In 1970, a group of long-haired, anti-establishment student filmmakers came together at the University of Southern California to work on the degree project of an aspiring director.
The director was John Carpenter. The film was Dark Star, and it served not only as the launching point for Carpenter’s career, but it would go on to have a startling effect on science fiction film as a genre, with its impacts felt even now, 50 years later.
Over the course of 1970 to 1974, Dark Star was shot and cut together first as a student film running just 45 minutes, then re-cut with an additional 50 minutes of new footage, and, finally, theatrically released, making it Carpenter’s feature directorial debut, before he went on to become a legend of sci-fi and horror cinema with titles like Halloween, The Thing, and Escape from New York.
It was also the feature debut for Dan O’Bannon, who served as the film’s co-writer, editor, and main supporting actor. O’Bannon is revered today among dedicated sci-fi aficionados, serving as the screenwriter for Alien, co-screenwriter for Total Recall, and working on visual effects for films like Star Wars.
But those impressive careers started humbly, with a cramped, cobbled-together set, a budget of just $60,000, and the very simplest of premises.
“At some point, [Carpenter] told me about what his degree project was going to be, which was a science fiction story about…his phrase was ‘truck drivers in space,’” said Dark Star’s optical effects consultant Bill Taylor, in an interview for the documentary Let There Be Light: The Odyssey of Dark Star.
Indeed, the film was deliberately positioned as the “anti-2001: A Space Odyssey”—a movie which O’Bannon and Carpenter both respected, but which O’Bannon in particular thought represented a romanticized, glamorous version of space. Instead, Dark Star set out to focus on the people working boring, unglamorous jobs, living a life of tedium.
The crew of the titular spaceship, the Dark Star—Doolittle, Talby, Boiler, and Pinback (played by O’Bannon)—are tasked with deploying huge bombs, each of which is equipped with its own artificial intelligence system, to destroy “unstable planets” that could threaten human civilization as it expands out into the cosmos.
Due to the effects of time dilation from jumping through hyperspace, the crew has been on their mission for 20 years, but has aged only three years, and their boredom has made them all a bit loopy.
Talby spends almost all of his time sequestered in a tiny observation dome, obsessed with a cluster of asteroids called the Phoenix Asteroids. Boiler performs dangerous knife tricks and recklessly shoots a laser gun for target practice. Pinback plays practical jokes, keeps a video diary, and has also adopted an alien lifeform shaped like a beachball as the ship’s mascot. And Doolittle, left in command after their commander, Powell, suffered an accident which has left him essentially dead (but kept in cryogenic suspension), finds solace while playing a crude musical instrument made from glass bottles while he fantasizes about surfing.
The movie spends most of its 90-minute run time simply spending time with the crew as they go about their weird routines, occasionally lapsing into an almost episodic sequence, like when Pinback pursues the beachball alien into a comically harrowing situation that leaves him dangling from an elevator. Rather than having a core “plot” per se, Dark Star invites the audience to experience space with a bunch of schlubby, scruffy dudes.
This was, in Carpenter’s own words, intentional.
“I was always a big fan of absurdist humour. I was a big fan of…not the intellectual content of, say, Waiting for Godot and some of those things, but they were extremely humorous to me. I think O’Bannon influenced me a great deal, because he enjoyed that. He really enjoyed the craziness of the pointlessness of their mission.”
In its initial release, critics were not kind to Dark Star. Variety called it a “dim comedy” that “consists of sophomoric notations and mistimed one-liners.” Carpenter himself has said the film isn’t his favourite, and O’Bannon was so wounded by the experience of seeing audience members not laughing that he pivoted to horror with Alien.
That particular turn in O’Bannon’s writing and career is often cited as the biggest upshot of Dark Star, given the subsequent impact that Alien had on horror and science fiction. The beachball alien sequence in Dark Star is credited by O’Bannon himself as the inspiration for the duct-crawling Giger creature in Ridley Scott’s 1979 flick.
Other filmmakers were also affected and influenced as well, particularly by the film’s creative use of early computer graphics and low-budget set and costumes.
“[George Lucas] did such things in his student version of THX [1138]… he used actual video monitors and put stuff on them,” O’Bannon says in Let There Be Light.
“We did them in a different manner, using traditional animation table. Then Lucas sees that; hires me to do the computer screens on Star Wars. That was that little two-step.”
“I would guarantee that George Lucas saw Dark Star well before he wrote Star Wars. I think that’s inescapable, because of him being a USC alum, etc. etc. I think he would have seen it.”
Carpenter, meanwhile, would make it a career trademark that he would also compose music for his films, starting with Dark Star. His iconic music (often featuring synthesizers) is heard in the opening notes to Halloween, Escape from New York, and in most of his movies.
But on top of the filmmaking expertise the two lead creators of Dark Star would go on to establish in their professional careers, the film would have a major impact on the future science fiction comedy as a whole genre.
Prior to Dark Star, sci-fi comedy, where it existed, often fell into a handful of sub-categories. There were the films with established characters or groups, like Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, or The Three Stooges in Orbit. Then there were the raunchier comedies of the ’60s, like the iconic Barbarella or Invasion of the Star Creatures, where the invaders are (what else) buxom women with skimpy outfits. And then there were the goofy “mad scientist”-style comedies, like Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor, or the parodies of ‘50s pulp heroes, like Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century.
What these films have in common, despite their apparent stylistic differences, is that even as they parody the golden age of science fiction, with its aspirations of moon colonies and extrapolation from the Soviet-US space race, they celebrate it as well. There’s still a belief in the core idea that space, and science, are cool, and fun, and filled with strong men with jawlines and beautiful women who swoon.
Dark Star rejected that notion.
“I could hear Dan’s voice saying: ‘space is not fun. Space is boring. Space is shitty. It’s a horrible job out here, doing this crap. It’s awful.’” said Tommy Lee Wallace, Dark Star’s associate art director, in Let There Be Light.
While this is a seemingly cynical outlook, there’s tremendous pathos and empathy at the heart of Dark Star as well. Each of the four crewmembers is fully realized and distinct. Doolittle’s surfing obsession, while initially treated as a joke, leads to a final, climactic fate that mirrors the tragic ending of Ray Bradbury’s short story “Kaleidoscope.” Pinback confesses in one of his video diaries that he is actually a stowaway named Bill Froug, and only on board by accident, an admission which gives the character a curious amount of depth.
Rooted firmly in O’Bannon and Carpenter’s anti-establishment tendencies, fueled in part by the Vietnam War-era counterculture movement, Dark Star celebrated the average joe in the future. And this filtered down into its various successors.
Rob Grant, one of the co-creators of Red Dwarf, the iconic British sci-fi comedy series about a crew of dysfunctional failures, credits Dark Star as a key inspiration. Red vs. Blue, one of the earliest examples of machinima filmmaking, is said to have been inspired in part by Dark Star by co-creator Burnie Burns.
That shift in comedic sensibilities has trickled out, and we can trace back more recent shows like Avenue 5 or The Orville to Dark Star’s celebration of ordinary goofballs’ struggles in space. If 2001 was a revolutionary film for “serious” science fiction filmmakers, Dark Star was the absurd beachball alien chasing after it, altering the trajectory of science fiction comedy with a bomb blast that was felt, if not seen, by millions of fans to come.
Let there be light.
