It started off as a spoof of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which screamed for spoofing from the first second it was onscreen. John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon, who were film students at USC (although Carpenter had already written an Oscar-winning short film), cobbled it together as a short film, using whatever they had around as props: a beach ball for an alien, muffin tins for the front of a space suit, a microfiche reader for a video diary. It was such a hit that they expanded it with a modest budget into a feature-length film. The end product is spotty: sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant, and sometimes pretty stupid.

The Dark Star is an interstellar spacecraft that travels to new solar systems and blows up unstable planets, securing the system for future colonization. It's the mid-21st century, and the ship has been in space for 20 earth-years. Somehow, the crewmembers have aged only 3 years, but they've felt every second together. According to a physics friend of mine, "the (constant) speed to age 3 yrs as compared to 20 is 2.966*10^8 m/s, or 0.988667 times the speed of light. Of course we know they're not traveling at constant speed, so they probably go 0.999999c and do most of the aging when they slow down to do their dirty work." It's nice to know that Carpenter and company checked their math.

Anyway, if people suffering from cabin fever after only a few months together, what must it be like spending 20 years together? As the years have passed, the ship has slowly fallen apart. There's a radiation leak. The former captain was killed by a malfunctioning pilot's seat and now resides in cold storage below decks, but you can still consult him like an oracle. The sleeping quarters were damaged years ago, and now the crew camps out in the food storage area on makeshift bunks. There's no help in sight, either: contact with Earth is delayed by 10 years, and Congress has already stopped funding the program that sent them out in the first place.

The crewmembers are all bordering on dementia. Lt. Doolittle (Brian Narelle), the new captain, just wants to blow things up. He's not interested in whether his ship finds signs of intelligent life. Talby (Dre Pahich) mans the viewing deck, and he's not interested in coming down anymore, or eating, for that matter. Boiler (Cal Kuniholm) just seems confused by everything. And Pinback (writer Dan O'Bannon) passes his time taking care of the alien beach ball the ship took in a few systems back. The sets are goofy and the acting borders on terrible, but Carpenter and company manage to squeeze out some genuine suspense, showing the knack for it that would manifest in later films. In one great sequence, Pinback searches the dimly lit depths of the ship for the escaped alien, and it's easy to forget that his opponent is just a huge painted beach ball because of the way Carpenter shot the scenes.

The ship also has intelligent, talking, planet-destroying bombs made out of scale models of semi trucks. One of them is accidentally deployed during a meteor storm (the effects definitely a spoof of 2001's interminable "racing lights" sequence), and it's so smart that it won't be convinced to halt its impending detonation. This becomes a real problem when the mechanism to loose it from the ship is damaged too. All technical avenues blocked, Doolittle must talk to the bomb and convince it not to kill them all. This scene is the perfect distillation of what makes this film so entrancing. It's goofy, to say the least. We are presented with wide shots of Doolittle superimposed on a shot of the scale model ship and its scale model bomb, against a backdrop of an artist's renderings of bizarre galaxies. He's got his space suit on, complete with muffin tins for a chest plate. It's tempting to laugh at it, but the dialog is surprisingly intelligent and interesting. He must use Cartesian reasoning to convince the bomb that it can't be sure that it received the order to detonate, since the only thing it can be sure of is its own existence. It's the wonderful combination of sly humor and intelligence that characterizes Carpenter's best work, and the way it turns out provides the best line in the film.

Carpenter went on to direct some of the most memorable films of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, Starman, and The Thing. It's easy to dismiss him as a mere schlock peddler, but his best work shows a mastery of suspense that few directors can show. It's too bad that his best work seems behind him. O'Bannon is probably best known as the writer of Alien, but he also did special effects work for that other 1970s sci-fi epic, Star Wars.