(T)Raumschiff Surprise - Periode 1 (2004)

Michael Herbig's (T)Raumschiff Surprise - Periode 1 arrives from 2004 with a premise that would confuse a modern audience expecting a thesis. Three flamboyantly stereotypical crew members, Captain Kork, Mr. Spuck and Schrotty, mince their way through a Star Trek spoof that sends them back to medieval Britain, the Wild West and finally 2004 Nevada. The camp is the engine of the joke, not a statement. Herbig described his heroes as a group of girl-roommates on adventure, and the film treats their flirtation with a hunky space taxi driver as a running gag. There is queerness here in abundance, but it is deployed for laughs in the manner of a variety sketch, which places it somewhere in the middle of the modern ledger and nowhere near the vanguard.

The cast is a wall of white German comedians, with a couple of background performers of color drifting past without comment. Queen Metapha rules Earth and joins the adventure, though she functions mostly as a straight woman for the crew's antics and advances no argument about power or gender. The film has no interest in race, no interest in climate, and no interest in the redistribution of wealth. Its target is the starship, not the social order.

Where the picture does stumble into contemporary sensitivities, it does so backwards. Spucky's weight becomes the punchline that strands him in the past, and Jens Maul's asthma is a recurring sight gag. Neither invites a body-positive reading. The whole enterprise exists to entertain, and it does so with a shrug and a Bavarian accent. We are left with a curious artifact: a broad farce that predates the current vocabulary and would likely be baffled by it.