Dark Star

Dark Star is John Carpenter’s first film or his student film depending on who you want to believe or which version you see.  I’ve had mixed feelings about Carpenter for my whole life.  Movies like The Thing & Escape from New York were movies that came home from the video store shortly after we got a VCR when I was 8 years old & I love them to this day.  However Christine & Halloween (which I had somehow seen earlier on HBO when my family would have our annual beach vacation) I always thought were horrible.  So even though I knew about this film & its connections to films I like (the co-writer of this Dan O’Bannon wrote Alien & the story is the special effects guy went on to work on Star Wars), I was in no real rush to check it out despite being a pretty big sci-fi fan.  As fate would have it AMC put it on their free streaming service (it is still up here at the time I’m writing this for those who are interested).  I don’t know how I feel about it after watching it.  There are parts of it that are good (that the astronauts seem to be blue collar jack-asses instead of scientists) & parts of it that are pretty awful (the beach ball sub-plot (couldn’t you have spent an extra $50 for a better monster?)).  However, I think if this were Russian with bad sub-titles I would have loved it.  Maybe if I saw the original version that was 40 minutes shorter I would dig it.  But as it is… well, I could waste my time watching worse things, but I’m sure I could spend my time watching better things as well.