Dark Star

Some time back, I was going through the movie channels on Pluto and a movie that sounded interesting and that I hadn't heard of before showed up: Dark Star. The live showing was going to run later than I wanted to stay up since I work the early shift, so I added it to the watch list and recently finally got around to watching it.

The opening credits, several minutes into the movie, list several behind the camera roles for John Carpenter, including director, screenwriter, and music. This was in fact Carpenter's first film, originally conceived as a student film project and then expanded when Carpenter was able to get a bit more money a few years later. But the movie was made on a shoestring budget, which is probably a big part of the reason why the image quality looks almost like it could have been videotape if it weren't in a 16:9 ratio.

As for the relatively limited plot, four astronauts are aboard the Dark Star, some time in the distant future, going through the galaxy looking for planets suitable for human habitation and destroying those that could be a danger to humans. There used to be a fifth on board, but the computer suffered some malfunctions a few years prior in an asteroid storm with one of the malfunctions killing the ship's commander.

It's a relatively boring life, and the four men have been on board for 20 years now, or at least 20 years in earth time, the men saying they've actually only aged three years. One of the astronauts likes to sit up on what on a train would be the observation deck, one of those plastic bubble-like protuberance, so he can be alone and look out at the stars. Another one found an alien on another planet and has been keeping the alien on board as a pet that looks like a beach ball with feet. The alien escapes the room where it's being kept, causing all sorts of havoc.

Worse is that the computer is about to malfunction again, this time causing problems with one of the bomb bays. The computer has AI that talks to the astronauts, and is frankly rather snarky in its dealings with the astronauts. But with the bomb bay malfunction, it seems as though the computer and especially the bomb bay might be getting some sentience, 2001: A Spacy Odyssey-style.

There's not actually a whole heck of a lot of plot, which shouldn't be that surprising since the movie had such a limited budget. That lack of a budget certainly causes some problems, like horribly bad special effects (and I'd bet the alien looking like a beach ball is because of the budget). However, the movie has a lot of charm, and John Carpenter inserted a lot of humor into the script. The movie is listed as a comedy on many sources, although I'd consider it more like the sort of humor Alfred Hitchcock put into some of his movies to lighten the tension.

Dark Star doesn't always work, and it may not be for everybody, but I think it's worth a watch.

Thoughts on They Live

Some months back, when TCM Underground was still a thing, one of the movies they aired was They Live, which I knew a fair bit about because of how much of it has entered popular culture. Surprisingly, however, I had never seen it in its entirety, so I recorded it and made certain it was one of the movies I watched before I get rid of the current DVR in the upcoming move.

Professional wrestler Roddy Piper plays Nada, a guy with a shady past who winds up in Los Angeles working as an itinerant laborer in the construction industry. Since he can't afford anyplace else, he winds up at an encampent that's across the way from one of those street-corner churches that preaches an individual mashup of various strains of American Protestant theology that lean heavily on Revelation and the idea that the end might be nigh. At the same time, TV broadcasts are being broken into by grainy images of of a speaker telling everybody to wake up and that what they see around them might not be real.

Two things happen to change Nada's life. One is that the encampment is attacked by the police, Soylent Green style if you remember the scene where the police deployed bulldozers to deal with the food riots. The other is that the church is also raided, as the church was apparently a hive of anti-government activity. Nada makes his way into the church, and finds that among the things the church administration, if you can call it that, has dumped hastily is a box of sunglasses. Nada puts on one of the pairs of sunglasses, and is shocked at what he finds.

This is where the movie gets to the part that is much better known. Nada sees a whole bunch of subliminal messages. Behind billboards and magazines are messages such as "OBEY" and "NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT", also telling people to CONSUME and REPRODUCE. That's bad, but the glasses also reveal that there's a substantial minority of the people who are apparently not really human, as they have skeletal heads with no skin or hair and bulging eye sockets. Some people in very high places know about this, and no wonder they're trying to keep it a secret.

Now, of course, the question becomes one of whether Nada can convince other people of what's going on, which seems like it might not be that difficult if he can get anybody to put on the sunglasses. But that's difficult enough, and made more difficult by the fact the authorities are on his trail. There doesn't seem to be much of anywhere Nada can turn to.

A lot has been said of the idea that They Live is prescient. I have to admit that over the past several years my opinion on the conspiracy theory movies that go back to the 1970s and the Watergate era has in many ways changed. I think that's in no small part because of the broader changes in society in general. The people putting out the conspiracy theory movies of the 1970s were fighting "The Man", and in many ways they became "The Man", which will certainly change your perspective on the idea of questioning authority.

