Fanboys is a sweet, somewhat obvious, idea that struggles to assert itself as a feature film as opposed to a few pleasing comedy skits. The movie – which is screening at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image from Friday 5 June to Sunday 21 June – is nominally a love letter to George Lucas’ original space opera trilogy, but the reels have little of the heightened emotion or high stakes that love should invoke. Instead this is a matter of juvenile obsession and the insular safety of popular culture immersion.
In a technologically innocent Ohio of 1998 four school friends are reunited. Linus (Chris Marquette), Hutch (Dan Fogler) and Windows (Jay Baruchel) remain Star Wars fanatics, quoting lines, doing voices and turning every event into a debate about whether masked bounty hunter Boba Fett is a true badass; Eric (Sam Hutchinson) has gone over to the dark side, wearing a suit and selling cars at his father’s dealership. They’re brought together by the looming premiere of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. It’s six months away, but Linus, who suffers the same vague fatal illness that Bette Davis had in Dark Victory, where you look fine even on the cusp of dieing, doesn’t have that long. Their solution, after some simplistic bonding, is to drive across America, break into Skywalker Ranch and secretly watch a rough cut.
Per most road movies, what follows is sequential shenanigans: drive somewhere, do something wacky, and repeat. Fanboys was conceived in 1997, with the original hook being to shoot it as a low budget independent feature and release it alongside Phantom Menace, but despite a decade of on/off development and reworking it remains a thin concept. It’s made, primarily, by Star Wars fans for Star Wars fans. The cinema has a long history of young men obsessing over film – see the French New Wave – but the geekiness of modern fanboys, a culture invented by Star Wars, deserves a sharper pricking. What are they hiding from? Women would be one suggested answer.
That makes the presence of Kristen Bell (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) as Zoe somewhat problematic. 'You’re not a girl," insists Windows, giving her a nerd pass because she works in a comic book store. Bell does a game job of looking like she belongs among this adolescent riff-raff, but the script does the cast few favours. The comic schematic is curtly interspersed with Star Wars cameos (Billy Dee Williams, Carrie Fisher) and mawkish attempts to emphasise the value of true friendship. As with his lead turn in recent ping pong comedy Balls of Fury, Fogler fills the void with sweaty showmanship and arch line readings. He’s a one man show attempting to take over the story.
There are various amusing gags, including a running battle with Star Trek fans who are marshaled by a bucktoothed Seth Rogen (his mortal insult is to declare that 'Han Solo is a bitch"), while the Lucasfilm security come up with the one genuinely clever reference to the unseen mogul’s body of work. But the unspoken problem is that we now know just how bad Phantom Menace was. If you take the passion of the protagonists at face value, then surely it’s a tragedy that they’re questing to see such a miserable, unworthy work. Fanboys doesn’t have the one scene you truly want to see: the hopeful fans’ reaction to Jar Jar Binks, Anakin Skywalker and their expensive travesty.
