John Carpenter’s first feature is a plywood spaceship crewed by bored men and a bomb that wants to discuss things. It is slow, thinly acted and often charming, and two sequences are as good as anything he made later.
John Carpenter’s first feature began as a student film and was stretched to 83 minutes with almost no money and a good deal of cardboard. It is a comedy about boredom, which is a risk, because a film about bored men can easily become a boring film, and for stretches this one does. It is also, in two or three sequences, inventive and sad in ways that science fiction with far larger budgets rarely manages. We came out fond of it and unable to pretend the middle half hour had not dragged.
The joke is 2001: A Space Odyssey with the dignity removed. Kubrick’s astronauts were calm, clean and tended by a computer that took an interest; Carpenter and O’Bannon’s are unwashed, sulking and tended by a computer (Cookie Knapp) with the manner of a tired school secretary. The crew mark time. Doolittle plays an organ he has built from bottles, Pinback records diary entries nobody will watch, Talby will not come down from the dome. The bombs are the idea that lifts it above spoof: they are polite, literal-minded and keen to do their job, and when one is told to arm itself while still bolted to the ship, the crew have to talk it round like a man on a ledge.
O’Bannon designed the ship, and it looks like what it is, a run of grey corridors and painted panels with the seams showing. Douglas Knapp shoots them flat and front-on, as if there were nowhere else to put the camera, which there probably was not, and then lights the dome so that Talby’s face is lit by nothing but stars. The model shots of the ship sliding past a red planet are better than they have any right to be. Carpenter wrote the music himself: a plain, pulsing synthesiser line under the corridors, and over the opening titles a country song, Benson, Arizona, sung by a man homesick for a town he will not see again. The song is the best thing in the film and it tells you in three minutes what the next eighty are about.
The alien chase is the set piece everyone remembers, and rightly. Pinback goes to feed the beach ball, is bitten, chases it into a lift shaft, and ends up wedged beneath a lift that is about to move. We laughed out loud, more than once, at a man in a boiler suit losing a fight with an inflatable, and O’Bannon, who also cut the film, knows exactly how long to hold the shot before the lift starts. As an actor he plays Pinback as someone who has been making the best of things for far too long and has run out of best.
Then there is Talby. Dre Pahich spends the film in the dome, his lines dubbed by Carpenter, talking about the Phoenix Asteroids, a cluster that passes through once in an age and glows as it goes, and he wants to see them. We expected to laugh and found instead that it got to us: a man two decades from home whose only wish is to be allowed to look out of the window. Nothing in the film is played straighter, and nothing in it lands harder.
What does not work is most of the rest. Narelle and Kuniholm are not actors in any sense that helps, and the script gives them little to do between set pieces but lie in bunks and complain. The diary scenes repeat a joke that was thin the first time. Several gags run a beat long because there was plainly nothing else to cut to. Around the forty-minute mark we were bored, and not in the way the film intended.
Much of what both men did later is already here in rough form. O’Bannon took the fractious crew, the pet that bites and the unhelpful computer to Alien five years on, and gave the beach ball teeth. Carpenter took the synthesiser and the patient, wide framing to Assault on Precinct 13 and Halloween. Nick Castle, the man inside the beach ball, would wear a different mask for Carpenter in 1978.
The last twenty minutes are the reason the film is still talked about, and we will not describe them, beyond saying that the bomb gets the best dialogue. Watch it late, with company, and be forgiving for the first hour. It runs 83 minutes and carries a PG.
