Any sci-fi film buffs on NN? I figure there must be a few.
Not real science, but a sad day for sci-fi film buffs today as the news just broke that screenwriter / director Dan O’Bannon has died aged 63.
O’Bannon’s obits may well give the biggest mentions to his screenwriting credits on seminal sci-fi movie Alien and the Schwarzenegger vehicle Total Recall. But in the Elliott family he will be remembered mostly as the other half (with director John Carpenter) of the team that produced the low-fi 70s sci-fi classic Dark Star,) a favourite movie of my younger brother and me ever since we first saw it in our teenage years. Dark Star has been one of those films we share lines from as private jokes – part of our shared history.
Dark Star started life as a USC film-school graduation short made on a shoestring budget by Carpenter and co-written with fellow film student O’Bannon. It was later expanded into a feature in 1974. You can read about the film here.) It can be seen in some ways as a parody of Kubrick’s 2001, and indeed of the whole idea of exciting adventure-filled “to boldly go” space travel of the future portrayed in Star Trek.
The running gag of Dark Star is the one about – what if space travel turned out to be really, really boring? With people stuck together for years, thoroughly fed up with one another’s company, eating monotonous food and doing monotonous things on a malfunctioning spaceship?
For those too young to have ever caught Dark Star, perhaps its most obvious descendant, at least on British TV, is the comedy series Red Dwarf (official website here) which seems to me to owe much of its “Waiting for Godot in space” premise to Dark Star. Of course, Red Dwarf has other obvious antecedants in 70s sci-fi, including Alien and another “space will drive you crazy” cult classic, the proto eco-movie Silent Running.
Perhaps the best known single sequence from Dark Star is the end of the film, featuring the philosophical and talkative bomb (see here and here). However, more of a flavour of the film overall can be got from this sequence, or this shorter one.
Anyway, if you’ve never seen Dark Star, it is well worth digging out on DVD or video (do they still have those?) to see what 70s film-makers could do with a quirky vision, next to no money, improvised-on-a-shoestring special effects (by O’Bannon) and an absurdist deadpan sense of humour.
If the film-makers were talents like Carpenter and O’Bannon, at least.
RIP Dan.
Good call, Austin. Although I don’t consider that being in science should necessarily make one a de facto science fiction fan, as we should really be the genre’s biggest critics (shouldn’t we?). It seems an odd ‘genre’ to me. I mean, it’s fiction, right? But often as a vehicle for recycling familiar plot devices. (Just set it in space, and Hey! You’ve got a ‘science fiction’ film.) The science is either plausible, which makes it more interesting, or implausible, which can often render it, well, ridiculous.
I bristle slightly at your bracketing 2001… with ‘the whole idea of exciting adventure-filled…’ Star Trek thing. I’d consider it the prime influence of that ‘space… really boring… and crazy’ stuff (HAL the computer goes nuts): including Alien, which thirty years later I still find riveting (as opposed to Aliens, which I used to like but, after watching it again last week, now find just a silly action film); and Silent Running, directed by Douglas Trumbull, who worked on 2001…, which I consider superlative (but I’m a Kubrick nut).
Thanks for this Austin. I confess I didn’t know of O’Bannon’s input in so many projects.
I saw Silent Running again this year, after it had been mentioned in comparison to Pixar’s Wall-E. It is kind of elegiac but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I had anticipated (or remembered). Mind you, maybe that had more to do with watching in on my iPhone over the course of 2 or 3 commutes.
Hi Lee
Blame my slightly inaccurate phrasing – didn’t really mean to identify 2001 with “exciting adventure filled space travel”. Obviously 2001 is something rather different, and I would agree that it has been a prototype for all the many “malevolent artifical intelligence” movies that have come after it. It is certainly also a big influence on Alien, as you say.
I have to say I have never been all that fond of 2001, though I am a diehard Kubrick fan for the most part. I think this is partly because 2001 is a bit glacial in pace in places, and has such shifts of tone and setting – it is almost several movies in one. But the central bit on the ship with HAL the computer is certainly “seminal” for later sci-fi films.
Stephen, have never watched a movie on a handheld device. I have a mixed relationship with handhelds – the only time a tried out an iPhone I found my fingers were too clumsy to work it. I have just invested in an external DVD drive for the netbook, though – mainly to help me survive my next extended visit to the in-laws where there is no TV (!) and no internet access (gasp).