I think it is safe to say I have developed a real fondness for the work of director John Carpenter in the past year. I’d seen a few of his movies before, and even liked some of them, but I’ve really been catching up on the stuff I missed going back to around the time I did that podcast episode with Jen for Big Trouble in Little China. Point is, I’ve been filling in those holes, so to speak.
And that means I finally got around to Carpenter’s feature debut, the sci-fi comedy Dark Star.
The Dark Star is a deep space ship with a single mission: find and destroy unstable planets to make future human colonization of other worlds safer. However, they’ve been at it for 20 years, a few members of the original crew are dead and gone, and they can’t even get some much-needed radiation shields from Earth due to budget cuts. And quite frankly, space is boring. As such, it falls to the four man crew of Pinback, Boiler, Talby, and Doolittle to find a way to make the time pass. They seem to be running out of such options.
Most of this movie isn’t overly concerned with plot. Heck, a good chunk of the movies’ runtime follows Pinback as he tries to corral the ship’s mascot, a living alien beach ball, back into the cargo hold. There’s no real interest in doing much more than finding planets and blowing them up, though why the planet-killer bombs have an AI in them seems a bit silly. Whatever philosophical implications there are to what the crew does, like whether or not the planets they blow up might be inhabited or not or whether there even is intelligent life out there isn’t of much concern to these guys. That boredom, combined the aforementioned lack of shields, will cause real problems at the end of the movie. That said, if the mission is not ending any time soon, then the way the movie ends may not be much of a tragedy for all involved.
It’s worth noting my blu-ray includes a note from writer Dan O’Bannon (who plays Pinback and voices the bombs) that when he and Carpenter, curious to audience reaction, snuck into movie theaters and saw not much of a reaction from the handful of people present, and I can somewhat see why. This is still a low budget student film given a theatrical release and feature-length runtime. The cast is made up of unfamiliar faces, with Carpenter reportedly dubbing over some lines and that’s the closest you can come to a name actor in the cast. It is funny in a somewhat stoner sort of way. Death doesn’t seem to mean much to these guys in the end. If anything, it’s a way to escape boredom.
Of note that O’Bannon was a bit inspired by his scenes with the beach ball alien to write his next movie. That would be Alien. The crew of that vessel was far more professional than these knuckleheads. Then again, Ripley never got stuck in an elevator’s maintenance hatch, so there’s that. This was good, but probably best for Carpenter’s biggest fans. Otherwise, this is probably not going to work out too well for a lot of people as O’Bannon and Carpenter noted when they snuck into movie theaters back in ’74.
Grade: B
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