Stanley Donen's "Saturn 3"

March 25, 2025 4:27 PM

"It seemed to have everything … an Oscar-winning visionary at the helm, a hot young writer, astounding production design, a sex symbol who defined a decade and Harvey Keitel – not to mention Kirk Douglas’ butt. So what went wrong?"
posted by Lemkin (24 comments total)

I remember watching that on TV and loving it! At age 10.
posted by gottabefunky at 4:56 PM on March 25 [4 favorites]

That and The Black Hole kind of blend together in my childhood memories. And Logan's Run, Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica...what a time for low-grade sci-fi.
posted by gottabefunky at 4:59 PM on March 25 [8 favorites]

Harvey Keitels monotone voice.
the improbability of stealing a spaceship.
blue dreamers
a robot that looks like general grievous.
space curlers
the major and the madman.
posted by clavdivs at 5:32 PM on March 25

Dubbing Keitel with that weird flat voice was amazing.

There is so much wrong with Saturn 3, but holy moly even now Hector is the scariest movie robot (semi-robot, since he's got that terrifying brain tube) ever.
posted by sonascope at 5:48 PM on March 25 [6 favorites]

I want you to look at that picture of John Barry in the article and realize that he died at aged 43. That's when I ask, "So what went wrong." He died of meningitis after collapsing on the set of The Empire Strikes Back.
posted by 3.2.3 at 6:20 PM on March 25 [4 favorites]

"not to mention Kirk Douglas’ butt."

Um... Farrah Fawcett topless?
posted by Marky at 11:31 PM on March 25 [2 favorites]

VHS cover HoF, first ballot
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 3:11 AM on March 26 [2 favorites]

It says something that, even with other cheesy Star Wars knockoffs (Starcrash, Battle Beyond the Stars) getting cult status, this has been all but forgotten.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:08 AM on March 26 [2 favorites]

Such a mess of a movie. So many strange bits.

And Martin Amis writing! Sort of.
posted by doctornemo at 5:13 AM on March 26 [2 favorites]

Even ignoring its obvious flaws in execution, Saturn 3 is a rough watch for me because, despite releasing in 1980, it exemplifies what I think of as the pre-Star Wars 1970s sci-fi vibe that the future is going to suck unbelievably. I mean, as a resident of 2025 they might have had a point, but the likes of Logan's Run and Zardoz and Saturn 3, going all the way back to early shades in Planet of the Apes, are practically abusive in their conviction that we are fucking up everything forever and the future will consist entirely of protagonists struggling to survive one sort of dystopian hell or another. Got hope? Optimism? Fuck you.

Oddly enough, I think Kirk Douglas had already done the broad theme of "aging relic clinging to a vanishing golden age of individual freedom" far better in Lonely Are the Brave. To the point of his insecurity about aging, it's worth noting that Douglas had been fit for that role nearly twenty years prior to Saturn 3.

A lot of the film just screams "hippie midlife crisis" in general to me. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say it's done well, but I can definitely see where they were going with it. They wanted peace and free love, and ended up with violence, hard drugs and meaningless fucking, stripped of all the youthful ideals. Whether those ideals were ever more than a self-deluded rationalization is a separate debate. Kirk Douglas has taken a job on the ass end of the Solar System to escape what the world has become. Farrah Fawcett is a naïf who Douglas has successfully protected from corruption. She's curious about Earth, but he guides her away from it. That this is a pretty gross relationship should go without saying, yet I feel the urge to say it. Keitel is an exemplar of that mainstream world gone insane, who just will not let them be. His dubbed monotone is weird on purpose. It aligns with his mechanistic vocabulary and social attitudes, which I think we are to understand is just how Earth is now. He is determined to destroy a way of life the movie wants us to sympathize with and replace it with something cold and soulless.

