The music is the first thing I think of whenever Flash Gordon comes up, and I’d bet it’s the same for most people who’ve seen it. That Queen theme kicks in, Freddie yells “Flash!”, and I’m grinning before a single hawkman has turned up. It’s one of the most recognisable pieces of film music I can think of, and what I love is that it’s exactly the right amount of ridiculous for what’s on screen. Flash Gordon knows precisely what it is, and every time I go back to it I’m reminded how rare that is.
What it is, is camp, and for something that came out in 1980 it’s astonishingly, gloriously camp. Star Wars had just made space opera feel mythic, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was busy being solemn about it, and then here comes this thing painted in primary colours, where the Earth is being pelted with natural disasters because a bored emperor on another planet fancies some entertainment. Nobody pretends otherwise. I’ve never once felt the film wink at me, and it never needs to. It just plays it all completely straight, at full volume, and invites you along.
Hot hail and a crashed plane
The setup is pure pulp, and I mean that as the highest praise. Something is pushing the Moon toward Earth, storms of fire are coming down out of a clear sky, and a quarterback named Flash Gordon and a travel agent named Dale Arden end up in the same small plane when it gets hit. They crash through the roof of Dr Zarkov’s lab, and Zarkov, who’s worked out exactly where all this is coming from, more or less kidnaps the pair of them into his homemade rocket and sets off to find whoever’s doing it. There’s no pause to wonder whether any of this is a good idea. Dale tells Flash she loves him and then reminds him they only have fourteen hours to save the Earth, which is easily my favourite line in the film, and it’s said with total sincerity.
Flash is the least complicated hero you could ask for. He’s brave, he’s cheerful, he’s very, very blond, and he’d rather punch a problem than think about it. Sam J. Jones plays him a bit wooden, if I’m honest, but it suits the character, a football star who’s been dropped into a comic strip and takes it in his stride. Dale gets less to do than I’d like, and the film is so busy that you barely have time to be annoyed. Topol’s Zarkov, meanwhile, is hamming along gleefully, a mad scientist who’s right about everything and furious that no one believed him. The three of them together make a good little team, and the film doesn’t waste any time getting them where they need to be.
It helps to remember where all this comes from. Flash Gordon started out in newspaper strips in the 1930s and then ran as cliffhanger serials, and you can feel that in every scene: rescues that happen at the last possible second, villains with elaborate titles, and a hero who’s never more than one punch away from the answer. The film doesn’t try to modernise any of that, it just turns the colour up. Once Ming decides he’d like Dale as his bride, the plot hands Flash a ticking clock and a reason to take on a whole planet, and the film is far too busy to stop and explain why this should be believable. I love that.
An emperor who is having the time of his life
Ming the Merciless is where most of the laughs come from, and Max von Sydow plays him with such a straight, theatrical face that it only makes everything funnier. A man of that calibre, sneering through a goatee and an enormous collar, announcing that he’ll do something merciless to the Earth just for the sport of it. You get the sense Ming gets bored very easily, which explains the earthquakes, and he treats a planet like a bit of afternoon entertainment. There’s a moment early on where he tells his right-hand man Klytus he’s bored and asks what plaything he can offer today, and that’s the whole villain in one line. He isn’t conquering anything out of ambition. He just wants something to look at.
Everyone around him is just as much fun. Peter Wyngarde’s Klytus hides behind a gold mask and a voice like a funeral director, and Ornella Muti’s Aura, Ming’s daughter, is bored in a very different way, drifting through the palace looking for something dangerous to do and settling on Flash. The throne room has silver walls and glowing orbs and soldiers in capes, and Flash stands in the middle of it looking mildly unimpressed, because he’s a quarterback and he’s seen worse crowds. The film never lets the villains be scary for long. They’re having too much of a good time, and so, I think, is the cast.
The flying soldiers, and a very daft tournament
Then there are the hawkmen. The flying soldiers are, I’ll say it, one of my favourite things in any film of that era, and they’re so silly I can’t help but love them. A whole sky of winged men in feathers and helmets, led by Brian Blessed’s Prince Vultan roaring “Dive!” at the top of his lungs, and he’s the best thing in it for me. Everything about Vultan is huge. His voice, his laugh, his appetite for a fight, the moment he switches sides, and his entirely sincere enthusiasm for the whole business. I could happily watch a film that was just him and his sky city, and I’ve no idea why nobody’s made one.
Timothy Dalton’s Prince Barin brings a bit of actual dignity, a grumpy rival who slowly turns into an ally, and the little trial with the spiked stump and whatever’s waiting inside it is exactly the kind of daft test a cartoon would throw at its hero. Flash has to put his arm in. Of course he does. It’s the sort of scene that shouldn’t work and does, mostly because everyone involved looks like they believe in it, and because Dalton plays Barin like he’s in a Shakespeare production that’s been dropped into a space opera by mistake. The rivalry between him and Flash is the closest the film comes to a real character arc, and it’s a good one.
A comic strip come alive
The look of it all is half the fun, with sets that glow, cloud skies the colour of a sunset, and costumes in gold and red that nobody in a serious film would dare. It looks like a comic strip come alive, which is precisely what it’s meant to look like, and I wouldn’t change a bit of it. The effects are very obviously models and painted backdrops, and I think they’re better for it. Compare that with the grey, careful space of the Trek film and you can see why this one is so much easier to love. It’s a film that wants you to have fun, and the colour does a lot of the work.
Which brings me back to Queen. The score isn’t an afterthought stuck over the top, it’s the engine of the whole film, with the guitars and the choir coming in at exactly the moments the pictures get most outrageous. If you want the background on why the soundtrack works so well, this piece on how Queen soundtracked the film is a good read, and Ultimate Queen’s page on the song has the lyrics if you fancy shouting along. I always do. It’s also the reason the film has lasted, because plenty of expensive 1980 space films have been forgotten and nobody forgets this one.
I’ll admit it took me a while to see how hard this is to pull off. Camp is easy to do badly, and it dies the second anyone on screen looks embarrassed. Here nobody ever does, from Ming’s ridiculous collar to Vultan bellowing at a sky full of men in feathers. That commitment is what carries it, and I think it’s why people who’d never call themselves sci-fi fans can still sing the theme. It’s a film that gets by on being sure of itself.
Saviour of the universe
The finale is where it all pays off. Flash leads the hawkmen against Ming’s war rockets, and the whole thing turns into a big, noisy air battle with Vultan’s men diving through the clouds, and it never stops being fun. Ming gets what’s coming to him, run through by the nose of a rocket, which is as goofy and as satisfying as anything in the film, and it gets that big swell of music right on cue. Then the very last shot nudges you to wonder whether Ming is really finished, and I love that the film is cheeky enough to leave the door open.
It’s in the same lane as Superman, which also took a comic-book hero and played him with a completely straight face, and as other old-school genre films I keep returning to, like The Running Man, where the fun is in how far everyone is willing to go. I don’t think Flash Gordon is a great film, and I don’t think it was ever trying to be. It’s a daft, bright, loud one that I keep coming back to, and I’ll take that over most of the serious ones any day. Put it on with the volume up and let Freddie do the rest.