Dark Star (1974)

(Criterion Streaming, March 2020) Ugh. It’s with no pleasure whatsoever that I emerge from Dark Star reporting no pleasure whatsoever. Sure, I know it’s a classic reference in SF film history—writer-director John Carpenter’s debut, an oddball humorous critique of spaceship movies before spaceship movies became mainstream, and a definite cult classic considering its absurd black humour and downbeat ending. But when one says “cult classic,” one must hear “not for everyone” or perhaps “best suited to a specific time”—Dark Star, in its low-budget technical roughness and coarse execution only one step beyond a student film, is perhaps more remarkable now for what it inspired than for what it is. The links to Alien are obvious thanks to the working-class shipboard atmosphere and co-writer Dan O’Bannon’s signature on both scripts. But influence is not always correlated to original quality—sometimes, something is striking because it’s new, and then the newness fades as copies pullulate. Sure, I’m glad to strike off Dark Star from the list of landmark SF movies I hadn’t yet seen—but I’m done with it. And I can’t even blame the technical roughness of the copy I watched, since it came straight from best-in-class Criterion.