Dark Star (film)

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Movie
German title Dark Star
Original title Dark Star
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1974
length 82 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
Rod
Director John Carpenter
script John Carpenter,
Dan O'Bannon
production John Carpenter
music John Carpenter
camera Douglas Knapp
cut Dan O'Bannon
occupation
synchronization

Dark Star [ dɑ: stɑ rk: r ] (also Darkstar - Sinister Star ) is a science fiction - parody by director John Carpenter from the year 1974 and at the same time a tribute to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey .

The low-budget production with an estimated production cost of 60,000 US dollars advanced to become a cult film , which is not insignificantly due to the philosophical excursions with the "bomb number 20". The premiere in Germany took place on February 9, 1979.

action

The Dark Star spaceship has been around for 20 years and has seen better days. The mission of the originally five-man crew is to blow up unstable planets in solar systems that will subsequently be colonized. The ship systems are falling into disrepair, an asteroid storm destroyed the bunks and storage compartment 9 itself, including all the toilet paper supplies.

Commander Powell was killed by a short circuit in the rear instrument panel of his seat and has been in cryostasis ever since . Talby has withdrawn from the crew into the observation dome of the spaceship, where he occasionally ponders the beauty of surfing and meteor streams with the passionate surfer Doolittle . Boiler meanwhile makes rough jokes and unsafe target practice with guns. Sergeant Pinback, actually a fuel supply technician by the name of Bill Frugge, took over Pinback's place on the mission shortly before take-off due to a mix-up when he tried to prevent him from suicide and put on his spacesuit for this purpose. The neglected team members have fallen into lethargy and get on each other's nerves.

Sergeant Pinback has to grapple with the "exotic" (called "Alien" in the English original), the stubborn, extraterrestrial mascot that the crew has picked up, a kind of water ball or moldy tomato with feet (Pinback's paraphrase in German dubbing : " useless bouncy vegetables ”). When trying to recapture the volatile creature, Pinback follows it into the elevator shaft of the central freight elevator, where his life is in danger. After a successful self-rescue through a blown maintenance hatch, Pinback shoots the exotic with a stun gun. Then it turns out that it is apparently filled with gas and now flies through the room like a leaked balloon, only to finally lie limp in front of Pinback's feet.

Even before the plot began, Lieutenant Doolittle had taken command of the deceased Commander and directed the Dark Star through the void of the room to the Veil Nebula in order to destroy another planet. When passing through an asteroid field, the "communication laser 17" is damaged, as a result of which the bomb deck systems are activated incorrectly several times and the intelligent bomb number 20 is deployed.

To the general disinterest of his colleagues, Talby decides to look for the cause of the error. The on-board computer locates the defective communication laser and Talby goes into the emergency airlock in a spacesuit without the knowledge of his colleagues. While Talby repairs the defective communication laser, Lieutenant Doolittle starts the 24-minute countdown of bomb 20. Talby gets caught in the laser beam of the activated communication system and is blinded by it. In doing so, he damages the on-board computer and the release mechanism of the already activated bomb. This persistently refuses Doolitte's orders to defuse itself. Panic breaks out among the crew.

Doolittle consults the late, frozen captain, who recommends teaching bomb phenomenology . Doolittle follows his advice and goes out in his spacesuit to philosophically persuade the bomb not to explode. He convinces the bomb of Descartes' methodical doubt (“ I think, therefore I am. ”), Whereupon it retreats into the bomb bay for the time being to “think about it”. Pinback opens the emergency airlock for Doolittle and accidentally shoots Talby into space. Doolittle follows Talby with his jet pack to save him.

