Moviegoers who wish to see how movies depicting extraterrestrial encounters in the 1980s were made can be use the 1984 movie by John Carpenter ‘Starman‘ as a case study. In fact, I should be a little more accurate – it’s about the subgenre of (relatively) pleasant encounters with aliens, because the cinema of those years already divided visitors from space into gentle and (obviosly) very intelligent beings, and murderous monsters. So with ‘Starman‘ we are in the zone of pleasant encounters, well, at least from the point of view of the spectators and of part of the heroes. The aliens, on the other hand, seem to have always had many difficulties when they arrived on Earth, regardless of their intentions. The one in this film knows how to take human form and the result is a sci-fi film with elements of romance and road movie. At the end of the screening we learn in this movie more about the human species than about extraterrestrials.
Imagine, say the authors of the script, that the Voyager-2 unmanned spacecraft launched in 1977 carrying a message of friendship and an invitation to visit the planet from the UN Secretary General is discovered by an advanced civilisation and that they decide to return the visit in 1984. Earth inhabitants are not so well prepared and they gun down the alien spacecraft somewhere in the northeastern United States. The survivor of the mission possesses the technology to clone into any human being and chooses to become the reincarnation of Jenny Hayden’s recently deceased husband. The interaction between the two begins in fear, develops in communication, and ends in love. While the visitor learns the secrets of the human body, he also gets into some of those of the soul. The two heroes embark on a journey across much of the United States to reach the place where the visitor is to be rescued and start his journey back to his star. The film becomes a combination of a road movie, an alien encoybter film and a romantic comedy.
36 years after its release, the best part of ‘Starman‘ is the the one related to emotions. Much of the credit goes to the actors, first and foremost Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen who do an excellent job in leading roles, but also Charles Martin Smith who plays the supporting role of the scientist expert in searching of alien life forms. The formula is known from numerous films before and after ‘Starman‘ from Steven Spielberg‘s ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind‘ to Denis Villeneuve‘s ‘Arrival‘. The ‘technological’ details allow a nostalgic comparison of terrestrial technology evolution and of the ways in which the imagination of filmmakers represented the technologies of stellar civilisations. Are terrestrials ready for contact with other civilisations in the universe? Will we know how to accept life forms and especially ways of thinking that are very different from our own? The answer is given in ‘Starman‘ with the means of romantic comedy and I believe that these aspects are the ones that stay the most visible and memorable in this film.