Beginnings and Origins (and other such synonyms)

After a short hiatus to accommodate some not-at-all stressful university deadlines for the end of the first semester, and the holiday season, I shall return to (somewhat) regular posting in the new year, i.e. next week. This is just a quickie update to prove that I'm still alive. I do hope you all had a Merry Christmas, or fröhliche Weihnachten, or С Рождеством Хрисовым, or З Божым нараджэннем!

And also have a Happy New Year (prost Neujahr, С Новым Годом, З новым годам) for tonight or tomorrow or yesterday or whenever your country enters/entered 2012. Which takes care of the Beginnings.

Onto the Origins. This past week I bought Rayman Origins in a sale in GAME (having made a bit of a fuss in the middle of the shop about a pricing mistake). I got my first taster of the game at GAMEfest this past September and now I'm totally in love with it. In fact I'll likely be posting a gushing love letter to it on here in a matter of days.

And to close 2011 with another origin-themed... thing, I'll leave you with the intensely exciting first teaser trailer for Ridley Scott's upcoming Prometheus. Despite his denying that it's going to be an Alien-related film, there are some definite parallels in this teaser to Alien's original trailer, notably the title style, the sound, and the overall atmosphere. If this doesn't get your mouth watering for Scott's first sci-fi in 30 years, well then maybe you should rewatch Alien and Blade Runner and remind yourself just how good he can be.

Enjoy.

The Thing about The Thing...

In The Thing, the Thing attempts to absorb and imitate its victims, then kill everyone else in the same way. This also works as an analogy for The Thing. The Thing attempts to imitate The Thing and then kill its audience (well, kill their IQ), much like the Thing in both The Thing and The Thing.

By watching The Thing, we can learn how to defeat the terribleness of The Thing by finding out how the people in The Thing defeat the terribleness of the Thing. Firstly, if we keep our eyes open for subtle differences between the Thing and its counterpart, we can tell which is the original and which is the imitator. In both The Thing and The Thing, the Thing is unable to absorb and imitate inorganic material, meaning Thing versions of people can be spotted if they’re missing earrings or fillings etc. In The Thing, the Thing is created using wonderfully-repulsive, inorganic latex creature effects (courtesy of Rob Bottin), while in The Thing, the inorganic effects materials are not replicated, and the Thing is instead presented with intangible computer-generated effects (which, in fairness, are still wonderfully-repulsive). Thereby, The Thing is revealed as the Thing counterpart of The Thing.

The second thing we can learn from watching The Thing is that if we attack the Thing, it will reveal itself as a Thing and can therefore be destroyed. This also applies to The Thing. To attack The Thing, we can pull it apart via its dumb, clichéd script, its generic, uninspired cinematography, its simple, typical characters, its predictable over-reliance on jump scares, and so on. Eric Heisserer has written a blues standard of a horror screenplay, but absorbed some of The Thing to create his own rendition. There’s the usual cast of dumb characters, even more surprising since they’re supposed to be a bunch of scientists and yet they could probably be declared brain-dead in the real world. There’s the usual ‘expose and explain everything we can because our audience is as dumb as our characters’ attitude to the dialogue. And there’s the usual ‘very quiet, very tense, guy on his own, something’s gonna hap-“BLAH! LOL IT’S ONLY ME DIDN’T MEAN TO SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF YOU DUDE HAHAHA.”’ cheap jumpy moments. None of which were present in The Thing.

The Thing seems to try to imitate not only The Thing, but also, nearly every American ‘horror’ film of the last 10 years, becoming one big amalgam Thing of The Thing and about a zillion other films. And so, comparing these aspects of The Thing to the same aspects in The Thing reveals The Thing as the Thing.

The bit that fans of The Thing are probably waiting for finally occurs after an hour and a half of bland, mostly-forgettable predictable horror fare, albeit dragged out by the interspersed credits. The Thing ends with the Thing escaping the Norwegian base, heading towards the American base in dog form, chased by two Norwegians in a helicopter, leading immediately into the beginning of The Thing wherein the Thing goes on to wreak further disgusting havoc. I was pretty much waiting the whole time for that tie-in, and it did make me smile, like some kind of in-joke that not a lot of other people got.

The other redeeming thing about seeing The Thing at the cinema was the tension between my friends and I afterwards as we all realised we couldn’t trust each other anymore.

As a reflection of The Thing, this review of The Thing has been an exercise in redundancy. You see, I was trying to be like The Thing and imitate The Thing. Or was I trying to be like the Thing and imitate the Thing? Maybe I was the Thing imitating The Thing. Wait, now I’m confused...

The Perfect Organism - Part 2

Continuing on from Part 1...

So rarely does a film reach so far into the viewer’s consciousness as does Alien. It invades our thoughts like the creature invades the ship, and then the crew. Alien gives new meaning to invasion in the sci-fi sense. In the past, invasion had been depicted through alien species landing on the planet and taking over, or any such plots, but Alien goes beyond that. The xenomorph firstly invades Kane (and even before that, the deserted ship and the space jockey), using this as a means to invade the Nostromo, and then to invade the rest of the crew. Body horror is such a shocking subject, that screen depictions are often very memorable. But the creature’s rather sexual nature evokes rape and pregnancy, but in a previously-unseen, graphic manner. This plays on some very human fears, making our empathy with the crew much easier. The crew themselves are very human, very realistic. Achieving such a down-to-earth, relatable cast of characters in a film seemingly set so distant from the real world is quite a feat in itself.

