What came first, the hen or the egg? It’s not like I ponder over this extremely annoying question everyday. But for me, there has always been something fascinating about beginnings. How does life evolve, how do people build up a business and how does an artist start a new painting? When it comes to film, it is always interesting to look back at a director’s first – often shaky – steps with a camera on her/his shoulders. In this feature, I will look back at a certain director’s first film every month.
Let me start this review by admitting that I didn’t give Dark Star the full attention that it deserves. Although I actually don’t have any means to determine whether it does deserve more attention than I gave it, except for my principal rule that every movie deserves my full attention. I can rip it apart afterwards if it bored or agitated me. But as Lady MacBeth likes to say; “What is done, it’s done”. So what do I actually have to say about my peripheral experience of watching Dark Star?
Dark Star is a slow-burning movie. It has to, otherwise I wouldn’t have dozed off after 20 minutes (please note that this might have been different, had Michael Fassbender starred in it). It is a quiet and calm science-fiction movie, so calm that it can be hard to discover that it’s actually a parody of the genre. It blends in with the atmosphere of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien but then isn’t spectacularly thrilling enough to keep the audience interested. Watching some of the clips, I notice a very subtle and fun humor in the dialogue, however the acting is too bland to really transmit that humor to the other side of the screen.
Much like in A Space Odyssey, the funniest and most interesting character in Dark Star is a robot, or actually a bomb in this case. The philosophical exchanges of dialogue between the crew and the bomb are some of the best parts of the movie. But there is too much silence – or too little Strauss music? – to really draw you in.
John Carpenter isn’t exactly a man of a big budget, but with more money – and experience – he has managed to do so much better than with his first film. I’m glad this star has been mainly forgotten and become part of the dark past.
