Dark Star (DVD)

Dark Star is a low-budget 1974 science fiction comedy directed by John Carpenter and co-written with Dan O'Bannon. In the 22nd century the spaceship 'Dark Star' is on an ongoing mission to destroy unstable planets (that might turn into black holes) with smart 'Exponential Thermostellar Bombs' and therefore eliminate any threats to future human colonisation. The problem is that the bearded slacker crew have been doing this for 20 years (3 really but 'time relativity' makes it seem exactly like 20) and are bickering with each other more and more as the boredom of life onboard slowly drives them mad. Their Commander, Captain Powell (Joe Saunders), was killed in a freak ...  Read the complete review

Dark Star was originally a short film created by John Carpenter and Dan O’Brammpm while they were both studying film-making in southern Caliornia. They had no budget whatsoever, a mere four actors (including O’Bannon), and had to be extremely creative in their special effects. (For instance, a beach ball became an alien!) When a producer eventually stumped up $60,000 to turn it into a feature-length science fiction film in 1974, a cult classic was born. Though Carpenter later turned to the horror genre and O’Bannon went into scriptwriting (most famously penning the script for the original Alien), Dark Star will forever be an important part of sci-fi film ...  Read the complete review

The spacecraft Dark Star has been in space for twenty years and the crew are all bored out of their minds. It is now so far from Earth that there is a ten year delay in communications. The ship's commanding officer has been killed in a seat-belt accident, and as if that isn't bad enough, a storage area has self-destructed, destroying the ship's entire supply of toilet paper... Their mission is to search the universe for unstable planets to destroy. When they find one they drop a thermostellar bomb on it and then scarper, using hyper-drive... Cue streaky stars! Director John Carpenter originally made this film while at ...  Read the complete review

Knowing something of director John Carpenter’s reputation and being a fan of cult movies, especially those made on a limited budget, I was intrigued to stumble across a DVD release of Dark Star in a local branch of MVC; this was a film about which I had heard much but knew surprisingly little of substance. Allegedly a comedy or at least a piece of satire loosely based upon Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dark Star started life, according to the information accompanying the DVD, as a short film made by Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon (who I’d heard of from Alien) whilst they were on a film studies course. It was later expanded to feature ...  Read the complete review

Magnificent, the antidote to all of those clean-cut Star Trek style adventures where pioneering space cadets discover a rich and varied universe, and conquer it for America. 'Dark Star' sees the future as boring, space exploration as completely futile, and adventure as something you never encounter. The Dark Star is a spaceship searching the galaxy for unstable stars and planets, which it then blows up. The crew are a bunch of bored hippies desperate for something to break the monotony, but things suddenly go wrong when one of the talking bombs decides it should go off, and they have to use philosophy to talk it round. Very funny, with excellent ...  Read the complete review