Dark Star (1974)

directed by John Carpenter
USA
83 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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Nobody really likes or wants to talk about Dark Star due to it being one of John Carpenter's early, more amateurish films. Carpenter and his effects team may be masters of the ooey and gooey in a more fleshly form, and every movie coming after Dark Star may showcase that, but evidently when it comes to knobs, buttons, and interfaces instead of blood, guts, and gore, there's something left to be desired.

Dark Star is an obvious satire, but it feels like it reaches through time and borrows from the present in order to make its criticisms of the past (or what was the "present" but is now the past). The crew of the titular ship is a bunch of bored surfers given tremendous power that they handle like rowdy ten-year-old boys. They are tasked with blowing up any errant planets defined as "unstable", which essentially means that a computer predicts they'll begin to decay out of their orbit in any number of years- much like, oh, I don't know, Earth. Weapons technology has become normalized to a point where you can now talk and reason with your bombs. You can also talk to the dead, provided they're preserved correctly, but it's anyone's guess whether or not they'll actually have anything interesting to say.

In technical terms, it's a complete mess. The film's sole alien is quite literally a large inflatable beach ball with a pair of Halloween-costume monster hands. I think the majority of the sound effects were produced by somebody just making noises with their mouth. The actors are all horrible, nobody does a very good job at all. But because of all those failures, specifically because the actors are acting more like your friends you go get a beer with sometimes than professionals, this movie also manages to reach through time to embrace the present-day viewer. Maybe if you expect immaculate performances, you'd get disappointed in this, but the casual atmosphere and the way the actors don't even seem to be trying very hard makes this feel strangely intimate, like watching something all your buddies agreed to star in for a few dollars and the promise of a returned favor.

I'm surprised that more people don't like this movie, because to me personally it was near-perfect. It doesn't resort to cheap, brainless humor, it never gets offensive, most if not all of the jokes are clean, and despite how low-budget it looks, there's a definite feeling of intelligence behind it that I'm attributing to Carpenter being a good filmmaker even when he's making "bad" films. The sets may be poor, but they're also elaborate. It looks like the interior of the spaceship could have taken up a whole house's worth of space. It reminded me a lot of when I was a kid and I used to pretend to be in a spaceship in the room under the stairs at my old house. You can pretend anything is a spaceship if you try hard enough.