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In John Carpenter's guerrilla deflation of the pomposity of space odysseys, the Kubrickian crack-up is enacted for the vessel's video log: "This statement is for posterity. Uniforms don't fit me. The underwear is too loose." The spaceship is a rectangular cardboard model on a mission to vaporize unstable planets, the shaggy crew members struggle with faulty radiation shields, toilet paper shortage, and nostalgia for Malibu surfboards. Dan O'Bannon's screenplay is a lovely bit of streamlined absurdism, wittily meditative down to the little sighs with which the characters address an artificial-intelligence explosive ("Weeeeeell, Bomb..."). As the least atrophied of the astronauts, he engages in a pas de deux with the rubbery alien mascot (a mischievous beach ball with clawed flippers) as a rough draft for his Alien chest-busters. Up in the observation dome and down in the elevator shaft, the cosmic void that's also a blue-collar cubicle and a stoner's cluttered pad. "Don't give me any of that intelligent life stuff. Find me something I can blow up." Meteor showers and short-circuits, the bleak comedy of bored wonks gradually crushed under the weight of their own beards. Milton's "misled and lonely travelers," Rossini and muzak, the vastness of the universe contemplated to the tune of a trucker ditty ("Benson, Arizona, blew warm wind through your hair / My body flies the galaxy, my heart longs to be there"). "So many malfunctions," wheezes the cryogenic oracle about humanity, it all builds to a philosophical argument with an Exponential Thermostellar Bomb, "Let there be light" and a sparkle of transcendence amid the stars. Carpenter's own riposte is The Thing, naturally. With Brian Narelle, Carl Kuniholm, and Dre Pahich.
--- Fernando F. Croce |