Saturn 3
Saturn 3 (1980)
One of the things I love most about Sci-fi is the amount of ideas you can incorporate into the genre. The amount of different tales you can tell in a completely different environment. You can have horror, romance, action… you can tell stories about humanity, war, change, utopias, robots, love… it’s endless.
Saturn 3 starts off with brutalist architecture on a space ship with everyone in silhouette and an extremely violent death, and by the end of the next scene Harvey Keitel is popping little blue pills while he watches Kirk Douglas having sex with Farrah Fawcett and then proceeds to build a robot to share his fantasy about her with… what other genre can you do that?
I really enjoy films about a happy couples life being turned upside down by a stranger. It’s one of those tropes which just works on the screen for me. The danger off it. How unsettling it is. Dead Calm was one of my favourite movies when I was younger, and Saturn 3 was nine years before it.
The performances are all a little weird, but that just adds to the texture of the movie. Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett don’t have great chemistry, but that plays into the idea of their idyllic hideaway, especially as you learn she knows very little of the outside world––It makes you ask some serious questions (none of which are answered).
Harvey Keitel plays an anal scumbag really well, but again, it just feels odd and plays into the script as he relentlessly pursues Farrah Fawcett like her sleeping with him shouldn’t be in question.
And that’s one of the things I find most interesting about Saturn 3… the world building. While a lot of it is a little underserved, it’s nonetheless fascinating. We know food supplies are running out. That space travel exists. There are robots. Humans willingly share partners now, (at least according to Harvey) and while the idea of sharing partners seems free-loving, there’s something extremely authoritarian about the presentation of the main ship at the beginning. The future is clearly fascist, so no wonder Kirk wants to hide away on the dark side of a Saturn moon with Farrah Fawcett––I think we’d all make that choice.
I enjoyed the sets, the ships, overall environment. I think for a 1980’s sci-fi it looked great. The most impressive thing for me was Hector the Robot. He looked amazing. I loved the armoured rib cage which made him look like a badass Terminator, mixed with the little diddy eyes. When he clamps Harvey’s hand off and then walks about with gore hanging from the end of his claws for a few scenes… amazing.
Overall, it’s not a perfect movie and skips a lot of storytelling. The tension could have been built better, and by the sounds of it there was some developmental hell as the director was replaced and the script changed, but I really liked it. It’s a good looking sci-fi with bright ideas and a style to it. Plus, the whole way Hector works with the AI learning, that seems pretty relevant now.
