Director(s)	John Carpenter
Principal Cast	Brian Narelle as Doolittle Dan O’Bannon as Pinback Cal Kuniholm as Boiler Dre Pahich as Talby Joe Saunders as Powell
Release Date	1974
Language(s)	English
Running Time	83 minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

A red screen takes center frame. A message meant for the ship “Dark Star” begins to play. A man (Miles Watkins) from Mission Control informs the ship’s crew that the message they previously sent took near 10 years to get transmitted back to Earth where it was broadcast to rave reviews. He smirks and asks the crew to send increase the pace of the messages sent, a redundant gesture given aforementioned temporal delays.

But to add insult to injury, he proceeds to inform them that their request for mechanical assistance to deal with a radiation leak has been declined due to the same distance issues; sending up tools to their location is financially infeasible. Thus, communication is rendered nothing more than a product, losing its function as connective tool. The crew’s messages are nothing more than nicely packaged goods meant to be consumed as entertainment by the public on prime-time instead of as genuine requests for assistance meant to be acted on. They make profit but are awarded none of its spoils. The communicative farce brings to a close as the man gleefully tells the crew they’ll make do in spite of the difficulties.

Director John Carpenter’s electronic synth score plays, generating a propulsive energy as the ship appears on screen flying towards a planet. We get a view of the crew; one member – Talby (Dre Pahich) stays at the top of the ship while another 3 members – Doolittle (Brian Narelle), Pinback (Dan O’Bannon), Boiler (Cal Kuniholm) – work in a chamber of sorts. The group work in tandem to drop a bomb from their ship.

Pinback (Dan O’Bannon) proceeds to engage in cordial conversation with the bomb to set it up for its upcoming drop and Carpenter employs the traditional shot-reverse-shot between Pinback and the bomb itself, elevating the artificial intelligence qua tool of destruction to a similar agential field as the crew proper. The bomb is released and the crew engages in hyperdrive to get out of the area before the explosion goes off.

Carpenter deftly conveys the effects of such a maneuver in spite of obvious budgetary limitations. The ship quickly “moves” forward into the screen and disappears into a vanishing point created by the movement. A planet emulates the ship’s motion and disappears in a similar fashion. Then, the ship is seen approaching the frame from its front-side, and it comes into the frame before the screen cuts to a view of the stars.

The series of cuts up to now have generated a forward momentum within the frame and the stars begin to blur into streaks of multiple different colors. Another cut reveals the ship flying past a host of streaking colors, demonstrating the intensity of the ship’s speed.

The green lights in the chamber accentuate the intensity of the event before we cut to a screen read-out charting the explosion’s success. The final shot highlights the ship in the foreground and explosion in the background and makes the distance travelled more apparent.

Each part of this sequence is low-tech and has the propensity to feel jarring in its own right, but Carpenter knows exactly how to use them in tandem to present a convincing sequence of the crew successfully accomplishing their mission: they bomb uninhabited areas which may impede future human colonization.

The ship’s computer congratulates the crew on a nice bomb run before they set out to their next mission location. Boiler locates a 95% probability of intelligent life in one sector and asks Pinback if they should head out there; the latter scoffs at the suggestion and reminds the group that when Powell led them to find life during his tenure as ship leader, they only discovered a mindless balloon-like creature that they could do nothing meaningful with; bomb runs have proven to be more productive uses of time. This cynical move to prioritize destruction over preservation extends the farcical nature of the initial transmission sent to the ship: in a world where communication is a compartmentalized product instead of connective force, there’s no reason to prioritize incorporating more voices into one’s discursive sphere.

Thus, the crew continues on their merry way: they ignore all signs of life, plot out the destruction of planets which may impede a future humanity’s evolution, and send communications doomed to receive no meaningful responses back to this same humanity. Carpenter and screen-writer Dan O’Bannon tap into darkly comedic, misanthropic stylings of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb in the way they navigate communicative failure and humanity’s drive towards violence but cross it against a futuristic milieu which pays homage to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, namely in the way it uses artificial intelligence as a way to define and tease out the parameters of humanity and its tendencies.

By using two of Kubrick’s masterpieces as spring-boards for Dark Star, Carpenter and O’Bannon give what started out as a student-film enough momentum to work as a feature-length film^[1]IMDb.com. (n.d.). Dark star. IMDb. Retrieved July 11, 2022, from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069945/trivia/?ref_=tt_trv_trv. The film spends its run-time constantly demonstrating the way communication operates and breaks apart on the ship: the crew-members avoid talking to one another in favor of recording their messages for record-keeping or transmission while the most talkative parties end up being the ship’s main computer and the bombs themselves. By primarily orienting the film around screens and non-human entities, Carpenter is able to create effective set-pieces that expand on the themes without the need for grandiose visuals.

Unfortunately, the gaps made by stretching out the narrative’s running-time are large and frequent enough to seriously dampen the pacing, drawing a negative attention to the film’s sparsity. Communicative efforts between the characters, which already hinge on a dry, wit that may not work for many viewers, often devolve into unclever, insipid moments that feel like run-time extensions, undermining narrative momentum and making the 83-minute film feel like a slog to get through at times.

The intent behind these moments is discernible given the film’s thematic context, but the execution suggests a focus on ensuring the relevant footage exists rather than elevating it with a more intricate build-up. Yet, the thematic intent of the narrative buoys it through its less than memorable moments, culminating in a finale that brings together the film’s best elements in satisfying fashion. Despite being a (very) far cry from his best work, Dark Star serves as a charming calling card for Carpenter’s filmography-to-come, portending the cynical, misanthropic, anti-establishment attitude that will characterize much of it.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	In spite of production issues and limitations, John Carpenters debut film, Dark Star, should provide more than enough laughs for viewers in the mood for a wry, cynical science-fiction feature that asks what life should look like in a world where authentic communication seems inaccessible.
Rating	7.8/10
Grade	B

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