Dark Star (1974)

I'll be straight with you: Dark Star is one of the worst films I've ever sat through. And I say that with a kind of baffled respect, because there's context here that genuinely matters, even if it doesn't save the film.

This started life as a student project between John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon, and in that context, yes, it's impressive as heck. You can see the ambition, you can see young filmmakers throwing everything at the screen and trying to build something from virtually nothing. For a student film, some of what they pulled off technically is remarkable, and apparently the effects were considered quite something back in 1974. I'll take the word of audiences at the time on that.

The problem is that Dark Star wasn't released as a student film. It was expanded, finished and put out as a proper theatrical release. And judged as that, the whole thing falls apart almost immediately.

The cast aren't really actors in any meaningful sense, and it shows in nearly every scene. The props include what are very obviously shop-bought beach balls doing service as alien lifeforms. The comedy, which the film seems to think is one of its strengths, lands with a thud every single time. The jokes aren't funny. I don't mean they haven't aged well, I mean they feel like they weren't funny on the day they were shot. The whole thing has a kind of cheerful amateurism that works fine when you're showing your mates a short film you made at university, and becomes actively painful when you're watching it as a paying audience member expecting a finished product.

There's a loose, ramshackle quality to the storytelling that some people will charitably call "laid-back" or "deadpan." I'd call it undisciplined. Scenes drift. Characters wander in and out without much purpose. The pacing is non-existent. If there's a joke coming, you'll see it from about ten minutes away, and when it arrives, it still doesn't work.

So why one star rather than none? Because there's one genuinely interesting reason to watch Dark Star, and it's this: you can see the DNA of Alien being tested out here. O'Bannon took ideas, images and themes from this film and refined them into something extraordinary five years later. Watching Dark Star, there are moments where something clicks and you think, "oh, that's where that came from." That's not nothing. As a piece of film history, as a sketch in the margins of a much greater work, it has genuine curiosity value.

Carpenter, of course, went on to prove his talent was absolutely real. I've seen enough of his work to know the man could direct, and his subsequent run of films is extraordinary. But you'd barely know any of that was coming from watching this.

The honest truth is that Dark Star is a film that probably deserved to stay in the student archive and be watched by film scholars and hardcore Carpenter completists, not inflicted on general audiences as a feature release. The context is interesting. The origin story is interesting. The film itself is a chore.

One star, and that star belongs almost entirely to the ghost of Alien that haunts it.

Rating: ★  | Year: 1974  | Watched: 2025-05-11

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from John Carpenter: Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) · They Live (1988) · The Fog (1980) · Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
More science fiction: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Fantastic Planet (1973) · Nightmare City (1980) · The Long Walk (2025)