Red Dwarf, sometimes known as
Red Dwarf: The Movie, is a British science-fiction comedy film based on the TV series of the same name. Released on the 9th August, 2002, it reunited the cast from the then-most recent series (Series VIII, broadcast in 1999), and was co-directed by co-creator Doug Naylor and long-running director of the series Ed Bye. The movie was a reboot of the series that also lifted ideas from the novel adaptation of the series,
Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, first published in 1989, as well as some storylines and jokes from fan-favourite episodes.
Plot
On Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, two out-of-work and unproductive men, middle-class Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie) and working-class Dave Lister (Craig Charles), meet when they join the Jupiter Mining Corporation to get off the moon, but with very different motives- Rimmer wants to become an officer in the Space Corps, while Lister is trying to get money to start up a farm on Fiji. Despite clashing almost immediately, they are assigned to the same ship, the
Red Dwarf, and the same shift as Second and Third Technician (the lowest ranks on board), with their superior officer Kristine Kochanski (Chloë Annett) developing a rapport with Lister (who quickly starts to crush on her and try to convince her to join his plan) and an abrasive relationship with Rimmer.
After
Red Dwarf’s captain, Captain Hollister (Mac McDonald), forces Lister to choose to either hand over the pregnant cat he brought with him from Titan or go into stasis, he chooses the latter, and without him Rimmer fails to properly repair the ship’s drive plate, killing the crew and forcing the ship’s computer Holly (Norman Lovett) to keep Lister in stasis for 3 million years.
Just before Lister awakens,
Red Dwarf is hit by a crashing spacecraft named the
Nova 5, the only survivor of which is its sanitation mechanoid Kryten (Robert Llewellyn), who awakens Lister (who is appalled by Kryten’s odd appearance) from stasis. The two are apprehended by holograms Holly set up of Captain Hollister, Kochanski and Rimmer, and when Hollister tries to hold Lister and Rimmer to trial for the death of the crew, the trial is interrupted by the arrival of a life-form known as the Cat (Danny John-Jules), whose species evolved from Lister’s cat’s offspring over millennia.
Holly explains to the assembled ‘crew’ that he has found an anomaly in the galaxy
Red Dwarf has entered that he describes as a ‘time hole’ which may lead back to Earth, and despite Hollister and Rimmer objecting, Lister orders Holly to go through it. In the process, the ship goes through a large swathe of ‘GELF space’, forcing the crew to fight of Genetically Engineered Life Forms (GELFs) known as polymorphs, which can change shape into anything and are insane killing machines that feed on human emotions and identity.
After overcoming the polymorphs (despite every crew member being successfully attacked by a polymorph at one point or another, which among other things causes the Cat to turn into his uncool human alter-ego Duane Dibbley), the crew then come under fire from rogue stimulants, cyborg life-forms made for a war that never took place which became space scavengers. Despite briefly fooling them by disguising themselves (poorly) as aliens, the crew are soon caught and almost killed; they are saved only by the arrival of a Starbug (one of
Red Dwarf’s surface vessels) piloted by Ace Rimmer, a version of Rimmer from another dimension who is far more suave and charismatic than the one from our own (much to the ‘normal’ Rimmer’s disgust).
Ace’s intervention allows Holly time to finish piloting the ship through the ‘time hole’, and they emerge in Earth's orbit and land on Fiji, much to Lister’s delight. However, his and the others’ excitement is somewhat tempered when he notices time in this version of Fiji is running backwards, with people walking and talking entirely in reverse. While Hollister, Rimmer and Kryten decide to stay and try to fix the ship to keep looking for ‘their’ Earth, Lister, Kochanski and the Cat walk backwards into the sunset.
Production
Red Dwarf’s co-creator and producer Doug Naylor had wanted to make a
Red Dwarf film since the mid-1990s, before Series VII of the show entered production. Indeed, the possibility of a future film had been influential in several decisions of Naylor’s in relation to the franchise, such as the reintroduction of Kochanski as a recurring character and the production of
Red Dwarf Remastered to make the first three series of the show more appealing to broadcasters in international markets like the USA and Japan.
