the second number, and voila<\/i>, you have computed that film’s GQS. It’s really that easy. Below is a simple diagram that explains the somewhat arcane mathematics involved:<\/p>\n
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