Dark Star

DARK STAR
Director ~ John Carpenter
Writers ~ John Carpenter, Dan O'Bannon
1974, US
Stars ~ Dan O'Bannon, Dre Pahich, Brian Narelle

Blue collar slackers in space on a shoestring budget makes for a all-round amusing entertainment. The crew barely come out of their beards to express more than bored competence with their job, bickering and making daft and dangerous distractions for themselves while they look for new planets to blow up, just to meet quota and kill time. Famously, a student film expanded to full length and sporting a slightly amusing/ridiculous beach-ball alien, there is plenty of agenda and Carpenter director’s flare to make this a credible peer to other Seventies sci-fi favourites. It may not present his excellent trademark widescreen shots, but there’s a lot of canny framing with the claustrophobia and the basic effects having a charm of their own.

The crew act like burnouts that sort-of know each other after decades in space; indeed, they may be suffering the numbing mental repercussions of such employment. Sci-fi antecedents may have leaned on a shinier future, and ‘Star Wars’ may have looked lived in, but ‘Dark Star’ looked worked in, perhaps suffering from cut-backs, a detail capitalised on by writer/actor Dan O’Bannon for his following seminal credit, ‘Alien’. (‘Silent Running’ (1972) does this, and ‘Blade Runner’ (1982) arguably merges both for an urban retro-futurism.)

The lack of resources is easily mocked, but the indie stoner sensibility hasn’t dated, and the wit, writing, promise, limited production design and overall conception is more than competent, even if the pacing is a little stretched. There’s a real sense of artists really going for it despite limitations. It works as a satire on the pretensions of science-fiction by saying, yeh, but what if you had to work there? It has a smart counter-culture sensibility, affectionately satirising prestige genre fare.Variations on ‘2001: a space odyssey’s (1968) HAL, becoming one with the universe and cribbing the ending of Ray Bradbury’s short story ‘Kaleidoscope’ (1949) make for a strong conclusion, giving this enough dark humour and ludicrous detail for its solid reputation. A minor delight.