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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

Another overlooked gem from this era is "Dark Star".

The dreary psychological effects of prolonged confinement in closed quarters seem particularly poignant today; and the dispute and argument with Bomb is a delightful foreshadowing of the frustrations of dealing with advanced, yet imperfect and inhuman, artificial intellegences.

And yes, the beach ball alien was intendedt be humorous; and yes, the closed-quarter panic in narrow vent shafts was inspirational on later science fiction movies.

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Dark Star is wonderful!

Also:

- it's the first movie by horror movie legend John Carpenter

- it was co-written by Dan O'Bannon, who also wrote "Alien"

I feel like the beach ball sub-plot in that movie is a practice-run for Alien. Not to mention the parallels between the conversations with bomb and Ash.

The bomb was the best - This is really interesting, I wish we had more time.

I love how the the origin of the terrifying duct scene in Alien was the guy chasing the beachball through the ducts in Dark Star. All those guys were waiting for was a proper FX budget.

Don't forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Cobb who worked on Dark Star, Star Wars and many others.

You can see similarities between Dark Star sets and Star Wars.

These are the guys that connect Dark Star with Alien with Jodorowsky's Dune.

Ty Franck (co-write of The Expanse) and Wes Chatham (Amos in The Expanse) talk about this in their new postcast, well worth a listen if you like sci-fi :)

https://www.youtube.com/c/TYandThatGuy

I had no idea this podcast existed, but love The Expanse. Listening to the first two episodes last night was great, it’s immediately apparent just how much they love the genre.

Yeah it was very unexpected, I always assumed that Wes was a meat head - but no, he's a sci-fi nerd just like me.

And the tickling by the beach ball alien, though possibly to death. So there's still some menace there :)

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