Austin School of Film

Sam J. Jones, Melody Anderson, Max von Sydow. Dir. Mike Hodges.

I'm going to lay my cards out on the table: Flash Gordon is a magnum opus of pulp filmmaking. Every shot is built from a structure of carefully placed elements that speak to artistic influences from a selection of disciplines other than film: architecture, fashion, photography, comic book art, colour design.

This can be disorienting to the general moviegoing public; no wonder Flash Gordon did so badly at the box office. But if you know your way around a pulp rag, you won't mind when colour and form starts narrating story, rather than just prettying up the place. Throughout the film Hodges stays true to comics format: every shot is a new panel, every line a new speech bubble. Flash's yellow hair says that this man is your protagonist. Forget nuance, forget the feel-good lessons of high-school flicks: the angle of his jaw is honestly square, not brutally stupid. Members of the tyrant's entourage show belonging with needlessly angular uniforms. Chekov doesn't use a gun in pulp comics - if the entire set can be coloured in three inks except for one door, you know where to find your masked assailant - and Flash Gordon follows this rule religiously. The sound design provides a healthy quota of instrumental "Bang"s, "Pow"s, and "Kablooie"s. Thanks, Queen! Only the band who did Radio Ga-Ga could have pulled it off.

I'll dissect a scene for you visually: a shuttle passes through the cosmos of 60s and 70s VFX - oil and water wormholes, spreading ink droplet nebulas - crash landing in a tray of dirt seeded with moonrock pebbles, surrounded by sharply lit silicone mountains. We're treated to a splash page, lush with colour: in the courtyard of a red and purple metal palace, soldiers wearing gleaming gold armour approach the shuttle (yellow, lit with lilac), its nose buried in black sand. Inside, the occupants compose a scene from a Lichtenstein silkscreen, printed in two colours to save ink costs; someone took the effort to let us know that this is just a plot panel, down to the tonal variations that come with dot-shading and cross-hatch lowlights.

If "Flash Gordon" were just pulp breathlessly transposed into celluloid, it would be a different experience: fun, occasionally grating, sometimes boring. It's not, though, and thank god - pulp magazine dialogue doesn't pull any punches, and on screen all those exclamation points would get really old, really fast. Instead, the main actors underplay their parts. Whilst being led through (presumably their first) alien palace, Flash and Token Ingenue talk broadsheet politics and discuss going home as if they might miss the last train. Their delivery is reminiscent of a tête-à-tête over brunch and coffee rather than a hostage situation. But their performance has depth - the emotions seem real, if strangely calm. They react to their surroundings with cool heads: pragmatically, without bothering to harp on things like, "Why should I now trust the mad scientist who pushed me into a rocket against my will," or, "What are the repercussions/implications of making First Contact?".

Why was it done this way, I wonder? The most sensible explanation is that Flash Gordon is an homage to pulp comics, but made by a film professional. Hodges seems to respect his medium: he knows that his actors must play down their lines to support such outrageous design lest they look hammy, and to make Flash Gordon campy without being laughable. He loves pulp for its talents (plots, visuals, ideas, ambiance) and doesn't bother supporting its weaknesses (characterization, dialogue, emotional depth), which he gently supplants with the strengths of film.

Stars dot this strange sky: Max von Sydow, who manages to somehow underplay Ming the Merciless, Timothy Dalton, swinging his cape rather sweetly to the tune of Errol Flynn or perhaps Tyrone Powers, Brian Blessed in short shorts, a cameo by the as-yet-unknown Robbie Coltrane.

Flash Gordon doesn't take itself seriously, but anything crafted so carefully and cleverly deserves to have cult status - and while Flash does retain some fans, I don't see it screened on B-movie nights as much as I'd like. This is how comic book films should be made. (I admit, I have a soft spot for Batman's schizoid catalogue of adaptations, but they're not nearly this good.) Hodges manages to take all the best bits - all the bits on your childhood VHS collection that are divided in thirds by lines of neon static, that no number of tracking buttons in the universe can fix - and stick them all together with nothing in between. This whole film is "the best bits": a few hours of oversaturated, pulpy glee.

Kate Tracy