The Absolute Joy That is the 2008 Movie Space Chimps

The Absolute Craziness That is the 2008 Movie Space Chimps Starring Adam Samberg and Why It Kind Of Works

Shortly before the release of The Lonely Island’s song “Jizz in My Pants” on SNL and Youtube, Adam Samberg starred in the July 2008 released movie called Space Chimps. 

Space Chimps follows a chimp named Ham III (Adam Samberg) who is the only grandson of Ham I, the first chimpanzee (not to be confused with the first mammal in space, who was Albert II, a monkey)  to be launched in space. His mentor(?) Houston (named just so that they can do a “Houston, we have a problem” joke later in the movie) , an elder chimp (Carlos Alazraqui) shakes his head as he watches him showboat. The intro ends with a shot of Ham III looking at the moon as he lays down in pain on top of the collapsed drum set.

The title card for Space Chimps is shown, with the scene of Ham III fading into space, literally. We see an unmanned remote-controlled space probe called the Infinity Probe flying through space. Its mission is to search for life, whether in space or on planets. Suddenly, just as suddenly as this movie started, a wormhole in space with lightning slash electricity (yup, you read that right. Most likely just an aesthetic thing…) grabs hold of the probe, dragging it to land on a faraway planet called Malgor. 

Okay. So Malgor is a very colourful planet with three suns and a massive volcano. In a few days, the volcano will erupt, most likely engulfing everything that surrounds it.. Malgor is populated by these mostly purple and blue alien creatures, who live in a village near the volcano together in harmony.  

That is, everyone is living together in harmony, except for Zartog (Jeff Daniels), a big, mean, blue, lumpy, alien. I mean, that’s the best way to describe him, really. 

A group of alien fellows find themselves chasing a butterfly (it’s good to know there are other life forms on this planet) and accidentally find themselves at the front “lawn” of Zartog’s home, which is on the base of the volcano. Zartog conveniently has a sort of silver covering metal goop puddle in front of his home, and he dips the butterfly in as a threat for the rest of the townsfolk. The butterfly emerges frozen from whatever the silver goop is. (Science people could probably find an accurate actual chemical or whatever for it, but unfortunately, I’m not a science person and I don’t want to research for the sake of this movie review) However, once he finishes doing this, the Infinity Probe crash lands right on top of his house, destroying it and making it appear that he died. The alien folk celebrate for a moment, but only until they realize Zartog is still alive. From then, the Infinity Probe, well, probes and prodds at Zartog in the name of science, and exposes him to the arts and culture of humanity. The probe then goes into manual control mode for reasons unexplained, and because of this, Zartog gains power because of the fact that he controls the “sky beast”. He literally enslaves the townspeople in order for them to rebuild him a castle and acknowledges the fact that doing this will make it so that the lava will be redirected towards the village. 

Back to the actual space chimps that will indeed go to space, don’t worry. Because of the knowledge that the Infinity Probe landed on an unknown planet, NASA (Yes, NASA owns the Infinity Probe in this movie) decides they want to explore that planet, but don’t necessarily want to risk human life just yet. That’s where they get the idea of using chimps. They recruit Ham III as a publicity stunt while two others selected, Lieutenant Luna (Cheryl Hines) and Commander Titan (Patrick Warburton), have been actually trained to do this kind of thing. The three chimps enter the wormhole and take back the Infinity Probe, and also frees the alien villagers by freezing Zartog in his own silver goop liquid thing.

It sounds like a fucking ridiculous movie, right? But I mean, it kind of works. It honestly feels both ahead of its time and perfectly in its time all at once, and that’s because of the jarring switch in animation quality from the alien world to the chimps. There are some jokes and lines that seem so out of place that it’s kind of jaw dropping, like for example, while training the chimps to be able to function in space,  a space scientist guy (again, don’t quote me on this, I am not a science person) named Dr. Bob (classic) says very monotonically: “And to think, I almost dropped out of Harvard to start a software company; Who’s laughing now, Bill Gates?”

It is honestly such a hilarious movie simply because of how absurd and ridiculous everything is, from the stereotyped science nerds to the even more stereotyped chimps to the crazy funny villain that is Zartog. I mean, there are multiple moments in the movie where Ham III just says “What?!” He was just forced along for the ride, as you also were, reading this movie review. 

Everyone needs to watch Space Chimps once in their life. It took me on the biggest roller coaster ride and made me shake my head while laughing because of just how ridiculous it was and the fact that I couldn’t tell whether anyone in the movie was taking it seriously or not. I watched it for the first time last year and… yes… animation leaves much to be desired, but that’s part of the absurd charm of this movie. Everyone in the movie made fun of everyone, even themself. The plot was insane, but everyone else was more insane. The interviews with Adam Samberg about the movie are very limited and he did not sound excited about it at all, but I, personally, am so glad he accepted this relatively easy money, despite how much everyone seems to cringe at it. 

There is a sequel; although I have not watched it yet-- mainly because they recast pretty much everyone.