Review – Dark Star

Here we have John Carpenter’s directorial debut, an odd low-budget effort from the late hippie days of 1974. I’ve been told by a couple of Navy vets that being shut up for a long time in the company of men actually is more than a little like this. That largely serves to make me grateful that I never had the experience myself. The atmosphere is good stuff, sort of a bridge between the clean technology of 2001 (which this picture at least in part parodies) and the grubby realms of future sci fi efforts crafted by Dan O’Bannon and Ron Cobb. The story, on the other hand, is uneven. Some of it is clever in a quirky sort of way. But most of it is more silly than anything else, such as the sequence in which O’Bannon spends 15 minutes battling a beach ball with feet. Overall this stirs up some nostalgia for sci fi con screenings back in the early 80s, but beyond that this is probably fairly missable. Mildly amusing