⭐️⭐️⭐️½
52-week film challenge, film 27

This is the first time in literally decades I’ve seen this film, and yet it left such a mark when I first saw it that most of it was already burned into my memory. This was very much the (accidental) forerunner of Star Wars as well as being part of an array of now-forgotten but excellent Sci-fi movies from the early 70s that included Colussus: the Forbin Project, The Andromeda Strain, Silent Running, Solaris, Fantastic Planet, Soylent Green, Westworld, Sleeper, and even another in the genre of “expanded-version-of-a-student-film” that hardly anyone saw called THX 1138.

I once met Dan O’Bannon shortly after Alien came out at some SF convention in Miami (I think) and a very young me probably fanboy’d his ear off about Dark Star rather than the movie he was presumably there to promote, but he was polite and seemed impressed that I’d seen it. I did also absolutely love Alien, for the record, but I think all I said about it to him was to congratulate him on writing what was in my youthful estimation the scariest alien horror movie everrrrrr before moving on to Dark Star.

If my memory serves me right, my late friend Kelvin Mead, who was collecting 8mm and 16mm versions of cult movies at the time, had a print — and that’s how I saw it, sometime in ‘78 most likely. It was John Carpenter’s first major film as a director (and composer, he also did the soundtrack), and while it’s quite rough compared to the big SF Hollywood films of the day, it really holds up pretty well if you overlook the limitations of the $60,000 budget. Let’s say there weren’t a whole lot of nihilistic sci-fi comedies to compare it to until the TV show “Red Dwarf” came out some 14 years later.

The story, very basically, focuses on four extremely bored starship personnel (there were five, but one died before the film begins), who have been warping around the galaxy for the last 20 years destroying what are deemed to be unstable planets with smart bombs. While they’ve only aged by three years, the monotony of the job (which is the only part of the voyage most of them like) has really caused entropy to set in in myriad ways.

They all have long hair and unkept beards, and sound suspiciously like USC film student (heh). The core three who do most of the work are called Doolittle, Pinback (more about him in a moment), and Boiler. Talbi, on the other hand, has sequestered himself in the ship’s observation dome and just stares out at the heavens all day.

When they are doing their job, they are (almost) a well-oiled machine, especially in a crisis — which is happening more frequently because they do next to no maintenance at all of the aging ship’s issues. The conversations Pinback has with the smart bombs (who talk back occasionally) introduce the comedy element early on. The rest of the time they are either indifferent or spiteful to each other.

Having started life as a student film, the film is woefully padded with “extended remixes” of various scenes, including a very minor subplot about Pinback’s “pet,” a very bored alien he doesn’t pay enough attention to. A loooong sequence of Pinback losing a battle with the “beach ball with feet” alien is really nicely shot, but goes on far too long. The optical effects in the film are surprisingly good, but if you’ve seen George Lucas’ similar “expanded student film” then you get the idea that a little more money got stretched out very thin to turn it into a feature.

The saving grace of Dark Star, though, is the dark comedy and great ensemble acting. Although Doolittle (Brian Narelle) is the replacement “commander,” Pinback (O’Bannon) is the source of most of the comedy, and embodies every annoying office worker everywhere. At one point, Pinback confesses that he isn’t actually Pinback, but a man named Bill Frug who saw the real Pinback go crazy and remove his jumpsuit before killing himself. Frug put the jumpsuit on, was mistaken for Pinback by indifferent superiors, and placed on the ship. The other two argue lightly about how long it’s been since Pinback told this story before.

Meanwhile, the ship continues to deteriorate, at one point causing one of the bombs to exit the hangar early, awaiting commands to arm itself. These are handily the best scenes of the film, where Pinback (mostly) must convince the bomb that the signal to leave the bay was an error (twice). It’s even funnier once you realise that O’Bannon also voiced the smart bombs, so he was literally arguing with himself.

The air of psychological tension and claustrophobia throughout the film, only avoided by Talbi by not really interacting with the others much, is beautifully executed (and O’Bannon freely used that dynamic again in Alien). Speaking of tension, I should mention the soundtrack, which includes a full-on country song of all things, all written/performed/sung by Carpenter.

Most of the soundtrack works subtly to heighten the growing issues both between the crew and between the crew and the ship (and the bomb) to bring us to the finale, which in my view was a huge and very satisfying albeit dark payoff. Up to that point, it is fair to say that Dark Star is an entertaining, but slowly-paced (because of the padding) psychodrama in space, that features effects that mostly work (but, like the ship itself, occasionally doesn’t).

The climax of the film is genuinely inventive and surprising, but the denouement is (chef’s kiss). There are several later films one can point to (like Alien) that were clearly influenced by this, and in particular the dutiful-but-patronising female voice of the ship’s computer (voiced by Barbara Knapp) is now a stock Sci-fi cliché.

If you have the patience to stay with it during the padded-out stuff, you’ll be glad you went on this journey. As a blueprint for some of Carpenter’s later work as well as O’Bannon’s, it offers some real insight into where they (and Lucas, since he was at the same film school a few years earlier, and doing similar things) picked up their style, but is also a clever exploration of the “lonely outpost” scenario with enough original twists to sustain it.