Finding the Galaxy

From 1978 to 1982, viewers enthusiastically watched the adventures of the crew of the Protector starship. The series was finished shooting 18 years ago, and since then its stars participate only in conventions and store presentations - neither new films, nor decent earnings. The artists are tired of the images stuck to them, tired of saying the same remarks from the film, they are insulted that they made a toy for teenagers. The only actor who still enjoys his popularity is Jason Nesmith ( Allen ), the "commander" of the star crew.

At one of the conventions, a group of fans who make up for aliens approach Jason and ask him to help them in some very important matter. Jason takes them for fans who want to make their own video with his participation, and easily agrees. They send a limo for him and take him to their “movie studio”. There, Jason is struck by the realism of the layouts and the thoughtfulness of the details, right down to the aliens scurrying around the ship. He quickly enters the role of captain, they explain to him the task - to resolve the conflict with the warlike alien ship led by Sarris. Without thinking twice, Jason orders the crew to open fire on Sarris's ship. Having decided that this ended his role in the performance, he asks to return him home, but instead of traveling in a limousine, he goes to Earth through interplanetary space in a gelatin transport “capsule”. Only after that he realizes that he really was in space. It turns out that Metezar and other "fans" are terms - a peaceful and naive race of cephalopods , who, having accepted the twenty-year broadcasts of the series "In Search of the Galaxy" from Earth and having no idea of fiction , considered the television series "historical chronicles." Watching the dizzying adventures of the Protector’s crew and how brilliantly earthlings emerge from the most difficult situations, the terminians believed in their greatness. Since then, they have changed their society according to the "teachings" of the series, even building an exact copy of Protector. Special devices allow them to look like people, but their speech and manners still remain far from human.

Jason is impressed with the idea of ​​looking like a hero for real aliens, and he takes his "crew" to the ship. Along the way, he inadvertently exchanges a communicator (a means of communication like a mobile phone), received from the termin, with Brandon ( Long ), an avid fan of the series. Since the "Protector" is real, then Sarris is also not an invention. Sarris is a ruthless reptilian governor who deals with the genocide of the terman. Actors, in order to help the terms, have to play their roles for real. In exchange for safety, Sarris's terminology requires Omega 13, a device built by the termins inside the ship, again copied from the series. Omega 13 was mentioned only once at the very end of the series, so no one knows its purpose.

After the battle with Sarris’s ship, the Protector barely escapes from it, badly damaged by enemy missiles and a minefield through which they managed to fly. To repair the power supply system, the crew needs a new sphere of beryllium . The crew sits on another planet, where they have to flee from a group of small, goblin-like predators. Jason, the last of the fleeing, is captured by local monsters who sacrifice him for a monster made of stone ("gorygnak" in their language, which means "rock" in translation). He dodges the monster as best he can, and finally, with the help of a teleporting device, he is saved by actor Fred ( Shalub ), who plays the sergeant technique in the series.

In the end, the Protector is captured by the soldiers of Sarris. Jason tries to save his friends, admitting that “Finding the Galaxy” is a movie. Realizing that Omega 13 is nothing more than a fiction, Sarris orders his lieutenant to arrange overload of the reactor on the Protector and to let out air in the halls where the termians are kept (the last representatives of his race, since their homeworld was destroyed by Sarris) . Sarris then orders the cast into space. However, just before the decisive moment, the artists, recalling an episode from the ".. seventeenth .." series, start a fight, thereby diverting the attention of the escorts. Actor Alexander ( Rickman ), who plays Dr. Lazarus in the series, is trying to settle scores with Jason, men are clutching heavy objects that have come to hand, but instead of thrashing each other, they attack the aliens who did not expect such a turn of events. Then the crew begins to gradually recapture the ship, trying to prevent the explosion of the reactor and the death of the termin from suffocation. To do this, they are separated: Jason and Gwen ( Weaver ) follow into the reactor compartment to stop the reactor, Alexander and the terminist Quelleck try to save the rest of the term, Fred and his assistant Guy ( Rockwell ) - an actor who starred in one episode of the series and accidentally stuck to the main heroes - fight with the soldiers of Sarris, and Tommy ( Mitchell ) trains to pilot the ship.

Jason communicates through a communicator with Brandon and his fellow friends who know even more about Protector than the term itself. Brandon sequentially shows the way to Jason and Gwen through the ship’s dangerous internal systems into the reactor compartment. Along the way, Brandon speculates that the Omega 13 throws the ship and crew back in time for 13 seconds, rather than annihilating the universe in 13 seconds, as Sarris thought. At least he and his friends came to this conclusion, studying the ship for a long time. The commander and Gwen get to the reactor, but can not stop the countdown. It turns out that since in the series they always stopped him 1 second before the explosion, here the countdown stops only at the last moment, like in a movie.

Meanwhile, Alexander and Quelleck manage to save other terms, but Quelleck mortally wounds the soldier of Sarris. Alexander, astonished by the alien’s devotion to his fictional character, begins to play the role of Dr. Lazarus seriously and, having uttered his “crown” phrase from the movie “I swear by Graptor’s hammer, you will be avenged”, raises the termin rebellion against aggressors. Fred and Guy manage to destroy part of Sarris’s soldiers by teleporting aboard the gorignak - a stone man from whom Jason nearly died.

