Starman (1984) * *

Directed by:  John Carpenter

Starring:  Jeff Bridges, Karen Allen, Charles Martin Smith, Richard Jaeckel

Starman is all too reminiscent of E.T. and suffers in comparison.    In E.T., an alien is stranded on Earth and befriends a human while awaiting the day when a ship will come to bring him home.     In Starman, an alien is stranded on Earth, assumes the identity of a woman's dead husband, and the two travel cross country to the rendezvous point where he will be picked up and brought home.     Coincidentally, both E.T. and Starman were written at about the same time, but E.T. was filmed first.    Starman is not a ripoff, but it was released two years after the unprecedentedly successful E.T. and I couldn't help but realize how similar they are.   

The movie stars Jeff Bridges as the unnamed alien whose ship is shot down over rural Wisconsin.     He finds refuge in a cabin belonging to a young widow named Jenny (Allen), whose husband died a year earlier.     The alien awkwardly assumes the human form of Jenny's late husband and soon they are traveling to Arizona to meet up with the mother ship.      They fall in love while on the road and outrunning government agents who suspect correctly that Bridges is from another planet.     Like in E.T., when the government starts poking around, it's time to head for higher ground.  

Bridges and Allen have nice chemistry together.    Jenny takes her time to patiently teach Starman about human traditions and emotions, all of which are foreign to him.    While trying to learn to move in his new body, Starman (as the credits call him) resembles a walking ostrich.     He is a benevolent alien fascinated by the human species, while the only humans he meets other than Jenny are hostile and violent.     Bridges (Oscar-nominated for his role) hits all the right notes and makes for a likable alien.     Allen is sweet, kind, sad, and confused while coming to grips that her husband is back...sort of.     Charles Martin Smith has the thankless task of being the sympathetic bureaucrat who has to track down the couple and capture the alien.   

Starman inevitably moves toward its predictable conclusion with a couple of nice touches, including a scene where he brings a dead deer tied to the roof of a car back to life.     The hunter who killed the deer is none too happy about this, although he should be at least somewhat curious about a man who can bring things back to life.    I guess he is not a big-picture kind of guy.     But the sweet scenes are islands onto themselves.     The rest is just formula chase/road movie stuff.   

In the movies, anyway, humans are forever desiring to make contact with alien life forms only to chase them down and make life generally miserable for the poor things.     Starman must have seen E.T. so he knows what's in store.