Saying that’s a satire goes a little far; there’s not really much there to mock the space opera-type stories or anything. There are real script problems and the overall plot in place just isn’t long enough to fill its running time. If it were edited down, there’d probably be a smart film abut half as long. That said, the first thing people produce is often not very good, and this movie had some very interesting impacts on the genre. We shouldn’t ignore the real flaws, but there’s no need to dismiss the good ideas that simply needed more time and work to mature. Dark Star has many intriguing concepts and these did turn into some very fine films.
I saw it about 15 years ago after encountering references to it for years. The bombs were far and away the best bit but the rest was just a bit limp.
It’s interesting to see Carpenter’s work in his early days but I found it a bit like Easy Rider in that, I get why it’s popular with it’s audience, but that it’s so much a product of it’s time that I didn’t feel that same kind of connection or resonance that a lot of people obviously had it on release.
No, it’s primarily because they only had $60K to make a movie. Just as a comparison, The Front Page of the same year – which was basically a one-set movie – cost $4 million to make. Benji cost half a million. Of course it’s going to look cheap.
And my point about Casablanca is that people dismiss it because it’s in B&W. You’re doing the same thing because it was low budget – reviewing the look and not the film.
Granted, it was episodic. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Fellini’s Amacord did the same thing. You can argue about the quality, but the fact that it’s episodic does not make it bad.
To clarify, when I say Dark Star *looks *like it was made by people who just didn’t care much about their movie, I’m not just talking about the visual appearance of the film.
Really, for a movie made on a shoe-string budget some of the effects are pretty decent (lame-ass alien excepted).
Like Just Asking Questions said, the biggest problem with this movie is *not *the low-budget look. I was mostly disappointed with this movie because the lack of a decent plot meant I had nothing to be intrigued by, and without a decent script or acting there was nothing to engage me.
In my view, it was a bad comedy.
I was disappointed not because I didn’t get another space opera, but because I didn’t get the clever, edgy, dark, satirical movie I was expecting.
Still, I guess if I can’t appreciate what it’s got, that’s my loss.
Well, it was a movie of its time. The ‘plot’ is simply that it’s a stoner road trip in space. And each character is a stereotype. The frozen Capt is that way (mostly absent) because otherwise there’d be a real authority figure present. Pinback is the self-important, incompetent, loudmouth loser that nobody likes. His ‘buddy’ is the good looking, sunglasses-wearing, unashamed, total slacker who just likes getting to blow up planets. The Lt. is basically one of them, but since he’s in charge he has to at least pretend to try some of the time. And the guy down in the observatory is the trippy, obsessed loner.
Consequently the film is not really ‘plot-based’ at all, but rather based on the (rather slow-paced) interactions of these arch-stereotypes, and their very different reactions to the things that happen.
Not gonna lie, I was bored while watching it a few years back. It’s clearly a stoner comedy and watching it sober is rough.
But I’ll give this to the movie: I still remember every scene quite vividly. I may forget what most movies are about five minutes after the credits are done, but every choice made by Carpenter, every weird twist and turn O’Bannon put, were so weird and off the wall even by today’s- hell, particularly by today’s standards, that it gives it staying power.
And that’s not high praise, but it’s something.
Dude, the beach ball alien rocked!! I love that movie.
“Teach it Phenomenology”.
That has to be one of the greatest lines in Sci-Fi movies.
You want something trippy, try watching Time Bandits while bombed out of your mind. It’s awesome! :o
I saw it on its first release (on a double bill with the long-forgotten SF flick Clones) I liked it then and still like it now.
The SFX are actually pretty good, considering they were mostly made with an optical printer by Bob Greenberg, The ship model, made by Greg Jein (who would go on to work on CE3K) is also pretty good and a nice design. I was involved in a lot of Super 8 and 16mm amateur films, so it was great fun to see what a bunch of guys from USC (or UCLA? Can’t remember) film school did with a little more money and some inventiveness. (They weren’t supposed to sell a student film project to a studio, and the university was pissed off they did. After that, students had to sign a contract that the films they produced, and all the profits they generated, were the property of the university.
The great country western theme song is one of my favorites (especially after living in Benson, Arizona.) It was done as an answer to all the SF movies after 2001: A Space Odyssey that used an austere classical music score. It was composed by Nick Castle, who would go on to play Michael Myers in Halloween.
This wasn’t the only student film that Jack Harris bought and then padded - he also did the same with Equinox.
It’s a long time since I saw it, but I loved the talking bomb.
That’s an interesting angle that I didn’t consider.
However, given the shortness of the film and it’s lack of complexity, it shouldn’t be surprising.
I must admit that the country music theme song works well.
It’s definitely stoner humor. You either get it or you don’t! :o
This:
I liked the increasingly frazzled bathroom mirror confessionals, reminding me of a very similar thing in THX 1138.
(And also a possible “homage” to HAL?)
The persnickety, fussy bomb’s voice was, I believe, also done by Dan O’Bannon…
It doesn’t really sound like O’Bannon. O’Bannon was a bit more nasal. According to IMDb, Bomb #20 was voiced by Adam Beckenbaugh; his sole entry.