Dark Star
Dark Star is a 1974 science fiction comedy cult classic. It’s set in the 22nd C on the eponymous starship, now 18 parsecs from earth, and on a mission to find and destroy unstable stars. That may have once been exciting but the crew are now utterly sick of it, bored stupid and showing signs of mental strain.
It’s directed (and scored and produced) by John Carpenter, later to become famous for ‘The Thing’, ‘Assault on Precinct 13’ (the original) ‘Christine’ (also the original) and ‘They Live’.
Dan O’Bannon wrote the screenplay, starred in the film and gets by far the most laughs and funny lines. It started life as a student project while they were both at USC studying film. O’Bannon later wrote the screenplay for Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’ and borrowed from Dark Star heavily for it, to all cinephiles’ everlasting gratitude.
If you are a Star Trek fan (people are either Star Wars or Star Trek) you may have wondered how the Enterprise remains so suspiciously squeaky clean. Dark Star, by contrast, shows exactly how four men in space would, even under a lax military command, inevitably descend into slobbery. So they do and the space ship becomes like a student pad. Red Dwarf may well have taken this idea and pushed it to its extreme by writing Lister as a slob from Day 1. The only female character is the ship’s computer (again, ripples touching Red Dwarf?) and although bossy, she has no influence on the ship’s cleanliness.
There are some scenes and ideas that were clearly built out into famous scenes in Alien and Aliens.
‘Hey do the thing with the knife Bishop’
Pinback and Captain Dallas trapped with an alien in tight, narrow places
Frustration with parts of the spaceship constantly breaking down and having to be repaired
Being so distant from earth the crew have been forgotten.
I like to think the nail-biting scene where Ripley and Newt are waiting for the elevator to come while being hunted by the queen came from Dark Star.
Pinback, O’Bannon’s character is the irritating wannabe comedian who is oblivious to everyone else not finding him funny. He’s the bottom of the totem pole too and gets bossed around, at least to the extent his demotivated team mates can be bothered to.
You’ll recognise some of these ideas in yet to come, far more famous sci-fi movies. A smart bomb that thinks, problem solves and communicates with the crew, becoming dangerously self-aware. An alien on board with humans in a claustrophobic environment (it’s a comedy scene in Dark Star). The Skype like communication between earth and ship. In fact the computer intelligence that may or may not actually be wholly committed to human welfare, preceded Dark Star in 2001 Space Odyssey and O’Bannon may have been writing a lighter hearted gentle satire of 2001.
So, if you like comedy, sci-fi, Red Dwarf or Alien, give it a spin.