Links post: Test footage from Alien, jewellery by Salvador Dali, behind-the-scenes photos from The Hollow Crown, and more.

Alien: Test footage of the original xenomorph actor in Alien, Bolaj Badejo, has surfaced on youtube. A while ago one of my friends said that one of the good things about Prometheus was the fact that Ridley Scott could now afford to do something "better" than just have a really tall skinny guy wearing an alien costume, and I was like WASH YOUR MOUTH OUT. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is like the first commandment of movie costuming and special effects, and most of cinema's most impressive and sneaky tricks have been invented by people working on comparatively low-budget movies like Alien. In my opinion that tall skinny guy in an alien costume is still as creepy as all get-out, and certainly better than most CGI monsters up until very recent times.  

Dali jewellery, 1950. From How To Be A Retronaut.

Kehinde Wiley. This artist paints strikingly intense, colourful portraits -- his homepage can be found here. I love the mixture of very modern contemporary models and this almost glowing, Renaissance-era background in some of the portraits.

Londoners! Or people who will be in London on the 16th, 17th and 18th of August! If you like comics, awesome stuff, or awesome stuff about comics, then you should go to see Full Stage Splash: A Comic Look at the Comic Book. It's a show about the history of comicbooks in the style of the Horrible Histories BBC sketch show or the Reduced Shakespeare Company, and I highly recommend it. Tickets are £7.50 (less than a movie, if you're in London!) and you can get them HERE. Were I not working at the Edinburgh Fringe right now I'd be at the Camden Fringe for sure, watching this play. ;)


Behind the scenes of The Hollow Crown. Related to my earlier posts about the BBC's Hollow Crown series of Shakespeare adaptations, here are some backstage photos by Charlie Gray.

DYI comicbook high-heels tutorial. I haven't tried this yet, but it looks pretty easy and if you do it right, the results should be awesome. All you need are some cheap high-heeled shoes and a bunch of old comics!

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Prometheus: Proof that epic sci-fi doesn't belong in the Alien franchise.

Previously: Disturbing viral marketing for Prometheus: Happy birthday David, from Weyland Industries.

My feelings about Prometheus are very mixed. As a grown-up sci-fi blockbuster movie, it was excellent, albeit a little cumbersome at times, but as a prequel to Alien it really didn't seem to know what it was doing. The pre-movie marketing included a lot of extra information on the extended universe -- a timeline of Weyland Industries' technological developments; background on Michael Fassbender's android character David; an in-character TED lecture from the fictional billionaire Peter Weyland -- but the film itself included very little of that worldbuilding, and not in the sparsely-written, isolated sense of Alien. Compared to the fast-paced thriller tone of the film as a whole, the reoccuring themes of religious belief and creationism seemed clumsy and out-of-place.
I feel like Prometheus must be a very different film to people who have no previous experience of the Alien franchise. Aside from the handful of lines that were objectively clunky, my main problem with this film lies in the way it relates to the Alien franchise, particularly Alien itself. Each of the Alien movies is different: The first is a slow-build horror movie, the second is a military adventure story, the third (in addition to being a total mess) is an action thriller set in a prison, and Alien Resurrection is a sci-fi blockbuster. The one theme that all four of these movies share is that shadowy, distant corporations control the characters' lives without them knowing it, and are happy to kill the worker ants in the name of profit. They tried to include this theme in Prometheus, but in terms of internal consistency within the premise of the mission (to explore an alien moon for signs of life) it didn't make a hell of a lot of sense.

Given that Peter Weyland is one of the richest and most powerful people in existence and that the Prometheus' journey to LV-223 is a trillion-dollar investment, I assumed that this was a well-publicised exploratory mission, albeit one where the religious undertones of their research were being kept under wraps. Taking this into consideration, one would think that the crew of the Prometheus must be the best of the best: Shaw and Holloway as the leaders, and the other scientists coming along to help with on-planet survival and any research that isn't directly connected to the Engineers and/or "finding God". However, when the crew is first introduced, we learn that they don't even know why they're there. Why not? Why did they sign up to go on a deep-space exploratory mission if they didn't know what they were doing or even who they were going to be working with? One of them wonders if they're going to be working on terraforming (which makes sense if you know the Weyland slogan: "Building Better Worlds"), and the rest are just there to provide backup, loose cannons every one. Seeing as Weyland is rich enough to build his own spaceship to fly off on a vanity mission to find god, and Vickers (Charlize Theron) is obsessed with "minimizing risk", this seems like an extraordinarily impractical recruitment strategy.