One other difference is that a lot of the conspiracy theory movies suffer from a form of "Top Man Syndrome", which is the idea that it's not the system that's a problem; just the people running it. Government is running for the benefit of Evil Big Business, and if we could only get the right people in who would run it for The People, everything would somehow be so much better. A good argument can be made that the government is really in it for itself first. There's a reason why I've made reference on a bunch of occasions to the British sitcom Yes, Minister and how the civil service seems to be as much if not more the ones running things than the elected officials. The past seven years have shown a pretty big disconnect here in America between the government class, and anyone who doesn't share the worldview of the government class, with the government class feeling it needs to do anything necessary, no matter how unconstitutional, to destroy the people who disagree with them.

One thing that I think a lot of conspiracy theory movies get wrong is to give government the wrong sort of power to keep people in check; I think I mentioned this not too long ago in my review of My Fellow Americans where the state is somehow able to get to Jack Lemmon's presidental library to alter records, along with bringing ridiculous amounts of overt force. To be fair, the latter looks good on film and gives the opportunity for explosions and action scenes. In reality, the power is more likely to be used to kill people through the death by a thousand cuts: politically-motivated tax audits; pressuring banks and other intermediaries to stop doing business with wrong-thinking companies (see One America News or Tucker Carlson); and the like. But that doesn't look good on screen.

They Live certainly falls into that trap, although at least director John Carpenter had the sense of making the back story, if you will, being one of aliens using Earth as a sort of Third World labor pool and coopting the wealthier and high-status people into being masters in a gilded cage. No wonder the government has the powers it does; these are alien powers.

Carpenter also doesn't get particularly heavy-handed in telling the story, letting the action unfold in a more entertaining way. I think that's part of the reason why the movie works and overcame its low-budget status to become a cult classic, while other conspiracy theory movies seem to be liked more by the critics and people who might like more arthouse-type movies

And if you think I haven't talked enough about politics, I'm sorry to say you're going to get more, and probably more controversial, when I get to a post about Tucker: The Man and His Dream sometime this week.

Starman

Another of the movies that I had the chance to catch courtesy of one of DirecTV's free preview weekends was Starman.

In 1977, the US launched Voyager 2, a probe designed to visit the outer planets of our solar system before continuing on into deep space. On the off chance that there is any intelligent life out there, NASA included a disc with greetings from Earth in 54 languages and pictures of our planet. Starman posits that an alien civilization found Voyager 2 and decided to investigate this little planet.

Except, of course, the visit doesn't go as planned. NORAD finds the alien spaceship on its radar and, not being able to figure out what it is, sends airplanes to intercept and possibly shoot it down if it's a danger. Ultimately, they do shoot it down, and it crash lands in Chequamegon Bay, an inlet of Lake Superior bordering northern Wisconsin. (It's a real place in case you were wondering.)

The crash landing causes a big fireball, and when NORAD figures out where the shot-down thing might have landed, they, led by NSA chief George Fox (Richard Jaeckel) send people in to investigate. Eventually word gets to Mark Shermin (Charles Martin Smith), who had worked with SETI in his days at Cornell and is an expert on this stuff.

Meanwhile, there was a living being in the spacecraft, and that beign looks for the nearest shelter it can find, which is a house owned by Jenny Hayden (Karen Allen), a widow whose husband died a year ago. The alien, called "Starman", finds some strands of the dead husband's hair that still have DNA in them, and he uses this to clone himself into an image of Jenny's late husband, something which is understandably disconcerting to her.

Starman is a fairly quick learner, in that he's learned the entire disc that was on Voyager 2 by memory. But he still has a quite limited knowledge of the English language. He's able to communicate with some of his kind, learning that they'll come to pick him up at the Meteor Crater outside Winslow AZ in three days' time; otherwise they'll have to leave him behind and he'll die.

Starman has to get to Arizona, not knowing the geography of Earth, and not really being able to communicate to Jenny what exactly he needs. So he commandeers her and her car to drive him to Arizona, leading her to think he's kidnapping her. Jenny and Starman make their way to Arizona, while the authorities put the pieces together and try to intercept Jenny. George Fox wants to investigate Starman as a specimen, stopping him by force if need be, while Shermin thinks Starman has come in peace and doesn't want him hurt. Not that he has any influence.

Once the movie gets to the cross-country flight and pursuit, the movie becomes, if not quite predictable, a plot that is not unfamiliar. But Starman rises above that, in part thanks to a reasonably intelligent script and a very good performance from Jeff Bridges. Jenny's reaction is natural, starting off being frightened and angry that this thing has taken her with no good explanation of what he's doing, and slowly changes as the two begin to understand each other through Starman's increasing command of English. (I did, to be honest, wonder why the alien civilization didn't investigate Earth for longer before getting close enough to get shot down.) The military-as-bad-guys trope is old, but to be fair to them, they had no idea what they were up against.

Starman is absolutely worth a watch if you haven't seen it before.