STARMAN

* * ½

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 honour 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 . . .
 

• Read a book review of John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness by Gilles Boulenger.
• Read extracts from John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness.

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