Find out which sci-fi movie would have inspired George Lucas for Star Wars according to Quentin Tarantino.
A cinephile as well as a master of directing, Quentin Tarantino recommends this “masterpiece” of science fiction that is John Carpenter’s first feature film, Dark Star – The Black Star, released in 1974.
In 2150, the “Dark Star” spacecraft is tasked with destroying planets deemed unstable. But after dropping a new destructive bomb on an unknown planet, the crew hits an electromagnetic cloud, and the Dark Star is damaged.
Bryanston Pictures
Make no mistake about it, the film is a sci-fi comedy, scripted by Carpenter himself with Dan O’Bannon, future screenwriter of Alien, Return of the Living Dead and Total Recall. Dark Star is a 68-minute student project that gradually grew into a one-hour, 23-minute film with outside funding.
At the microphone of The Video ArchivesQuentin Tarantino made a point of explaining what the film had invented and which, according to him, will be taken up in Star Wars:
[Carpenter et O’Bannon] completely preceded the lightspeed jump of Star Wars. It’s obvious that George Lucas saw this and used this idea for light-speed travel.
Bryanston Pictures
Remember that when Dark Star comes out, we are three years before the release of Star Wars, the universe created by George Lucas. Tarantino is a huge fan of the film, and credits it with the “m word” (the “m-word”, for “masterpiece” or “masterpiece” in French):
“I want the ‘m-word’ to mean something, I don’t want to throw it out there. (…) I really think it applies to Dark Star, it’s a masterpiece of Science fiction”.
Bryanston Pictures
The strange creature from the Dark Star
The artificial intelligence present in the ship and showing itself little by little refractory is inspired by the HAL 9000 of 2001: a space odyssey by Stanley Kubrick released five years earlier and will lead to the voice of Mother, heard aboard the Nostromo of Alien, the eighth passenger. We also find in both films the theme of confinement, which goes hand in hand with the loneliness of the astronaut.
The film would have been very badly distributed (restricted to drive in very targeted) and quickly removed from the screens. If it is not very successful, Dark Star is inventive enough in the resourcefulness to show on the screen much more than its microscopic budget let predict. Its influence on the history of cinema is really worth rediscovering. It is available on DVD and Blu-ray.