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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Costume design and the crew of the Prometheus.

Costume design is the point where my positive and negative feelings about Prometheus intersect. The visuals of this movie were amazing, but at the same time I'm of the opinion that almost every reference that directly connected Prometheus to Alien was handled very poorly. I've already written about how the decision to make Prometheus into a glossy sci-fi epic and attempt to overtly tie it to Alien was a mistake, and costume design was definitely one of the details that should have been used to distance Prometheus from Alien, not bring the two together.

In space, all food is brightly-coloured and comes served in Muji containers.

This interview with costume designer Janty Yates touches upon the fact that while the spacesuits in Prometheus were designed to look very different from those in Alien, the indoor/casual clothes were intentionally similar to the costumes worn by the crew of the Nostromo. Which, to me, immediately seems like a bad idea. The waking-up/breakfast scene in Prometheus is already similar enough to the one in Alien that it's a comfortably direct reference, but aside from the basic scene-setting they should have avoided any other similarities because the premise and setting of the two movies are so fundamentally different. Although the two films share the same discovery-thriller structure and pacing, the crews are different people with very different aims in mind. The Nostromo was a beat-up old mining ship, crewed by experienced blue-collar workers who treated each other with friendly, professional wariness; the Prometheus is a brand new, hugely expensive exploration vessel, crewed by academics, businesspeople, and some expert pilots and security staff. The idea of these two casts of characters looking similar makes no sense at all.

Shaw, Ford, Holloway, and Fifield. (pics from www.prometheus-movie.com)

Alien has some of my favourite character-based costume design ever. If you want a bit more detail my review is here, but the short version is that most of the clothes we seen on the crew of the Nostromo are well-worn uniforms, with a couple of personal items thrown in. For a group of people who work for a strongly branded corporation -- and may only be allowed a limited quantity of personal items onboard -- this makes perfect sense, especially when you see how dirty some parts of the Nostromo are. Basically, they are dressing for work on the space equivalent of a long-distance freighter ship. The Prometheus, however, is a completely different kettle of fish. Firstly, the ship itself was built specifically for this mission, and is state-of-the-art. For several of the people onboard this is probably the first time they've travelled to another planet, and in the case of Shaw and Holloway at least, they are passionate. Unlike the characters in Alien or Aliens, they aren't just showing up for another day at work in an uninspiring job they don't particularly enjoy. The fact that everyone seems to be wearing Weyland Industries uniforms kind of makes sense because that's who funded the mission in the first place, but also they're really not very... uniform? This isn't something I have a major problem with, but I do feel like it's been consciously included in order to emulate the aesthetic of Alien in a way that doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Ford, Fifield, and Millburn

Much of my confusion about the costuming decisions stems from my confusion about the characters themselves. One of the biggest failings of this movie was its inability to explain why the characters acted the way they did. Which, you know, is kind of an important aspect of storytelling. Alien was simple: the crew of a mining vessel happen upon what appear to be the ruins of an alien structure and accidentally bring an alien onboard their own ship, causing chaos and disaster. Prometheus, though, is a far trickier story to tell, mostly because Ridley Scott made it difficult for himself. The background of the mission to LV-223 was baffling from the start because even once we'd found out Weyland's "true" reasons for wanting to find the Engineers, we still had no explanation as to why half of the people onboard had agreed to come along in the first place. In the introductory scene where Shaw and Holloway explain their hokey search for Bald Xenu Jesus to the rest of the crew, we learn that several of the crewmembers literally do not know why they are there.

Ravel, David, and some redshirts.

