Starman (1984)

Out of everything John Carpenter directed, I didn't think I had anything left that's worth watching. With the mention that I don't know about anything "worth watching" to be directed by him since the '90s. What I knew about "Starman" was limited to a synopsis I read somewhere telling that the movie is about some romance between an alien and a woman on Earth. Because I generally avoid love stories, I obviously ignored the movie for some time. Luckily enough there's not much new to watch these days...

The synopsis I mentioned doesn't lie, but what we have here has Carpenter written all over it, enough to get the result more towards the type of romance we have in the same year's "Terminator", and not what you might think when reading the taglines of the movie. Indeed, we have an alien entity crashing nearby a farm in Wisonsin inhabited by a young widow, the alien taking the form of the late husband. What follows though, before getting into the romance part, is a road-trip, more like a road-thriller, where "the starman" forces the woman to drive him to Arizona in no less than three days, where he has a scheduled ride back to space. All this time we also have the US government following them with a table ready for dissection.

So, the romance actually gets its screen time towards the end. What Carpenter manages to accomplish is not to drop the movie into the cheesy zone you might expect it, creating altogether a pretty good mix between the action and the soft parts tempering frequently the tensed run we're watching. What Carpenter doesn't accomplish (so to speak) is to make the visuals durable enough. The age of the movie is obvious, especially comparing it with others around the same time that are much better on the VFX side. It compensates, however, with the cast. Even though Jeff Bridges got an Oscar nod for his role, I think "the starman" is literally eclipsed by Karen Allen, making a much better role here than in the first Indiana Jones (I don't remember seeing her in another place). Above all, even the parts where it somewhat fails, the movie is a decent production with a strong '80s feeling reminding me of "Firestarter", so if you have a weakness for that decade it's definitely worth watching.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5