"As a morality tale, the message is so well worn now as to be hackneyed: We are the monsters. Worse, we make the monsters. And we make the monsters that make the monsters. Right. We get it."
13 years ago, I blogged, asking the question “Is the remake of Battlestar Galactica merely the worst kind of crap, or does it actually represent the end of Western Civilisation?”
Today, I want to talk about the Alien movie franchise,
having seen the latest instalment, Alien: Covenant last night (and yes, this essay
contains spoilers). As you can see, I weigh in on such questions rarely, and
the purpose of my musing is not merely to offer either just a review or fanboy speculation,
but to ask a wider question about the way our civilisation regards itself. The
entertainment of our age, be they movies, TV shows or books, reflect in some
way self-esteem of late Western society. And by “late”, I presage the view of
future historians who will see this time in our history as an ending of whatever it is that
we are, before it is replaced by something else.
The Alien franchise has held a curious fascination for me
since my teens. I remember going to the State Library and poring over
a rare copy of H.R Giger’s Necronomicon
as though it were every bit the “terrible and forbidden” grimoire its namesake, via H.P Lovecraft’s
Abdul Alhazred, described. There was something genuinely original and
disturbing about Giger’s vaguely pornographic, biomechanical nightmares.
After decades of science fiction depictions of aliens that were little more than men in rubber suits, the sense of otherness exuded from Giger's work; of the cadaverous and monstrous, was unsettling in the extreme. I pored over them with a mixture of horrified curiosity and revulsion. I wondered how such creatures would “work”, and I reflected on what it was that Giger tapped in our collective subconscious that made us so uneasy. Subverted motifs of sexual congress, and violent birth; of the mechanical infiltrating even the integrity of our bodies, borg-like; they all combined to made me shudder.
After decades of science fiction depictions of aliens that were little more than men in rubber suits, the sense of otherness exuded from Giger's work; of the cadaverous and monstrous, was unsettling in the extreme. I pored over them with a mixture of horrified curiosity and revulsion. I wondered how such creatures would “work”, and I reflected on what it was that Giger tapped in our collective subconscious that made us so uneasy. Subverted motifs of sexual congress, and violent birth; of the mechanical infiltrating even the integrity of our bodies, borg-like; they all combined to made me shudder.
And then there was the Pilot, later depicted in the original
Alien as the “Space Jockey”.
This strange creature and its lonely enthronement in an
ancient, fossilised and ill-fortuned ship, struck me as sad, and deeply mysterious.
What happened? What race did it represent? Was it even separate from the device
it controlled, seemingly growing from its chair? The architecture of its ship,
resembling the inside of a ribcage, suggested technologies so unfamiliar as to
be beyond even our speculation.
The genius of any fiction lays in its ability to invoke our imagination, rather than laying everything out, pre-digested. And the 1979 Alien did that. The titular monster was far scarier because of how little we saw of it. And that was its appeal. We were meant to yearn for answers, and equally, never to have them. Like a magic trick that loses its appeal once it is explained; like Oz behind his curtain; like the Force before we were told about Midichlorians; the riddle of the Engineers is perhaps better left unexplained.
The genius of any fiction lays in its ability to invoke our imagination, rather than laying everything out, pre-digested. And the 1979 Alien did that. The titular monster was far scarier because of how little we saw of it. And that was its appeal. We were meant to yearn for answers, and equally, never to have them. Like a magic trick that loses its appeal once it is explained; like Oz behind his curtain; like the Force before we were told about Midichlorians; the riddle of the Engineers is perhaps better left unexplained.
Crucially, neither the Engineers or the Alien had anything
to do with humans. We were just the hapless and recently spacefaring species
that stumbled along to realise how scary outer space is. And here’s the
parallel with the remake of Battlestar Galactica. Suddenly, we are responsible for the creation of
the Cylons, and some of the mystery of their origins is dispelled. Plus, all of
humanity become both Victor Frankenstein and Eldon Tyrell, rueing the return of
our creations to wreak havoc among us, and to teach us the terrible price for our sin of Pride; of usurping the prerogative of God in creating life. Now,
we have Peter Weyland to add to that dubious pantheon. In creating a synthetic
life-form capable of better-than-human reasoning but possessing no empathy, he
creates in David the monster that creates all other monsters. Considering
Ridley Scott directed Bladerunner as well, it’s safe to say that this motif is
deliberate. Expect the imminent
Blade Runner sequel (also a Ridley Scott vehicle) to repeat the same mantra:
the Creation is in some way better than the Creator, and the impulse of all created beings is
to become disillusioned with, and then kill, their gods.
