The Stanley Kubrick movie that “insulted” John Carpenter
With serious contributions to the cinematic worlds of action, horror and science fiction, John Carpenter remains an enduring icon of the film medium. Having released celebrated works like Halloween, The Thing, Escape from New York and Assault on Precinct 13, Carpenter is a true master of directing and has written himself into the very fabric of cinema’s history.
However, it all began for Carpenter with his first major feature as a director, the 1974 science fiction comedy Dark Star, written in collaboration with Alien writer Dan O’Bannon. The film tells of the crew of a malfunctioning spaceship 20 years into a mission to destroy planets that will threaten mankind’s future colonisation of space.
Discussing his debut with Sight and Sound, Carpenter spoke of some of its influences, noting, “I’ve loved science fiction since I was a kid, and some of the film was paying tribute to the old science fiction films… the beach ball alien was like the 50s rubber monsters running around.” Carpenter is well-known to love low-budget sci-fi movies from the 1950s and has named several of them as his top guilty pleasure films.
When Dark Star arrived, some compared the film to Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi, but Carpenter admitted to being a bit pissed off with its pretension. “We had no money to compete with 2001,” the director added, “but its religious overtones insulted me so much that I just said, ‘I’m not going to do that; I’m going to make a down-to-earth movie; how do you clean your underwear when you’re on a spaceship’ and so on.”
2001: A Space Odyssey is, of course, the legendary science fiction movie of 1968, directed by Kubrick and co-written with iconic sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke. The film charts the evolution of mankind, from bone-wielding apes to spacefaring technologically advanced beings, all with the help of a mysterious black monolith.
Starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, and Douglas Rain, 2001 remains one of the greatest films of all time and has an exploration of philosophical themes like the dangers of technology and the meaning of life; it was also championed for its pioneering use of special effects and score comprised of classical music pieces.
John Carpenter refused to be influenced by 2001, even though it was the most influential science fiction movie at the time. Dark Star sees the legendary director bring an air of humour into space, whereas Kubrick’s films, particularly that one, tended to be completely serious in tone. Only someone like Carpenter could resist such inspiration, believing rather in his own creative vision.
