On ‘Saturn 3’, no one can hear you stifle a yawn

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
May 30, 2013

Last year, I wrote about some 1970s and 1980s science fiction movies that fascinated me, even though I was too young to see them in the theater. (Left unmentioned was the fact that I did go see at least three pictures — the original Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Animal House — in initial release despite really being too young and immature to have done so.)

Well, there was another picture that, along with Alien, Outland and Capricorn One, fascinated me due to its science fiction content but went unwatched by me. It was a film called Saturn 3, and here’s what I knew about it: It was set in some kind of ill-lit outpost, it starred Farrah Fawcett, and it featured a menacing silver quasi-biological robot called Hector.

It turns out that someone (perhaps illicitly) has posted a rather murky full-length copy of Saturn 3 on YouTube, so the other day I got a chance to watch what turns out to be this justly obscure outing from 1980.

This was a film, I should stipulate, that started out with no small measure of promise. The story was conceived by John Barry, the British production designer who won praise for his work on A Clockwork Orange, Star Wars and Superman. Martin Amis, now a well-established British novelist, wrote the screenplay. The cast list essentially contained just three names, but oh, what names: Kirk Douglas, Harvey Keitel and Farrah Fawcett.