Tonight, Sheffield electronica duo Animat furnish cult sci-fi Dark Star with a fresh soundtrack as part of the Glasgow Film Festival. We revisit the film's creaky corridors and find its lustre undimmed...
A long time ago on a university campus far, far away, John Carpenter
and Dan O’Bannon started work on a small-scale student flick by the name
of Dark Star. Their budget was shoestring and their progress
slow, piecing together the initial cut over the course of three years.
But with wit, invention and a vital wellspring of filmmaking chutzpah,
the duo worked alchemy. Beach balls became aliens, baking trays were
repurposed as space suits, and an hour-long student film became a
full-length feature with lasting cult appeal. A sharp satire with a
goofy sensibility, Dark Star combines slapstick humour with
Cartesian philosophy; the destruction of planets with the monotony of
long-term isolation; existentialism with gags about toilet paper. It
roughed up the pristine visions of a then freshly popular genre (thanks
to Kubrick’s 2001), and launched its creators’ careers in the process.
Carpenter and O’Bannon met while enrolled in the University of
Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television – by then already
boasting at least one poster-boy alumnus in the form of George Lucas
(whose feature debut THX 1138 was based on an earlier USC short). Both Carpenter and O’Bannon donned multiple creative hats to make Dark Star
a reality: as well as directing and producing, Carpenter provided its
iconic score and co-wrote with O’Bannon; in addition to scripting,
O’Bannon’s credits include production design and editing, plus a role in
front of the camera playing Sgt. Pinback. And, as comprehensive
making-of doc Let There Be Light makes clear, the list of
unofficial roles extended further still. With zero ventilation in the
astronauts’ helmets (made, as they were, of toys and tape), breathing
was tricky. Therefore, the scene in which Doolittle (Brian Narelle)
teaches phenomenology to a bomb was filmed one line of dialogue at a
time, with O’Bannon on hand to help recuperate wilting actor Brian
Narelle the moment Carpenter called ‘cut’. This can-do DIY approach is a
big part of the end result’s abundant charm: while you can see the
frayed edges and corner-cutting, it’s all the richer for it. The
aforementioned inflatable extra-terrestrial is a case in point:
flagrantly cheap, but endearingly memorable.
Viewed forty years on, Dark Star seems very much a product
of its origins (both in terms of its 70s counter-culture tropes and its
microbudget aesthetic) but it has dated gracefully. Even if it hadn’t,
it would retain a prominent place in the chronicles of cinematic sci-fi
by virtue of its progeny alone. Carpenter’s subsequent successes need
little elaboration, with the likes of Escape from New York and The Thing
establishing him as a genre titan (even if the crown has since
slipped). The late O’Bannon enjoyed a comparatively less feted career,
but one nonetheless studded with gold: Dark Star’s beach-ball chase became the basis for Alien’s stalking xenomorph; further script work included the original Total Recall and Tobe Hooper’s Invaders from Mars remake; and in 1985 he received his first director’s credit, for seminal shocker Return of the Living Dead. Meanwhile, Dark Star’s DNA cropped up again and again – from the Millennium Falcon’s hyperspace blur to the galactic misadventures aboard Red Dwarf’s eponymous mining ship – establishing an enduring legacy for this most unorthodox of space odysseys.
21 Feb – CCA Theatre @ 21.30
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