At least superficially, Keitel seems to think he's doing them a favor, but honestly it's not clear at all what his objective is, which is really strange considering he murders somebody to pieces right off the bat to put himself in the position to do whatever it is. If nothing else, the metaphor is consistent throughout: the psychopathic representatives of a depraved society will destroy absolutely everything, even themselves, and leave us at the mercy of robots powered by five-gallon jars of scooped-out baby brains and wearing human skin, who have learned their creators' insanity and taken their place.

To the extent that metaphor becomes increasingly relevant (and increasingly no longer a metaphor), I really wish they'd found a way to built a movie around it even a little bit competently.
posted by gelfin at 5:22 AM on March 26 [14 favorites]

As for dubbing Keitel, the alternative is Tony Curtis in Son of Ali Baba (1952), where he says “Yonda lies the palace of my fadda, da caliph.”
posted by Lemkin at 6:03 AM on March 26 [3 favorites]

I recall it being creaky and somewhat underwhelming, with some interesting parts.

But this article made me take another glance at Stanley Donen's interesting catalog.
posted by ovvl at 6:16 AM on March 26 [1 favorite]

I think that dubbing Keitel was a huge unforced error but we were a decade out from the Keitelnaissance that would have made such a thing unthinkable; his weird robot voice clips the performance so that he's no longer acting against Douglas and Fawcett, which does not work at all.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:45 AM on March 26 [2 favorites]

To the extent that metaphor becomes increasingly relevant (and increasingly no longer a metaphor), I really wish they'd found a way to built a movie around it even a little bit competently.

The best story done on that general theme was and probably still is H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, with its depiction of Earth's future as the Eloi being farmed by the Morlocks.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:14 AM on March 26 [2 favorites]

...but we were a decade out from the Keitelnaissance

Ah, the Keitelnaissance -- where the great Age of Anthropocene Benightement began. Keep your seatbelts well fastened. We are expecting turbulence.
posted by y2karl at 8:49 AM on March 26 [3 favorites]

Ah, the Keitelnaissance -- where the great Age of Anthropocene Benightement began. Keep your seatbelts well fastened. We are expecting turbulence.

posted by y2karl

----eponysterical?
posted by Bigbootay. Tay! Tay! Blam! Aargh... at 9:38 AM on March 26

Ah, the Keitelnaissance -- where the great Age of Anthropocene Benightement began. Keep your seatbelts well fastened. We are expecting turbulence.

[ Far away, Jane Campion awakens like Lobot ]
posted by jquinby at 9:58 AM on March 26

honestly it's not clear at all what his objective is

God knows I love a b-movie more than I should, but this is my big beef with the movie. It would go much better to start the movie with Keitel hacking or paying someone to hack into his Evil Government Records to change his psychological testing from WARNING DANGER WILL ROBINSON to THE HUMAN EMBODIMENT OF PUPPY SNUGGLES. Or show him having Hollywood style multiple personalities or some shit.

Because one of the things I've always liked about this stupid, misbegotten b-movie is that as soon as Keitel's character realizes what's going on, he's (IIRC) all OH SHIT NO and tries to help.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:51 AM on March 26 [1 favorite]

Yul Brynner would have been an excellent role for Alex.
posted by clavdivs at 11:48 AM on March 26

The surgery scene from this movie, where Hector pulls a splinter(?) from Farrah Fawcett's eye, has haunted me for decades.
posted by JaredSeth at 12:23 PM on March 26

I always assumed the robot was basically a suit with someone inside, but...no?
posted by gottabefunky at 12:59 PM on March 26

I want you to look at that picture of John Barry in the article and realize that he died at aged 43.

Ah, different British movie John Barry, I was confused.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 3:12 PM on March 26

Dammit, you've all gone and made me watch the movie again, which ARGH because it's a truly awful movie in so many ways, but it always gets me thinking about what it's trying and failing to say. Like any such movie, I ended up with some more takeaways this time:

One, Douglas was somewhat less overtly paternalistic towards Fawcett than I remembered. Much of his deflection of her Earth curiosity is passive aggressive. "Oh, you should totally go to Earth and see it for yourself, because I'm old and won't be around much longer anyway."