As an expository device, that scene was incredibly clumsy. In a more general sense it was even worse because it immediately made me start wondering about a) who the hell signs up for a two-year research mission on another planet without knowing what they'll be working on or why, and b) who picked out the crew in the first place. Because the two people in charge are Vickers and Weyland, and since they're both meant to be entitled, self-absorbed control-freaks, crossing the galaxy in a spaceship full of volatile and/or incompetent strangers seems like a really out-of-character life choice. This Prometheus Pre-Prequel youtube sketch is spot-on with regards to the terrible survival skills of these people. A certain amount of panicked stupidity can be excused in sci-fi and horror movies, but not this much -- especially when you're trying to inject a little gravitas into your sci-fi epic. I mean, either you can tell a story about people struggling with faith and searching for the origins of the human race, or you can make a cheesy horror movie where people get their heads blown up for doing stupid things like taking their helmets off on an alien planet and touching creepy-ass slime worms. You can't have both.

You're an idiot.

There are a lot of clumsy plotholes in Prometheus that I can ignore or explain away, but I just can't find a way to legitimise why Vickers and/or Weyland would actively allow everyone to go into such a dangerous situation completely unprepared. Considering the fact that they're all alone in a spaceship millions of miles away from anything safe or familiar, this shows a distinct lack of the self-preservation instincts that supposedly make up the backbone of Vickers' and Weyland's personalities.

Fifield the geologist is the only crewmember chose characterisation really benefited from his costuming and character design. Although other characters all had little personalised costume details like Holloway's neckerchief (realistically douchey because he's a world-travelling archaelogist), Fifield had the most distinctive style, and for good reason. Aside from Shaw, none of the characters get any explicit backstory. This isn't a criticism per se -- Alien did just fine without providing any backstory for anyone -- but Fifield's actions and appearance made him seem like he might be the kind of person who would be reckless enough to sign up for a lengthy space mission to an unknown destination. It's implied that Fifield has had more field experience than the other academics, specifically in terraforming (Weyland Industries' main focus). His smock is covered in patches, indicating that he's travelled with several other ships, and his personal style is way more individualistic than anyone else's. With his mohawk and tattoos, there's clearly no way that he's going to fit in with the uniform guidelines -- if, indeed, there even are any. The fact that no one seems bothered that he's ditched the uniform entirely just makes everyone else look stranger to me, because if no one's enforcing the uniform rules then why does everyone else appear to be following them?

If the costumes in Prometheus hadn't been so closely related to Alien, I probably would've been way less critical. The visuals are one of the main strengths of this movie, and it's not like I think Janty Yates did a bad job. I think the crew look great, in fact, particularly the spacesuits (which were apparently an absolute bitch to construct and maintain) and Millburn's white tube hoodie, for which I have an inordinate fondness. Ridley Scott is the real source of my irritation here because although he didn't actually write the movie, he's the person who made all the major decisions. He hasn't reached anywhere near George Lucas levels of franchise-ruination, but some of the quotes I've heard from him regarding this movie's mythological background have been rather ominous. As in, his original vision included wayyy more Space Jesus. After 30 years it's  understandable that he'd want to tell a different kind of story than he did when he was just starting out as a director, but rather than providing a complementary addition to the Alien franchise, Prometheus only seemed to ovecomplicate things. Instead of trying to tie the crew of the Prometheus to the crew of the Nostromo he should have done the exact opposite and made them look as different as possible.

Coming soon: David8! Until then, you should totally read that Clothes On Film interview with Janty Yates, particularly if you're interested in the intricacies of how they worked out spacesuit logistics during filming.

Previously
Prometheus: Proof that epic sci-fi doesn't belong in the Alien franchise.
Prometheus and the fannish mindset: Plotholes Aren't Everything.
The costumes of Alien. Part 1: Uniforms and characterisation.
The costumes of Alien. Part 2: Space suits, retrofuturism, and Prometheus.

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Prometheus and the fannish mindset: Plotholes Aren't Everything.

Before I start in on the costume reviews, I have a postscript to add to my earlier criticism of this film. Thanks to many of the reasons I mentioned in that post, fans of the original Alien movies have reacted harshly to Prometheus, leading to things like this video by Red Letter Media going viral in a textbook example of fandom's desire to pick everything apart. This isn't going to be one of those times when someone's all, "Stop overthinking everything and ruining everyone's fun!" because that would be blatant hypocrisy ony my part, but I do have one caveat with regards to this kind of list-all-the-faults criticism: It works for literally any movie.

