Dark Star (1974)

Dark Star arrives with a curious origin story, even by the standards of low-budget science fiction. What began as a student film at the University of Southern California in the early 1970s was picked up by producer Jack H. Harris, expanded and released theatrically in 1974. The premise is, on paper, a reasonable one: a crew of increasingly dishevelled astronauts twenty years into a deep-space mission, tasked with destroying unstable planets, find their sanity fraying at the edges as they contend with a troublesome alien mascot and, in the film's most talked-about conceit, a philosophical bomb that has started to question its own existence. It is science fiction played for laughs, pitched somewhere between existential comedy and lo-fi space opera, running to a trim 83 minutes and carrying the tagline "Bombed Out in Space with a Spaced Out Bomb!" which does at least manage your expectations honestly.

For anyone tracing John Carpenter's career, Dark Star is the starting point, the rough first sketch before the more assured, polished work that followed. His subsequent output would grow considerably in confidence and resource, as you can see if you look at Assault on Precinct 13, made just two years later, or the considerably larger-scale They Live from 1988. Dark Star is also notable for being an early credit for Dan O'Bannon, who co-wrote the script with Carpenter and appears on screen as one of the crew. O'Bannon would later go on to write the screenplay for Alien (1979), and the connections between certain ideas tested here and what ended up on screen in that Ridley Scott film have been a talking point among genre fans ever since. The cast, to put it plainly, is not a cast of professional actors: Brian Narelle, Cal Kuniholm, Dre Pahich and Adam Beckenbaugh round out the crew alongside O'Bannon, and the production reflects its student-film roots in ways that are not always charming. For context on what other science fiction filmmaking looked like around the same period, it is worth comparing notes with something like Westworld from the year before, or the altogether stranger Fantastic Planet, also 1973, both of which give a sense of how wide the genre's range was even then.

Probably one of the worst films ever made The fact that this was a student project for Carpenter and O'Bannon does make this impressive as heck in a way. The effects were considered very impressive back in '74. The problem is... it's not a student film. It's a full release and as a full release it's just terrible lol. The actors aren't really actors, the props are store bought beach balls and things, the jokes aren't funny... the lady goes on. The only reason it gets 1* is because it was quite interesting to watch the origin of some of the scenes in Alien get tested out here.

That footnote about Alien is really what saves Dark Star from being a complete write-off for me, because without it there would be very little reason to sit through 83 minutes of wobbly props and jokes that land with a thud. As a piece of film history, it is a curiosity worth knowing about, even if knowing about it and actually watching it are two rather different propositions. I suspect most people would be better served reading a paragraph about it than committing an evening to it. Sometimes the most interesting thing about a film is the films it quietly helped to make possible.

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)