Battle Beyond the Stars: Corman's Magnificent Seven in Space

The farming planet is called Akir. Its people are the Akira. John Sayles put that in the script of a Roger Corman knock-off in 1980 and nobody at New World Pictures made him take it out, which tells you most of what you need to know about how this film was made and why it is better than it has any business being. Sayles was not hiding the theft. He was signing it.

Battle Beyond the Stars is Seven Samurai in space, via The Magnificent Seven, made in the gold rush that followed Star Wars by the one producer in Hollywood constitutionally incapable of arriving late to a trend. Corman had spent twenty-five years turning other people’s hits into his own product at a tenth of the price. The difference this time is that he spent money — a reported two million dollars, the largest budget New World had ever committed — and that he spent it on the two things that outlast a film: infrastructure and young people.

The most productive crew list of the decade

Look at who was on this picture. James Horner scored it; he was in his twenties and this was the job that made him. Two years later he wrote Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and anyone who has heard both will recognise the same muscular brass writing being redeployed at Paramount rates. Horner’s Battle Beyond the Stars cues went on to be reused across New World’s catalogue for years, because Corman had bought them outright and Corman did not throw anything away.

James Cameron came aboard as a model builder and left as the film’s art director. Corman needed a special effects facility, so he had one built in a former lumberyard in Venice, and the young men who staffed it — Cameron, the Skotak brothers, a production assistant named Gale Anne Hurd — constituted the most consequential unpaid film school of the era. Cameron designed the ships. Cameron designed the hero ship, Nell, whose hull is unmistakably and deliberately shaped like a torso with breasts, which is either the joke of the decade or a young man’s idea of one, and which he has spent forty years being asked about.

And Sayles wrote it. He was already funding his own independent films with money earned from Corman genre scripts — Piranha, The Howling, Alligator — and he approached the assignment the way a good session musician approaches a jingle: play it straight, play it well, and put one thing in there for yourself. Akir was the thing for himself.

What Sayles actually did with the structure

The Kurosawa architecture is the reason this film survives while its shelf-mates rotted. Seven Samurai is a machine rather than a plot. Farmers with nothing hire warriors with nothing to lose, and the recruitment sequence is where all the character work happens, because each mercenary reveals himself in the manner of his hiring. Sayles kept the machine and rebuilt every component.

Shad (Richard Thomas, fresh off The Waltons and playing the part with an appealing lack of swagger) goes out in Nell to find fighters. What he brings back is a genuinely peculiar collection. Gelt (Robert Vaughn) is an assassin so rich and so notorious that he cannot eat a meal in public; he asks for payment in food and a place to sleep without a gun in his hand. Space Cowboy (George Peppard) is a trucker from Earth with a bourbon problem and a cargo of weapons. Saint-Exmin (Sybil Danning) is a Valkyrie looking for a death worth having. Cayman (Morgan Woodward) is a reptilian bounty hunter with a private grudge. The Nestor are a hive of clones so bored by their own collective omniscience that they have volunteered out of curiosity. And Nanelia (Darlanne Fluegel) arrives with a technician’s skills and a father (Sam Jaffe) who has fused himself to his own space station.

Casting Vaughn is the film’s masterstroke and its most open piece of larceny. Vaughn played Lee in The Magnificent Seven in 1960 — the gunfighter whose nerve has gone, who cannot sleep, who takes the job because he needs to find out whether he is still a man. Sayles gives him the identical part twenty years later and Vaughn plays it identically, older and more tired, and the effect is uncanny. It is a sequel to a performance rather than a film.

The villain is John Saxon’s Sador, who has a stellar converter that unmakes planets and a habit of grafting the limbs of the conquered onto his own decaying body. Saxon plays him at full theatrical throttle and he is enormous fun, but the limb-grafting is the detail that stays with you. It is a Sayles idea: a tyrant who is literally assembled from the people he has beaten.

Craft: what two million buys

The effects are the film’s most instructive feature, because they are honest about their money in a way that modern cheap films are not. Cameron’s miniatures are photographed with hard side light against black, in motion-controlled passes, and the ships have surface detail — panels, greebles, wear — because surface detail is the cheapest possible way to imply scale. The Nell interior is a set built for reuse. The battles are cut fast and held short, because a miniature composite that looks convincing for two seconds falls apart at five, and Murakami’s edit knows exactly when to leave.

