8 Space Adventure Movies That Don't Take Themselves Too Seriously
Not only scientific dramas can be filmed about space.
Space Jam (1996)
Evil alien monsters, the Nerdlucks, abduct the Looney Tunes to use them as slaves in an amusement park in space. Bugs Bunny negotiates a deal, convincing the abductors to let the Looney Tunes go if they can win a basketball game against them. But the Nerdlucks cheat immediately by stealing the talent from the best basketball players and turning into huge muscular "monstars". So Bugs Bunny has to ask Michael Jordan for help.
The film is a classic piece of entertainment catering to the fans of basketball, the Looney Tunes and Michael Jordan.
WALL-E (2008)
This computer-animated film follows WALL-E, a cute trash-compacting robot left on a future Earth to clean up the planet after humans abandoned it.
WALL-E develops a personality and falls in love with EVE, a robotic probe looking for signs of plant life on Earth.
E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982)
This Steven Spielberg classic tells the story of an extraterrestrial who strays from his group of alien botanists, who were collecting samples on Earth, and ends up bonding with Elliot, a boy who hides him and becomes his friend.
The film is an all-time classic, whose signature shot of Elliot and E.T. flying on a bicycle across a massive moon in the background still adorns the Amblin Entertainment logo. Drew Barrymore had her first role, playing Elliot's little sister Gertie in this film.
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
This movie is perhaps the funniest MCU film out there. It follows an unlikely group of ridiculous superheroes tasked with protecting the Galaxy from evil and their own stupidity.
Groot is essentially a sentient tree, Drax is an avenging warrior with a psychotic sense of humour, Rocket is a genetically engineered intelligent racoon, Gamora is an orphan from an alien world, and finally, there's Missouri-born Peter Quill, who refers to himself as Star-Lord.
Over the Moon (2020)
This Netflix animated movie follows little Fei Fei, who is trying to deal with the loss of her mother and the news that her father is fixing to marry somebody else.
She remembers a legend her mother told her about the goddess Chang'e, who drank an immortality potion and rose over the moon. To prove the legend true, Fei-Fei builds a ship that looks like a Chinese paper lantern and takes it on a voyage to a new unknown world.
Star Wars
George Lucas, a friend of Steven Spielberg's, made the first instalment of his space opera back in 1977.
He started with Episode IV, A New Hope. The original episodes (4 through 6) followed Luke Skywalker, his sister Leia, and their enterprising friend Han Solo as they took on the Empire. The prequels tell the story of Luke's father Anakin Skywalker, once a promising Jedi, and his fall from grace.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)
An adaptation of Douglas Adams' novel about an ordinary Englishman, Arthur Dent, whose neighbour and best friend, Ford Prefect, turns out to be an alien hitchhiker who got stranded on Earth. Ford collects information for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a kind of galactic Wikipedia. The movie's premise is that Earth is being destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass through the Milky Way galaxy. Arthur and Ford manage to hitch a ride on one of the ships that destroy Earth, and numerous space misadventures ensue.
It's very funny and very British.
The Fifth Element (1995)
In 2263, Korben Dallas, an ordinary New York taxi driver, and Leeloo, a love incarnate, have to protect the Earth and, ultimately, the universe from absolute evil that travels towards the planet in the form of a giant ball of fire. Now Leeloo is the fifth element, love, but they first need to find four stones representing the other four elements to deploy them in an ancient temple, along with Leeloo as the uniting force, to generate divine light that will destroy the great evil.