The things about fandom is that we're obsessive, and when something we love jumps the shark, that obsession often turns to the dark side. I understand it, this desire to dissect and rebuild; it's why fanfiction exists. (And fantasy football*, which is pretty much just fanfiction for people who like to delude themselves that they aren't geeks.) Not to mention the zillions of words of blog posts and magazine articles and, at this point, probably books fans have written to try and explain how and why the Star Wars prequels came to be so terrible. I'm often surprised by how non-fannish people can "like" a TV show or movie but only think about it for the couple of hours they're actually watching it -- I mean, why wouldn't you want to Wikipedia all the actors in Stargate: Atlantis and/or write agonisingly detailed reviews of all the costumes in the Avengers franchise? But of course, that dark side I mentioned earlier (ie, the side that leads some people to think that fans are "crazy") means that once you focus the laserbeam of your nerd energy on something you hate, it's super easy to let that can of worms explode in your face, and from then on it's a slippery slope down to Youtube-comment flamewars.

I CANNOT WAIT to see how Bald Xenu Jesus fits into the Director's Cut.

Your mileage may vary as to whether Prometheus was the Worst Thing Ever or just kinda fun-but-mediocre, but wherever you fall on that scale, the "List allllll the plotholes!" method of non-analysis is not going to help. Setting aside the childishness of feeling clever because you proven that something else is stupid, do you know what else was full of plotholes? Every movie you ever loved. I'm not going to get all Leave Britney Alone re: Prometheus, but if Inception taught us anything it's that a film can be riddled with internal inconsistencies and still be critically acclaimed and rated as one of the smartest mainstream blockbusters of the decade.

This is the ancient Vulcan sign for JUST GO WITH IT.

Science fiction thrives on nonsense. The Star Trek reboot movie is a glowing example of fast-paced action comedy and managed the seemingly impossible task of retaining (and satisfying) the most intense and persnickety fanbase in the history of ever, and yet the entire plot hinges on Kirk and Spock Prime coincidentally ending up in the same cave. Of, like, an ice planet where Kirk has literally been dropped at random. Oh, and time travel, a fictional conceit that has a 0% success rate when it comes to logical consistency. The guys at Red Letter Media could make an equally damning plothole list for Star Trek, Blade Runner, and every episode of Doctor Who ever made, because successful storytelling isn't a matter of rooting out and destroying every plothole and inconsistency, it's about making the audience believe.

I am yet to hear anyone complain about the fact that those cave-paintings were the only maps the crew of the Prometheus used to get to another star system through, you know, three-dimensional space.

The problem with Prometheus isn't that the story makes no sense (remember Inception?), it's that Ridley Scott failed to make us suspend our disbelief. And while the laundry list of unexplained dead-ends and scientific bloopers is far, far longer than it should've been, I still think that they could've pulled it off if the execution hadn't been so damn clunky. Ridley Scott made Blade Runner and Alien over thirty years ago, but I'm getting the impression that he still doesn't understand science fiction audiences. It's not enough to make a film look like it's in space, or to do really detailed research on terraforming. For all that books like The Science Of Superman sell like hotcakes, most of us are willing to swallow any old non-scientific ridiculousness, provided it's propped up with a story that flows well and has a solid base of emotional truth. Unfortunately, Prometheus didn't manage either of those things, and that left it open to this death by a thousand cuts of fan-criticism.

Oh, and just as an indicator of what works and what doesn't when it comes to suspension of disbelief, here's a short list of some of the objectively silly things in Prometheus that I was able to accept at face value. You know, unlike the whole, "OMG, Human DNA is the same as Engineer DNA!! We're all descended from Bald Xenu Jesus! ...Wait, what about the dinosaurs?" thing.

