By Adrian Smith
For
many people, having to do your college work is a chore. Assignments are dull
and all you really want is to be out partying with your friends. Not John
Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon. Their assignment was to make a movie, using
equipment provided by the University of Southern California film school, and
dragging their friends and fellow classmates in for good measure. The result
was a science fiction classic that would launch both of them into fully-fledged
Hollywood careers. The original movie ran a little short to qualify as a
feature, so a wily distributor encouraged them to shoot a further ten minutes.
Both versions of the film, the original and extended editions, are available
here.
Dark Star borrows heavily from such space-set
classics as 2001 and Solaris in its presentation of space as a
working environment. This is not the space of heroes like Buck Rodgers or Flash
Gordon. It is a place of work, where astronauts are just ordinary guys just
doing their jobs and counting the days, or years, until they can go home. Their
mission,which appears to have lasted some three years, involves identifying and
then destroying unstable planets with massive thermo-nuclear talking bombs. No
particular reason is given as to why they are unstable, or indeed why they need
to be destroyed, but it is something to do with the possible colonization of
space. When problems develop with one particularly stubborn bomb, the crew are
forced to take desperate measures if they want to survive.
Carpenter
and O'Bannon wrote the screenplay together, and O'Bannon ended up taking a
starring role as Sgt. Pinback, a member of the crew whose sole function appears
to be to annoy everyone else on board. The rest of the cast are made up of friends
from the film school, and they all sport impressive amounts of facial hair.
Given its incredibly low-budget origins, Dark Star stands up remarkably
well, thanks mostly to the wit of the script and the imaginative camera work.
Yes the miniatures look like miniatures, and the sets look like cardboard, but
the story and the performances are so enjoyably goofy and genuine that this
simply does not matter.
The
Blu-ray restoration gives the film a fresh look and the colours are remarkably
vivid. The film has looked rather murky in previous DVD releases, and this is a
significant improvement. The main extra available here is a new feature length
documentary Let There Be Light: The
Odyssey of Dark Star. It provides some fascinating background on the
movie, and features interviews with some of the cast including an interview
with Dan O'Bannon shot shortly before he died. Sadly the involvement of John
Carpenter is minimal. He appears to have been interviewed over the phone, on a
line so muffled that subtitles have to be displayed (including some spelling
mistakes which are unforgivable!). However, this small gripe aside, it is a
documentary with plenty to offer fans of the movie, and is probably the main
reason for picking up this new release.
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