With 1984’s Starman, both leading man Jeff Bridges and director John Carpenter showed what they could do with an epic, tragic sci-fi romance. John Carpenter was best-known for his nitty-gritty thriller films, particularly the run of work from exploitation classic Assault on Precinct 13 to Halloween to 1983’s Stephen King adaptation Christine. And Jeff Bridges, excellent and subtle in ‘70s films like The Last Picture Show and Fat City (besides lending credibility and a human touch to blockbusters like King Kong and Tron), got to play an alien in human flesh. For his work in making the alien lovable, Bridges received his first Academy Award Nomination for Best Actor.
Starman is a love story with a light touch. It begins in the far reaches of the solar system as an alien ship receives the Golden Record from the Voyager 2 probe, blasting the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” and evoking the similarly playful sci-fi of Guardians of the Galaxy thirty years later (like so many John Carpenter movies, this one is sneakily influential). As one of their own makes his way to Earth, he is shot down and ends up in a small town in Wisconsin. Paired up with deeply suspicious widow Jenny (Karen Allen), he has three days to make it to the rendezvous point at the Barringer Crater in Arizona before he dies. Complicating matters is the fact that he has taken on the form of her dead husband to survive on Earth.
John Carpenter Used ‘Starman’ To Grow as a Filmmaker
Compared to the deep paranoia of something like 1982’s The Thing or the slasher greatness of Halloween, Starman is a massive departure for John Carpenter. Like many 1980s American movies, it adopts a certain optimism, and is warm and deeply human despite its alien themes. Per his interview with Bobbie Wygant, Carpenter saw the film as an “attempt to grow as an artist,” to use the formidable tools he had developed over his decade as a genre pro to a different effect. You definitely see that in the movie’s opening act, which still can play the horror notes as well as anything in Carpenter’s oeuvre.
Collider Exclusive · Sci-Fi Personality Quiz Which Sci-Fi Hero Are You Most Like? Paul Atreides · Captain Kirk · Princess Leia · Ellen Ripley · Max Rockatansky
Five iconic heroes. Five completely different ways of facing an impossible universe. One of them shares your instincts, your values, and your particular way of refusing to back down. Eight questions will tell you which one.
🏜️Paul Atreides
🖖Capt. Kirk
✊Princess Leia
🔦Ellen Ripley
🔥Max Rockatansky
01
How do you lead when the stakes couldn’t be higher? The way you lead under pressure is the most honest thing about you.
02
What is your greatest strength in a crisis? The quality that keeps you alive when everything else fails.
03
What is the thing you’d sacrifice everything else for? Your deepest motivation is your truest compass.
04
How do you relate to the people around you? Who you are to others under pressure is who you really are.
05
You’re facing a threat that no one else believes is real. What do you do? How you respond when you’re the only one who sees it defines everything.
06
What has your heroism cost you personally? Every hero pays. The question is what — and whether they’d pay it again.
07
How do you feel about the rules of the world you’re in? Every hero has a relationship with the system. What’s yours?
08
When everything is on the line, what keeps you going? The answer is the most honest thing about you.
Your Hero Has Been Identified Your Sci-Fi Hero Is…
Your answers point to the iconic sci-fi hero who shares your instincts, your values, and your particular way of facing the impossible.
Arrakis · Dune
Paul Atreides
You carry a weight most people would crumble under — the knowledge of what you’re capable of, and the burden of what you might have to become.
You see further ahead than others and you plan accordingly, even when the vision frightens you.
You are driven by loyalty to your people and a sense of destiny you didn’t ask for but can’t escape.
Paul Atreides is not simply a hero — he is someone who understands the cost of power and chooses to bear it anyway.
That gravity, that willingness to carry what others won’t, is exactly you.
USS Enterprise · Star Trek
Captain Kirk
You lead with instinct, warmth, and an absolute refusal to accept a no-win scenario — because you’ve always believed there’s a third option nobody else has thought of yet.
You take the mission seriously without ever taking yourself too seriously.
Your crew would follow you anywhere, not because you demand it, but because you’ve earned it.
Kirk’s genius isn’t tactical — it’s human. He reads people, bends rules with purpose, and wills outcomes into existence through sheer conviction.
That combination of warmth, audacity, and relentless optimism is unmistakably yours.