Having returned the ship, the crew again sees Sarris on the screen. As before, Sarris’s flagship is much stronger than the Protector, but Jason orders Tommy to fly through the recently abandoned minefield, throwing all the ship’s energy into defense, not attack. When there is almost no energy left, the commander orders to deploy the ship and go to the ram of the ship Sarris. After a short spectacular dialogue between the ship’s commander and Sarris triumphing his victory, a small brisk “Protector” passes the minefield, turns around, and self-propelled magnetic mines that the “Protector” lured behind themselves crash into the adversary’s ship.

The crew returns to the wheelhouse to celebrate the victory. Alexander is trying to draw the attention of the crew to a bunch of energy that separated from the enemy’s ship before the explosion, but the actors are too excited. Sarris, who entered the ship under the guise of Fred, enters the command compartment and freely shoots all members of the star crew. Dying, Jason orders Metezar to activate Omega 13. The device, indeed, throws the commander back 13 seconds, and this time is enough for Jason, with the help of Metesar, who infinitely trusts him, to save the team.

The ship cannot land on Earth, therefore, having transferred command to Metezar, Jason and his team undock the command compartment and make an emergency landing right in the convention building, where their next meeting with the fans was about to take place. One by one, the crew enters the stage, but Sarris also leaves after them, who, as a “cinematic” as usual, were only wounded but not killed. Jason disintegrates him in front of an enthusiastic audience who believes that this is only a continuation of a great show. The rest of the terminians continue their adventures as the new crew of the Protector. Termian Laliali stays with Fred, whom she fell in love with.

And here is the continuation of the series “In Search of the Galaxy” on the screen. The team has two new crew members - Laliali (assistant sergeant-technician) and Guy (security chief).

• Commander / Captain Peter Quincy Taggard , played by Jason Nesmith ( Tim Allen ), an analogue of James Tiberius Kirk / William Shatner . Taggard takes off his shirt for any reason, makes unnecessary flip-flops and makes outdated remarks. Nesmith is an egoist who considers himself the central figure of the series and a favorite of the public.
• Dr. Lazarus from Tev'Mek , played by Sir Alexander Dane ( Alan Rickman ), a member of the alien race known for its intelligence. Apparently, Lazarus is very smart and has psi abilities. The alien’s favorite ritual phrase is “In the name of the hammer of Graptor, in the name of the sons of Varvan, you will be avenged!” By this he mimics Spock and, possibly, Worf . Also, his name ( Lazarus ) describes a person who returned from the other world, which happened to Spock. In “reality”, Alexander Dane is a tired “Shakespearean” actor and Englishman who hates his typical role. Dane always wears a mockup of Lazarus's huge skull on her head.
• Lt. Toney Madison , played by Gwen DiMarco ( Sigourney Weaver ), Protector computer and communications officer. Her work in the series is a request for information to the ship's computer (this leads to the fact that the computer created by the terms accepts only her commands). She is a mixture of several Star Trek women, especially Uhura . Like them, she wears a tight-fitting uniform, which leads to the fact that many people cannot take their eyes off her chest. The character Gwen himself is the opposite of Ellen Ripley , the Weaver character in the Alien movie series, that is, she is anti-Ripley - a stereotype of a stupid blonde with a meaningless task.
• Sergeant Technician Chen , played by Fred Kwan ( Tony Shalub ), is Protector’s chief engineer and digital conveyor operator (an analogue of the Path transporter). His name is Chen, a typical Chinese name, even though Shalub is an American of Libyan descent . This also mimics some of the national inconsistencies in Star Trek. For example, Nunien Sun sounds like something derived from Hindi / Chinese / Korean names, but clearly is not one of the three. Also, the British accent of Captain Picard does not fit in with his French roots. Chen most likely is a parody of the engineer Montgomery Scott , played by Canadian actor James Doohan . Actor Fred Kwan behaves quite calmly in most situations.
• Lieutenant Laredo , played by Tommy Webber ( Daryl Mitchell - adult; Corbin Bleu - child), is a very young wunderkind pilot, reminiscent of Wesley Cracher . Webber also mimics many of the actors who have lost their fame as they grow older.
• Crewman No. 6 , played by Guy Fligman ( Sam Rockwell ), begins the story as a “Kesterian” ( tracks ) and a little-known actor living with his mother. He considers the appearance in the series the best moment of his life - like a “red shirt” , killed by a lava monster in episode 81 before the first commercial break. Once in a real mess, Guy begins to panic, being sure that he will die first. However, later he shows courage, and after the resumption of the series at the end of the film, the more self-confident Fligman becomes one of the main crew members - the chief of security named “Rock” Ingersol.
• General Roth'h'ar Sarris ( Robin Sachs ), a typical evil alien whose name was borrowed from critic Andrew Sarris . Sarris wants to get Omega 13, although he himself does not know what it is.
• Brandon ( Justin Long ), an ardent fan of the series, who at the beginning of the film was offended by Jason, but at a critical moment, he resorted to his help. His thorough knowledge of the ship helps the team defeat the enemy.

• In 1998, actor Peter Jurasic , known for his role as Londo Mollari in the series Babylon 5 , wrote the novel The Diplomatic Act. In this book, the main character is an actor from a science fiction series that is being abducted by aliens, considering him a real character.
• On DVD there is a selection of the Omega 13 menu. By pressing the viewer sees how the screen saver returns to the beginning and continues as if nothing had happened.
• In the film, Diane Bahar starred as an alien engineer, but most of his scenes were cut and are present only in the full DVD version.

• Finding the Galaxy on the Internet Movie Database
• Finding the Galaxy on the Metacritic website
• “Finding the Galaxy” on the Rotten Tomatoes website