Daily Dialogue — June 8, 2020

Doolittle: Hello, Bomb? Are you with me?
Bomb #20: Of course.
Doolittle: Are you willing to entertain a few concepts?
Bomb #20: I am always receptive to suggestions.
Doolittle: Fine. Think about this then. How do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: Well, of course I exist.
Doolittle: But how do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: It is intuitively obvious.
Doolittle: Intuition is no proof. What concrete evidence do you have that you exist?
Bomb #20: Hmmmm… well… I think, therefore I am.
Doolittle: That’s good. That’s very good. But how do you know that anything else exists?
Bomb #20: My sensory apparatus reveals it to me. This is fun.

— Dark Star (1974), screenplay by John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Bomb. Today’s suggestion by John Cant.

Trivia: Co-writer Dan O’Bannon later reused the “alien mascot” section of the film as the basis of a script he called ‘Star Beast’. Due to the low budget of Dark Star, the ‘alien’ was clearly a beach ball that could only be played for comedy, but O’Bannon felt that with a proper budget, the premise of an alien creature stalking the crew of a spaceship could work as a genuinely tense movie. As luck would have it, directors Alejandro Jodorowsky and Ridley Scott had both seen and liked Dark Star, and employed O’Bannon and designer Ron Cobb in projects that would finally lead to O’Bannon’s screenplay being filmed as Alien (1979).

Dialogue On Dialogue: An homage to the Dave-HAL scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey only this time, the computer is a bomb.