Alien Wouldn’t Exist Without This John Carpenter Film

Anyone who knows the later work of Carpenter or O’Bannon will do well to remember the “student” part in Dark Star‘s student film origins. The movie follows a group of space travelers in the 22nd century who have grown very bored with their mission. After 20 years in space, the Dark Star has started to fall apart and acting captain Dolittle (Brian Narelle) and his crew try to pass the time any way they can.

Most of the movie’s run-time follows Dolittle, Pinback (O’Bannon), Boiler (Cal Kuniholm), and Talby (Dre Pahich, dubbed by Carpenter) as they play pranks, get high, and have conversations about existence. Defenders of Dark Star point to these scenes as the best in the movie, which capture a sort of nihilism involved in deep space and failing missions. For others, these scenes are interminable, unfunny, and unprovocative.

Along the way, the crew must deal with an alien that freed itself from the storage room. The alien doesn’t do much and gets killed off fairly easily. However, it does manage to loosen a bomb which, along with deep-space radiation, gains sentience. The crew tries to stop the bomb by engaging in a philosophical discussion with it. But when the bomb accepts that it exists only to explode, it fulfills its purpose and the destroys the ship.

Dark Star Falling

O’Bannon and Carpenter first made Dark Star between 1970 and 1972, and gained financing to shoot enough material to make it feature length in 1973. With the help of future director John Landis, O’Bannon gained support from B-movie producer Jack H. Harris, who ordered cuts to tighten the movie and give it a G rating. The finished film debuted in 1974 and then had a larger run in 1975 where it was met with critical praise and audience apathy.

However, as both O’Bannon and Carpenter became bigger names, Dark Star‘s following grew. It became a home video staple and is now considered a cult classic, in part for the way it presages the chief creatives’ later careers.

Carpenter has always resisted the idea that he’s a filmmaker who deals in heavy themes and big ideas, so it’s easy to guess that the philosophical mumbo-jumbo comes from O’Bannon. However, the cynical worldview does match the perspective that Carpenter would bring to movies such as Escape from New York and They Live. Furthermore, one of Pinback’s practical jokes involves him trying to convince everyone that the real Pinback killed himself years ago, and that he is an imposter. It’s played for laughs here, but one cannot help but think of the paranoia of The Thing.