2001: A Space Travesty
October. 31,2000 RWhen odd reports are received through official channels stating that the President of the United States is being held captive on a secret international moon base called Vegan and that he has been replaced on Earth by a clone, the US Marshall Service immediately sends their 'best' man, Dix, on the mission.
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Reviews
Excellent, Without a doubt!!
Best movie of this year hands down!
Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast
what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
Please don't get me wrong - I love comedy in the Absurd, Slapstick, or even outright Silly categories, and can stomach a heaping bowlful of saucy schtick in a single sitting. I so love Nielsen in a comedy role, and so wanted Ezio Greggio to have a follow-up to his Silence of the Hams, but this movie was so contrived and unbearable that I could only power through what seemed to be a five-hour dignity slaughter by killing a bottle of whiskey with countless toasts to a Dracula, Dead and Loving It poster.My second star was piteously donated from my regard for Nielsen and Greggio, and my third mindlessly to the impressive budget that was dedicated to this eye-gouger. It really needed to have a Brooks, Zucker or Abrahams to help it through, but it didn't.I understand that Nielsen (God bless his soul) had been suffering a lull in his career at the time ...as he had gone slapstick, and was not attractive to the big hitter producers. This was a dreadful follow-up to Mr Magoo and wrongfully Accused, and his career had never really recovered. He was posthumously honoured by the Academy for his noteworthy career.I will probably scrub through this again just to see Nielsen and Greggio again, out of my best regards ...or perhaps not.
Now I do like spoof movies, when they are funny and done right. There are some funny spoofs around, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety and Loaded Weapon 1 for example, but the spoof genre has also had some excrement such as Disaster Movie and Epic Movie. 2001: A Space Travesty is not as bad as any of the worst of Friedberg and Seltzer. However, that is not saying much, 2001:A Space Travesty is still a terrible movie, being contrived, embarrassing and unfunny and it makes you think what possessed Leslie Nielson to take on this project.As I said in the review title, the irony in the word "travesty" is correct. To be honest, while hardly clever or original the title is the best asset of this movie, as well as the end credits which was the only time in the entire movie when I cracked a smile, you know immediately there is something wrong when that is the case. The production values are cheap, with the costumes more reminiscent of fancy dress, shoddy camera work, dismal special effects and wobbly sets. The soundtrack is poorly thought out, In the Navy by The Three Tenors especially felt as though it was shoe horned in.The story is predictable and almost a non-event, the pace didn't draw me in in any way and the direction was decidedly patchy. Also the characters are little more than stereotypes and caricatures and really bad ones at that with names that felt like poor Carry On lampoons. The acting is terrible, yes including from the talented Leslie Nielson. Nielson shows he can be funny as with Naked Gun and Airplane, which are comedy classics in my opinion, but he overacts and mugs shamelessly here which saddened me hugely. Everyone else either overplay, are bland or seem to be playing themselves. Worse is the humour, the film just isn't funny and is filled with the crude and vulgar kind of humour that doesn't come close to the inspired zaniness of the best of the spoof genre. The homages and references to sci-fis such as 2001:A Space Odyssey(one of my favourite films) are obvious and poorly thought out and the script is abysmal and didn't make me laugh one time.In conclusion, not the worst of the genre but a mess all the same. 2/10 Bethany Cox
Poor in all the other aspects. The plot isn't watchable, the actors look lazy, the story runs slowly and have few jokes that aren't that funny. Having a trip around the outer space was good to arrange some funny moments, but the writers and the directors didn't avail this place very well. Also, 99 minutes for a comedy-idiot movie like this is too much. Look others of the same genre: Disaster Movie: 87 minutes Superhero Movie: 75 minutes Meet the Spartans: 86 minutesGolstein could have noticed this, made more quickly jokes and less stupid development.
This is another spoof movie starring Leslie Nielsen, and I first heard of it a while ago, and knew it was obviously a sci-fi spoof. The title is derived from Stanley Kubrick's groundbreaking 1968 film, "2001: A Space Odyssey", though this film is certainly not entirely a parody of that one. I've seen that particular Kubrick movie several times, but was not as impressed with it during my last viewing, in January 2008. Still, the title of this 2000 comedy, "2001: A Space Travesty", was what brought it to my attention, since I obviously know where this title came from. I could see that this was not one of Nielsen's popular spoofs, but after a while, and only about 24 hours after first watching "Airplane!", an earlier parody film with Nielsen (and a MUCH better one) this week, I watched this despised sci-fi comedy. While I didn't find it to be QUITE as bad as many others have (maybe most other people who have seen in at some point in the past decade think it's worse than I do), I still thought it was a lousy attempt at comedy, so I can't defend it.Marshall "Dick" Dix is a clumsy detective who is informed that the President of the United States (a nameless character, but obviously based on Bill Clinton) is being held captive on a moon base called Vegan and has been replaced by a clone! The detective is sent out of Earth's atmosphere to this moon base, on a mission to rescue the real president and find out who's responsible for the crime. He is accompanied on this mission by an officer named Cassandra Menage. Together, the two of them make it to Vegan, where they see that there are many beings around, both human and alien. Dix and Menage begin their inspection, which will obviously not be helped by Dix's clumsiness. After defeating the evil Dr. Griffin Pratt and his hoodlums in a fight, thanks largely to Menage's martial arts skills, the two inspectors escape from the moon and take the president with them. Back on Earth, Dix puts who he thinks is the real president back in the White House, but it turns out he has just replaced the real president with the clone! Even though the detective has messed up, it's still up to him to save his home planet, so the mission which started with a trip to the moon now continues on Earth! "2001: A Space Odyssey" is obviously too slow paced for some viewers, and it did seem too slow to me the last time I watched it, but with only one viewing of "2001: A Space TRAVESTY", it seemed to me that it had the opposite problem, it was too fast! The direction seems so rushed and unfocused, and so does Leslie Nielsen's narration. Unfortunately, the problems certainly don't end here. The movie is full of very juvenile and unfunny humour, and since it's a comedy, that's its main problem. This already shows during the opening sequence and is featured in many other scenes, including the penis jokes about the main protagonist's name, Dix trying to use a spaceship toilet on the way to the moon just as the artificial gravity is turned off, a human on the moon coming out of the bathroom covered in alien waste, condoms which are found later in the film, etc. There are so many gags here which obviously took no comedic talent whatsoever to come up with! Not only does the toilet humour fail, so does the slapstick, with such occurrences as Dix accidentally making a huge mess during his inspection on Vegan. The gags generally seem like they were just thrown in with very little or no thought put into them. In addition to that, the film also seemed too noisy to me.Unfortunately, with all this movie's flaws, it's most certainly a misfire. Leslie Nielsen's character here is like Lieutenant Frank Drebin, his character in the "Naked Gun" series (they're both clumsy detectives), but if you're a fan of any or all of those movies, that certainly doesn't mean you're guaranteed to like this later spoof. I remember one time when I was in high school, a student was banned from my school bus route after playing with a dildo during the ride home and giving the bus driver attitude when he told him to get off the bus. "2001: A Space Travesty" seems like it was written by hyperactive high school students like that guy! I'll admit, I did smile at times while watching this film, but this was VERY rare, and I never actually laughed. Not only did it not make me laugh, I may have had a slight headache while watching it, which the film didn't help. Yes, my rating for this sci-fi spoof is 4/10, which is higher than what seems to be the most popular rating for it, but I still don't like it. I even feel like 4/10 just might be too generous, and know that many people would believe that saying this rating is too generous is an understatement! If you've never watched this unpopular 2000 comedy, I strongly suggest you don't, whether you like Nielsen's comedy roles in general or not.