Naylor initially received £10 million in funding for the film in the late 1990s, with a projected budget of £15 million. BBC Film invested a further £5 million beyond this into the film’s production in 2000, and would ultimately help distribute it upon release. At times he pursued some rather eccentric ideas, like bringing in a studio audience (almost unprecedented for a feature film) and trying to renew his collaboration with Rob Grant, with whom he had co-created the series and split with in 1994; however, the studio audience idea proved unworkable and Grant was uninterested in the project.
In terms of rewriting the series, Naylor was clear from the start he wanted the film to be a reboot of the series, and sought to fix what he perceived as faults in the show’s stories and narrative in the past, including significantly overhauling Kochanski (since many fans had not liked how the character was portrayed in series VII and VIII) and incorporating moments that would please fans while still making them coherent to new audiences who had not seen the series. In a 2002 interview promoting the film, he said, ‘I didn’t want it to just be a greatest-hits reel, but at the same time we’ve had a lot of jokes people who haven’t seen the show never saw and the fans love, and it’s been fun to put a new spin on those so the fans aren’t just quoting along as we do them.’
Initially production was pencilled in for 1999, after Series VIII wrapped (particularly since the BBC had no interest in producing a ninth series for television), but budgeting issues and clashes with both the cast working on other series and Ed Bye working on
Kevin & Perry Go Large at the same time prevented this. (Indeed, production was originally set to begin in May 2001, but had to be pushed back to September and then October to allow for Danny John-Jules filming
Blade 2 and then Craig Charles and Robert Llewellyn filming series of
Robot Wars and
Scrapheap Challenge respectively.)
Filming began in November 2001 and wrapped in February 2002, though in post-production the film ran into budgeting problems once again, as there proved to be less time and budget for the CGI and other effects than originally hoped, requiring the team to resort to using a scaled-back CGI team working with Chris Veale, who had singlehandedly produced the CGI effects for the last two TV series due to its tight budgets.
Reception
Red Dwarf received mixed reviews from critics and audiences in the UK. It was praised in the
Independent,
Daily Telegraph and
Daily Express; writing in the
Guardian, Peter Bradshaw described it as ‘a love letter to the TV show’s cult audience, though one with a fair few of the embarrassing elements most love letters have to outsiders’, and gave it 3 stars. The
Daily Mail’s review was significantly more negative, calling it ‘a bunch of recycled jokes’ with ‘a paper-thin story meant for foreign moviegoers who don’t know anything about the boys from the
Dwarf’ and advising readers to ‘just watch the TV series instead- there are good reasons it’s starting to come out on DVD, and one of them is that this is the alternative’.
It got a similarly mixed reception abroad, with Amy Taubin of the
New York Times saying ‘its characters are decently drawn and its sense of humor is zany enough to be able to enjoy what’s going on without having seen the show, sort of like if
The Wrath of Khan was re-enacted by the Pythons’, but criticizing some of its characters, seeing the Cat as ‘veering quite close to racist’ and Kryten as ‘a poop joke dispenser’.
Fans have also had mixed opinions on the film, with some praising it for effectively reimagining so much of the series and characters while in their view staying true to its spirit, while others have criticized it for its creation of a separate continuity and for what they see as ‘bastardising’ the old jokes. It has also sometimes been accused of ripping off the ending of the second
Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and of the TV series. As of 2021, it has a critic’s score of 69% and an audience score of 83% on Rotten Tomatoes and 7.0/10 on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).
In terms of its international box office, the movie made a significant profit, grossing around £52 million worldwide, with about 45% of this coming from the UK; the largest foreign grosses were recorded in the USA, Australia and Japan (all of which are countries where the show had a cult fandom). While there was briefly talk of a sequel, Naylor said when asked about it in 2003 that ‘doing a film was an amazing experience, but I don’t think we need to do another’. No new
Red Dwarf projects would be made until 2010, when a ninth series of the show was produced for the British satellite channel Dave, which had rerun episodes of the series consistently for several years.
(I should mention since AFAIK all we know about the script for certain is that it would’ve been a reboot, I came up with my own ideas of how it might’ve been done.)