The decision to declare that Giger’s otherworldly vision of
the Pilot should give way to the revelation that its form was merely a
spacesuit and that the inhabitants were basically ancient giant humans, right down
to our DNA (and now living in "space Rome", rather than a biomechanical city), was the biggest cop-out ever, and one that the writers of
Prometheus like Damon Lindelof should be ashamed of. The whole point of the Pilot and the
Juggernaut, and the Xenomorphs were that they weren’t human. That’s what “Alien” means. Now, courtesy of the latest installment, we learn that even the lifecycle
of the egg/facehugger/xenomorph we considered "original" is because of a human-made android tinkering in solitude and madness.
Implication? Somehow, we deserve our fate. We brought it upon ourselves in our pride and cruelty. In fact, the Engineers saw how bad we were, and were about to wipe us out, until we got to them first. And ethically, the Engineers were far from benign themselves. Was it a shared failing, that they seemed capable of indiscriminate genocide? Were we more alike than either thought?
Implication? Somehow, we deserve our fate. We brought it upon ourselves in our pride and cruelty. In fact, the Engineers saw how bad we were, and were about to wipe us out, until we got to them first. And ethically, the Engineers were far from benign themselves. Was it a shared failing, that they seemed capable of indiscriminate genocide? Were we more alike than either thought?
This is nothing if not a post-modernist conceit, an
increasingly popular trope not just in entertainment, but in history, to regard
humanity as irredeemable, despite our miraculous advances of technology.
James Cameron’s films do the same thing:
James Cameron’s films do the same thing:
Titanic: Build a boat, a wonder of the technological age.
Sunk by pride. People behave ignobly in the aftermath.
Avatar: Develop a spacefaring civilisation. Rape innocent
worlds for their resources. Cue heavy-handed metaphors between westerners and
native americans.
Terminator: Develop A.I. Watch it immediately conclude that all humans
should be wiped out.
I could say that this is entirely the wrong emphasis, and
that the outlook of our speculative fiction should be less bleak. But then I realised that the genre of the Alien films is less Sci-Fi than Horror. One of the purposes of horror
stories are to reveal not only the darkness under the bed, but within the human
heart as well. As we contemplate the (quite genuine) horror of the situation in
the final twist of the Alien: Covenant movie, we realise that, in part, we have created that situation.
As a morality tale, the message is so well worn now as to be hackneyed: We are the monsters. Worse, we make the monsters. And we make the monsters that make the monsters. Right. We get it.
As a morality tale, the message is so well worn now as to be hackneyed: We are the monsters. Worse, we make the monsters. And we make the monsters that make the monsters. Right. We get it.
Worse, the implication is that space is not a majestic tabula rasa for us to paint our future
on, but a darkness concealing uncountable horrors beyond imagination, and that
humanity is presumptious to the point of folly to even seek to tread there. H.P
Lovecraft would be proud. Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!
But here’s the flipside: We’ve created faster-than-light
drives. We’re colonising the galaxy. We’ve built artificial intelligences,
which (in every alternate model, at least) can be noble and good. The good ship
Covenant is peopled by crew we could like; who want a better life, a cabin by
the lake, and clean air to raise a new generation in. The future does not yet
seem to be ruled by the questionable ethics of the Weyland-Yutani corporation.
And much of the ill-fortune we seem to experience “out there” arises from bad luck, plus supposedly smart people doing really dumb things. This is a mandatory requirement for
any horror film, when you think about it… Don’t go alone into the dark place. Ignore
even the most basic rules about safety or quarantine. Don’t wake up the dude
who runs the facility making the goo intended to wipe out humanity and ask him
for immortality before he’s had his coffee. That kind of thing. Despite this, there's a lot to like about this vision of humanity's future, and that perhaps explains the enduring popularity of Star Trek.