The Rebellion · Star Wars
Princess Leia
You are the kind of person who holds the line when everyone else is losing faith — not because you’re fearless, but because giving up simply isn’t something you’re capable of.
You lead through conviction. Your voice carries because your belief is unshakeable.
You gave up everything ordinary the moment you chose the cause, and you’ve never looked back.
Leia is not a supporting character in her own story — she is the moral centre of the entire rebellion.
That same fierce, principled, unbreakable core is what defines you.
The Nostromo · Alien
Ellen Ripley
You are not reckless, not grandiose, and not particularly interested in being anyone’s hero — you just refuse to stop when it matters.
You see threats clearly, you document the truth even when no one listens, and when the time comes you handle it yourself.
Ripley’s heroism is earned, not performed. She doesn’t have a speech — she has a flamethrower and a plan.
You share her composure under the worst possible pressure, and her refusal to pretend the monster isn’t there.
When it counts, you don’t flinch. That’s everything.
The Wasteland · Mad Max
Max Rockatansky
You have been through fire that would break most people — and what came out the other side is something the world underestimates at its peril.
You don’t ask for help, don’t need validation, and don’t wait for anyone to tell you the rules no longer apply.
Your loyalty, when it finally arrives, is absolute — but it’s earned in silence and tested in action, not in words.
Max is not a nihilist. He is someone who lost everything and found, against his will, that he still has something worth protecting.
That bruised, stubborn, ultimately human core is exactly yours.
For one, there’s the long point-of-view tracking shots pushing in on Jenny’s house that evoke Halloween. When the movie begins, you don’t know that the Starman is benign. And Jenny, still grieving the loss of her husband, reads like a classic horror victim, alone and vulnerable to what could easily be a monster. As the Starman enters her house, it summons anything it can to adapt to Earth, and ultimately takes on the form of her husband, shifting from a baby to a child to a grown man in seconds in the movie’s most body horror-influenced scene. While Carpenter shifts gears after this sequence, he does a good job of keeping the movie from getting too cuddly too quickly. Jenny’s suspicion is warranted.
‘Starman’ Pulls From Classic Hollywood To Set Itself Apart From Other Sci-Fi Movies
Starman is directed with such sentimentality that it almost feels like John Carpenter’s revenge forE.T. The Extra Terrestrial’s crushing The Thing at the box office two years before. It deals with similar material: the alien who crash lands in a suburban house needing to reconnect with his people while the government is targeting him. Like E.T., the Starman even has to learn the ways of humanity in an awkward fish-out-of-water way. The difference is, of course, in the romance, which is tender and a far cry from the bleak cynicism of other first contact stories like Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Whether or not you buy the central love story in Starman, Bridges and Allen commit to the relationship with sincerity. It’s hard not to root for them. As much as she tries to shrug him off for the first half of the movie (including by accusing him of kidnapping), that’s in keeping with the classic screwball romance tropes from which John Carpenter is consciously drawing. He famously brought up to LA Weekly that he saw Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night as an inspiration, looking at how that movie made lovers out of bickering road trip partners. However, he also cited David Lean’s Brief Encounter: a movie about a love that cannot be.
‘Starman’ Features an Unforgettable, Oscar-Nominated Jeff Bridges Performance
Karen Allen and Jeff Bridges on the run.Image via Columbia Pictures
The Jeff Bridges performance in Starman is strong and subtle, and certainly one of his best. Tasked with conveying the whole of the human experience in under two hours, he learns about the joys of life and its disappointments through his time with Jenny. As Carpenter told LA Weekly, Bridges was the sole actor who read for the role who was “unafraid to be foolish or take chances.” His special abilities, made real in the form of malleable chrome spheres, might be what differentiate him from others, but it’s the spiritual warmth that only Bridges could convey that makes Jenny fall in love with him.
The turning point in the movie is Jenny seeing the Starman resurrect a deer and realizing he has more to him. Some of the most enduring imagery in Carpenter’s filmography (horror or otherwise) lives in Starman, from that shot to the moment of the Starman holding Jenny in the midst of an explosion to the final moments when they make it to the Barringer Crater. The brilliant final shot of the film lingers on Allen’s face, rich with grief, longing, and wonder. The trick of the movie is that audiences feel the same way.
