The American Astronaut is a low budget indie homoerotic space western musical. And that’s a strange mix of genres. In fact the whole movie is strange. And I found it incredibly charming. It mixes together this odd punk rock aesthetic mixed with like a love of Flash Gordon-esque 1950s science fiction. These elements have no business working together, but when tied together with the dry humor of director Cory McAbee, it all comes together in a Jim Jarmusch-ian black and white minimalist comedy.
The movie takes place in a science fiction world where all the women now take residence on Venus, and astronaut Samuel Curtis is smuggling and making trades all over the Galaxy. In a lonely western dive bar on the moon, Curtis is given a proposition, deliver a real live girl to a mining community in exchange for a healthy teenage male, then take the healthy teenager to the women of Venus in exchange for their recently deceased breeding male, and then take the dead body back to earth to collect a reward from the dead guy’s family. It’s a fairly simple plan, too bad it goes haywire when Curtis’s arch nemesis, Professor Hess, has other plans… oh and it’s Hess’s birthday.
What makes this indie film so charming is the music and the special effects. The punk rock meets western soundtrack makes for something unique and refreshing. The best musical number comes early on in the movie as two bar patrons follow Curtis in the bar’s restroom and start musically accosting him. The special effects are done so well, they are cheap as we see obvious models of spaceships hover over homemade backgrounds. But McAbee never pokes fun at his special effects or the cheapness of them, which is a smart move as they all feel like an intentional stylistic choice.
I really don’t know why this movie works, and I’m not sure if anyone else could mix all these genres together and get the same result. But somehow The American Astronaut is a good science fiction comedy musical, and might be the only one on the planet… but then agin, I’ve never been to Earth.
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