This is an awful movie on so many levels that it’s difficult to choose one facet of awfulness to begin with. Let’s start with the characters: In 1998, three nerds (and a tagalong girl, played by the ever-beguiling Kristen Bell) band together to take a cancer-stricken friend to Skywalker Ranch, break in, and show him an early cut of Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace. None of the characters, even Cancer Boy, are remotely likeable. They mistreat females (“Shut up, woman!” they bellow at any girl who dares to intrude on their fantasy life) and they call all their enemies, particularly Star Trek fans, “faggots.”
As they drive across country—quoting at great, annoying length from the Star Wars films—they while away the hours trying to coax women in other vehicles to take their shirts off (a woman’s breasts are the ultimate goal to these sad shlubs in their mid-20s). There are cameos galore (Kevin Smith “hilariously” pimps Jason Mewes to men in one sequence, and in another, Ethan Suplee appears as a slimmer, kung fu-fighting version of morbidly obese Ain’t it Cool News founder Harry Knowles, in an embarrassing five minutes clearly included to court Knowles’ powerful nerd approval), and the last segment is a tremendous suck-up to George Lucas and his legacy. Of course, since everything Lucas has produced in the last 10 years has been an ossified husk of his earlier glories, the film feels like a long, filthy lie.
There are elements of sci-fi fan culture that deserve to be celebrated on film. Many fanboys and fangirls are imaginative, good-hearted people who are also often very sexually liberated. Instead, this film embraces every awful, homophobic, sexist, small-minded fan stereotype there is. The sad part is, fan culture is so desperate for popular-culture representation that this film has a good chance of being embraced by the very people it mocks. We deserve much better than this, nerds.