Bill The Galactic Hero

I normally don't bother with Kickstarters, for a few reasons. I really don't consume that much stuff, especially not chintzy anthologies, role-playing game materials, video games, or other stuff that I see promoted across social media. (Maybe I need to follow a better class of people on social media?) But I was interested in this project: Alex Cox directing Bill the Galactic Hero with film students as cast and crew. Cox has been doing microbudget features for years—they're like extended, radical SNL skits, but funny. Bill is no exception.

It's hard to make a film with $150,000, especially when one insists on shooting on 35mm film rather than DV or even 16mm. Harder still when it's SF. Luckily, the source novel by Harry Harrison is plenty goofy and can only be dealt with as a nostalgia piece at this point. A fair number of its themes and jokes and whatnot can be found in more recent books and films (e.g., Hitchiker's Guide), and Harrison's vision of down-on-their-luck suckers fighting a losing war isn't quite what America is experiencing now: a volunteer force overwhelming developing nations militarily and technologically, but being routinely partially thwarted in its imperial designs by insurgencies anyway, while spawning new generations of opponents. Think Forever Peace, not Forever War. It's a Vietnam movie in an Afghanistan era.

The trailer:



Anyway, the movie. It's an often very funny student film, well-directed. Like many student films, the sound is a bit of a mess. In addition to the usual issue with microfeatures—the bizarre idea that anyone with arms can be a boom operator—most of the cast wears either bubble helmets, or masks, all the time. It begins with some animation, crude but in color, and when the scene shifts to space it becomes B/W—almost like The Wizard of Oz in reverse.

To be a Trooper is to be in a ridiculous battle against the enormous (tiny) ruthless (docile) and deadly (pacifist) Chingers (Chingers). Bil (two l's are for officers) lucks his way into heroism and medals, and then everything gets worse thanks to the immensely wealthy planet Helior, as played by several interesting buildings. Bill is very much in the mode of cult books/films—an alienated outsider finds himself trapped in a world he didn't create, soaring to the top of it and then crashing back to the bottom (sometimes vice-versa). The cult fiction of the book/script meshes fairly well with the cult look of the microbudget film. It feels 70s or early 80s, indie film before She's Gotta Have it and other "calling card" pictures.

Is it a good movie? Sure, it's fun! Does it offer the typical experience of a film adaptation, despite being much closer to the source text than most adaptations? Not at all. Partially because it's closer than most adaptations while depending on a heavily symbolic/gestural visual language that doesn't even attempt verisimilitude—not with sets and effects (obviously) or acting or cinematography. If you're ready for that—and you should be, having grown up on either 1970s paperback cover art or 1980s eight-bit video games, check out this film when you get the chance.