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Barbarella (1968)

Paramount Home Entertainment
Blu-ray Disc Released: 7/3/2012

All Ratings out of
Movie: 1/2
Video:
Audio:
Extras:

Review by Mike Long, Posted on 7/4/2012

When a movie is being made which is set in the present, shrewd costume designers and production designers will do what they can to avoid specific looks of the time so that the movie can avoid having a dated looked in the future. Of course, a dated look is often unavoidable, especially when the filmmakers are naive. ("Bell-bottoms will never go out of style. Let's put everyone in bell-bottoms!") However, if one is making a science-fiction movie, the idea of looking dated is moot, right? How can something which is set far, far in the future look like it was from a specific time? How can this happen? Just ask Barbarella, because it does this feat with ease.

Barbarella (Jane Fonda) is an astronaut of some sort, who apparently lives on-board a spaceship...a spaceship which has shag carpeting. She receives a message from The President of Earth (Claude Dauphin), who instructs Barbarella to journey to the distant planet Tau Ceti in order to rescue Durand Durand, a scientist who has invented a very dangerous weapon. Barbarella makes the journey to the planet, crash-landing there. She is aided by Mark Hand (Ugo Tognazzi), who, in exchange for...favors..., instructs Barbarella to journey to the city of Sogo to find the man she's looking for. She attempts to travel there, but her ship crashes again. (Seriously?) In the labyrinth on the outskirts of the Sogo, she meets Pygar (John Phillip Law), a blind angel, and Professor Ping (Marcel Marceau), a scientist who agrees to repair her ship. With the help of Pygar, Barbarella enters Sogo, but soon finds herself at the mercy of The Great Tyrant (Anita Pallenberg). Surrounded by evil, Barbarella must find a way to complete her mission.

Barbarella is well-known for two things. First, it was directed by Roger Vadim, who was married to star Jane Fonda at the time. Secondly, the film opens with Fonda doing a strip-tease (with glimpses of nudity) while floating weightless. Notice that Barbarella isn't well-known for being a good movie. That's because it isn't. However, that's not for the sake of not trying.

Produced by Dino De Laurentis, calling Barbarella lavish would be a wild understatement. Costing a reported $9 million -- which would be quite a sum today -- the movie is filled with large, elaborate sets and flashy costumes. Vadim's goal was clearly to not only re-create the world of the source comic book, but to place the viewer in a futuristic world the likes of which they'd never seen. The result is a big, flashy movie which has wall-to-wall colors and shiny surfaces, none of which resemble anything seen on Earth, so in that instance, he certainly succeeded. The costumes, most notably Fonda's, are very noteworthy and take high-fashion and insane inspiration to create concoctions of leather, feathers, plastic, and tights.

However, the film's slick look can't overcome the fact that it's brain-dead. The movie is episodic to a fault and we are simply treated to one independent scene after another showing Barbarella on her quest. The search for Durand Durand simply serves as an excuse for Barbarella to run into one weird person after another and an excuse for her to change costumes. (More on that in a moment.) The movie also never decides what its tone should be. While the look and story are clearly science fiction, the movie also wants to present itself as being fun and whimsical. However, it's never funny and any attempts at humor, even tongue-in-cheek humor fall flat. The movie also can't decide just how sexy it wants to be. It's awfully strange for a Blu-ray Disc to open with the MPAA's familiar "PG" logo and then show Jane Fonda getting naked. Barbarella's clothes are often being torn off, hence the costume changes, and everyone she meets seduces her, but the movie is very coy about mentioning sex specifically. But, how coy can a movie be when a character is placed in a deadly pleasure machine. The movie should have avoided sex altogether or gone for broke, as its middle of the road approach doesn't work.

Barbarella is yet another of those older movies which I'd read about for years but never gotten around to seeing until now. So, imagine my surprise when I saw how influential this movie was/is. De Laurentis clearly didn't learn any lessons on Barbarella, when he made a very similar movie with 1980's Flash Gordon -- a movie which has a nearly identical look and feel. While this made sense, I was floored to find that major plot points from Ghostbusters II and Demolition Man were lifted directly from Barbarella. I'd never seen these two items mentioned before, but they jump out at you as you watch Barbarella.

One only has to watch a few moments of Barbarella to pinpoint this as a movie from the swinging sixties. It's full of free love and psychedelia, and very short on story and logic. It’s certainly worth seeing for the sets and costumes and for the delicious Ms. Fonda, but don’t expect to be bowled over by the story.

Barbarella makes me look forward to the fashions of the future on Blu-ray Disc courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment. The film has been letterboxed at 2.35:1 and the Disc contains an AVC 1080p HD transfer which runs at an average of 30 Mbps. For a movie which is over 30 years old, the image is sharp and clear. There is a slight amount of grain here and the occasional black dot from the source material, but otherwise it looks very good. The lavish colors look very good, most notably strong blues and reds. The image is never overly dark or bright. The level of detail is good, but the picture does look a bit flat at times. The Disc carries a Dolby TrueHD mono audio track which runs at 48 kHz and an average of 1.1 Mbps. The track provides clear dialogue and sound effects. Being a mono track, we don’t get any spectacular effects, but the dialogue is always audible and the “this would be perfect in Austin Powers” music comes through clearly.

The lone extra on the Barbarella Blu-ray Disc is a THEATRICAL TRAILER for the film. It's nearly 3 1/2 minutes long, cheesy, and gives a lot away.

Review Copyright 2012 by Mike Long