Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
“It has absolutely no message,” said Ridley Scott of Alien when it was first released in 1979. “It works on a very visceral level and its only point is terror, and more terror.” Somewhere along the line, however, he seems to have had a change of heart, for by the time he got around to making the prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, Scott had decided that they very much did have a message — a big one (the biggest of all, in fact). Escalating the body horror of the original to near Biblical proportions, we get references to Shelley and Wagner, Piero della Francesca and Milton’s Paradise Lost, all designed to answer the question referred to by cybernautics genius Weyland (Guy Pearce) as “the only question that matters: Where do we come from?”
It has often been pointed out that film directors suffer from a God complex. “I like Gods,” says Jack Palance’s producer in Godard’s Contempt. “I like them very much. I know exactly how they feel.” It will not come as news to close followers of Scott’s career that the longer it has gone on, the more his films have grown fascinated by creation myths. “You were made as well as we could make you,” Eldon Tyrell tells Toy Batty in Blade Runner, “Look at you! You’re the prodigal son…. revel in your time.” In 1492: Conquest of Paradise, he tackled the origins of America; in Exodus Gods and Kings, he portrayed the origins of the Jewish people. It was only a matter of time before he returned to his own personal prime-mobile, the film that jump-started his own career and spawned a franchise whose control he regretted losing control of. “I let [Alien] get away from me,” he said recently. “I shouldn’t have.”
So authorship was on Scott’s mind even before filming a single frame of the prequels. His return to the helm of the series was marked by a certain belligerence.
“I was always amazed that no one asked who the hell the Space Jockey was… I always thought it was amazing that no one ever asked who he was, and why was he there? What was all that about? … I always figured that [the ship in the first Alien] was a carrier of weapons. Therefore, who is that, inside that suit? That wasn’t a skeleton, that was a suit. And if you open up the suit, what do you get inside it? And why were they going, where were they going?”
It is telling that when conceiving the prequels, Scott fastened on one of the elements he didn’t originate himself. There is lots to choose from, for Alien had many midwives. “I stole from everybody,” said screenwriter Dan O’Bannon who contributed the crucial idea of alien incubation. In his rewrite, Walter Hill supplied the idea of truck-drivers-in-space. Ron Cobb designed the chunky, samurai-like spacesuits. Chris Foss and Jean Giraud’s ideas went into the Nostromo. Most famously of all, H.R. Giger designed not just the alien but the derelict ship and the landscape in which they find it. If you examine Scott’s original storyboards for the film, they are a stunningly rendered synthesis of Cobb, Giraud, and Foss. “His imagination is like a fucking virus,” said writer Hampton Fancher of working with the director on Blade Runner, whose vision of the future was a famously postmodern mash-up of Los Angeles, London and Hong Kong. “It keeps growing and spreading and mutating.”
The one thing Scott’s career has never been about, in other words, is creation — or, at least, the God-like sole authorship that is so fetishized in the Alien prequels. This may be why they feel so bogus, or boring: they are creation myths by a born synthesist, king of the mélange. All movie directors are, to one degree or another, magpies, filching ideas from their collaborators, frequently niggardly in the attribution of credit, greedy for sole authorship. It’s part of the job description, but Scott more so than most. A graphic designer before he was a film director, he studied at the Royal College of Art alongside David Hockney, where he blossomed after his lackluster school years. His films return again and again to the image of designer at his board, quietly working, above the fray: Deckard poring over his photo-enhancer in Blade Runner, Clarice Starling or her desk of evidence in Hannibal, or Ash (Ian Holm), snug in his cubby in the Nostromo while his fellow-crew members fight for their lives.
In the Alien prequels, the creator figure is the lordly cyborg David (Michael Fassbender), camping out in the ruins of an Engineer city, sequestered in his alchemist’s lair hung with sketches of insect-like xenomorph prototypes. In these leisurely scenes, Scott takes time out from his horror-movie plot, essentially putting Alien: Covenant on pause to finally lay to rest the anxiety of influence that has bedeviled his multiply-authored saga. Unlike the messy credit attribution of Alien, or of the sequels, the xenomorph itself has but a sole creator, a single father who sits, like Scott at his design board, in splendid isolation from the fray. In space, it seems, nobody can hear you ask for credit.
This accounts for the slightly lunatic flavor of the prequels — their sense of personal hobbyhorses being ridden and private obsessions aired. Even after audiences recoiled from all the creation myth stuff in Prometheus, Scott returned to it in Alien: Covenant, still intent on fashioning a fable of sole authorship from a franchise that has the idea the cross-breed at its heart. No franchise is more hybrid. It’s about a parasite; something that breeds with others to be born. Tellingly, most of the good stuff in Alien: Covenant is, again, borrowed: the alien with a milky-white head seems a spin-off from the fourth film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet; the Harrier-like emergency exits and cowboy hats from the second by James Cameron. Scott’s own embellishments — a back-bursting alien, a crew composed of couples — suggest a man still in exile from his own franchise, trying to get in. Paradise Lost, indeed. At the movies, at least, monsters beat Gods every time.
Tom Shone is the author of Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Summer. His most recent book, Tarantino: A Retrospective, will be published in October. Currently he is Film Critic of the London Sunday Times. Follow him on Twitter: @tom_shone.