In Alien, the crew of the Nostromo are working stiffs and have very little personal stake in the work they do for Weyland-Yutani. Likewise in the sequels, most of the primary characters are low on the corporate food-chain and are unaware that they're being screwed over by their bosses. But while the Nostromo is a mining ship crewed by the famous "truckers in space", the Prometheus is more like the Starship Enterprise, crewed by academics, idealists, and explorers. It would have made far more sense for the crew to begin the film with a sense of well-organised confidence, and then have the first signs of conflict appear as they discover that their well-planned mission is not what it seems, that they've unknowingly been providing cover for a religious megalomaniac all along.

The basic problem is that Prometheus tries to occupy an impossible hinterland between the world of sci-fi epics and the world of the Alien franchise. Star Wars is a myth about rebellion and heroism, Star Trek is about a crew of peacekeepers and scientists exploring the wonders of the galaxy, and the Alien franchise is a series of horror stories set within a cynical universe where no one cares if our beloved protagonist lives or dies. Prometheus, on the other hand, is a story about a scientist's search for God, an aging trillionaire's search for immortality, and the dangers of hubris when it comes to creating life in "unnatural" ways. These are all common sci-fi themes, but they don't really gel with the Alien universe. Up until now, the Alien franchise has dealt with amoral corporate lackies, tired blue-collar workers, violent convicts, and incompetent soldiers. It's difficult for Prometheus to exist within the context of a series where most characters are far more interested a steady paycheck than in the meaning of life.

Maybe it would've been possible to successfully tell an epic story about God and creation within the Alien extended universe, but not without removing most of the references to Alien itself. It didn't help that every scene that took place outside the spaceship was purposefully designed to provoke a feeling of awe and wonder. It seems strange to be complaining about the design and visuals of a film being too good, but I found that it muddied the waters to have to concentrate on individual human fears and the sense of "Oh, wow, we're on an alien planet full of untold wonders," at the same time.
 

There were several aspects of the film that failed to live up to the marketing, but Peter Weyland's casting was, to me, the most confusing. Guy Pearce performed the TED Talk used in the film's viral marketing campaign, and his name was in the credits of the movie, so many viewers would be aware before the film even started that Guy Pearce would be appearing at some point. This meant that his old man prosthetics were extremely distracting, because all the way through I knew that Guy Pearce was lurking underneath, and why the hell would they hire a young actor to play an old man? I spent the entire time waiting for him to be magically de-aged by some alien technology. Did they cast Guy Pearce just so he could do the viral marketing campaign?? Wouldn't it have been more effective to hire an unknown actor to play the young Peter Weyland, and someone like Peter O'Toole to play the older version in the film itself? To make matters more confusing, another Weyland video was released after the film came out.

screencap from here.

While I do believe that Prometheus failed as a prequel to the Alien franchise (and, more simply, that God should stay out of sci-fi unless you go for the full-on cheesy Chariots Of The Gods schtick, as seen in Stargate), there were some Alien quadrilogy nods that I did enjoy. David playing basketball was a fun reference to Alien Resurrection, and the production design (which I'll tackle in a separate post) was full of little details that harked back to the aesthetic of the other Alien movies. And, criticism aside, it was nailbiting thriller. The action scenes were frightening and avoided the kind of obviously unrealistically cliches one often sees in movies of this size, and the moments of visceral horror were incredibly well-executed.

Next: Costume design and the crew of the Prometheus. 

Links
My previous posts on the Alien franchise. 
Prometheus Unbound: What The Movie Was Actually About. This review focuses on the religious aspects of the film, including Ridley Scott's original (horrible) idea to include a Jesus-like figure among the Engineers.
Featurette on the visual effects of Prometheus.
Five ways to improve Prometheus.
Reddit: The Secrets of Prometheus: Explained.

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The costumes of Alien. Part 2: Space suits, retrofuturism, and Prometheus.

Previously: The costumes of Alien. Part 1: Uniforms and characterisation.

People often use the phrase "space truckers" in relation to Alien, which amuses me because from the appearance of the Nostromo and its crew, it seems like Weyland-Yutani ("The Company") is actively trying to combat that image. The aesthetic of Alien was a purposeful step away from the gleaming consoles of Star Trek and other classic space adventures, with most of the action taking place against a backdrop of murky, dripping corridors and the functional and battered interior of the Nostromo's control rooms. But there are several indicators that originally, Weyland-Yutani's preferred image was that of the sparklingly clean, iPod-like spaceship. Rooms that don't see much active use, such as the medical bay and the hypersleep pods, are still pristine, even while the engine rooms look like a sewer and the control room is literally held together with gaffer-tape.

