Trollheart

Why do I love this film?

When this came out, 1974, there was at the time no real concept of humour in sci-fi, at least in films. Science-fiction movies, before the advent of Star Wars, were almost always dark, often scary affairs with marauding aliens and usually bad endings. Many portrayed the futility of believing Man was the dominant force in the galaxy, and showed us just how small and unimportant we are. Then you had the old classics, like This Island Earth, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, all that sort of thing. Sci-fi, we were taught, was serious, and not something to be taken lightly.

Then this movie came around, and for the first time ever I personally began to see that space, though hard and unforgiving a mistress certainly, was not devoid of the odd cosmic joke. The fact that this movie both takes its subject matter seriously and laughs at it too is quite a feat. Mostly it's the characters the script lampoons: the men who try to fill up their boring humdrum lives with irrelevancies in order to get through another day. No doubt when they signed up for this mission they envisaged great romance and adventure among the stars, but quickly found it to be nothing of the sort. It's lonely, it's cold, there's nothing to do and there is no way back.

This movie is also the first directorial effort of the eminent John Carpenter, who would of course go on to direct so many great horror movies, such as It and The Thing, and its story both formed the basis for the sci-fi comedy cult series Red Dwarf and for the later, far from funny space horror Alien. It's pretty much a two-man show, with Carpenter co-writing, directing, composing and playing the music and producing, while Dan O'Bannon co-writes, stars in and creates most of the special effects.

This movie would also have a huge impact on future sci-fi movies, from the aforementioned Alien to Star Wars, which would use the spinning hyperspace effect a few years later. Even the dark, doomy amd spacey music, made mostly by Carpenter on synthesisers, would find its way into Red Dwarf's first and second season.

I love the characters, flawed as they are. The portrayal of the four main characters as inherently just ordinary guys working away at their job was also quite fresh. Up to this, sci-fi protagonists had generally - with a few exceptions - been square-jawed heroes challenging the cosmos. These guys are essentially four hippies, none of whom are particularly interested in their job after twenty years doing the same thing - but where are they going to go? - and one of them maintains he's someone else entirely. A quick profile of each follows:

Lieutenant Doolittle: A man who would much rather be surfing off Malibu than exploring deep space, Doolittle has acclimated to his job by developing a single-minded fascination with, and desire to blow up planets. He doesn't particularly care where they are, he just wants to destroy them. Still, when the chips are down he proves he can still hold a philosophical argument - even with an intelligent bomb. Well, in fairness his life and the lives of everyone else depend on it. It's good to see though that he earns a kind of redemption, although the commander's plan backfires.

Sergeant Pinback: Says his real name is Bill Frugge, and tells a story of how he was mistaken for the astronaut and now finds himself in space with people he does not know, whom he doesn't like and who don't like him. He seems to be the butt of jokes, certainly the odd man out and yet when he has to he performs his duty admirably. He it is who insisted on bringing the alien creature onboard, and who inadventently kills it. He makes video diaries and complains about his treatment at the hands of the other crewmembers.

Talby (Rank, if any, unknown): Talby is a loner, spends all his time in the observation dome watching the stars. He is nevertheless the most diligent of the crew, the only one to recognise and then investigate the malfunction that leads to the bomb getting stuck in the ship's bay, and leads eventually to the destruction of the Dark Star. He is also blinded by the laser as he tries to fix it and then blown out of the airlock, where the passing Phoenix Asteroids take him with them.

Boiler: (Rank, if any, unknown): Seeming to be the lowest in rank on the ship, Boiler is like a refugee from a heavy metal concert, and spends his spare time using the ship's only weapon to shoot targets. He tries to save the ship by shooting out the bomb's holding pins but Pinback, with little faith in his marksmanship, stops him.

In the end I love this movie because it's so different, or it was for the time. It bucked the accepted trend at the time for sci-fi movies, injected dark humour for the first time into one of these types of movies, set a template for much of what was to follow and it showed us that Man is capable of fucking up even twenty parsecs from his home planet. There's a strong argument, to my mind, for the damage to the communications laser having been caused by Boiler. He has already shown he likes to shoot at things, and it doesn't matter whether he's supposed to or not. The faceplate of the door to the laser shows evidednce of some sort of burn: a shot from a laser rifle?

As a first movie for John Carpenter this hardly set the world alight or put his name up in lights, but I certainly believe it's an important and indispensable part of science-fiction canon. A cult classic that again, like Dust Devil, previously reviewed, deserves to be better known than it is.

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