STARMAN
  
STARRING:
Jeff Bridges, Karen Allen, Charles Martin Smith, Richard Phaeln,
Tony Edwards
1984, 115 Minutes, Directed by: John Carpenter
 Description:
The only John Carpenter film that ever earned an Oscar nomination. That
honor went specifically to Best Actor nominee Jeff Bridges for his performance
as an alien visitor to Earth who is knocked off course and must take an
interstate road trip to rendezvous with a mother ship from his home planet. To
complete this journey he assumes the physical form of the dead husband of a
Wisconsin widow (Karen Allen) who responds first with fear, then sympathy, and
finally love.
—
Amazon.com
ET meets
Love Story as a naive and likeable alien (Jeff Bridges)
meets Karen Allen (Raiders of the Lost Ark), has to
rendezvous with his mother ship, elude pursuers interested in him
as potential lab specimen and fall in love.
The effects,
especially for such an expensive project, are substandard but
that is missing the point: Starman is more of a love
story than a sci-fi movie. Take your girlfriend.
Made
in the wake of ET's success, Starman came
nowhere near that movie's box office success. An unlikely movie
to be directed by John (The Thing, Escape
From New York)
Carpenter and probably the last time anybody paid him any serious
attention: afterwards his movies would become progressively
poorer and more B-grade. One cannot help but think that Starman's
box office failure had been responsible. That and the failure of
the Chevy Chase/Darryl Hannah vehicle Memoirs of
an Invisible Man . . .
Voted
# 88
of the
Top 100 Sci-Fi
Movies
of all time
by:
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