Monday 1 May 2017

"BIG THINGS HAVE SMALL BEGININGS..."

David (Prometheus).


The "money shot".



Why do I keep doing this to myself?

Growing up Alien and Aliens were two of my favourite films, a love that has followed me into adulthood.

Alien 3, after initial disappointment as a teenager, I've grown to appreciate as a beautiful disaster. Alien Resurrection, however, I believe is total and indefensible garbage, for which all those involved should be totally ashamed of themselves. That film marked the absolute low-point for the franchise till Aliens vs Predator and the subsequent sequel. It's not that I took offense to the notion of a cross-over, simply that the films were as life affirming and enjoyable as a one-way trip to a Swiss clinic.

By that point I couldn't see how things could get any worse and hoped (Christ, how I hoped) that would be an end to it.

Then, news surfaced that no other than Ridley Scott was returning to the franchise, for a prequel to his first Alien. That got me curious, and as the release date grew closer and closer, my expectations ran higher and higher.

Long story short: Prometheus was shit. Poorly defined relationships, and a smorgasbord of forgettable one-dimensional characters who only serve to drive the story into a number of contrived hoops- and for what? Some hackneyed space-Jesus plot! Hardly an original idea. And to top it off, the crowning turd in the water-pipe (something you'd not even credit for a film in the Alien franchise) no fucking alien!

Anyway, Mr Scott is returning to the series for this next installment and has decided to back-track on his “I-know-best” NO-ALIEN policy.

We've had a number of little teasers so far, including two trailers (one much more subtle than the other), a closer look at the new stock-android (it seems most crews feature one, even though this was a major surprise to those on board the Nostromo first time round), and a “bloody-hell-it's-in-broad-daylight” view of the new 'Xenomorph' design- although I need to add at this point, I personally hate it when people call the aliens Xenomorphs like that's their official genus, it's a term used by the Colonial Marines to describe a generic 'bug' before they even meet their first monster...


One of H.R. Giger's early designs- look familiar?

I wasn't entirely sure about that 'money shot' at first, but given how everyone and their dog knows how the alien looks these days (Scott once famously said he spotted the alien in Disney Land), maybe it's better to tackle that head-on. Looks like much of the bio-mechanical styling have been dropped in favour of a more naturalistic and 'butch' design- the alien till this point had always been predominantly slender and feminine. In truth, it sticks quite accurately to Giger's original sketches from the first film, and I feel like that's a bold move on Scott's part.

Other 'tools' in the marketing campaign for Alien Covenant are the release of a number of clips. One of these is entitled Last Supper and provides a look at the new soon-to-be-doomed crew, while another shows Shaw (Prometheus' only human survivor) repairing David the android's destroyed body. Given how one of the things I loathed about Prometheus was the lack of group dynamics and believable characters, I was relieved watching Last Supper to see a little more of the 'old magic' at play; the scene felt believable and intimate. Obviously this is just a small window into a feature length film, but it's reassuring. A final clip revealed a now-repaired David essentially laying waste to what appears to be the Engineer's homeworld with their own weaponised black toxin (which truth be told felt a little like a spoiler).

However, for everything Alien Covenant might be doing right, it may be making further errors. News is now circulating which throws the whole premise of the current Alien saga in a different direction... Apparently David, the android who just barely survived the events of Prometheus, is responsible for engineering the particular strain of alien we've so far seen in the franchise, thus entirely decoding the subtext of the film cannon. What had once been a case of 'man is inferior to nature / man is not on top of the natural order of things' is now 'man sows the seeds to his own destruction': man created A.I, A.I creates the alien, alien destroys man.' Scott is quite pleased with this little gimmick, pointing out that while the 'man vs nature' trope has been played out quite often, this particular little avenue of creativity is fertile ground... Aside from my own reservations (personally I actually really like the 'man vs nature' trope) what the blinding-fuck is Ridley Scot actually talking about? 'man sows the seeds etc' is a trope as old as the hills! I mean, Christ alive, that's the entire through-line for the Terminator franchise for a start! Man creates A.I ' Skynet, Skynet creates terminators, terminators destroys man', not familiar at all? Ridley! This is James Cameron's shtick, you've probably heard of the guy, he got the job of doing a sequel to your first Alien film! Off the back of his first Terminator film! I despair, I really do...

Am I the only one who thinks Ridley Scott as actually suffered some sort of stroke?

Anyway, long story short, I'm off to see Alien Covenant when it comes out. Here's hoping it's good.

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