Starman (Blu-ray)

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Hollywood is full of mysteries--among them, how a pair of writers like Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon could produce a brilliant script for "Stand by Me" and also collaborate on something with such uninspired dialogue as we get in "Starman."

Define uninspired dialogue. Uh, how about when an alien who only knows 100 words in English manages to understand a whole lot except for abstractions that make for good, artificial ways of getting people to talk about their feelings and advance the emotional plot? Throughout the movie we get the alien's repetitive requests for random words he hears: "Define love." "Define shit." "Define beautiful." With only a hundred words under his belt, if logic prevailed, this alien's entire role would consist of him asking for definitions and clarifications. As it is, he does this so often and so randomly that it's artificial and as annoying as little kids who keep bugging, "Are we there yet?"

But I get ahead of myself. On August 20, 1977, the U. S. launched the space probe Voyager 2 in the direction of Uranus and Neptune to gather data. That much is fact. The basis for "Starman" (1984) is a "what if" extension of fact. What if that space probe also transported a recording of "hello" in 54 languages, along with a message from the head of the United Nations urging whatever intelligent life finds the probe to "please visit"?

We watch a pretty good replica of the Voyager 2 go toward a gigantic mothership in deep space, the way that ships are pulled toward the Death Star by its gravity belt. We see it drawn inside, hear the message played, and we watch a small spaceship leave the mothership (talk about instant messaging) and head straight for Earth, where U.S. Armed Forces try to shoot it down. It takes evasive action but crash-lands in Wisconsin, America's Dairyland. All this takes place in the opening sequences. The alien is a scout, we later learn, and if he doesn't make it to a crater in Arizona three days from now, he'll be left behind to die.

Director John Carpenter leans pretty heavily on "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial," which came out in 1982, because aside from the basic situation of a single friendly alien making contact with a single human and being chased by plenty of unfriendly people who want to dissect him, there are specific scenes that smack of "E.T." Among them is one in which the nameless Starman (Jeff Bridges) meets young widow Jenny Hayden (Karen Allen) for the first time, and both scream--an echo of little Drew Barrymore's encounter with E.T.

"Starman" is rated PG, but this is the old rating system, and parents should be warned that full male nudity from behind is shown, Allen wears skimpy panties for one scene, and the two make love to where you can see the shapes of her breasts. Starman learns how to give the finger and say "Up yours, Buddy," and someone is saying "shit" at least four times. But if parents who enjoyed this the first time around want to share the experience with their children, be prepared to have them asking just as many questions as Starman. Define "movie projector," for example, because the film begins with Allen watching 8mm home movies of her and her late husband, who's an unabashed Gomer. So when the alien intelligence probes the house (we see the house from his point of view, same as in "E.T.") and discovers the film and photo album with some of Scott Hayden's hair, he takes some and processes it and becomes a DNA-cloned replica, or at least his physical shell of Scott, transforming right in front of her very eyes.

"Starman" is one case where the Hi-Def technology exposes the movie trickery that we didn't notice in standard def--or maybe it's just that special effects have progressed so rapidly that these look dated and quaint. But you can clearly see that this transformation was accomplished with Claymation shots, and the space ship looks like a model against a brilliantly clear space sky. Later shots, as when Starman reanimates a deer, are more convincing, but the overall effects were much better in the 1977 film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," which also influenced this little alien love story.