Plot
- For the plot of the film-within-the-film, see This Island Earth
The film opens with mad scientist Dr. Clayton Forrester, working from an underground laboratory, explaining the premise of the film (and associated TV series). Mike Nelson and the robots Crow T. Robot, and Tom Servo, along with Gypsy, are aboard the Satellite of Love high in Earth's orbit, when Dr. Forrester forces them to watch the film This Island Earth to break their wills; as per the television show, Mike, Crow, and Tom make fun of the movie as it airs.
The movie riffing scenes are bookended and interspersed with short sketches. Prior to the movie, Crow attempts to dig through the ship's hull to return to Earth. After the filmstrip breaks and Dr. Forrester reloads it, Crow and Tom dare Mike to drive the Satellite himself, but ends up crashing into the Hubble Space Telescope; Mike then tries to repair the Hubble using the Satellite's manipulator arms, MANOS, but instead further damages the unit before Gypsy takes over. Some time into the film, Tom reveals that he has an interocitor like that used in This Island Earth. The gang tries to use Tom's device to return to Earth, but instead contact a Metalunan (the alien race from the film) who is unable to help them to figure out how to use it correctly but does accidentally repeatedly zap Tom's head with a laser beam. The contact is broken by Dr. Forrester, who also has an interocitor, and he zaps the group to encourage them back to the movie theater.
After the movie, Mike, Crow, and Tom are far from broken, celebrating in various Metaluna ways. Dr. Forrester, furious at his failure, attempts to use his own interocitor to harm Mike and the others, but only succeeds in transporting himself into the shower of the Metalunan previously seen. Mike and the robots briefly celebrate Dr. Forrester's disappearance before they realize they no longer have a way back to Earth without him. Mike says "Hey, wait a minute!" and the crew head back to the theater in time for the movie's ending credits.
Read more about this topic: Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)