1. David being able to "watch your dreams". Was this a cheesy conceit, clearly inserted just to illustrate Shaw's Tragic Backstory? Yes. But was I bothered by the basic fact of this being possible? No. As proven by the central premise of movies like Inception and Minority Report, it's not the believability of the technology that counts, it's how you use it.
2. People being scared shitless. Once you accept the fact that this ship was crewed apparently at random, and by a collection of incompetents and borderline cultists, then it was perfectly consistent for them to start running around like headless chickens as soon as the terrifying alien menace showed up. In fact, this was more "realistic" than the supposedly hard-as-nails space marines in Aliens, who I could only ever assume were the worst space marines ever because they were constantly terrified by everything and had the tactical instincts of a flock of lemmings**.
3. The myriad of coincidences required to make any deep-space exploration movie flow correctly. What, the gravity on LV-223 was totally Earth-standard? And the environment within the crashed Engineer spaceship had the perfect layout for chase sequences and for the little flying droid thingies to map it out in a cinematically appealing way? How convenient! (Because it's fiction.)
4. The surgery pod. Technology is sufficiently advanced in 2093 that androids are about ten minutes from scaling the final peak of the Uncanny Valley, and yet Weyland's state-of-the-art medical facility seems to have been designed by someone who had never met a human before. The surgery pod scene was like every primal claustrophobia, pregnancy and surgery nightmare rolled into one, and that's why it was one of the best scenes of the movie. For this reason I don't really care that no one would ever design a remote medical unit that holds your still-conscious body down while pincers whir over your face like some kind of gleaming iPod/torture-chamber hybrid. It's a horror story.

I'm sure people will disagree with some of these items, but my point is that when you pay to see a mainstream sci-fi movie then you're basically tearing up your Realism Club membership card. There will always be something that doesn't make sense, and the mark of a science fiction film's quality is how many of those things it can make you ignore.

* I had to google "fantasy football" just to make sure it was what I thought it was. Yes, I am my own nerd-joke punchline. 
** Do lemmings travel in flocks? Or herds?? Answers on a postcard.

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

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

I'm not having the vapours over Prometheus the way I currently am about The Avengers' pre-movie shenanigans, which is probably just as well as Prometheus doesn't come out until June. I am, however, quietly impressed by the direction their viral marketing is taking. These days most sci-fi/geek-oriented movies use viral videos and ARG sites alongside traditional marketing, but quality varies.

In the case of Prometheus, Guy Pearce's 2023 TED Talk (in character as the CEO of Weyland Industries, an early precurser to the Weyland-Yutani corporation of the Alien Quadrilogy) was an intriguing turn, especially since Prometheus takes place decades after 2023. Likewise, the new David8 robot ad from Weyland Industries features one of Prometheus' main stars, but doesn't seem like it's going to appear in the movie itself.

Not gonna lie: I'm kind of fixating on this video. Watch it and you may understand why. Michael Fassbender is just so creepy.

Like most people watching viral videos several months before a film's release date I'm enough of a fanperson that my future film ticket is metaphorically booked already, so I can't really guage its usefulness as a marketing tool (although I guess I am currently perpetuating its ploy by writing about it here...). But at face-value, as an advertisement for a robot as opposed to a film that contains a robot character? WORST. AD. EVER. Let's break it down.

1. David8 (lovingly played by Michael Fassbender's smooth, skull-like face and vast array of teeth) is supposedly a master of human emotion, yet his dead-eyed expression and Swarovski crystal tears are so far down the Uncanny Valley that I'd rate this video at least a PG for pure inhuman disturbia value. He also has the soft, calm voice of Hal 9000 or Hannibal Lecter.
2. He manages to enhale the perfume of a lily (FUNERAL IMAGERY, I see what you did there) in such a way that he somehow resembles a lizard about to kill and eat a small defenseless animal.
3. "I understand human emotions... although I do not feel them myself." SCREAM. Look, I know this ad is aimed at CEOs looking to hire someone with no ethical qualms about doing their dirty work, but David8's demeanour is so disquieting I can't imagine buying him for that exact reason. 
4. When he cries, not only are the tears fake in the sense that he's a robot and therefore has no autonomic function, they're false because he freely admits that he doesn't feel any emotion.

