Review of Dark Star (1974) by Ivan L — 12 May 2010

John Carpenter has done many very entertaining movies like Halloween, Christine and Escape From NY. And everybody has to start somewhere. And Dark Star is where John started. Thank God every career ultimately moves onward and upward. While this has interesting moments, overall you have to be a movie historian to fully enjoy John's premier work.

In many ways, this movie seems like a bad episode of Star Trek, the original TV series. Even the fonts of the credits as well as the special effects looked just like 1970s TV scifi. Yet there is a glimmer of what's to come from Carpenter. In the story, four men are on a 20 year space mission to destroy rogue planets. Insanity and boredom set in to create issues for the crew. There is a faint, very faint, parody of 2001 imbedded in the script that fails to work for me. Carpenter captures the vastness and unpredictability of space but the movie drags more often than not. The special effects look more like an Ed Wood movie than Avatar - very bad. An alien in the movie is nothing more than a Halloween inflatable pumpkin with feet, yet has a 15 minute cameo appearance in the movie.....

For fans of Carpenter, jump over this one if you want to view his early works. Assault on Precinct 13, his next movie after this, is so much better. Dark Star is out there, really out there, and it never quite gets back to Earth. Thankfully for most of us, we are never defined by our first jobs......