Starman

Starman (1984) begins with a light falling on a widow's house in Wisconsin. What arrives uses a photograph in the house to copy the body of her dead husband. Then it asks her to drive it to Arizona; it has three days to get there or it will die. The two of them cross the country by car. Columbia had bought the script before optioning Steven Spielberg's Night Skies project. During development the producers worried that Starman was too close to E.T., and the screenplay was substantially rewritten to separate the two. John Carpenter took the job after The Thing failed. He wanted to move away from being known as a maker of exploitation thrillers and built the film not on effects but on the rapport between two people crossing a country; his references were The Defiant Ones and It Happened One Night. Jeff Bridges was nominated for Best Actor at the 57th Academy Awards. It is the only film by Carpenter to receive an Academy Award nomination in any category. Bridges's choices are at the centre of it. The character is learning a human body; his walk, his blinking and the movement of his head are deliberately wrong. He is said to have worked from watching birds. It cost 24 million dollars and made 28.7 million in America, opening in sixth place and treated as a commercial disappointment. It runs 115 minutes. Good for: warm science fiction, road films, and Jeff Bridges. Less good for: the effects are of their period and some transitions have dated. The plot is simple and the pursuing government agents are a familiar pattern. The emotional ending is not left ambiguous so much as made far too explicit.