Dark Star

It all started out as a short film made at film school made by the now legendary John Carpetenter, but then they wanted to make a longer version, however they couldn't get money to remake it, so they simply added extra scenes in the middle (example, the beach ball alien).

The story is this, on a ship where the captain is dead (but you can unfreeze to ask him questions) and the rest crew are going basically crazy they have problem. One of their bombs has become sentient and is busy contemplating the nature of existence.

The effects are OK, and who would have thought the beach ball would become the inspriration for the movie Alien.

Over all one of the great classics of science fiction and of low budget film making.

I heard of this movie a long time ago and it took me over 10 years before I finally found it in my local video shop. Great and amazing movie.

What will bomb number 20 do, now it is intelligent...watch the film and find out.

Dark Star (1974) was a student film that John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon worked on while they were in college. They later found a film distributor who asked them to expand it to feature film length. The movie takes place in a small, cramped out of date spacecraft. Several astronauts are on board (who have been around each other to long) trying to complete their mission of destroying unstable planets. I found this film to be very entertaining and bizarre. I enjoyed it very much. The highlight of this film is when a computerized bomb decides that he doesn't want to take orders from the astronauts anymore and ponders the meaning of life. Highly recommended, but it's not your average Sci-Fi film.

A.

Up until "Dark Star", crews of rocket ships were usually "spit and polish", highly disciplined members of a crew all working towards a common goal in harmony. This was the image of the astronauts as promulgated by NASA. Dark Star introduced the negative dynamic to spaceship crews: space travel was ho-hum, they had little contact with earth, and everyone had gotten sick of each other.

Dan O'Bannon used this to good effect in "Alien".

Also, the use of contemporary music was highly original and helped move the movie along.

The scene where they talk to the bomb was just a rip-off from Star Trek and the episode "The Ultimate Computer".

Well OK this may not the most enjoyable film I've seen but it is certainly one of the most unique and cynical films ever. I find myself pulling out the tape and watching it again every couple of years just to give myself a reality check with all the Hollywood tripe you get these days. To make the most of it you need to watch a couple of Star Trek episodes first and then watch this. Instead of the clean-cut, politically correct, join-the-dots films that are so common now, you get a feeling that this might just be the way life on a space ship would really be.

It was really way ahead of its time. People now comment that films like Star Wars and Alien were the first to make sci-fi more 'realistic' but Dark Star pre-dates both of them by several years. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is where Scott Ridley and George Lucas got some of their ideas.

I didn't realize what I was watching 3 A.M. one day until someone told me.

This looked like a cheesy rip off of something, but at 3 A.M., all I could do was enjoy.

The low production really shows, but I didn't care. This movie is funny, and as a comedy, that's hard to do these days. The acting, well... ok, but I had the sense that these guys were trying to do it as best they can.

All I can say about this is, this is the type of movie you can watch at 3 A.M. and still enjoy.