Glaxy Quest

>How Galaxy Quest is postmodern.

November 21, 2004

Postmodernism is concerns the incorporation of the time setting of the author in a piece of work. The time frame is a reference to the events that have occurred until the 1980s. It is the emphasis on modernism where the meaning and value of the things we find in our world are viewed. The process in which things are defined as real or unreal merge and the question of this "boundary" become blurred.

Galaxy Quest is a movie where a show has become the focus for reality. Where the imagination holds truth and the once unreal interacts with the real. It is the perverted vision of role playing, and extends the fact that what is faked or acted out, could ultimately be something that must be done. The commander and his crew, in order to save the alien race must actually act as a commander and crew. They must actually function as what they've only pretended to do.

How things are seen or the way they are thought about does not necessarily prove that it is real. This idea is extended in postmodernism and in Galaxy Quest. The science fiction conventions show that there are people in this world who are willing to dedicate their lives to an alternate reality and take part in human imagination. The little kids who lived as if they were commanders themselves ended up being an essential tool in saving the alien race. Their knowledge of such a far fetched obsession gave them a surprisingly valuable and heroic role in the movie.

Galaxy Quest captures some of the qualities looked for in a postmodern piece of work. It is an evaluation of the relationship between what’s fake and reality. It is an impossibility that could be possible or impossible.