Galaxies Are Colliding Reviews

GALAXIES ARE COLLIDING concludes that love is a quick-fix for the philosophical quandaries mystifying great minds for eons. Congratulations, you don't have to watch the movie now. On his wedding day, deep thinker Adam (Dwier Brown) disappears into the desert. At a memorial service, his parents, cloying bride Beth (Susan Walters), and assorted wedding/funeral guests comment on the late Adam's depressed reactions to natural catastrophes, astronomy, quantum physics, and approaching nuptials. Flashing back and forth from Adam's trance-like wanderings, as he encounters numerous loonies, to his wake, the narrative demonstrates the hero's gradual withdrawal from society, so overwhelmed is he by world hunger, strife, faith, God, and nothingness. When Beth purposely allows him to catch her in apparent infidelity with a stud, she can't ignite the slightest spark. Only a street evangelist rouses Adam, to a duel of contradictory Bible quotes. As his survivors mourn, Adam ends up at a diner with Margo (Karen Medak), free spirit and would-be actress who manipulates men for a hitch to L.A. Though Adam fled the prospect of connubial bliss, or even sex, with Beth, he comes back to life dancing in an empty church with vapid chatterbox Margo. Final scenes put the pieces together: En route to the wedding Adam abandoned his car at a weapons-testing ground where it was immediately fired upon; his loved ones have presumed him dead. Freed from the stasis of past commitments, Adam finds a universe of possibilities with Margo. Documentaries have long been disparaged as talking-heads films; GALAXIES ARE COLLIDING is a romantic comedy to answer to this charge. On and on, in a most contrived manner, Adam's friends toast and roast his need to comprehend human suffering and existence to the point of leaving him psychologically immobile. But one man's burning theoretical musing is another's kvetching, and this tedious talkfest spotlights a zonked-out protagonist whose catatonia seems less a charming eccentricity than psychosis, and parasitic Margo makes a pitiful candidate for anyone's cosmological epiphany and redemption. Squeaking laughs out of peripheral characters, like an escaped mental patient played by James K. Ward doing marathon celebrity impressions, the ghastly GALAXIES ARE COLLIDING unfolds in a void. Its central dilemma of a man too bright and caring to function in the real world crystallizes the Meaning of Life in the adage: All he needs is love. Made in 1992, this unreleasable indulgence emerged in 1996 on Paramount's home-video label, as did the unnervingly similar space-brained romances WAVELENGTH (1996) and PONTIAC MOON (1994). (Sexual situations, profanity, adult situations.)