I'm convinced this is all on purpose. The David8 commercial is a masterpiece of subtle horror. Take, for example, his immediate appearance. Even discounting the fact that his facial expressions are seriously off and that Fassbender takes great trouble to move with the calculated smoothness of a machine (there's actually a fake David8 promotional website where you can examine his full range of emotional expression), he looks like... a Nazi. I've been wondering for a while now why Fassbender dyed his hair blond in order to play a robot, and I guess we have our answer now. What with the trim figure, masculine facial features and that blond side-parting he genuinely looks like the Aryan ideal -- plus the uniform shirt buttoned up to the neck.

Screencaps from here.

Oh, and in the background of that scene? Robot skulls.

The chess shot is really an extension of the Uncanny Valley thing as a whole. On top of David8's subtly non-human appearance, here we see two Davids performing what is supposedly a human leisure activity. Except they're doing it in a sterile room, with uncomfortably perfect posture, and expressing none of the body-language of either a person who is having fun, or a person interacting with another person. "THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT ACTUALLY PEOPLE," it screams, and I have to wonder if this is a purposeful marketing choice on the part of Weyland Industries because if a robot was exactly the same as a human, then what's the point in paying for a robot at all?

Another unnecessarily disturbing moment: the filmmaker chops footage of David8 up into little sections and spreads them out across the screen. The right hand side is particularly disturbing, since for a moment it gives the impression of a single, cyclops-like eye above a normal mouth. Also, the supposedly casual poses of the Davids labeled C, D and E are not remotely casual at all. My favourite detail is probably the sandals, which are probably intended to imply relaxation and comfort but in fact are very jarring when compared to David's pressed, buttoned-up clothes and flawless hair and skin.

What's that? David8 enjoys poking at tiny model people with sharp impliments? How delightful and artistic! I must buy one at once! Particularly in order to perform tasks that "humans might find... [ominous pause]... distressing, or unethical". What could possibly go wrong.

In conclusion, David8 is what you buy when you want a really efficient, emotionless version of Patrick Batemen in American Psycho, except he bleeds white blood, never dies, and has a metal skeleton like Wolverine. What appealing employee characteristics. Luckily he's totally obedient and able to work for 24 hours per day. You know... unless he malfunctions. Which never happens to humanoid robots on isolated space missions in sci-fi movies.

I assume it's no accident that David shares a name with the young protagonist of AI: Artificial Intelligence, a role for which Haley Joel Osment trained himself not to blink for long stretches of time in order to seem less human. But if David8 is the eighth iteration of the David series, I hate to think what their developmental process entails because David8 has all the human comfort and appeal of a switchblade.

Not disturbing at all.

Weyland Industries' homepage for David8 provides various ominous details about the robot's basic functions, such as his "Fear center safety program (can be disabled)". David8's marketing seems so skewed towards him being a soulless denizen of the Uncanny Valley that I'm very much hoping he turns out to be the opposite. Not that I want Fassbender's character to evolve into a warm and cuddly romantic hero like Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man, but what with Blade Runner and the original Alien movie, Ridley Scott does have a good track record for creating layered non-human characters.

Links

The timeline for Weyland Industries from Peter Weyland's birth to the "present" day is well worth checking out. This is the kind of constructed reality I appreciate: lots of believable detail, but very little solid information relating to what will take place in the movie itself.

This Twitter feed is an astonishingly well-devised piece of viral marketing. In character as David8, @david8weyland answers questions from fans with tweets like, "Spiders are a most fascinating breed of insect. Arachnids have superior strength, reflex and survivability." and "What fascinates me about humans is their individual interpretation of beauty. I can interpret positive visuals from objects."

There's also a David8 Tumblr, although I'm not sure if it's official or a fan-page and it doesn't seem as interesting as David's personal Twitter.

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Links post: 18th century Danish face-coverings, Tom Hiddleston & Michelle Dockery: time travelers, Alexander McQueen's "Alien" shoes, and more.