The medical bay of the Nostromo.

When the crew wakes up they're all wearing the same perfectly-laundered utilitarian white underwear, the baseline of clean uniformity The Company would most likely prefer them to retain throughout their careers. Once upon a time the rest of the characters' uniforms would have been just as clean and white, but while the hypersleep pods and medical bay are clean from lack of use, the Company evidently doesn't care enough about the condition of its employees' main workspaces to make sure the less photogenic areas of the ship are well-maintained. 

Ash's MU-TH-UR room is the most spaceship-looking place on the Nostromo.

Aside from the lived-in aesthetic of the Nostromo -- something shared by Star Wars, both in terms of costume design (John Mollo won an Oscar for Star Wars the year before he worked on Alien) and sets -- the main reason why Alien still looks so good is because the filmmakers never tried to make it seem futuristic. As a rule, the harder you try to make your TV show or movie seem like it's set in the future, the more likely it is to look incredibly dated in twenty years' time. 1950s spaceships-and-aliens stories now seem so hilariously old-fashioned that we had to invent a whole new term for them: retrofuturism. So while everyone on the USS Enterprise now looks like they come from a universe where all clothes, hairstyles and interior decor stopped evolving in 1969, Alien still looks pretty good. You can't exactly mistake it for a new film, and some details (Ripley's hair; all the high-top sneakers) seem a little '70s/'80s, but it doesn't fall into the retrofuturism trap. The costumes definitely play into this.

The spacesuits in Alien interest me both from a retrofuturism perspective and because of the recent announcement of a new film in the Alien saga, Prometheus. Prometheus will be the first Alien film directed by Ridley Scott since the original in 1979, and although he's claiming it's not a direct prequel, it does involve people working for Weyland (a precurser to the Weylan-Yutani/Weyland-Yutani corporation) exploring a planet that, in the trailer, looks very similar to the one encountered by the crew of the Nostromo. The trailer even shows a scene where the spacesuit-clad explorers find a Xenomorph egg chamber and Space Jockey. Now, I'll get back to Prometheus in a moment, but first let's take a look at the Nostromo's planetary-exploration suits.

Nostromo crewmembers on Lv-426.

These are the work suits. They give every impression of being old, unwieldy, and uncomfortable to wear. From a filmmaking perspective I'd say they're a lot better for the egg chamber scenario than a gleaming white spacesuit would be because they can blend into the soupy murk of Alien's horror/suspense scenes. Practically speaking, there's no point in wasting photogenic suits on muddy planetside work, plus these suits are designed for a different purpose than the more traditional-looking white spacewalking suit Ripley wears at the end.

The suits worn by Kane and the others when they go planetside are really quite odd-looking. They're heavy, with a strong emphasis on durability and insulation (presumably because the mining planets they visit are often uninhabitable) and no emphasis whatsoever on looking good. The pads around the shoulders imply that they're designed to withstand rockfalls, and the padded shins would protect the wearer's legs from any rubble or sharp objects they wouldn't be able to see through the restricted view of the helmets. With regards to what I was saying earlier about futurism, this kind of design almost goes in the opposite direction, although not quite to the extent of steampunk. They're more like the outer-space equivalent of mechanic's overalls. The white suits Ripley finds in the escape shuttle, however, are very similar to the sort of space suits that were around in real life when Alien was being made. 

Promotional still from Prometheus.

From what I can see from the Prometheus trailer and promo pics, the suits worn by the explorers are very different from the ones seen in Alien. They're a far more modern design than the suits in Alien, but even though this film is set decades before the Nostromo landed on LV-426 you can't ignore the obvious fact that it's being made now. If they'd gone for similar level of technology and set design to a film made in the '70s it would look clunky and ridiculous, even though Alien itself still doesn't particularly give that impression. But if you feel the need to rationalise the knot of futuristic/retrofuturistic issues created by a prequel film made 30 years after the sequel, try this for size:

• The characters in Prometheus are on an exploratory mission, funded by Weyland. This is set in a time when space travel is still new and exciting, so they'd be kitted out with far better gear than the crew of the Nostromo both for PR reasons (I'm assuming this is a public mission, reported by the news and therefore partially an advertisement for Weyland) and because far more is riding on them than on the low-level corporate employees we know from Alien.
• These suits aren't made to be worn by mining and refinery workers who'd only expect to go off-ship once per journey, if that. They provide a far better range of movement, as if designed for people who'd expect to be walking or climbing. This is a high-minded exploratory mission.
• The skin-tight suits worn by Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender and the others look like they're tailored to the shape and dimension of their wearers, and therefore must be very expensive. The crew of the Nostromo, on the other hand, are definitely part of the "one size fits all" class.

