Starman (John Carpenter, 1984)

Voyager 2 wends its way to an inhabited star, prompting one of the place's residents to make a journey to Earth. NORAD spies the alien's spacecraft and a U.S. missile knocks it off course from a pre-arranged Arizona rendezvous point — the only place his alien compatriots can collect him for the ride back home — to a Wisconsin farmhouse occupied by a lonely widow. Taking the shape of the woman's dead husband, the alien demands to be driven all the way to his original destination, all the while being pursued by a desperate SETI guy and learning about This Illogical Thing You Human Beings Call... Love.

* * *

Starman isn't quite as trite as it sounds, though it does often play like the product of a focus group. It's as if the studio figured that if mid-80s audiences liked how E.T. wanted to get home, and if they liked how Mork from Mork and Mindy didn't quite grasp our Earthling ways, and if they liked how Johnny Five of Short Circuit — which wasn't out yet, but never mind — clumsily emulated the human actions he observed, and if they swooned over Jeff Bridges in Tron, and if they thrilled to what that John Carpenter fellow did with those Stephen King adaptations, then they'd love a combination of all five.

The movie closely resembles so many other mainstream releases from, say, 1981 through 1984 that I couldn't stop my mind from constantly drawing parallels. (Apparently audiences of that time demanded stories where some kind of outsider insider recruits a normal person to help accomplish a mission while clueless authority figures give chase. The aforementioned E.T. is a popular example, though for some reason Blue Thunder and Wargames, both John Badham classics, repeatedly came to mind.) There are two main draws for modern viewers: first, the neato practical special effects. The alien takes on the form of Jeff Bridges by actually growing into him, starting off as a baby and rapidly avancing to 35-ish. As a series of clever cuts and one stop-motion shot, it's effective; ten years later, it would've been accomplished by "morphing" — as was everything in 1994 — and twenty years later, it would've been CGI, and you know how I feel about CGI. The second draw is Bridges' performance, a prime specimen of the tricky not-quite-human style. A lot of actors probably assume they can do a non-human entity in a human body, but most just resort to a host of gimmicky tics, which Bridges mostly doesn't.

But technical goodness aside, the movie wastes the huge opportunity afforded by the fact that the alien takes on the form of Scott, the widow Jenny's husband. Though he picks up some human vocabulary and mannerisms along the journey, the alien remains basically static, speaking slowly and with odd usage, gazing wide-eyed at what we all take for granted, melting stuff, bringing dead deer back to life, etc. The only function his appearance serves, it seems, is to prevent Jenny from shooting him on sight when he materializes in her house, and maybe to bring down her guard a little from time to time.

A much richer choice would have been for the alien, who already displays an impressive ability to acquire and implement knowledge — he learns to drive just by watching for a few hours, for instance — to ultimately gain the ability of near-perfect human emulation. Hell, just by gauging Jenny's reactions and iterating, he probably could've developed a plausible imitation of Scott. (The film's opening even shows Jenny watching home movies of the living Scott; if the alien watched them, you'd think he could do a pretty fair sim-Scott based on that data alone.) By the third act, then, Jenny would be in the company of a being who, for many intents and purposes, is her husband back from the grave, not just Johnny Five in the guy's body. This would complicate matters when the time comes to drop the alien off at the pickup spot, because she'd be facing what's practically a re-run of the original death. And since the alien dies if he stays on Earth too long and a human would die on the alien's star — at least, that's what the alien claims — then it's a rock and a hard place indeed. No easy answers there.

Watching Starman right after The Wild Blue Yonder gives me an idea. I usually just follow directors' oeuvres, but it might be fun to cluster my viewings thematically. In this case, it the theme would be "loners from outer-space utopias". Unfortunately, it's somewhat difficult to schedule one's own viewings thematically if one hasn't actually watched the films before; I can only guess as to what fits the theme. The Man Who Fell to Earth, maybe? There's only so many Little Prince variants around.