Two, I think it must have been the case that Keitel's motive was so straightforward that the creators didn't think they needed to waste even a single offhand line hinting at what it was he wanted. I suspect it might have been nothing more than he failed his psych exam but wanted to prove he could still do the job. This idea is instead undermined by the poor schlub he murders indicating that Saturn 3 is such a shit assignment it'd be worth faking a mental breakdown to get out of it. It is, on the other hand, supported by the fact that Keitel seems to actually be trying to fulfill the assignment: take the farmers a robot to increase their productivity. He's just absolutely terrible at it. Hector clocks him immediately and calls him out even while absorbing his madness.

I think Douglas' final line, "It's everyone's fault," is meant to be the closing argument for a case the rest of the movie fails to make, and I think I have inklings of a theory on what that case should have been.

Alex (Farrah Fawcett) should have been centered much more strongly in the story. The retrospective in the OP's second link makes me suspect that between creative chaos and Douglas' ego, that got warped into a pair of protagonists fending off a villain. I think the point they fail to make is that Alex has no idea at all what Earth is really like, and neither does the audience. She has two unreliable narrators feeding her all her information, one colored by nostalgia, the other by sociopathy. Douglas reminisces about the neighborhood where he grew up. Keitel retorts that it's a "dead cell," and was "cleared out" years ago. Douglas had no idea. He's completely out of touch. It's Keitel's account of Earth that makes it seem awful, but we can't take his word for anything. Is it really considered "penally unsocial" on Earth to decline to sleep with a stranger on request (ick if true), or is he just trying to snow the farmer's daughter partner with something only a desperate psycho would come up with? To do the job I think the movie wants to do, I think we need elements that make the audience skeptical of both Douglas' and Keitel's accounts beyond the point-counterpoint between them.

The opening scene of the film has some badly constructed choreographic business with pretty heavy fascistic vibes. It looks to be calculated as an audience grabber, but unless I miss my guess it should have been dialed back or cut entirely. It contrasts strongly with the closing scene, Alex as the sole survivor, on a space cruise liner, approaching Earth. Given all she's been through, the tone is almost jarringly neutral-to-upbeat as the captain instructs the passengers to look out the window for a great view of the Earth. Alex does so, and sees an Earth in total shadow, lit by great, sprawling cities far beyond those of modern Earth. That Earth is all mystery and possibility. She has no idea what she will find there, and neither do we. We are curious, and simultaneously hopeful and frightened for Alex as she goes to find out firsthand.

More than ever, I think the film is struggling with the whiplash shift in the zeitgeist of the boomers from far-left in the 1960s to far-right in the 1980s. Douglas represents the nostalgic rose-tinted view of the 60s, Keitel the cold, ruthless sociopathy of the burgeoning 80s. Hector represents the future, a blank slate that will absorb and reflect whatever we put into it. To editorialize, the reality seems to be that the boomers as a cohort always affected principles to rationalize doing whatever suited their own interests in the moment. Outside a few notable figures, among the mainstream the hippies and the yuppies were often the same people. The message Saturn 3 should have leaned into is, don't listen to either of these assholes. Form your own opinions and make your own future.
posted by gelfin at 3:19 AM on March 27 [3 favorites]

On further reflection, and with the free admission that this movie occupies WAY more space in my brain than it merits (probably because I saw it on TV when I was single-digits years old and saw a dude get exploded to pieces while being explosively decompressed out of a spaceship, and it left a mark), if the closing argument for your movie is anything along the lines of "it's everybody's fault," then you probably ought to seriously rethink your movie.

I mean, unless your movie is Network. For my money, that's the only movie that did the 1970s pessimism right. If somebody asked me for one movie to sum up the 1970s political zeitgeist, it would be Network. For the 80s it would be RoboCop. Now that I think about it for the 1960s I think it would be Dr. Strangelove, and I am starting to think this says more about me than it does about the movies.
posted by gelfin at 12:20 PM on March 30 [1 favorite]