Noomi Rapace in Prometheus.

On a Prometheus-themed postscript, can I just say how much I love the fact that Michael Fassbender dyed his hair for this film for no reason at all? Yes, in order to play an android in Ridley Scott's new movie he definitely needed to go blond. I'm so sure.

Links
Dava Newman's streamlined "Bio-Suit". This suit was invented very recently, and I think it bears a strong resemblance to the skin-tight ones seen in Prometheus.
Retrospective of early spacesuits at the Smithsonian Museum. Here are some spacesuits from the 1960s, showing early designs prior to the introduction of the now very recognisable white suit on which Ripley's escape suit in Alien was probably modeled.
Trailer for Alien, recut in the style of the Prometheus trailer. (Purely because this is straight-up awesome.)

Continued in: The Costumes of Aliens.

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The costumes of Alien. Part 1: Uniforms and characterisation.

It took me until the ripe old age of 22 to see Alien, mostly because my mother warned me for years that it was the Most Terrifying Film Ever and should be avoided at all costs. Having seen it I can now verify that it's pretty scary but not, you know, lethally so. Puzzled, I asked my mother to elaborate on her experiences, and very quickly everything became clear. After leaving school she more or less ran away to sea, working on freight ships and oil-tankers. In the '70s and '80s the main communal entertainment for the crew was film reels brought onboard at the most recent port, and this was the context in which my mother saw Alien. In other words, she, a young woman working a low-level engineering job on a huge commercial freighter full of men in overalls, saw Alien for the first and only time in what is basically the setting of Alien. Apparently the one thing that differentiated it from "real life" (aside from the whole "it's set in space" thing) was that when you're working the nightshift on cargo ships it's always really brightly lit so you'd definitely be able to see the alien coming.

The thing that immediately won me over when I first saw Alien was the fact that the characters are so obviously people rather than the sort of cleanly-drawn caricatures favoured by many sci-fi and horror movie writers. Even disregarding my personal dislike of overt exposition, the practise of introducing characters by one or two defining characteristics doesn't exactly lend itself to realistic storytelling.

The crew of the USCSS Nostromo.

There's a certain formula for these things -- the hero, the antagonist, the authority figure, the comic relief, the love interest -- but for the first third of Alien it's not even clear who the main character is. We know it's Ripley because she's a geek-culture icon with a decades-old franchise behind her, but if you went into Alien with no foreknowledge of that then for the first half-hour or so it'd probably seem more like an ensemble movie than a hero story. Which is perfect, because real life is rarely a hero story. If not for the catalyst of the Xenomorph making its way onboard, the crew of the Nostromo would be nothing more than a selection of individuals who don't really know or care much about each other, working together before going their separate ways.

The actors were all given character backstories, but we never see much of that onscreen. The crew of the Nostromo are, for the purposes of the movie, like any group of people who work together doing uninspiring jobs that they neither love nor hate. This isn't the USS Enterprise, and Captain Dallas is more of a line manager than a heroic leader. What one must remember is that for most of their time together, the crew are meant to be in stasis. They interact with the impersonal jocularity of people who know they're going to be stuck together for a while so it's best to keep a bit of distance. Thanks to the film's admirable restraint when it comes to expository dialogue, we don't learn much about "The Company", Weylan-Yutani, except from the general impression that it's the sort of faceless corporation that rules and ruins the little guys' lives in everything from Blade Runner to Firefly.

Veronica Cartwright as Lambert, the Navigator.

