Starman is easily director John Carpenter's warmest and most beguiling film, and the only one that ever earned him an Oscar nomination. While most movie buffs are likely to call Halloween the best movie from Carpenter, die-hard romantics and anyone who cried while watching E.T. will vote in favour of the director's 1984 hit. Jeff Bridges is the alien visitor to Earth who is knocked off course and must take an interstate road trip to rendezvous with a mothership 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. Carpenter's graceful strategy is to switch the focus of this E.T.-like film from science fiction to a gentle road-movie love story, made believable by the memorable performances of Bridges and Allen. It's a bit heavy-handed with tenacious government agents who view the Starman as an alien threat (don't they always?), but Carpenter handles the action with intelligent flair, sensitivity and lighthearted humour. If you're not choked up during the final scene, well, you just might not be human. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com On the DVD: Starman on disc is presented in anamorphic widescreen transferred from NTSC and letterboxed at 2.35.1. The picture is clear and sharp with very little grain. The soundtrack is crisp, perfectly complementing the romantic nature of this film. The overriding reason to shell out on this special edition is the commentary from John Carpenter and Jeff Bridges, in which director and actor show a genuine affection for the film. Other extras are a featurette filmed around the original release in 1884, a music video starring Bridges and costar Karen Allen covering The Everly Brothers classic "All I Have to Do is Dream", and a trailer for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. --Kristen Bowditch [show more]
1977: with the intent to contact any possible extraterrestrial intelligence, NASA sends Voyager 2 probe in deep space along with a message recorded on an anodic gold disc. 1984: John Carpenter tells the story of an alien that lands on Earth, willing to learn more about the authors of that message. This is the beginning of a three-day journey of the nth friendly alien (and his respective sympathetic companion) that tries to communicate with humans and discovers both their weaknesses and their virtues, love and hate, madness and rationality, in a word their genetic dichotomy.
"Starman" proves itself atypical in Carpenter"s filmography. Thrilling shots gives way to somewhat thoughtful scenes; breathless action to slower rhythm; ubiquitous electronic sounds to popular hits (Rolling Stones, Frank Sinatra,...); muscular and ironic main characters to more vulnerable and soulful ones.
Actually, the movie lacks originality and the fairly predictable plot is interspersed with dialogues that nowadays may sound naïve. Anyway, the solid screenplay and, above all, the astounding Jeff Bridges" performance makes this explorer-from-the-stars an unforgettable one and unique enough to define this movie a must for every sci-fi fan.
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