Video Review: 'Galaxies are Colliding' (1996)

The existential crises that sometimes strike Hollywood types would be harmless if only they kept them to themselves. Unfortunately, with Galaxies are Colliding, writer-director John Ryman shoves his in our face — or rather in Brown's face, which wears an infuriatingly expressionless cast as he wanders through the desert contemplating the meaninglessness of existence, while his fiancée and friends back home honor his memory with dippy statements like ''He was drowning in his own stream of consciousness.'' Even the occasionally amusing James K. Ward as a mental patient who mimics a channel-surfing TV set and Grammer as a lustful scientist can't enliven the straight-to-tape morose meditations on God and quantum physics. In the end, Brown reinforces a lesson that he should have learned in Scriptwriting 101: Anomie, by definition, is dull. C-