Viking Night: Dark Star
By Bruce Hall
August 31, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com
If you enjoy romantic comedies in general, please do not watch this movie.
However, if you’re sick in the head, enjoy writing long winded articles about your hobbies, and consider Kurt Russel to be a living God, then congratulations - you are the intended audience of Dark Star.
The movie itself is the brainchild of cult heroes John Carpenter and his friend Dan O’Bannon. If you’re reading this, you probably know who John Carpenter is. And if you know who John Carpenter is, you actually already know who Dan O’Bannon is. Or, you should. So just Google him if you want. But for the sake of this article, just trust me – he’s awesome. Dark Star is to these two what THX-1138 is for George Lucas. They are fascinating works of near madness by ambitious young filmmakers who were talented beyond their years.
And both would go on to inspire other, more well-known properties. But more on that in a minute. Let’s talk about the 22nd Century.
Apparently, it’s kind of a dull place. Humanity seems to have gotten it together enough to begin colonizing space, which sounds pretty exciting. What doesn’t sound exciting is being one of the poor bastards stuck aboard the scout ship Dark Star. They’re the men who get to explore the universe ahead of the colonists, making sure things are safe. Their job is to destroy “unstable planets,” because that’s evidently a thing that could threaten future space settlers.
I should pause and point out that while Dark Star is in no way meant to represent actual science, it does have a distinctly scientific flavor to it – but I’ll get to that in a minute, too.
So, “unstable planets” are a thing, and a thing that needs to be blown up. Dark Star is carrying a seemingly unlimited number of “Thermostellar Triggering Devices.” If you think that’s a fancy way of saying “bomb,” think again. It’s actually a fancy way of saying “Darth Vader’s wet dream.” Each bomb is a highly efficient, artificially intelligent warhead roughly the size of a Winnebago, and powerful enough to destroy an entire planet. If you think this sounds like an awesome job, you’d be right. The crew of the Dark Star really get a charge out of blowing up planets, as any red blooded American male would.
It’s the interminable stretches of time in between bomb runs that have everyone on edge. It’s hard to tell exactly how long, but this crew has been continuously deployed without a break for 20 years. Although, at one point someone explains that since they do a lot of traveling at light speed, from their perspective it’s only been three years. Either way, that’s a long time to be on board a ship with four other people, performing tedious, repetitive tasks and eating bland space food. The ship itself is getting brittle, experiencing a string of malfunctions that culminates in the destruction of the toilet paper supply.
That does seem like the kind of problem thing that would add up a little every day, slowly driving the victim insane.
Oh, and also, the ship’s commander was killed when his seat electrocuted him. He’s kept below decks in cryogenic stasis. That’s when they put you in a block of ice with some kind of light bulb inside it so they can occasionally come and bother you with their petty problems and gross incompetence. So yes, it’s safe to say that everybody’s a little twitchy at this point in the mission.
Lt. Doolittle (Brian Narelle) makes music with whatever he can find around the ship, and dreams about his surfboard back in California. Sgt. Pinback (O’Bannon) annoys everyone with his habits and has a weird alien pet on board that he seems to despise. Boiler (Cal Kuniholm) likes to trim his sweet '70s porn star-stache, and Talby (Dre Pahich) likes to hang out on the observation deck and I assume, smoke pot and watch the stars. The men seem to genuinely be friends, while also appearing to grimly tolerate one another the way you kind of have to when you’re stuck in a tin can in deep space.
One of the funny things about their ship is that unless I’m mistaken, it’s WAY bigger on the inside than the outside. Remember the bombs they’re carrying? This story concerns bomb number 20, which when deployed looks about a fifth the size of the ship. Where were they carrying 20 of those things? The ship itself looks a little like a speedboat from Miami Vice, and on the outside doesn’t look a lot bigger than one. But on the inside, the crew is seen wandering around an area that seems closer to the size of Rhode Island.
Maybe I’m exaggerating a little. But the film exaggerates this a LOT, and I choose to assume it’s meant to be funny because it is. The one part of the ship that isn’t relatively spacious is the bridge, where the men sit crammed together like a box of Peeps. It is here that they experience passing through an “electromagnetic meteor storm,” which is also apparently a thing that exists. The storm damages the ship’s computer, and perhaps more important, it damages bomb number 20.
This leads to another series of catastrophic failures, during which shenanigans ensue.
Dark Star’s humor is similarly dark, and its sardonic wit, improvised interiors and ad-hoc visual effects were clearly an influence on the British series Red Dwarf. In fact, one of the most interesting things about this movie is the abundance of “Easter eggs” that would seem to be a direct influence on the future of science fiction. Remember the knife-hand-stabby scene in Aliens with Bill Paxton? You know that cool hyperspace effect they used in Star Wars?
Yeah, I just hope someone is sending John Carpenter a check every now and then.
The budget was reportedly about 60 grand, which in Hollywood currency, comes to “barely enough to buy a Ferrari made of cocaine.” In real dollars, that’s not enough to make much of a movie with. In some places this shows, like the air packs on the space suits, which are clearly just Styrofoam packing molds. I might even have spotted some aluminum foil here and there. And while I can forgive the lack of quality acting in a film like this, it’s occasionally hard to deal with the shitty audio. The effects and music are fine, but most of the dialogue sounds like someone just set a boom box in the middle of the room and recorded over their high school mix tape.
The only alien life form in the movie is obviously a goddamn beach ball that looks like someone’s kid painted it. Additionally, there are a few sections of the film that were added as padding to extend it to feature length. If you’re not sure which spots they are, don’t worry. You’ll see them. One of them involves an elevator which has no reason whatsoever to exist. You’ll check the time more than once.
But hey, what do you want for 60 grand? I could get a pretty nice watch, I guess.
On the other side of it, the visual effects are astoundingly solid for the time, and (with the exception of the aforementioned “padding”) this film is particularly well edited (O’Bannon did the work himself), all things considered. Despite the Tardis-like dimensions, my eyes were willing to accept that I was seeing a spacecraft, and that five guys with Lynyrd Skynyrd beards are having a hard time keeping it running. The film is, in part, meant to be a mild satire of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, and it does well enough creating a sense of atmosphere that I was willing to accept this, too.
Of course, I’ve seen 2001 recently. Normal people probably won’t get any of this and might even end up cursing my name for suggesting such an obscure, completely bonkers film to you. But as I’ve already implied, you might need to be a little off key to enjoy John Carpenter in general. Although if you are the kind of “off key” that enjoys things like Red Dwarf, Star Wars, the Alien films, Hitchhiker’s Guide, writing long winded articles about your hobbies…and you consider Kurt Russel to be a living God…then congratulations!
You are the intended audience of Dark Star.