Flash Gordon (1980) Review
7/10
A New York Jets quarterback, a travel agent and a disgraced scientist are pulled into space by a rocket in a greenhouse, and arrive on a planet ruled by an emperor who destroys worlds out of boredom.
The 7 is for total commitment to a tone almost nobody attempts. This is a film that decided to be gaudy, theatrical and absurd on purpose, hired a production designer who agreed, and never once winked hard enough to let itself off. The three points come off for the lead. Sam J. Jones is a physical match and nothing else, and another actor recorded most of what comes out of his mouth after Jones left the production.
Few big-budget movies make me as happy as this one. Max von Sydow sneering in a gold skullcap, Brian Blessed bellowing inside those gold wings, Queen hammering away underneath it all: I’d take that over a dozen tasteful space operas. I just wish the man at the center of it could hold a scene.
Camp Was the Plan, Not the Accident
Lorenzo Semple Jr. wrote the screenplay. He’d developed the 1960s Batman series and written De Laurentiis’s King Kong remake, and he brought the Batman approach with him deliberately. That’s the decision the entire film rests on. Star Wars had come out three years earlier and made mythic seriousness the default for space adventure. Flash Gordon went the other way, back to the Saturday serial, where the villain gloats and the hero is square-jawed and stupid and everything is announced at volume.
Mike Hodges directed, which on paper makes no sense. His previous work was Get Carter, one of the coldest British crime films ever made. What he brings is a refusal to let the comedy sink the action, so the fight on the rotating platform with retractable spikes plays as a real sequence with real stakes.
The balance is the achievement, and I think Hodges deserves far more credit for it than he usually gets. Play it straighter and the dialogue becomes embarrassing.
Play it broader and nothing is at risk. He holds a line that almost every later attempt at this tone has fallen off, and that spiked platform fight is my proof.
De Laurentiis had wanted Fellini first, then Nicolas Roeg, before settling on Hodges. Knowing that changes how the film reads. This was never conceived as a modest genre picture, and the visual extravagance is what survived from a much stranger set of intentions.
Camp only works when the execution is sincere and the material isn’t. The moment the film signals that it knows, the audience stops playing along and starts watching a comedian. That means everybody in the production has to be told. The designer, the composer, the actors and the editor all have to be building the same overblown thing with a straight face, or you get tonal disagreement. That reads as incompetence.
In prose the equivalent is committing fully to a heightened voice and never inserting a knowing aside. The aside is the author stepping out to reassure the reader that he’s above the material, and it costs more than it buys every time.
Danilo Donati Built a Different Universe
The production and costume designer was Danilo Donati, who had worked extensively with Fellini, and the look he produced belongs to no other science fiction film.
Mongo is red and gold and violet, all silk and lacquer and theatrical light, closer to opera than to engineering. Nothing looks like it was manufactured. Everything looks like it was decreed.
The costumes are the clearest statement. Ming’s collar, Klytus’s mask, and a pair of enormous gold wings bolted to Brian Blessed with no concern for how a person would move in them. Donati didn’t solve the practical problems because the practical problems were beside the point.
That choice is why the film still looks like nothing else, and it’s the part I’d argue for hardest.
Every space opera made since Star Wars has aged toward the same weathered grey. This one hasn’t aged at all, because it never pretended to be plausible in the first place. I could watch Mongo with the sound off and never get bored.
There’s a lesson buried in that about where realism helps. A world that claims to be functional invites the audience to check the function, and they will. A world that announces itself as invention is asked no such questions, and can then be as strange as its designer can manage.
Queen Should Not Have Worked
De Laurentiis hadn’t heard of Queen when their management approached him. Hodges had wanted Pink Floyd and had been playing their records on set. The band got the job anyway and were given unusual latitude, with Brian May later recalling that they were allowed to do what they liked provided it served the picture.
What they produced is a rock score that works as a score. The theme is a chant with the film’s own dialogue sampled into it, the quieter cues are quiet, and Howard Blake’s orchestral sections carry the sequences where a guitar would have been wrong.
It also solves a problem the film couldn’t solve otherwise. The visuals are so unmoored from any recognizable reality that a conventional orchestral score would have felt like an apology. The Queen material matches the tone exactly.
I think the Queen score is the single best decision anyone made on this picture. That theme hits like a stadium chant, and right from the start it tells you how to take everything that follows: dead seriously and with a grin on your face.
Almost nobody has repeated this successfully. A band scoring a feature usually produces songs laid over scenes. This is a band writing to picture, and the difference is audible in the first ninety seconds.
Tonal outliers succeed when they match the tone of the thing they’re attached to, and fail when they’re simply loud. The test is whether the choice would look absurd in a straighter version of the same work. Give a collaborator latitude and a constraint together. Queen were told to do what they liked as long as it complemented the picture, and the second half of that instruction makes the first half safe.
The transferable version for writers is voice in a hybrid work. A comic tone inside a serious book has to be doing the same job the serious material is doing, or it reads as the author losing his nerve.
The Problem at the Center
Sam J. Jones was cast for a physical resemblance to Buster Crabbe, who had played Flash in the 1930s serials. De Laurentiis spotted him after an appearance on a dating show. Kurt Russell had turned the part down as too one-dimensional. Jones and De Laurentiis fell out during production. Jones left before the end of principal photography and refused to return for dubbing, so Peter Marinker recorded most of the dialogue audiences hear from Flash. The name on the poster and the voice on the film are largely different people.
You can hear it, and it’s sloppy work. The voice never quite locks to the face, and in a film where every other actor is chewing scenery with enormous confidence, the hero is the flattest presence on screen. Every time the film cuts back to Flash I feel the air go out of the room.
Around him the supporting cast is having a wonderful time. Max von Sydow plays Ming with total seriousness, Brian Blessed is operating at a volume that’s since become a cultural reference on its own, and Timothy Dalton plays Barin as though auditioning for Errol Flynn. Topol is having the best time of anybody.
Von Sydow is the one to watch. He’d come from Bergman and he plays an emperor in a gold skullcap with exactly the gravity he’d bring to a chamber drama, and the seriousness makes Ming frightening instead of ridiculous. The film needed one person refusing to play the joke, and he’s it.
Why It Became a Cult Film
The film took around twenty-seven million dollars in the United States on a budget of about the same. That’s a failure. It did considerably better in the United Kingdom, where it was a real hit. What happened afterward is what matters. It found its audience on television and video, over decades, among people who didn’t need it to be Star Wars. The midnight circuit adopted it, the Queen soundtrack kept selling, and Blessed’s line readings entered the language.
The reason it survived is the same reason it failed. A film with a completely specific and unfashionable tone won’t open wide, and nothing else can replace it either, so the people who want it have to keep returning to this one.
Sam J. Jones sued De Laurentiis to force the contracted sequels. He lost, and they were never made. A documentary about his life afterward exists. That tells you how large a shadow one film can throw over one career.
Distinctive work fails commercially and survives culturally, and the mechanism is identical in both directions. What limits the opening audience makes the work irreplaceable later. If you’re writing something with a distinctive tone, budget for the slow build. The audience for it exists and has to find it. That happens over years and by word of mouth. Don’t soften it to widen the opening. A softened version has neither the initial audience nor the durability. That’s the fate of most compromises made at this stage.
Should you watch Flash Gordon?
Yes, and watch it with people. It’s built for a room, with a soundtrack you can hear from the street and a villain who announces his own cruelty for the pleasure of saying it. The 7 is what’s left when a blast of a movie loses three points to the hole where its hero should be, and I’d pay that price again for von Sydow and Queen alone.