Inspired by the philosophical excursus, bomb 20 comes to the conclusion after a short period of reflection that it is probably alone in the universe - like the Judeo-Christian creator god. It quotes the biblical Genesis and explodes with the words "Let there be light!" . The Dark Star including boiler and pinback are destroyed by the fireball. Talby and Doolittle, who are outside the ship, survive at first, and their dreams come true: Talby finds his meteor shower (the legendary phoenix asteroids that orbit the universe every 12.3 trillion years and, for unknown reasons, glow in all colors of the rainbow should), which takes him into the vastness of the universe, and Doolittle surfs with a part of the wreckage of the Dark Star his last big wave in the atmosphere of a planet and burns up.

synchronization

The speakers and their roles.

role actor Dubbing voice
Lt. Doolittle Brian Narelle Manfred Lehmann
boiler Cal Kuniholm Wolfgang Condrus
Talby Dre Pahich Andreas Mannkopff
Sgt.Pinback Dan O'Bannon Joachim Kerzel
Commander Powell Joe Saunders Jürgen Thormann
computer Cookie Scarce Hallgard Bruckhaus
Bomb 19 Alan Sheretz Lutz Riedel
Bomb 20 Adam Beckenbaugh Friedrich Georg Beckhaus
Watkins - Mission Control Miles Watkins Hans-Jürgen Dittberner

background

The film was started in 1970 as a student project by Dan O'Bannon and John Carpenter, who studied at the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California (USC). The original version was about 70 minutes long and was shown at several film festivals in 1973. The producer Jack H. Harris acquired the cinema rights and made sure that the film was stretched by around 10 minutes with additional scenes in order to get a more suitable length for the theatrical release. This longer theatrical version is sometimes incorrectly referred to as the “ Director's Cut ”, although the shorter version was the preferred one by the filmmakers.

The bedroom scene, which was added in 1974 for the longer cinema version, is optically censored in all cinema, DVD and BluRay releases. In the background there are pinups from Playboy magazine . These were shown blurred in close-ups in order to get approval for all ages (general audiences) .

In Dark Star , the term "alien" was used for an extraterrestrial life form for the first time in film history . For the German dubbing , however, it was still translated as “ exotic ”. Dan O'Bannon - who plays the role of Pinback, edited the film and co-wrote the script for the film - wrote the script for the film Alien , among other things .

Mention is made of the actually existing galaxy NGC 891 . With the piece of music When twilight falls on NGC-891 , moonlight melodies by Martin Secundo and his Scintilla strings, the on-board computer tries to lighten the mood of the unpowered crew.

Towards the end, the cistern of a toilet named thx 1138 floats through space; an allusion to the first feature film of the same name by George Lucas .

As a running gag , the on-board computer suddenly says "Thank you for observing all safety precautions." - in the German version "Thank you for observing all safety precautions" (dubbed by Hallgard Bruckhaus ).

The end of the film is taken from Ray Bradbury's short story Kaleidoscope from The Illustrated Man collection .

John Carpenter said it seemed to him that the film was "telling some truth about all of our lives."

The film was awarded the 1976 Golden Scroll for Best Special Effects by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films . The production was also nominated for the Hugo Award in the Best Dramatic Presentation category . John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon were jointly nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Screenplay .

The melancholy title song Benson, Arizona in country style about the city of Benson was written by Bill Taylor, composed by John Carpenter, sung by a friend named John Yager and recorded in an apartment of a friend of Carpenter (see also web link to the song).

The role of the astronaut Boiler was the only film role Cal (vin) Kuniholm (born December 17, 1949). After graduating from the University of California (USC), he became a pipeline design engineer. He died on May 28, 2008.

Brian Narelle (as Lt. Doolittle) now works primarily as a comic book artist for newspapers, film and television. He is a follower of the teachings of Guru Meher Baba .

On May 8, 2012, Synapse Films released the film as part of their anthology of horror, SF and B-movie films under the name 42nd Street Forever: The Blu-Ray Edition in the United States on Blu-Ray .

Book adaptation

In 1974 a slightly expanded book adaptation of the film by Alan Dean Foster was published by Ballantine Books in the USA . This was published in 1977 (two years before the film was released in Germany in 1979) by Bastei-Lübbe under the title Destination: Eternity . Two further editions by Bastei-Lübbe with different titles and covers followed after the West German theatrical release: Dark Star (Destination: Ewigkeit) - The book for the film by John Carpenter (1980) and John Carpenter's Dark Star - The novel for Carpenter's first cult film by Alan Dean Foster (1984).

