{"id":115,"date":"2009-12-18T23:41:12","date_gmt":"2009-12-18T23:41:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/2009\/12\/18\/rip_dan_obannon\/"},"modified":"2010-12-22T11:46:22","modified_gmt":"2010-12-22T11:46:22","slug":"rip_dan_obannon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/2009\/12\/18\/rip_dan_obannon\/","title":{"rendered":"RIP Dan O’Bannon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Any sci-fi film buffs on NN?<\/em><\/strong> I figure there must be a few.<\/p>\n

Not real science, but a sad day for sci-fi film buffs today as the news just broke<\/a> that screenwriter \/ director Dan O\u2019Bannon<\/a> has died aged 63.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Bannon\u2019s obits may well give the biggest mentions to his screenwriting credits on seminal sci-fi movie Alien<\/em> and the Schwarzenegger vehicle Total Recall.<\/em> But in the Elliott family he will be remembered mostly as the other half (with director John Carpenter<\/a>) of the team that produced the low-fi 70s sci-fi classic Dark Star,<\/em><\/a>) a favourite movie of my younger brother and me ever since we first saw it in our teenage years. Dark Star<\/em> has been one of those films we share lines from as private jokes \u2013 part of our shared history.<\/p>\n

Dark Star<\/em> started life as a USC film-school graduation short made on a shoestring budget by Carpenter and co-written with fellow film student O\u2019Bannon. It was later expanded into a feature in 1974. You can read about the film here.<\/a>) It can be seen in some ways as a parody of Kubrick\u2019s 2001,<\/em> and indeed of the whole idea of exciting adventure-filled \u201cto boldly go\u201d<\/span> space travel of the future portrayed in Star Trek.<\/em><\/p>\n

The running gag of Dark Star<\/em> is the one about \u2013 what if space travel turned out to be really, really boring?<\/em> With people stuck together for years, thoroughly fed up with one another\u2019s company, eating monotonous food and doing monotonous things on a malfunctioning spaceship?<\/p>\n

For those too young to have ever caught Dark Star,<\/em> perhaps its most obvious descendant, at least on British TV, is the comedy series Red Dwarf<\/em><\/a> (official website here<\/a>) which seems to me to owe much of its \u201cWaiting for Godot<\/span><\/em> in space\u201d<\/span> premise to Dark Star.<\/em> Of course, Red Dwarf has other obvious antecedants in 70s sci-fi, including Alien<\/em> and another \u201cspace will drive you crazy\u201d<\/span> cult classic, the proto eco-movie Silent Running.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Perhaps the best known single sequence from Dark Star<\/em> is the end of the film, featuring the philosophical and talkative bomb (see here<\/a> and here<\/a>). However, more of a flavour of the film overall can be got from this sequence,<\/a> or this shorter one.<\/a><\/p>\n

Anyway, if you\u2019ve never seen Dark Star,<\/em> 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\u2019Bannon) and an absurdist deadpan sense of humour.<\/p>\n

If the film-makers were talents like Carpenter and O\u2019Bannon, at least.<\/p>\n

RIP Dan.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019Bannon has died aged 63. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-procrastination","category-science-fiction","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/notranting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}