Dark Star (1974)

USA, Color, 83 minutes. Directed by John Carpenter. Starring Brian Narelle, Cal Kuniholm, Dre Pahich, and Dan O'Bannon.

The most pointless film ever made, or a philisophically mind-blowing masterpiece? It's both. It's Dark Star.

Working as both a comedy and a science fiction thriller, Dark Star shows us the final hours of four astronauts who have been living in a large, clunky spaceship for 20 years, destroying unstable planets and looking for intelligent life in the universe.

John Carpenter apparently had filmmaking experience at a very young age, using the camera to convince us that we were aboard Dark Star with the rest of the crew. His scary scenes are scary, and his funny scenes are very funny, thanks to the efforts of the cast and the special effects crew, who pulled off a miracle with this one.

This is probably the only film I've ever seen that includes a philosophical conversation with a talking bomb. And that's a good thing.

Look for the director's cut - it greatly improves on the theatrically released version.