The above picture is from Trine Søndergaard's photo series on strude, the complex scarves and hoods worn by 18th century women on the small Danish island of Fano to protect their faces from the elements. There's a full gallery of these photos at her website -- stunning, and quite the most interesting alternative to a balaclava that I've ever seen.

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Not precisely fashion, but definitely clothing: Iceland's necropants. Magic trousers made from... human skin. I wish I'd known about this when I was in Iceland! It sounds like the best museum ever.

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Alexander McQueen is known for beautifully bizarre couture, and for me this particular work of his is a real delight. I wish I'd known about it last week, in fact -- shoes inspired by the movie Alien:

Picture from HERE.

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A small follow-up on Chanel's show last month (reviewed here): Esteemed fashion journalist Robin Givhan was apparently relegated to the cheap seats because she gave a less-than-good review to Lagerfeld's last collection.

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Johanna Blakley: Lessons from Fashion's Free Culture. In the light of the current obsession among lawmakers for idiotic piracy/copyright legislation, this 15-minute TED lecture is particularly interesting. Fashion straddles the line between commercial production and artform, yet has incredibly leniant copyright law. Proof, perhaps, that embracing remix culture is a good idea?

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I'm loving this Time Magazine photoshoot with Tom Hiddleston (Loki from Thor/The Avengers) and Michelle Dockery (Lady Mary from Downton Abbey). It's... an intriguing mix of beautiful, London-based retrofuturism plus a couple of quite baffling outfits on Michelle. Click through to the article -- there's a video! It's supposedly about time travel so I'm 100% onboard, although it's not exactly Oscar-winning stuff. If you like the idea of hearing Tom Hiddleston drawl poshly about the apocalypse while Michelle Dockery sneers at him from beneath a silver pillbox hat, then I definitely recommend it.

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I capture the period pieces. A blog dedicated to the beauty of period and costume dramas, found while I was trawling Tumblr for Upstairs/Downstairs screencaps to feed my hopeless love for that show. It's just so... hilarious, and posh, and British, and... honestly, a lot more thoughtful and less overwrought than Downton Abbey, a show I generally love to hate. Check out this clip from the next episode (particularly the Duke of Kent, the chap in the admiral's hat). 

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The costumes of Aliens, or, James Cameron says Put A Gun On It.

Previously: The costumes of Alien. Part 1: Uniforms and characterisation, and Part 2: Space suits, retrofuturism, and Prometheus.

Each film in the Alien quadrilogy is so different that it makes me wish they'd continued to make sequels in a whole bunch of other genres -- Western, romantic drama, buddy-cop movie, you name it. Alien is the tense, slow paced thriller of the series; Aliens is the bombastic Vietnam war-movie blockbuster. As reigning overlord of American action/sci-fi cinema from Terminator to Avatar, James Cameron's vision of an Alien sequel was to take Ripley and plant her in a scenario that involves as many loud and deadly weapons as possible. Unlike the ungainly and slow-moving ore refinery Ripley works on in the first movie, even the spaceship in Aliens looks like a gun.

Ripley, Hicks, and the Sulaco.

My own personal recommendation for watching Aliens is to accept straight off that the team of Colonial Marines are really terrible. Because they are. They're really terrible. James Cameron went to a lot of trouble to get the actors into character with various training exercises alongside real-life soldiers, but the end result was still an overall impression of panicked incompetence. They're poorly disciplined, trigger-happy, and bad at thinking on their feet in a crisis. Accepting this as fact doesn't make Aliens any less gripping, and I don't really see it a criticism either of the film's quality or of the actors themselves. If the marines had been a well-organised fighting force of by-the-book professionals, there wouldn't be nearly so much narrative tension and Ripley would never get a chance to shine. The best explanation is that this squad of loudmouths and weirdos, headed up by a woefully inexperienced and uninspiring officer, were the ones deemed most disposable and therefore the best choice to check out the colony at LV-426. They're the Breakfast Club of military units.

