About the Movie
When the planet Mongo begins bombarding Earth with earthquakes, storms and a moon knocked out of orbit, disgraced scientist Hans Zarkov forces football star Flash Gordon and travel agent Dale Arden aboard his homemade rocket at gunpoint — the only sane response to an alien attack nobody else believes in. Mongo’s ruler, Ming the Merciless, is amusing himself by destroying Earth, and Flash’s attempts to resist turn him from prisoner into the one thing Ming’s empire has never produced: a rebel every subject kingdom can rally behind. Hawkmen, tree people, shark men and a princess with divided loyalties all enter the orbit of a hero whose main qualifications are courage, decency and a quarterback’s arm.
Producer Dino De Laurentiis spent lavishly and director Mike Hodges leaned all the way into the source: Alex Raymond’s 1930s comic strip, rebuilt as saturated colour, baroque sets and deliberate, glorious camp. Sam J. Jones plays Flash absolutely straight, which lets Max von Sydow’s Ming, Brian Blessed’s bellowing Prince Vultan and Timothy Dalton’s Prince Barin play the fireworks around him. And over everything soars Queen’s soundtrack — one of the great rock scores in cinema, with “Flash! Ah-ahh!” lodged permanently in the culture’s memory.
Why This Movie Matters to Sci-Fi
Flash Gordon is a hinge point in genre history twice over. First, the strip itself helped create space opera, and George Lucas’s failure to secure its rights pushed him to invent Star Wars instead. Second, the 1980 film demonstrated a completely different way to do pulp adventure after Star Wars: not used-universe realism but knowing, operatic excess — design, music and performance all turned up past reason, held together by sincerity at the centre. Its reputation has done nothing but climb, from cult favourite to acknowledged classic of comic-strip cinema.
Where to Watch
Watch on YouTube (rent or buy) via YouTube Movies & TV.
