Review of Dark Star (1974) by Eric B — 04 Jun 2012

Director John Carpenter's first feature looks surprisingly good, considering its tiny budget. This deep-space comedy -- mostly a parody of "2001: A Space Odyssey" -- benefits from being contemporary to the many sci-fi classics released during the same glorious era. However, its story is rather thin. Two isolated sequences have a strong pull -- a countdown crisis involving a bomb that has been mistakenly triggered and an incident chasing an escaped, onboard alien that looks like a radioactive beach ball -- but most of the film's short length just follows four astronauts (one of them is Dan O'Bannon, who later helped write "Total Recall" and the "Alien" series) killing time during a years-long mission to destroy planets with unstable orbits. Their idle boredom (daydreaming about surfing, clipping their beards, building homemade instruments, etc.) is precisely the point, but this doesn't make "Dark Star" any more fun to sit through. The best ongoing gag is the passive-aggressive banter between the ship's HAL-like computer (this time, it's female) and a skeptical bomb who's tired of false starts.

Trivia: Indie-rockers Pinback took their band name from O'Bannon's "Dark Star" character.