Starman (1984)
Directed by John Carpenter
When an alien takes the form of a young widow's husband and asks her to drive him from Wisconsin to Arizona, the government tries to stop them.
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What critics compared Starman to
Thematically, Arkansas-born writer-director Jeff Nichols’ fourth feature draws capably from the models of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “E.T.” and “Starman,” as well as Nichols’ own affinity for spare widescreen compositions akin to Clint Eastwood movies of that filmmaking era.
Nichols taps into movie history, with touches of “Sugarland Express,” “Close Encounters,””E.T.” and most pointedly, “Starman,” for this pursuit picture.
It shares a fair bit of uncanny road-movie DNA with John Carpenter’s Starman, as well as the quiet mystery seen in M. Night Shyamalan’s early films.
There's an explicit nod, in particular, to John Carpenter's Starman, echoed even in the enveloping mood of David Wingo's driving electronic score.
It's also, in its own way, a wonderful melding of two different, but influential popular '70s filmmakers, drawing its blue-collar heroes and "Starman" otherworldliness from John Carpenter, its government agents and questing characters from "Close Encounters" and "E.T."
Echoes of Spielberg ("E.T.," "The Sugarland Express," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind") and John Carpenter ("Starman") can be heard in the film, but Nichols is his own plain-spoken artist.
The film opens in outer space with a credits sequence that harkens back to classic Hollywood science-fiction (indeed, John Carpenter’s Starman was an inspiration), yet with a Brazilian twist in the form of singer Gal Costa crooning “Não Identificado.”
El romance entre Elisa y el anfibio tiene elementos que hemos visto antes, en amistades entre personas y seres extraños como E.T. o The Iron Giant, o relaciones amorosas como Starman, pero me gusta que The Shape of Water se atreva a empujar las convenciones hacia regiones inexploradas –¿qué otra cinta de este tipo es así de abiertamente sexual?–, sin temor al absurdo.
Or maybe Starman would be a better comparison because in John Carpenter’s 1984 feature, love and romance blossomed.
But as with John Carpenter’s classic sci-fi “visitor” film, “Starman,” and others like it, she gets curious, perhaps based on remorse.
In Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth and John Carpenter's Starman an extraterrestrial character went under cover and moved in our midst; they had to figure out how to adapt to human relationships and societal standards.
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It’s a little like the old Jeff Bridges movie “Starman’’ with the genders reversed, then serialized for Seventeen magazine.
However, if the deja vu don’t get you (it feels like elements of Falling Skies, Starman, The Island and This is Not My Life have been put in a blender and mulched into a schmaltzy, sappy pulp) then the portentous and pretentious dialogue, the worst use of voice-over since Jason Statham in Revolver and the repeated slapping of Ronan will.
He spends most of the rest of the movie in the mental hospital interacting with the various stock neurotics, psychotics, and such, while slowly convincing his overworked and generally unhappy (of course) psychiatrist (Jeff Bridges, who played the alien-on-earth before in 1984's Starman ) that he may in fact be an alien.
If this is beginning to sound like a combination of "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" (1975), and "Starman" (1984), which also starred Bridges, you're on the right track.
There are obvious ties to "Starman" (starring, coincidentally, Jeff Bridges as the visitor from another planet) for the space alien perspective and films like "Awakenings" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for the psychiatric institution viewpoint.
Toss in a little Awakenings, a little Starman (including Jeff Bridges--not the spaceman this time), and a little Hollywood preachiness, and you've got yourself K-PAX.
He did well playing a variant of Spacey's character back in 1984's "Starman," but on the other side of the desk he's simply dull.
The intimate telling puts "Another Earth" in the tradition of humanistic sci-fi movies like John Carpenter 's "Starman" and John Sayles "Brother From Another Planet."
It’s all glum, pseudo-rebellious attitude, with none of the gentle charm of John Carpenter’s Starman.
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Thereafter, "Meet Joe Black" takes a decidedly less cerebral tack than its predecessor, at times bearing a closer resemblance to both the recent "City of Angels" and John Carpenter's 1984 film "Starman."
Screenwriters Matt Lieberman (Scoob!, The Christmas Chronicles) and Zak Penn (Penn cowrote Ready Player One, with which Free Guy shares an unacknowledged nihilistic despair under its cheerful candy coating) and schlockmeister director Shawn Levy (The Internship; and recently announced as taking on a remake of John Carpenter’s Starman, which I anticipate with dread) have zero interest in examining potential authentic appeal of an “everyman”’s plight, but would rather play — tediously, in no new or fun way — with tropes of action movies and videogames.