John Carpenter's Starman

I remember seeing John Carpenter's Starman back when I was in high school and at the time I don't think I really appreciated the movie, I hadn't yet become a fan of John Carpenter's films, in fact I don't think I had connected Carpenter to his movies yet although I had seen and enjoyed several of them by that point.

Starman was a movie I remember liking when I saw it but having seen it, it wasn't something I felt I needed to see again and when the movie was released in the rental market on VHS it seemed like everyone I knew had rented it and insisted on watching whenever I was around so to be honest I think I got pretty sick of the movie for a time although I did enjoy the short lived TV series that was based on the movie.

I tend to be somewhat of an obsessive completest so when I decided I needed to own all of John Carpenter's movies on DVD that of course included Starman, the Starman DVD sat around unwatched for ages before I decided to watch it and I found that I really enjoyed seeing the movie again something like 20 years later, while it's certainly not the type of film that I would usually expect from John Carpenter it's a well made movie and the performances from Karen Allen, Charles Martin Smith especially Jeff Bridges were all excellent.

Over the last few years I have been upgrading some of my favourite movies to Blu-ray and this has included all of John Carpenter's movies that are currently available in that format and a while ago I purchased the Blu-ray released in the USA and while some of the effects work looked a little dated overall I enjoyed watching the movie in HD, in Australia John Carpenter's Starman received a sub-standard release on Blu-ray, just the movie and none of the special features from earlier DVD release which is disappointing but I thought I give the disc a spin tonight just to check out the quality of the movie transfer and while I'm no expert on these things it seemed to be the same or similar quality as the US released Blu-ray so given the insane price the US released Staman Blu-ray seems to be selling for on Amazon if you have the ability to play discs from other regions it just might be worth buying the Australian released disc instead.

Is John Carpenter's Starman a classic movie ?, no it's not but it is damn fine movie and deserves a place in any collection.