Flash Gordon (1980)

The 1980 Flash Gordon arrives from a vanished era of studio excess, when Dino De Laurentiis could hand a comic strip to Mike Hodges, add a Queen soundtrack, and call it an evening. The film is loud, gaudy, and entirely unserious, a camp artifact that treats its own source material as a joke worth telling at enormous expense. Max von Sydow plays Ming the Merciless with a straight face and a wardrobe that would fund a small nation.

It is also, by the standards of our current accounting, an empty ledger. The cast is a wall of white British and Italian performers, with Deep Roy's brief comic turn as the only non-white face of any note, a casting habit of its moment and not an effort at inclusion. Dale Arden spends the running time being desired and abducted, while Princess Aura exists to fall in love at first sight. Ming's villainy draws on an older, uglier tradition of yellow-peril menace, which is the inverse of racial awareness. The disasters Ming inflicts on Earth are spectacle, not sermon. The politics are comic-strip good against comic-strip evil. Zarkov is an eccentric played for camp. Nobody lectures. Nobody has an agenda. Nobody is trying to teach us anything about ourselves.

That absence is the point. The film's only ambition is giddiness, and it achieves that ambition with a confidence that has aged better than most of its contemporaries. We are left to record a near-total blank across the categories that matter to contemporary classification, and to admit that a blank can be a kind of pleasure. The hawkmen do not have a message. They simply fly.