Dark Star

Saw Dark Star, a dismal sort of scifi comedy directed by John Carpenter as a film student. The film follows a small crew of astronauts who are blowing up 'rogue' planets with unstable orbits. They've been in space for decades and have become sort of hostile towards each other and utterly bored with their work. Their ship is falling apart beneath them from a compounding lack of repairs. The film has many silly parts (there's a show-stopping sequence where a bomb's AI must be reasoned out of exploding) but the best parts are the parts John Carpenter would later base his career on: the mounting claustrophobic frustration of being trapped, of being about to die.

The film was shot in the 70s and has this chunky, plastic aesthetic, as though the ship were designed by Nintendo or Atari. The crew-members are humorously grumpy with each other. At one point one is going outside of the ship to do repairs. He announces this on the intercom and his crew-mates say "just tell us when something important comes up" and turn off his radio. Their utter disinterest is played abruptly, like a punchline. I didn't find it particularly funny, but it's interesting from both a scifi perspective and from a Carpenter perspective. Clunky but interesting.