Dark Star – 1974 – United States
Someone once described Dark Star as a parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). That’s not a bad summary. Dark Star is about a crew of bored astronauts on a 20-year mission. Their job is to pointlessly bomb uninhabited planets, and their superiors back on Earth are totally uninterested in them. Nothing much happens. They banter wearily. One guy gets stuck in an elevator. They run out of toilet paper. Their pet alien gets loose. And in the end, the ship blows up and they all die after one of their sapient bombs goes rogue.
Dark Star is an early effort by director John Carpenter, and it shares some themes with his later movies. For example: It’s about people who don’t really get along being trapped in a confined space. The movie is a comedy, but it isn’t funny. It’s occasionally amusing, but more often than not, it’s just sort of puzzling. The most memorable scenes involve an alien that is made from a beach ball. I also like that they keep the body of their dead comrade in a freezer, and apparently, he can still talk to them telepathically. In another standout segment, one astronaut argues philosophy to stop an intelligent, nuclear bomb from killing them all. They fail. And in the final scene, an astronaut who loves surfing rides a piece of wreckage like a surfboard before burning up in the atmosphere of a planet.
The visuals in this movie are thrifty in the most charming of ways. I already told you about the beach ball alien, but I didn’t tell you about the spacesuit that has a muffin tin strapped to the front. The interior of the spaceship is suitably cramped, grungy, and depressing-looking. All the actors have strongly 1970s hairstyles and facial hair. In Dark Star, being in space is no fun and not at all cool.
Rating: 6/10 Shrunken Heads. John Carpenter sings the folky theme song, “Benson, Arizona”.
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