In his first feature, film student John Carpenter is still figuring things out, but the rough 16mm craft here is perfect for the world’s greatest movie about hippies stuck in outer space. The weird pacing, deadpan humor and “who cares?” grasp on science all work together in weird harmony to depict the fractured mental states of a space crew who’ve been out in the cosmos way too long on an exploratory mission. Their space suits are made of baking tins and foam ice trays and their minds are held together by even more fragile material. It’s been either twenty years or three years since they’ve seen Earth, depending on how you interpret the time-dilation stuff. Bottom line: these guys are hairy, living in their own filth, sick of each other, blowing up a few heavenly bodies for fun and seeing things go sour one “day” due to a combination of equipment failure and an alien that looks like a beach ball getting loose on their ship. It’s science fiction drained of all wonder and romance and reduced to a few stinky guys on a ship, out of their minds and out of toilet paper.
It’s a great little footnote in the story of the Hollywood New Wave (or New Hollywood) of the late 60s and the 70s. George Lucas attended USC film school at around the same time as Carpenter and this film sits as a sort of comic companion to Lucas’s ultra-serious THX 1138. There are two headlines to the story of Dark Star: one is John Carpenter going on to become a major director after this film (which was originally seen mostly on the festival circuit in its day); the other is the curious career of Dan O’Bannon, who not only plays the crew dumbass, Pinback, but also co-wrote the screenplay, co-edited the film and designed the special effects. O’Bannon eventually worked on the special effects for Star Wars, where he re-used this film’s hyper-drive effect (seriously, it’s the same effect in both movies). Then he wrote Alien, which is basically Dark Star all over again, but re-imagined as a horror film. He’d eventually score a directing gig for the great Return of the Living Dead.