DARK STAR @ 50

The Dark Star, an unstable-planet disposal ship, is years into its mission into interstellar space, making way for the real estate of the future. The crew are sick of it but also resigned to their lives which might as well play out to the end like this. If they've gone so far beyond getting sick of each other, as well, there is always someone who'll rub the others the wrong way.  One day (why do they even bother with the concept of days, now?) one of the sentient bombs they use to destroy planets is accidentally activated and has to be persuaded to disarm itself and return to the bay. Does possible always mean necessary? Not on Earth but that's so far away it has become an abstraction. The cosmos beckons.

A black and white, glitchy recording from Earth opens the film, aligning it to a similar communication in Kubrick's Space Odyssey and letting us know we're in for a comedy. The news is not good and it's old. Essentially, there is no assistance on its way to The Dark Star; they're on their own. We'll be getting to-screen moments from the crew leader (in absence of the deceased commander) and the paranoid and whingey Pinback. The verité style of these recordings is largely due to the actor playing Pinback, Dan O'Bannon, who co-wrote the screenplay and went on to the impressive world building dialogue of Alien six years later. This has a lot to do with why Dark Star works: Carpenter brings the sci-fi and the spaceship as submarine/wagon train/lost patrol/etc and O'Bannon pours in the workaday realism that, both mixing it up in a comedic approach, makes this zero budget effort fly out of the gate.

Carpenter knew that intimate closeups as well as endless vistas can make an epic if your story supports it. This requires credible performances and gets them. They don't have to be Oscar winners to get the tale across but what we get is also a notch above contemporary tv acting. So, when Pinback prepares the bomb for its job, he sounds like he's calling a friendly colleague. Later, deep in the kind of frustration that acts of biology would otherwise quench, Lieutenant Doolittle gruffly orders the crew to find another planet to blow up. At the outer reaches of where humans have explored, these guys just live with it. Talby is the exception but his withdrawal to the observation bubble has turned his wonder into a formless chain of suppositions.

If you are new to this film and wince at the lo-fi effects remind yourself that apart from a tiny fraction of them, they are practical setups. If you want to know how the interior of the aircraft-shaped ship has Earthly gravity, you do not deserve this movie. If you scoff at the beach ball alien, you will never get this film. This is the story of a crew first but the convergent path of some serious sci-fi concepts bring the comedy into focus until it's revealed in all its existential details. It might look like a student film (that's how it began) but it plays like something much deeper.

Of course, this piece is overshadowed to the point of obscurity by the beginning of the Star Wars saga but for all the orchestras and dazzle of Lucas' epic I feel more cinema from Dark Star and its gaffer taped sets and home made electronic music. Lucas put a samurai quest in space but Carpenter asked us to consider space itself, its horror and the laughter that much come from sight of that. Later, when O'Bannon's screenplay for Alien had the characters talking seriously about their working conditions, it felt even more like what life in a spacecraft might be like and this early collision with a master of suspense would prove one of the most durably fruitful.

Viewing notes: I watched my old U.S. Blu-Ray of this but failed to find it on streaming or in physical form locally. Sheesh!