SPACE TRUCKERS (1996)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, psychological*

SPACE TRUCKERS is an amiable doofus of the film. Its title is the same as its premise, imagining a futuristic star-spanning empire defined only by what goes on with the profession of transporting stuff from place to place. For instance, when we first meet hero John Canyon (Dennis Hopper), he drops off his goods at a space station and promptly gets into an argument with the boss of a rival space-trucking company. 

Trucker-stories are also frequently about picking up "strays" in need of assistance and taking them where they want to go, which usually involves the more altruistic "knights of the road" in some sort of Good Samaritan cause. Canyon, though, fancies a young woman, Cindy (Debi Mazar), who asks him for a lift back to Earth, so he asks her for a less than altruistic reward: that she should marry him if he gets her where she wants to go. Cindy wants to reach Earth so badly that she consents to wed a man thirty years her senior. To her good fortune, though, the voyage also includes Canyon's partner Mike (Stephen Dorff-- oddly, the youngest of the three), and to Canyon's displeasure, the two young people began bonding.

What ought to have been a milk-run delivery of "sex dolls" becomes compromised, because the cargo is really a troop of cyborg soldiers in the service of Saggs, a would-be conqueror. A further complication ensues when Canyon and his comrades are ambushed by a group of space pirates, led by a fellow named Nabel. Nabel was a confederate of Saggs, and Saggs had Nabel maimed and left to die, with the result that Nabel is now disfigured and sports various prosthetics. Once again, Cindy tries to use her sexuality to make a deal for the truckers' freedom, offering to sleep with Nabel. But when the space pirate starts disrobing-- reminding one of a similar scene in Poe's story "The Man Who Was Used Up"-- Cindy reneges on the deal and manages to cause enough chaos that she and her friends escape the pirates. (It's tempting to see Nabel as a negative mirror-image of Canyon, who was being played by an actor who'd just turned sixty and thus might eventually be subject to prosthetic replacements.)

Canyon finally has a moment of truth, and during an emergency he evacuates the young lovers from his ship to save them while intending to sacrifice himself. However, Canyon survives the catastrophe and makes it to Earth to be reunited with the happy couple. It's at this point when Canyon's good deed is rewarded, for the script gives him a new love-interest, that of Cindy's mother. But although the mother in theory might have been age-appropriate for Canyon, the script tosses in a black-comedy twist, for the mother's age has been deferred by cryonics, and so the tough old geezer-trucker's reward for giving up a sweet young thing is that he gets a slightly older sweet young thing (played by Barbara Crampton, then pushing forty years of age). That twist is probably the best thing about the whole TRUCKING business.