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Starman on Blu-Ray

Main Feature (1H 54M 58S)

I am a huge fan of John Carpenter and Jeff Bridges and while I was pretty sure I had seen this movie many years ago I was also confident I had forgotten almost everything about it. Carpenter fails to hit the highs he achieved with other films; the same can be said of Bridges and Karen Allen. At the end of the day, in spite of these small disappointments, you’re left with something quite pleasant.

Starman appears to adopt many elements from previous movies in the sci-fi genre. At various points in the movie we are treated to short bursts of music which bear more than a little resemblance to the wonderful score from Vangelis in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Near the beginning of the movie Allen is shown walking around in a top and panties which reminded me of the scene at the end of Alien, another from Scott, in which Sigourney Weaver as Ripley walks around in a similarly revealing outfit. The most glaring example for me is that the story is almost a carbon copy of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. If you replaced Bridges with a rubber alien, Allen with a young boy, and added a cute kid to the mix then you’d pretty much have the script for that much more popular effort from Spielberg. It could of course be said that the script for James Cameron’s Terminator 2, in which a human spends time teaching an outsider (in that case a futuristic robot) basic human slang and customs was influenced by the core theme found in Starman.

This film is a bit of a departure for Carpenter as it lacks the level of cynicism or hopelessness found in some of his better-known work. They Live is effectively Carpenter’s take on Body Snatchers with a touch of satire of the media thrown in for good measure. The Thing, In The Mouth of Madness, and even the comical Dark Star are films which deal with loneliness and the thin line between clarity and insanity. Despite the severity of the chase, with our two protagonists pursued by those who wish to cause the alien harm, any possibility of doom and gloom is warmed by the feeling that everything will turn out okay in the end. Once again think E.T. and you won’t go far wrong in what to expect in this film.

I mentioned at the start of this review that Starman is a pleasant film and that is true. It’s pretty uneventful. It is not that this fails to love up to higher expectations in the action department – because that isn’t what the film is trying to achieve. The problem I have is that everything is so predictable. From the moment the alien takes on the form of Allen’s late husband his character development, each of the secondary characters, their motives and development – everyone just kind of meanders down to the expected ending. There are no twists and turns and the biggest difference between this and carpenter’s other films is that no risks are taken in what amounts to a highly commercial family film.

Extras

None. Zero. Zilch.

Summary

An average film which avoids doing anything bad but unfortunately also avoids doing anything particularly good. The extras are nonexistent and I find that disgraceful on a Blu-Ray considering how much space each disc can hold and the amount of money the consumers are expected to pay for the product.

Rating       **