Reviews

"Great, a flat share comedy in a spaceship!"

- Joachim Schätz : Filmzentrale, on Cigarette Burns

“With his debut, John Carpenter shot a targeted and successful parody of Stanley Kubrick's SF classic ' 2001: A Space Odyssey ', which was written six years earlier . Against Kubrick's enormous visual aesthetics, Carpenter set a minimal budget and improvisational art: The 'extraterrestrial', for example, is clearly a beach ball! Conclusion: cult! The finest bitter sci-fi parody. "

- Cinema

"The successful attempt to end Kubrick's transcendent soaring with a true crash landing on the ground of facts."

- Johann Georg Mannsperger : Film headquarters

“Although the film is active in terms of speed, Das Boot-like , but hats off to the generous John Carpenter, whose school history of space boredom, aliens and molasses-black humor is approximately a thousand times better than the last 15 years of his worst junk- asmen. "

- Adam Smith : Empire

"Acting [...] beards in spacesuits"

- Martin Gray : Eye For Film

“A brilliant genre parody staged with a lot of imagination and humor (especially on Kubrick's 2001 [...]), which plays through its initial situation with sarcastic consistency to the end. John Carpenter made his theatrical debut at just $ 60,000 in production; meanwhile a cult film classic. "

- Lexicon of international film

documentation

In 2010, the documentary Let There Be Light: The Odyssey of Dark Star was directed by Daniel Griffith and shows the background story and the making of the film. The film ran on January 20, 2012 in a special performance together with the main film Dark Star at the Grimm Up North Film Festival in Manchester, United Kingdom.

The German-language dubbing of the feature film has been freely available on the YouTube channel Movie Trash TV since 2016 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ IMDb.de: Budget and box office results Dark Star . Retrieved July 19, 2010 (English)
  2. ↑ Dark Star in German dubbing files
  3. ↑ Synchronized files : Hallgard Bruckhaus
  4. ^ Montreal Film Journal: The Directors Series (4). In: Montreal Film Journal. Montreal Film Journal, accessed on September 8, 2008 (English): "It seems to me that 'Dark Star' was telling some kind of truth regarding our lives"
  5. ↑ Brian Narelle's biography
  6. ^ Letters to the Editor: Nov. 14, 2007 . In: Daily Planet . November 13, 2007.
  7. ↑ First news / art: “42ND STREET FOREVER” Blu-ray; new Coffin Joe DVDs. In: Fangoria. Retrieved February 28, 2012 .
  8. ↑ Dark Star (Ballantine Books 1974) in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB)
  9. ↑ Dark Star (Destination: Eternity) (Bastei-Lübbe 1980) in the ISFDB
  10. ^ John Carpenter's Dark Star (Bastei-Lübbe 1984) in the ISFDB
  11. ↑ Joachim Schätz: Cigarette Burns. In: Filmzentrale. Retrieved September 8, 2008 .
  12. ↑ Dark Star. In: Cinema. Retrieved March 21, 2009 .
  13. ↑ Johann Georg Mannsperger: Dark Star. In: Filmzentrale. Retrieved September 8, 2008 .
  14. ↑ Adam Smith: Dark Star (PG). In: Empire . Retrieved on July 6, 2016 : "Although the movie is positively Das Bootian in its pacing, hats off nonetheless to young whippersnapper John Carpenter, whose studenty tale of space tedium, aliens and molasses-black humor remains approximately a thousand times better than the director's last 15 years of utter crapola "
  15. ↑ Martin Gray: Dark Star. In: Eye For Film. Retrieved on September 8, 2008 (English): "The actors are […] beards in moonsuits"
  16. ↑ Dark Star. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed September 17, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  17. ↑ UK Readers: Grimm Up North Hosting Two Special January Screenings - Seventies Sci-Fi and Italian Cult Classics
  18. ↑ Dark Star by John Carpenter | Full movie 1974 HD. In: YouTube. Kineos GmbH, April 14, 2016, accessed on September 16, 2019 .