Before he started making movies about contemporary life terrorized by the unthinkable — masked maniacs, shape-shifting aliens, ghost-filled fog, and the like — a 25-year-old John Carpenter introduced himself to the world by venturing out centuries into the future and deep into space’s bottomless bowels. In 1974’s Dark Star, which started off as a dirt-cheap student film shepherded by Carpenter and worked on with some of his University of Southern California buddies, a quartet of hirsute astronauts bides its time until the probably soon-to-come end of what’s turned out to be a suicide mission. They’ve been in space for 20 years, ordered to do a task as tedious in the grand scheme of their repetitive routines as it is callously colonialist: Zap, with the help of an artificially intelligent bombing device who speaks with the aw-shucksness of a proto-C3PO, any planets passed that their onboard supercomputer deems unfit for future inhabitants. 

The men — Doolittle (Brian Narelle), Pinback (Dan O’Bannon, who also edited and co-wrote the film), Boiler (Cal Kuniholm), and Talby (Andreijah “Dre” Pahich) — are trapped in their own kind of hell. Their relatively small and asteroid-shower-battered ship seems to get more crammed by the day. Their commander was recently electrocuted to death, their proper living quarters have been destroyed by a hull breach, and they’re being slowly radiation-poisoned. Their requests to have their superiors commission a shuttle to help relieve some of their problems have been denied, the costs supposedly too high to make a rescue voyage worth it. The difference in time’s passage in outer space has also made it so that they’ve only aged three years. They can’t even count on conventional mortality, if the ship’s other defects don’t get to them first, for relief. The lewd Playboy cutouts taped to their tiny control room have only become sad reminders of the earthly pleasures they know they’ll never again enjoy.

Carpenter’s filmography isn’t without a sense of humor — the sci-fi adventures Big Trouble in Little China (1986), They Live (1988), and the roundly dismissed Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) regularly engage in full-blown slapstick, and even his most violent movies’ set pieces can make you guffaw in disbelief — but Dark Star’s comedy nonetheless might throw even the filmmaker’s completists for a loop. The many comparisons to the Looney Tunes cartoons the movie has attracted over the years aren’t off, particularly as it relates to a quite long — actually, overlong — sequence involving the bored-out-of-his-mind Pinback chasing the badly behaved alien he’s been keeping as a pet around the ship. The chirping creature looks like a beach ball painted to look like a rotting tomato with duck feet; much of the pursuit is dedicated to Pinback struggling to get out of a shaft he’s been lured into whose elevator stressfully has a mind of its own, the face- and bodiless martian managing to look naughtily pleased with itself in the meantime. 

Dark Star’s comedy is more smile- than laugh-inducing; the movie is better in the fairly spread-out moments where it leans into its troupe’s existential crises. When Doolittle wistfully reminisces to the grief-struck Talby about the days spent down on the beach near his Malibu home surfing under the sun, it’s genuinely sad. As he spoke about his fears of the future and the long-gone part of his life when things were better, I wondered if it was a maybe-unconscious signal of the unease Carpenter and O’Bannon were likely feeling as young filmmakers. Here they are, at last making a movie after so many years of probably dreaming of working on one, yet it’s hard not to miss the safety of one’s low-stakes younger years when there’s only the uncertainty of what’s to come ahead.

Carpenter’s and O’Bannon’s futures would, fortunately, be brighter than the more-interesting-than-good Dark Star would suggest. Carpenter’s next movie, 1976’s claustrophobic hostage thriller Assault on Precinct 13, immediately confirmed him as a smart, sophisticated genre-film director — a status he only kept perfecting — and O’Bannon next worked on Star Wars’ special-effects team before co-writing the screenplay of the totemic Alien (1979), much of which you can see being worked out in Dark Star. (There are also vestiges of Dark Star, I think, in Carpenter’s The Thing, a 1982 remake of 1951’s The Thing from Outer Space.) It’s categorically a stepping-stone movie, but it isn’t without its charms, and it remains prescient in how it echoes 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969): It is not, it advises, wise to put any sort of faith in artificial intelligence.