Of course, the filmmakers’ contributions to this milestone in cinema go beyond just the story and the genre and the title. Every inch of the film is so well detailed. The cinematography, the score, the art design. HR Giger designed not just the alien, but several other aspects as well, including the planet surface, the derelict ship, and all other forms of the alien, and his excellence was recognised by AMPAS with an Academy Award for Visual Effects. Jerry Goldsmith (famed for the scores of Planet of the Apes, Chinatown, The Omen, and Star Trek, among others) provided a subtle, eerie score that reflects the film’s atmosphere, the isolation of space, and the unfamiliar locales. The camera work was provided by Derek Vanlint, whose choices range from large-scale wide shots, like that of the space jockey, dead in its chair, to jarring close-ups, like that of the ship’s resident feline, Jones. Together, all of these elements create an incredibly tight, well-sculpted, flawless film.

Alien doesn’t drop a single note. Every aspect works in conjunction with the rest. Even after so many viewings, I cannot pick any holes in Scott’s magnum opus. The fact that the film wasn’t even nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture for its year (won by Oscar-bait Kramer vs. Kramer) is a disappointment. In my opinion, it is perfect. And this brings me back to the title. As science officer/evil android Ash says of the xenomorph, it is “the perfect organism”. In a further reflection of the title’s aptness at describing the film, by relating the creature and the film through the name, one can also describe the film as a perfect organism.

It is perfect. A faultless piece of art, of science fiction, of horror. Transcendent of genre – blending these two well-established archetypes into a new, disturbing hybrid. Transcendent of time – offering visual effects that have not dated after over 30 years, and themes that are still relevant today.

It is an organism. Terror and suspense that live on in our minds as nightmare and nostalgia. Body shocks that reach out into the consciousness of the audience. A believable crew, setting and situation, even as distant into space and time as it is.

It is indescribable. It is horrifying. It is Alien.

The Perfect Organism - Part 1

As a gift for my 20th birthday this past Tuesday, I received Ian Nathan's excellent book... box... thing, Alien Vault: The Definitive Story of the Making of the Film. I'm a big fan of Alien, and have been for some time, insofar as that I consider it one of my two 'favourite' films. So, inspired by Ian Nathan, here's my own relatively-short look at the film and why I love it so.

For anyone that hasn’t seen Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), please stop reading right now, go watch the film, and then come back and read this.

*SPOILERS FROM HERE ON IN*

Alien is a rarity. In science fiction, in cinema, in culture. It is a transcendental work, a piece that cannot be tied down and labelled under measure of genre or type. A picture as elusive and indescribable as its titular character. In fact, the title itself represents so much more than it first seems.

At first reading, a title as simple as ‘Alien’ evokes very little about the film and its inner workings. But on closer study, and perhaps after a first viewing of the film, there is so much more to it, and there are few other names that could so perfectly encapsulate every aspect of Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece.

As a description of the character (I choose to avoid the term ‘villain’ here, because we are given no indications of the Alien’s motivations) it refers to, it hits the nail on the head. In noun form, it shows that the creature is indeed an alien, and in adjective form, it shows that the creature has an alien appearance, has alien behaviour, and perhaps most importantly, has alien reproduction.

But beyond the creature, it describes so much more within the diegesis. The alien world on which the human protagonists land; the alien ship within which the facehugger is found; the alien situation that the crew find themselves in. And it is the situation that is possibly the most key to the reading of the title. From the very introduction of the ‘xenomorph’, the crew’s control begins to completely collapse. For all their assumed knowledge and experience, their attempt to manage their altered circumstances is one long exercise in futility. The egg is alien, Kane’s new friend is alien, its purpose is alien, the chestburster and its birth are alien, the xeno’s behaviour is alien, and its resting state in the shuttle is alien. There is nothing about the creature that the crew or the audience understand.

It is this that lends the horror to the film, and further meaning to the title. Horror as a genre works best when the protagonists and the audience are dealing with something unknown, something we don’t understand ("and you always fear what you don't understand"). When both ourselves and the characters are dealing with the unknown, we can more easily place ourselves into the position of the characters, and therefore augment the experience of fear. Alien achieves this in many ways, not just through the unpredictable actions of the creature, but also through the lack of screentime the creature is given. We don’t know what it is, we don’t know where it is, and we are given a mere glimpse of what it looks like. This is why seminal horror films like Jaws and The Thing stick so vividly in our minds. Their respective ‘villains’ are barely shown, leaving our imaginations to run wild and create the scares ourselves.

When Ridley Scott blends this pure horror with the film’s science fiction roots, the title fits like a glove. Prior to Alien’s release in 1979 (and following the slew of schlocky B-Movies of the 50s), science fiction had very much been a pleasant, exciting, family-friendly territory, one that made us crave adventure and exploration. Some of the biggest pre-1979 pieces include Star Wars, Star Trek, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But then Alien came along and changed the game, making sci-fi a much less welcoming subject. Not only this, but the two genres blur together, as the film could not exist without both. Without the science fiction, there is no context for the horror, no setup for the creature’s invasion, no reason for the crew’s isolation, and no basis for the memorable tagline (“In space, no one can hear you scream”). Without the horror, the sci-fi is missing a crux, the disturbing HR Giger design wasted, the picture merely a dystopian vision of the future. This blending of genre is alien. Unseen before, unsurpassed since. An unforgettable assault on our senses.

To be continued.

(Kudos to anyone who knows where that fear quote comes from.)