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The classic John Carpenter movie Quentin Tarantino called a “science-fiction masterpiece”

Wed 1 February 2023 18:30, UK

It’s fair to say that we ought to trust the cinematic opinion of Quentin Tarantino. The iconic director has an encyclopaedic knowledge of film and has paid homage to the great genres across his works. So when Tarantino calls any film a “masterpiece”, the ears of cinephiles around the globe invariably prick up.

Tarantino’s podcast appearance with Roger Avary on The Video Archives sees the two men discuss their favourite films. However, in the first episode, Tarantino admitted: “The thing that I don’t want to do on this podcast is throw around the m-word. I want the m-word to mean something. The m-word is ‘masterpiece’.”

He stressed: “I want the m-word to mean something; I don’t want to throw it around. And I don’t want to use the m-word on the very first movie we talk about.” However, Tarantino added: “I actually think it applies to Dark Star. It’s a science fiction masterpiece.”

Tarantino and Avery had made Dark Star the first point of conversation in the first episode of their show. Dark Star is John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon’s 1974 science fiction comedy film that began as a student movie at the University of Southern California and was eventually made into a feature-length film.

Discussing the film and his only real problem with it, Tarantino said: “It’s a counterculture, anti-establishment, hippie filmmaking masterpiece. It’s an early 1970s masterpiece. I still agree that the guy playing Boiler is miscast; he looks like some buddy of theirs, some hippie buddy that they enlisted to do the movie.”

Dark Star focuses on the crew of the dilapidated titular starship, 20 years into a mission to destroy planets that threaten the future colonisation of space. Tarantino reserves special praise for Brian Narelle’s performance in the film. “In the first half of the movie, I don’t care about the Captain, Doolittle, any more than I did when I was younger,” he said. “But he gets better as the movie goes on, and in the course of time, he grows. In the climax of the movie, his philosophical conversation; he’s fantastic in that scene.”

Tarantino then claims that the film’s big set piece is “Dan O’Bannon fighting with this alien beach ball monster that they brought on the ship.” He then noted the great lengths that Carpenter and O’Bannon went to in making the film seem realistic despite a tight budget. “The thing about the movie is that all the special effects is them trying to do the best that they can to make it look like a real movie, a real spaceship and real space travel.”

Perhaps the greatest praise of all for the film, though, is that Tarantino believes that it went on to inspire Star Wars. “They completely predate the jump to light speed in Star Wars,” he said. “It’s obvious that George Lucas saw this and used the idea for lightspeed travel. It’s impossible that Lucas had not seen that, and we know he saw it.”

Check out the film’s trailer below.