The main impression I get from the costumes is that while there's a uniform, it's not a hugely strict one. The crew seem to have been given a few stock items of Weylan-Yutani gear each: overalls, tough white cargo trousers, jackets, and sneakers, but nobody is wearing exactly the same outfit as anyone else. It's not as if the crew are on show to the general public so it's likely that part of the reason why they have to wear a uniform is in order to give a sense of unity with the Company, which is exactly the kind of low-level corporate brainwashing technique I'd expect in this setting. They literally have their employer's signiture stamped all over them, along with the more specific Nostromo badge and a few more personal marks like American or British flag badges. The crew all have very specialised skills that mean that it's likely they can only work on this type of freighter/refinery ship, so it's not surprising that their feelings towards their corporate overlords are rather mixed. They even get paid in Weylan-Yutani stocks. So they wear the uniforms, but each of the crewmembers modifies theirs to show a little individuality.

Harry Dean Stanton as Brett, the Engineering Technician.

Brett and Parker have the messiest uniforms because they combine having the most hands-on jobs (engineering) with having the least respect for the authority of Weylan-Yutani. Brett is lowest on the pecking order and this, coupled with the fact that Harry Dean Stanton is the kind of actor you hire when you want to make it abundantly clear that a character has not had an easy life, indicate to me that living up the uniform standard is never going to be high on Brett's list of priorities. My favourite detail from Brett's outfit is his hat, onto which he's sewn his Nostromo patch. My own theory is that he kept being told to take his hat off but everyone has to be wearing a Nostromo-branded item of clothing at all times so he sewed his patch onto the hat and voila, they couldn't tell him to take it off any more. Fight the Man, Brett!

Yaphet Kotto as Parker, the Chief Engineer.

Brett's uniform modification is a Hawaiian shirt; Parker's is a headband; Lambert's (pictured earlier) is a pair of cowboy boots. The fact that each crewmember only has one or two personalised items on their outfits implies to me that they don't get to bring many of their own possessions onboard, although another possibility is that they just don't want to bend the uniform rules too much and risk a reprimand.

Ian Holm as Ash, the Science Officer.

It's not clear how long the other crewmembers have been working together and in what combination, but it becomes apparent quite early on that Ash is an outsider. It's not much of a surprise that his uniform is the neatest and most buttoned-up of the crew, both because he's the Science Officer and because of his general personality and demeanour. But Ash must be judged differently from the other characters thanks to his dual role of Science Officer and android infiltrator on orders from The Company. The way he presents himself is a calculated move to make the crew think he's a normal human. Compared to everyone else his appearance is oddly formal and neat (and, with the shirt tucked carefully into his trousers, implicitly less blue-collar), which I'd say is a result of his own tastes and personality, although the clothes themselves are just as worn as that of the other characters. I love this detail, because while the worn-in aesthetic of the Nostromo is one of the film's defining design themes, there's a possibility that Ash's costume is nudging a little towards the fourth wall: his uniform must have been purposefully worn-in in order to blend in. And he really doesn't look very comfortable. It's like the difference between wearing a pair of jeans until they're threadbare and faded, and buying a pair that's been pre-distressed.

Tom Skerrit as Dallas, the Captain.

As the captain, Dallas has to hold himself to a higher standard than the others. There isn't as much of a distinction between the officers and the lower ranks as there might be on a more military vessel, but it's still pretty obvious who's boss when Parker and Brett voice concerns about command decisions. It's a small enough crew that Ripley and Kane's position as officers (to a certain extent -- the chain of command isn't set out very obviously) doesn't matter overly much, but they still follow the Captain's lead in terms of presentability. Ripley's appearance reflects her status as a rather unconventional protagonist for a sci-fi or action movie, ie that she's sensible and is more of a "rules exist for a reason" kind of person than the heroic mavericks one often sees in this type of role. She's not stern but she's not particularly frivolous either, and her practical nature is revealed in the fact that she doesn't bother adorning her overalls, which are simple and worn, but clean.

At the beginning of the film Ripley adheres to protocol more than most of the other characters, pointing out that it's dangerous to bring Kane straight into the ship and risk contamination. But as the story progresses it become more obvious that she's not a blind follower of rules: she follows protocol because it's the sensible thing to do, in context. Once the situation becomes more desperate, she has no problem doing whatever it takes to stay alive, and that's highlighted by her gradual physical deterioration as one by one the other crewmembers are picked off. She begins as an an ideal employee, well turned-out and obedient to the rules and structures of her job, but once she learns that Weylan-Yutani are far worse than the faceless but ultimately innocuous corporation they originally seemed, she quickly dispenses with the rulebook and the uniform. The film closes with her in her underwear, stripped of any distinguishing marks and floating peacefully through space.

Continued in Part 2: Space suits, retrofuturism, and Prometheus.

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