Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy

a wonderful story with a hint of adultism not bad for the time it was made

The Good Things
*The film has good video quality. A few color shifts and particles on the print perhaps, but is mostly clear, sharp, and colorful.
*Some parts are actually pretty cool. The angelic alien and the Black Queen are great, and there are one or two neat fight scenes.
*Some symbolism (particuarly some phalyc symbols).
*Acting is not bad. A few good lines.
*The costumes are excellent (although some people may find them too outlandish).
*Some sets are great, with imaginative designs and props. As noted below, however, other sets are awful.
*It is presented in Widescreen. Includes English and French audio.

The Bad Things
*Some sets are great. Other sets are just plain terrible. Barbarella's ship is made of ugly brown shag carpet and moves in pretty lame ways to unconvincingly simulate movement. Another set was made entirely out of bags of air. On the other hand, this may just be something else great to laugh at.
*Jane Fonda seems to act pretty well in this film, but her character is terrible. She acts stupidly and shows hardly any backbone. She's attacked by little dolls and birds, and she's so helpless! Maybe it's just the times, but I would have liked it much better if Barbarella was actually a strong and intelligent person instead of a ditz.
*The plot is unremarkable. Barbarella has a task to find a mad scientists. She winds up falling from one peril to another, almost always as a result of dumb luck more than anything.
*Not for kids. Contains some nudity, a bit of violence, and other parts of implied sexuality.
*No subtitles.
*No special features.

The Questionable Things
*Some parts are completely laughable, usually unintentionally.
*This whole film must have been made by hippies. Aside from the outdated styles, there's also a lot of talk of peace ("Now why would anybody want to create a weapon?!" she asks...), love ("love" becoming a universal salutation apparently), and free love (which runs rampant throughout). The whole film is loaded with ideas like this; some people may enjoy them, others may hate them. I found it very laughable.
*Special effects may be slick for its time, but are notably outdated. It's similar to "Fantastic Voyage," only worse.
*Goofy sound effects.
*The music is very groovy and upbeat, adding to the psychadelic feel of the film. Some people seem to like it. I hate it.

This film is so bad, you'll either love it or hate it. The whole thing plays out like a sci-fi/fantasy version of "Austin Powers." There is a whole world of better sci-fi and fantasy, but if you want extreme cheesiness, this is the best in that regard.

I've seen a few scant bits of information, indicating that Robert Rodriguez is trying to remake the film. He can't do any worse than this, so I'll be looking forward to it...

"Barbarella" turns forty years old, the year this is written. If anything, its silliness has just gotten sillier over time.

Fonda herself embodies the biggest of the changes since this movie was made. This stars the old, giggly, pre-feminist, pre-political Fonda, the one willing to strip-tease all the way down to her sweet self during the opening credits. Another set of social changes happened when the Sexual Revolution turned into the AIDS Era. Back then, sex was good fun between grownups. So, in keeping with the times, casual (but not challenging) kinds of nudity appear throughout. This flick stands as close to Buck Rogers as to the current day, so borrows from Buck in the subtlety of acting, complexity of plot, and depth of characters - i.e., not a lot of any of them. The effects show it a pure product of its own time, though: blobby opticals with mattwork that looks naive to today's viewers. Then there's the costuming - imagine Mardi Gras, I mean the part that attentive parents steer their kiddies away from, blocks away, then add a Hollytwood budget. Barbarella's Lucite bra (that must have been uncomfortable) and Duran Duran's ocean-liner outfit stand out, but hardly represent the limit of what appears here.

The movie starts with a cute blonde (the 1968 version of Fonda) luxuriously undressing in a fur-lined spaceship - pink spaceship, if you must know. Let that image set your expectations. Back then, it was daring but campy. Now it looks cheesy and campy, but I mean that in the nicest way.

-- wiredweird

Totally awful movie. I can understand why Jane Fonda was so embarassed for years.

I can remember standing in a long line to get in to see this movie back in 1968, the year it was originally released. I was 12 years old, and my dad had dropped off me and my best friend, thinking that we were going to watch another juvenille sci-fi extravaganza, for which I had developed an extreme fondness. It was the dead of winter and there was snow falling, but we perservered, having heard that we would have the opportunity to see Jane Fonda buck naked, and, above all else, we wanted to be the first in our school to lay claim to that dubious achievement. However, the lady in the ticket booth had other ideas. Although we were 12 years old, we looked no older than 9 or 10, which didn't matter anyway, since we needed to be 16 to get into the movie. So, we didn't see "Barbarella", or Jane Fonda's flaunted nudity, and my father had to immediately turn around and make an 18 mile drive back to pick us up in falling snow, with my mom lecturing him, loudly, all the way home about "parental responsibility" and "pornography". And so it was that, 40 years later, give or take, I decided to order "Barbarella" from Amazon and find out what the fuss was all about and why I couldn't get into see this movie back when it first came out.

Well, for starters, there is nudity, for sure, but it's often fleeting and almost demure. There are breasts, a glimpse of buttocks, and...wait...was that what it looked like? Hard to tell and, at this stage, even harder to care. Jane looks good in the title role and she's funny; "Barbarella" may have been the last time that she was allowed to demonstrate any comic ability in a film for almost a decade. Sure, she was sensational in "Klute", perfection in "Julia" and "Coming Home", but she was a lot more fun in "Barbarella".

There's not much plot worth writing about. Barbarella is a sort of agent for the planet Earth, who drifts through the universe correcting wrongs and fighting evildoers. She travels in an outrageous spaceship driven by a computer that talks to her (not unlike HAL in "2001"). The always watchable David Hemmings is on hand as handsome Dildano, with whom she engages in a literal hand-to-hand sex ritual; hirsute Ugo Tognazzi engages her the old-fashioned way, leaving her sated and singing. And John Phillip Law is both blind and blonde as the angel Pygar, who manages to offend the Black Queen (Anita Pallenberg) by rebuffing her sexual advances, proclaiming, "An angel doesn't make love, an angel is love."

It's all very silly and tastefully lewd, on a sophomoric, 60's-era, "Tonight Show" level (and don't get me wrong, I loved Johnny Carson and my dad was the "Tonight Show's" biggest fan). Despite the presence of some very big names of the time, it doesn't add up to much, and a certain degree of tedium creeps in after awhile. Still, the acting is tongue-in-cheek, the sets are wacky and colorful, and there is a sexy innocence about the whole enterprise that strikes me as being very much in context with the times; in that respect, though worlds apart, Antonioni's "Blow Up" has some of that same carefree attitude. Director Roger Vadim (Fonda's then-husband) seems to embrace the spirit of the '60's without ever imbuing his film with much substance.

The quality of this DVD seems variable, for some strange reason. There are scenes where the colors are beautiful and vibrant, and suddenly the scene is transformed into a muddy murk, before the vibrancy just as suddenly returns. It doesn't really interfere with the enjoyment of the film; "Barbarella" is much too slight to be affected by minor color distortions.

Was it worth waiting 40 years to see? For me, the answer is yes, but mainly as a curiosity piece more than anything. It's not great cinema by any means, but it holds a nostalgic place in my mind of a time that is so radically different from the world we're currently living in, as to seem almost inconceivable. "Barbarella" is my own proof that 1968 did, indeed, exist, that it wasn't a beautiful fable where people still had audacious dreams and the courage to pursue their beliefs.