Dark Star (1974)
Directed by John Carpenter
A group of scientists are sent on a mission to destroy unstable planets. Twenty years into their mission, they have to battle their alien mascot as well as a "sensitive" and intelligent bombing device that starts to question the meaning of its existence.
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What critics compared Dark Star to
On the basis of his work on the low-budget quasi-student film "Dark Star," future "Alien" writer Dan O'Bannon was hired to create the special effects, after Jodorowksy failed to detect any sympathetic vibes in a meeting with the industry's reigning FX master at the time, Douglas Trumbull ("2001: A Space Odyssey"), whom the filmmaker dismisses as more a "technician" than a fellow truth-seeker.
After a meeting with “2001: A Space Odyssey” effects king Douglas Trumbull that did not go well (he was a technician, not an artist, Jodorowsky recalls) he seeks refuge in a Hollywood movie theater showing John Carpenter’s “Dark Star.”
He relates how he wanted 2001: A Space Odyssey wizard Douglas Trumbull to create his film's effects, changing his mind once he decided that Trumbull was a technician and not an artist; instead, he tapped Dark Star's Dan O'Bannon.
He rejected Douglas Trumbull of “2001” fame as his special effects coordinator because the man’s distant, mechanical attitude would make him impossible to work with, and opted for the more amenable Dan O’Bannon (of John Carpenter’s “Dark Star”) instead.
So he turned to Dan O'Bannon, who had worked on the inventive, low-budget SF movie Dark Star.
While 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Solaris (1972) are obvious touchstones, Jones seems more directly inspired by smaller films of the era such as Dark Star (1974) and Silent Running (1972).
Moon is an old-fashioned sci-fi movie in the best sense: far more psychological drama than space opera, dispensing with overweening CGI and loud flashy action sequences while harking back to subtler, more ideas-driven entries in the genre such as Solaris, Silent Running and Dark Star.
Sam’s dishevelled appearance and the film’s low budget aesthetic even resembles Dark Star to a degree while thematically Moon also strongly evokes Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris .
In some sequences there is that grunge look that harks back beyond "Star Wars" to John Carpenter's "Dark Star" (1974), which may be the most influential least-known movie of the past couple of decades.
Add Donald Sutherland in the most thankless SF cameo since The Force Awakens audiences asked themselves, "Was that Max von Sydow?," a seemingly inadvertent reference to John Carpenter's cosmic comedy Dark Star, and a space madness plot ripped straight from Ren and Stimpy, and what you're left with feels like a pretentious 1970s adaptation of a faux-intellectual 1950s space pulp potboiler – just with contemporary effects.
The result bears hints of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (naturally), a big whack of Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness (and therefore Apocalypse Now ), and an unfortunate glimmer of John Carpenter’s grungy comedy Dark Star that might make cult fans giggle at exactly the wrong moment.
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Look out too for a nice reference to John Carpenter's Dark Star in Jake Gyllenhaal's character.
Wright and Pegg’s screenplay dips into a grab bag of sci-fi bits and bobs, with flecks from Village of Damned (1960), Soylent Green (1973), Dark Star (1974), The Thing (1982), The Book of Eli (2010) and many more.
But the scale of Interstellar’s execution sits ill with the banality of so much of it, and made me think of other science-fiction films that once made me marvel and filled me with a melancholy sense of the universe as a place of deep, haunting solitude: 2001 most ineffably, but also what you might call the econo-sci-fi likes of Silent Running, Dark Star, and most recently Duncan Jones’s Moon, all pragmatically executed, pared down and yet mustering a massively deep, sad resonance.
Appropriately, the credits include a nod to the late, great Dan O’Bannon, author of the first “Alien” screenplay and a collaborator on John Carpenter’s debut feature “Dark Star.”
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One can easily see in it parodies of "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Dr.