Jimmy T. Murakami directed, having come from animation — he had run a studio and would later make When the Wind Blows — and there are compositional instincts here that no jobbing Corman hack would have had. Corman himself shot additional material, as he always did. The seams show. They also do not matter, because the film’s confidence never wavers.

Horner’s contribution deserves a specific note, because film scoring is where the picture punches hardest above its class. His main theme is a rising brass fanfare in an unstable metre, and the instability is the trick: a straightforwardly heroic march would have exposed how ramshackle the fleet on screen actually is, so Horner writes something restless and slightly anxious that makes the visuals look like they are keeping up with the music. He also gives Gelt a solo line — a lonely, descending figure that returns whenever Vaughn is on screen — which is a level of thematic economy Corman was certainly not paying for. Two years later a studio handed the same composer a battleship and he did the identical thing, and everyone called it a breakthrough.

Where the money is not is the Akir. The farming planet is a few adobe structures and some robes, and the villagers are barely characterised, which is precisely where Seven Samurai did its most patient work. Kurosawa spent an hour making you understand what the farmers had to lose. Sayles has fifteen minutes and a title card’s worth of pathos, and the film’s emotional foundation is correspondingly shallow. That is the honest case against it: the recruitment is terrific, the battle is efficient, and the thing being defended is a set.

The other case against is tonal. The film cannot decide whether it is a comedy. Peppard’s Space Cowboy plays broad, the Nestor play absurd, Saxon plays opera, and Thomas plays sincere, and Murakami never imposes a single register. On a good night that reads as generosity. On a bad one it reads as four films in a trench coat.

The real ancestor

The lineage is stated openly on the planet’s nameplate, so let us go somewhere less obvious. The truer ancestor of Battle Beyond the Stars is the Corman production model itself — the conviction, worked out across a career in the margins, that a genre film is a delivery mechanism and that everything inside it can be reused. The score went into other pictures. The effects footage went into other pictures; New World’s Space Raiders in 1983 recycled both so extensively that it is functionally a remix. The lumberyard in Venice went on to produce the effects for Galaxy of Terror the following year, with Cameron promoted again.

That is the film’s real legacy and it is a strange one. Corman’s method treated a movie as capital equipment, and the equipment in question turned out to be a generation of filmmakers. Within six years of Akir, Cameron had made The Terminator and Aliens, Hurd had produced both, and Horner had scored one of them.

For the collector, the sibling worth queuing next is The Black Hole — Disney’s contemporaneous attempt to catch the same wave with fifteen times the budget and a fraction of the wit — and after that The Last Starfighter, which took the identical recruitment structure four years later and gave it to a teenager with a games console. The seven never stop getting hired.

Copies are everywhere and most are poor; the film wants a decent transfer, because the miniatures were photographed with real care and a soft print destroys the one thing that cost money.

Spoilers below

Below the line, the ending.

The film honours Kurosawa where it counts, which is in the arithmetic. Most of the seven do not come home. Corman pictures did not usually have the nerve for that — a New World audience in 1980 wanted a win — and Sayles insisted on the structure’s central bargain: the mercenaries are hired because they are expendable, and pretending otherwise would break the machine.

Gelt’s death is the one that lands. Vaughn has spent the film asking for nothing except food and a bed where nobody is trying to kill him, and when he goes, Sayles gives him a beat that reaches directly back across twenty years to Lee bleeding out in a Mexican street. It is the only moment in the film where the borrowing stops being clever and becomes moving. Vaughn plays the last look as a man who has finally got the answer to the question he took the job to ask.

The endgame is a ram. Sador’s ship is too big and too armoured for anything the seven have brought, so the solution is to put an object through it at speed, and the object available is Nell — the ship that has been the film’s most likeable character, chatting away in Lynn Carlin’s voice, worrying about her crew, developing something close to affection. Killing the talking spaceship is a cheap trick that works every time, and it works here, and Cameron would spend the next three decades restaging it.

What survives is Shad, Nanelia, and a planet that still cannot defend itself. The film ends on the farmers, exactly as Kurosawa did, and while it lacks the nerve for the line about who really won, the shape of the point is intact. The warriors are gone. The soil is still there. Corman, watching the dailies, was already working out what else the footage could be sold as.