From the get go it's easy to see Dark Star is not your average science fiction romp, with its low-fi effects more suited to 1970's Doctor Who, shoe string budget production design and completely synthesised soundtrack, it stirs up a essence of tale made far before its time. Which to many fans of science fiction Dark Star ultimately is, as co-writer Dan O'Bannon would go on to use ideas from this film, particularly his beach ball with claws to inspire another creature legend of cinema, the title Xenomorph in Alien (1979). British writer and producer Doug Naylor would also be inspired by this film when creating his short radio plays that eventually became the cult classic television phenomenon Red Dwarf (1988).
Dark Star also has another big piece of cinema history under its belt, as it contains the first on screen use of the superliminal velocity tunnel effect, otherwise know and hyperspace which as we all know would come to be used just a few years later in the cataclysmic Star Wars (1977).Whilst definitely other worldly with its story and design, one of the biggest draws of this crazy little film is its characters. A rag tag bunch of spaced out astronauts who after twenty years hurtling around the galaxy blowing up planets in a tin can of a ship, have all gone a little loopy. Some have forgotten their names, another thinks he's really another person accidentally shoved on board, and another spends each waking moment starring at the stars and dreaming about a a group of strange glowing asteroids that circumference the universe every few trillion years. But the real stand out amongst this bizarre crew has to be officer Pinback (played by O'Bannon himself) whose over the top antics such as adopting an alien as the ships mascot and uptightedness about his fellow shipmates lack of decorum, really shows just how mad twenty years in space will actually make you.
As his first time gig Carpenter really plays around with this film, with no straight forward plot to the piece the story meanders here and there as the crew drift from place to place and attempt to fill in their time with crazy shenanigans. There's a few great scenes such as Pinback attempting to round up his alien which leads to an exciting moment of hanging from the underside of an ascending elevator. As well as makeshift leader Lt. Doolittle attempting to convince an smart aleck intelligent bomb not to explode by teaching it Phenomenology only to actually teach it Cartesian doubt. Which reminds of Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (1974) so hard it's amazing to not think scene was written by the man himself. But overall the story feels to loose for a feature length production with scenes feeling out of pace and some over extended, though this is most likely due to the film having an extra 15 minutes commissioned to it by distributors to bring it up to feature length rather than through any fault of its creators.
For such an influential film in the world of science fiction cinema I had expected Dark Star to feel rather more adventurous, possibly along the lines of Flash Gordon 1980 or Silent Running 1972. However this philosophical voyage through the galaxy with some of the universes biggest space bums really flipped those expectations upside down and by the end I was eager to drift along pondering the universe with Lt. Doolittle and Talby and just experience the ride as we surfed the cosmic waves.
With a story that's just about as nuts as its protagonist's, this dip into one of the bedrocks of science fiction cinema is not one for your average friday night flick. But as an adventure into just how strange, bizzare and yet oddly familiar sci-fi can be, Dark Star is a definite for lovers of the genre and a great opportunity for some drink-along nerdiness.
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