This is one massively bizarre movie. If you’re into Star Trek and Babylon 5, you gotta watch it. If not, you’ll probably be bored and confused. Either way, if you watch it, you’ll be very impressed. Not by the film’s chances of getting an Academy Award for writing or acting, but for the unbelievable effort and skill put into this thing.

Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning is a fan-made film spoof of Star Trek and Babylon 5. Created by a team of five amateur filmmakers in Finland over the course of seven years, it’s no run-of-the-mill video. Running one hour and forty-three minutes, it’s a pretty major production with, quite frankly, stunning visual effects–the kind you’d expect in a Hollywood film. These guys went all-out in making perfect recreations of dozens of ships from their favorite sci-fi TV shows, having it out in major space battles. Anyone familiar with Trek or B5 will instantly recognize that even the smallest details are in order here.

The plot and acting, while also impressive for a fan-made film, are a bit odd, though maybe that’s a cultural thing. The film is in Finnish, available with English subtitles. It follows the adventures of Captain Pirk, from a Star-Trek-like future, who becomes stranded in the present day after his ship crashes on a mission to the past. Pirk, Dwarf and Info (spoofs of Kirk, Worf and Data) get tired of trying to blend in without changing history, and when the timeline changes anyway, Pirk decides to take over the Earth and become Emperor. Using his crashed ship’s technology and a Russia wanting to bring back the Soviet Union, they build a giant starship (the Enterprise from the latest movies) and conquer the planet. They then build a fleet of ships, discover a “maggot hole,” and travel to an alternate universe based upon Babylon 5. Whereupon we get space battles and so on.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this film. The conquering of Earth is played out artistically well in the fashion of an old Soviet-era propaganda film, for example. If you look carefully, you can spot several in-jokes, some based on the sci-fi series, and others on general popular culture (look for the McDonald’s take-off in the Babel 13 space station, for example). But the best laughs come in the last half of the film, so if it’s not funny at the start, hang on and it’ll get better. The acting is fair, pretty good considering the amateur production. The plot is strange and wanders a bit at times, but is serviceable. The costumes look amateurish. There are lots of umlauts. But as I mentioned, it’s the special effects that’ll catch your attention on this one. The sets are either existing 21st-century sets, or are virtual sets–again, impressively done. The effects are so professional-looking, in fact, that they look out of place with the acting and costumes, as if they stole the FX from real Star Trek films.

The movie is a free download from the makers’ web site, starwreck.com, using either BitTorrent or a direct download from mirror sites. You can even order the film on a DVD. The trailer is also available. Already it is the most-viewed Finnish film ever made (probably most due to the fact that it’s free), without about 3 million downloads so far. I have a feeling that these guys will be getting job offers from effects studios–which may have been the idea in the first place. And I have to wonder what Straczynski (the creator of Babylon 5) and the various Trek producers must think of all this….