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The spaceship Dark Star has been travelling the universe for 20 years,
always searching for new star systems for humankind to colonize, &
clearing it of unstable planets (using their thinking bombs). Mission
control (Miles Watkins) back on earth calls them heroes ... but life on
board the Dark Star is not exactly Star
Trek ... The commander of the mission, Powell (Joe Saunders) has
died ages ago, their mission bores the four remaining crewmembers to
death, they don't really care about each other all that much, let alone
are able to communicate with each other. One of them, Talby (Dre Pahich)
has even gone so far as to retreat almost entirely onto the observation
deck. & then there's their mascot, an alien that is more of a
nuisance, & there is a fault in the bomb bay communication system,
causing bomb number 20 to repeatedly arm itself for no particular reason
... & for the ship's computer it gets harder each time to persuade the
bomb to disarm itself again. Soon, too, Pinback (Dan O'Bannon), the
lowest ranking crewmember - who ever so often claims he is only here by
accident, & actually isn't Pinback at all but a fraud -, who has to
feed the alien, lets it escape & when trying to hunt it down is almost
killed in the elevator shaft (... if you think now that this movie might
presage Alien
from 5 years later, you are of course right, & in case you wondered
... Dan O'Bannon did also script Alien).
When he finally manages to kill the alien, he has to discover it was
almost entirely made of gas (as it should be, being actually little more
than a painted giant inflatable ball). When he tells this to the others
though, they are of course not impressed. Later, Bomb Number 20 wants to
go off again, but this time for good, as the computer fails to persuade it
otherwise. The crew is left with no clue of what to do, so Doolittle
(Brian Narelle) decides to speak to the dead commander (who is frozen but
his mind is somehow kept alive) about what to do ... & he tells him to
reason with the bomb, teach is phenomenology. So Doolittle has to hop into
his spacesuit & convince the bomb that no information it's scanners
receive might be real ... at least there is no proof for it ... The bomb
is convinced (for the time being) & terminates its contdown for
explosion. But when Doolittle wants to reenter the ship through an escape
hatch, Talby is sucked out (fortunately wearing a spacesuit) & flies
off into deep space. Doolittle, wearing a jetpack, goes after him to get
him back ... when the bomb realizes the reason for its being is to explode
... boom, the Dark Star goes out in a bang ... Doolittle & Talby are
soon marooned in space, but Talby soon becomes part of the Phenix
asteroids he has always admired (mainly because they glow in all colours
of the rainbow) while Doolittle, a surfer when still back on earth, soon
finds a piece of debris from the ship he can use as a board when being
sucked into the orbit of the nearest planet ... A wickedly
funny comedy, Dark Star mainly works though because it is way more
realistic than the thousands of space operas that came before it &
that showed its astronauts as heroic figures (which too can be quite
charming at times), always ready to risk their lives or at least standing on the
threshold of some major universal development (think 2001: A Space
Odyssey here) ... Dark Star shows characters who have already
grown numb, who care more about (the entertainment value of) big time explosions
than finding new lifeforms, & who care more about their next meal
("I bet it's chicken") than possible securtiy leaks on the ship
... & somehow one just can't help but understand, maybe even like
them ...
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