This is one of those films that has legendary status - the debut from John Carpenter, the
all-directing, all-writing, all-composing talent behind such excellent movies as Halloween and
Assault On Precinct 13.
Set on the spacecraft Dark Star, it follows a group of astronauts who have been out there
for 20 years on their God Knows How Many Years Mission to boldly destroy uninhabited
planets that lie in the way of Earth's colonisation of the universe. As the film begins, we
see a message from base telling our heroes, sorry, there are no funds to improve
radiation shielding, despite the captain having recently died - fear not, he's still able to
offer advice from a cryogenic chamber.
The astronauts don't seem to be that bothered, having long since lost whatever zeal they
had for the mission; they're just workaday Joes, carrying on because they've nothing else
to do.
"Do you think we'll ever find alien life?"
"Who cares?"
There are distractions: a runaway alien, rubbish computer systems and a way-too-smart
bomb - it thinks it's God and decides to blow up the ship. Oh dear.
There are some nice ideas here, but not enough, and too many long sequences of not
much happening. This may be a deliberate attempt to portray the ennui felt by the crew,
but it made me want to boil my head.
The highlight of the movie is the chase sequence, involving a scary alien - a pair of
rubber gloves attached to a beach ball (no one even bothered to wipe out the segment
lines). I'm not saying the beach ball is bad. Indeed, its acting is far better than that of the
humans, who include the movie's special effects man Dan ("I have a beach ball and a
piece of string from which to dangle an Airfix kit") O'Bannon. The actors are singularly
incapable of playing believable explorers. They are beards in moonsuits, with the
exception of Commander Powell (Joe Saunders), who is a beard in an ice cube.
There's no sign of the talent Carpenter later showed for suspense, a little of which would
have gone a long way to shore up the comedy. The great man's music is better than
usual, it must be said, less Bontempi than in later works and the only thing keeping me
awake.
