Dark Star

It figures that John Carpenter’s first movie is his weirdest and the least like anything else he’s done. Ostensibly a sci-fi satire, only as dry as Death Valley, it follows the crew of the titular ship, whose mission is to blow up unstable planets (which seem to be planets with decaying orbits). The movie follows them on their mission, as the madness of being in space has long since set in, as well as dealing with a peculiarly friendly AI and an alien life form that looks like a beach ball. Everything about the movie is off, but in a way that keeps your attention. The pacing is weird, the lack of a singular story is weird, the acting is weird, and the direction is weird. I don’t think it’s First Movie Syndrome so much as an attempt to mock 2001’s ponderous profundity. It’s amusing to watch the movie pick apart self-important space epics, but it doesn’t really have fun with itself in the process. It’s mockery without humor, which puts the whole movie in a weird place. It’s too cheap to be taken seriously, but it has no intention of leaning into the potential camp value, so it’s remarkably serious in its satire. This is definitely a your-mileage-may-vary kind of movie. I don’t think anybody’s gonna put this at #1 in Carpenter’s filmography, but it’s definitely a curiosity, and worth a watch just to see where he started. The end result … how a person feels about it, though, is anybody’s guess.