I Must Have Forgot To Laugh

But I'm going to blame that on Dark Star, rather than myself.

That's an overstatement. I'm sure I could have figured out by watching it that it wasn't meant to be taken seriously, even without the Star Wars style scrolling intro from Dave O'Bannon that preceded the version on my DVD. I don't think I would have laughed any more without it, but I couldn't have laughed any less.

The film follows a crew of four as they travel the cosmos. Their exact mission is either to destroy planets in unstable orbits in systems humanity plans to colonize. The Lieutenant Doolittle is really just interested in blowing things up, and the captain, well the captain isn't an issue. The ship is in various states of disrepair, the crew is weary of the trip and each other, and frankly, everyone seems to be going a bit batty. Talbot spends most of his time in the clear dome on top of the ship, watching the stars, Boiler is messing around with some laser rifle, Doolittle can't stop talking about his surfboard, and Pinback? Pinback's a different sort of problem.

I suppose that's the problem with comedies. It's either funny to you or it isn't. Take the sequence where Pinback chases their "mascot" (the closest thing to intelligent life they've found) around the ship, and winds up dangling from the underside of the elevator for about 20 minutes in the film. I get it's supposed to be funny. The thing that looks like a rotting tomato with feet outsmarted this guy and left him hanging. Instead I found it tedious. I wanted it over. Whether that meant Pinback lived or died was irrelevant. I was more interested in the conversation Talbot and Doolittle were having. It really seemed to be each of them having a conversation with himself, since neither guy paid the other much attention.