The conclusion I reach is that Ridley Scott must
have a really low opinion of both humanity, and of his audiences. We
shouldn’t be fooled by the fact that these movies are all luxuriantly produced
and visually stunning. (I found myself in New Zealand last year and arrived at
Milford Sound smack-bang in the middle of filming for the movie – all the
scenes where the landing craft arrive at the fjord and land in the water).
The production design of Arthur Max and Chris Seagers are first rate and just jaw-dropping, as are the (very faint) echoes of Giger, where they let it leak in around the edges. In terms of the hardware, it’s a vision of a future in space that’s completely compelling. But, even withstanding the genre of film into which these films fit, Ridley Scott’s laziness and shallowness ruin the opportunities to tell more genuinely interesting stories based on the premises they start with. It’s like what someone has said recently of the vacuity of President Trump: “We try to analyse what we see for deeper motivations or meanings, but what if there’s no ‘there’, there?” And that’s the key. Even in 1979, Scott had no idea what to make of the Pilot, referring to it merely as the “big dental patient” while the mad genius Giger did his work. When returning to the franchise and seeking a hook for his plot, Scott speculated that Jesus Christ was an Engineer sent to Earth and our treatment of Jesus was ultimately what made then Engineers mad at us. WTF? What kind of brain fart is that?
What this tells me is that there's no real philosophy going on here, and no actual overarching meaning. Don't look for it. It's merely a bunch of hack writers spitballing inane ideas with no idea of what "canon" ought to mean, at least in the sense of avoiding simple errors that prevent you from telling a story that's coherent to the broader fictional universe in which it's set. Attempts like mine to remonstrate with Ridley Scott are like arguing over pareidolia; people are just going to see what they're going to see.
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| Holiday photos from Milford Sound, 2016. The set for the spaceship-lander is in the distance. |
The production design of Arthur Max and Chris Seagers are first rate and just jaw-dropping, as are the (very faint) echoes of Giger, where they let it leak in around the edges. In terms of the hardware, it’s a vision of a future in space that’s completely compelling. But, even withstanding the genre of film into which these films fit, Ridley Scott’s laziness and shallowness ruin the opportunities to tell more genuinely interesting stories based on the premises they start with. It’s like what someone has said recently of the vacuity of President Trump: “We try to analyse what we see for deeper motivations or meanings, but what if there’s no ‘there’, there?” And that’s the key. Even in 1979, Scott had no idea what to make of the Pilot, referring to it merely as the “big dental patient” while the mad genius Giger did his work. When returning to the franchise and seeking a hook for his plot, Scott speculated that Jesus Christ was an Engineer sent to Earth and our treatment of Jesus was ultimately what made then Engineers mad at us. WTF? What kind of brain fart is that?
What this tells me is that there's no real philosophy going on here, and no actual overarching meaning. Don't look for it. It's merely a bunch of hack writers spitballing inane ideas with no idea of what "canon" ought to mean, at least in the sense of avoiding simple errors that prevent you from telling a story that's coherent to the broader fictional universe in which it's set. Attempts like mine to remonstrate with Ridley Scott are like arguing over pareidolia; people are just going to see what they're going to see.
It’s vexing that Ridley Scott can make films that are
beautiful to look at, and even films with an important message (last year’s “the
Martian” was outstanding, but that was exclusively because of Andy Weir’s brilliant source-novel),
but then treats so contemptuously the opportunity to tell a good story with glib
ideas like “Jesus was an alien” or “humans are indirectly responsible for the variety
of Xenomorph that will be found on a thousand-year-old crashed ship only 18
years later”, or “Xenomorphs can grow from chestburster to full-adult in five
minutes”. Retconning is one thing, but Alien: Covenant does very little to
correct the egregious sins of its predecessor: namely, making smart characters
do dumb things, and invoking plot twists so illogical as to lift us out of the
narrative.
How hard can it be to make films that don’t insult the intelligence of their audiences? Obviously, in Hollywood, no one can hear us screaming.
How hard can it be to make films that don’t insult the intelligence of their audiences? Obviously, in Hollywood, no one can hear us screaming.