"Space Station 76" is too comfortable with its near-plotlessness, its 94 minutes feel padded, and there are moments where it runs out of gas (rocket fuel?), yet the tone is so special that it turns what might've been aesthetic crimes in another film into misdemeanors. The scene where Glenn struggles not to admit that he can't accept a woman as an equal has that eerily poker-faced quality we associate with sci-fi movies from other time periods that congratulate themselves on being "advanced." (Almost every film's values become campy if you wait long enough.) This kind of genial joshing isn't enough to sustain an entire movie, but it has its charms, mainly because everything onscreen seems to have been put there not to score points or wring cheap laughs, but because somebody involved with the production had an itch that needed scratching. "Space Station 76" is one of those viewing experiences where you're often not sure if the artists are kidding, and if so, about what. Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler films have conditioned us to jeer at the sorts of flat, Wonder Bread-bland characters that populate the main cast, but you can't, because in their sitcommish way, they're suffering (especially Sunshine, whose big meltdown is heartrending).
That the movie is ten times lovelier than it needed to be confuses things further (delightfully so). The art direction, costumes, effects, lighting and camerawork are committed to beauty for beauty's sake, to the point where you might respond to "Space Station 76" not as a sendup of its sources but as a lucid cinematic dream about them. Adapted from a Los Angeles stage production (the script is credited to multiple writers) and made for a pittance, it's a handcrafted art object filled with surprising grace notes: meditative inserts of icy asteroids crashing soundlessly into each other; a shot of a shuttle zipping past two stars (one violet, the other velvet blue) that might be disco lights wreathed in smoke. During musical interludes scored to '70s pop, we move from character to character and watch them tryst and suffer and fail to connect, as if the movie secretly wants to be "Shampoo" or "Boogie Nights" in space but can't muster the nerve.
I have no idea who the audience for this film is, beyond the people who made it, and that's what makes it special.
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