An anonymous reader wrote: In the early '70s, young filmmakers John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon made their graduation project, a spaceship story, little knowing that it would influence Alien and many other films. there was. Horror master John Carpenter's directorial debut, Dark Star, produced by film school students on his $60,000 budget, is now considered a sci-fi cult classic of his. The film, which has just turned 50, is worlds apart from much of the science fiction that came before it and what came after it, and is neither a space odyssey nor a space opera, but rather a dark, brooding story of people brought together. , often absurd portraits. Inside a malfunctioning interstellar tin can. Perhaps the most famous scene consists of an existential debate between an astronaut and a sentient bomb. Dark Star was created by Carpenter, who directed and composed the film, and Dan O'Bannon, who co-wrote the screenplay, served as editor, production designer, and visual effects supervisor, and played the unstable character. It was a collaboration. Paranoid Pinback Sergeant. They met as up-and-coming filmmakers at the University of Southern California. “meanwhile [Carpenter and O’Bannon] Their personalities couldn't be more similar. They were both very energetic and focused,” says Daniel Griffiths, director of Let There Be Light: The Odyssey of Dark Star (2010), the definitive documentary about the making of the film. .
John Kenneth Muir, author of The Films of John Carpenter, explains that science fiction films from this era tended to be dark and dystopian. Examples include “Silent Running'' (1972), in which all plants on Earth become extinct, and George Lucas movies. THX-1138 debuted in 1971 and suppressed human emotions. “Dark Star has arrived in this dark and hopeless world of imagination, but takes the darkness one step further into absurdist nihilism.” Carpenter and O'Bannon wrote, “Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey Griffith says he set out to create “the ultimate riff on the song.” Muir explains that Kubrick's 1968 film “was about the viewer looking to the star for meaning about the nature of humanity, but in 'Dark Star' life has no meaning.” Rather, Muir says, the film parodies 2001 “with its own sense of human irrelevance in the way things work.” While Kubrick used classical music to create his films, Dark Star begins with a country song from Benson, Arizona. (The real-life Benson roads are named after the movie). The film was released with the tagline “the spaced-out odyssey”. Muir says Dark Star captures the atmosphere of the era in which it was made, the atmosphere of America during the Nixon administration. “The 1960s were a time of utopian dreams and counterculture change in America. The 1970s represented what writer Johnny Byrne called the “awakening of the hippie dream.'' , based on the fact that the more things change, the more things change. Just like that. ” […]
When Dark Star premiered at the 1974 Filmex Expo, audience reaction was largely positive. “They recognized the film's absurdist humor and celebrated its student film roots,” says Griffiths. It had a limited theatrical release in 1975, but was not a commercial success. “The film received negative reviews from critics and general indifference from audiences,” Muir says. “Both Carpenter and O'Bannon realized that the struggles they had endured to make the film didn't matter to the audience, who only cared about the finished product. I think they were disappointed,” Griffiths said. talk. But the growth of the VHS market helped it build an audience and propelled it to cult status. Its influence is still felt today, perhaps most directly in Ridley Scott's Alien, for which O'Bannon, who died in 2009, wrote the screenplay. The two films share his DNA. Alien is also set on a creepy work ship with bickering crew members, only this time the aliens aren't played for laughs.