Hug the face of your loved one close tonight when “Alien” plays at the Memorial Union Terrace
In advance of WUD’s free screening of Alien this evening, I first had wanted to use the film as means of illustrating everything wrong about its pseudo-prequel Prometheus, a film which turned a year old earlier this month. I couldn’t do it. That would have been awfully mean-spirited to Mr. Ridley Scott, but perhaps more importantly, reverse-engineering his 1979 classic into an angry “Do’s and Don’ts” list seemed like a far too emotional approach to take with such a cold, unfeeling film like Alien.
In many ways, both Prometheus and Alien are concerned with evolution, with compassion and objectivity, and with the endpoints of life itself — the former with the afterlife and the latter with birth. One of Prometheus’ failings however was its attempts to tackle heady concepts while remaining so reverent of Scott’s original film. To put it another way, it’s far too sentimental a picture. Not Alien, where a downed “Engineer” ship isn’t heralded by a stirring of strings or a recurring musical motive but the violent winds of the planet on which it crash landed. Dan O’Bannon and Ron Shusett aren’t telling a story about the wonders of scientific discovery because Ripley, Dallas, and the rest of the Nostromo’s mining crew were never looking for the “Xenomorph” to begin with. Their Darwinian demise at the hands of a highly-evolved being is only part of a cold and unfeeling process.
Where that cold and unfeeling process terrifies us and what Scott’s callous direction and H.R. Giger’s beautiful monstrosity question is whether it’s natural to fight an uncompromising threat out of self-preservation or whether the Nostromo crew’s fight is against the course of nature itself. It’s easy to get cynical over this summer’s string of convoluted comic book mythologies and franchise sequels, but like several of WUD Film’s Lakeside Cinema selections have already shown us, sometimes simpler is better. With all the computer-generated destruction of metropolitan skylines, let’s not forget that there’s plenty to mine from a bunch of people trapped inside a ship with an alien. “Sizzle” in movies works just fine, but Alien deserves credit for being, to paraphrase one of its characters, as cold and unclouded by conscience as its subject. The perfect organism, indeed.
- Alien plays FREE at the Memorial Union Terrace tonight at 9:00p as part of its continuing Lakeside Cinema series.