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 register almost nobody attempts. This is not a bad film being enjoyed ironically. It 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 most of what comes out of his mouth was recorded by another actor after he left the production.
Camp Was the Plan, Not the Accident
Lorenzo Semple Jr. wrote the screenplay. He had developed the 1960s Batman series and written De Laurentiis’s King Kong remake, and he brought the Batman approach with him deliberately.
That is 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 genuine sequence with genuine stakes.
The balance is the achievement. Play it straighter and the dialogue becomes embarrassing. Play it broader and nothing is at risk. Hodges holds a line that almost every subsequent attempt at this tone has fallen off.
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 is not. 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, which 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 is 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 not a used, greasy, functional future. It 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 did not solve the practical problems because the practical problems were beside the point.
That choice is why the film still looks like nothing else. Every space opera made since Star Wars has aged toward the same weathered grey. This one has not aged at all, because it never pretended to be plausible in the first place.
There is 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 had not 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 functions as a score. The theme is a chant with the film’s own dialogue sampled into it, the quieter cues are genuinely quiet, and Howard Blake’s orchestral sections carry the sequences where a guitar would have been wrong.
It also solves a problem the film could not 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 register exactly.
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 register of the thing they are attached to, and fail when they are 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 is what makes the first half safe.
The transferable version for writers is voice in a hybrid work. A comic register 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 most of the dialogue audiences hear from Flash was recorded by Peter Marinker. The name on the poster and the voice on the film are largely different people.
You can hear it. The performance 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.
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 has 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 had come from Bergman and he plays an emperor in a gold skullcap with exactly the gravity he would bring to a chamber drama, and the seriousness is what makes Ming frightening instead of ridiculous. The film needed one person refusing to play the joke, and he is 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, which is a failure. It did considerably better in the United Kingdom, where it was a genuine hit.
What happened afterward is what matters. It found its audience on television and video, over decades, among people who did not 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 will not open wide, and it also cannot be replaced by anything else, 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, which 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 is what makes the work irreplaceable later.
If you are writing something with a specific register, budget for the slow build. The audience for it exists and has to find it, which happens over years and by word of mouth.
Do not soften it to widen the opening. A softened version has neither the initial audience nor the durability, which is the fate of most compromises made at this stage.
Should you watch Flash Gordon?
Yes, and watch it with people. This is a film 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 hearing it said. Bring the right expectations and it delivers everything it promised.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 3 of my film lists