I love the fact that the cast were told to read Starship Troopers in preparation for filming, since the infamously schlocky movie adaptation of that novel is more a parody of Aliens than anything else. All the uber-American shouting of "Let's go kill some bugs!"? The locker-room teasing? Soldiers being deployed onto dangerous alien planets with nothing more than some worryingly 20th century-looking body armour? It's a recipe for disaster -- AKA a recipe for a successful action movie, because it gives you all the violence, tension and team bonding of a war story with none of the ethical qualms of watching people kill each other over some morally-ambiguous idealogical dispute.

"The risk always lives."

As another part of their pre-filming homework, James Cameron had each of the actors playing marines decorate and personalise their own uniforms, both in homage to images he'd seen of soldiers during the Vietnam war, and presumably so as to make the characters easier to tell apart onscreen. The actor playing Vasquez painted her body armour with the slogan "The risk always lives", which she'd taken from a book of Chicana poetry she'd been reading at the time. Drake, Vasquez's partner in having an egregiously huge pivot gun, has chicken bones tied to his hat. Bill Paxton, who played Hudson, wrote Louise on his body-armour in honour of his wife. The squad's ineffectual leader, Lt. Gorman, instantly stands out as a stuffed-shirt thanks to his clean and rule-abidingly unmarred uniform.

Private Hudson's body armour.

The result is that the supposedly uniform, unified force of marines actually look far less official than the civilian "space truckers" of the previous film. The impression I got from Aliens is that the marines are less of an official army unit as we'd know it, and more like a security firm hired by Weyland-Yutani to wave big guns at people who seem like they might cause trouble. After all, who is the government? The United States namechecked by the United States Colonial Marine Corps but never heard from again? Or Weyland-Yutani, who are the first people to contact Ripley when she wakes up after her 57 years of hypersleep, who built the colony at LV-426, and who sent Ripley and the marines on their mission to explore it?

Burke visits Ripley and Jonesy at the Gateway Station hospital.

Waking up after decades of drifting through space, Ripley is alone, she's traumatised, and the world has completely changed. For the first few scenes when we see her on the Gateway Station, she tends to be dressed in clothes that emphasise her vulnerability -- first her hospital scrubs, and later on a bathrobe when Burke comes to visit her in her quarters. Her nightmares wake her up every night, and she's a far cry from the competent Ripley we know from the Nostromo.

The first major transition occurs when Ripley begins to take charge on LV-426. She's still set apart from the marines, wearing blue overalls similar to those she wore in the first movie -- no longer a mandatory uniform, but a comfort during a situation where everything else is so different and frightening. The leather bomber jacket adds a touch of badassery, plus it makes her look less like a skinny mechanic hanging out with a bunch of huge, armour-clad space marines.
For all that Aliens is a film about soldiers, the fact that Ripley isn't a soldier is her main asset. Viewing the xenomorph threat both as a civilian and as the only person who's encountered one before, she's the only character aside from Newt whose priorities aren't skewed by military conditioning or personal geed. Sigourney Weaver herself is very much anti-gun, which I think shines through in Ripley's character. For all that she ends up brandishing a flamethrower, she's someone who, after finding out that she can keep her head in a crisis and survive through tremendous violence and destruction, gets a job driving power loaders rather than pursuing a life of heroism.

Ripley at her debriefing session on Gateway Station.

The reluctant hero is a trope with a long and tedious past, but Ripley is up there with John McClane in Die Hard in that she's not some mythical "chosen one", she just tries to lead a normal life until circumstances force her to pick up a gun and start saving people. Watch her face during this movie, it's hilarious: there are countless moments where the marines will be discussing some idiotic plan while Ripley stands in the background looking absolutely horrified that anyone could be so stupid, gearing herself up to step in and solve the problem for them. So her costumes, free of weaponry and body armour right up until the final scenes, support this image of her as the civilian outsider, the unwilling participant in what she already suspects is a suicide mission.

Ripley and Newt's costumes, both jumpsuits, mirror one another, a visual hint towards the maternal bond Ripley forges with Newt as the film progresses. Newt is one of the very few child movie sidekicks that I don't find irritating, partly because of her lack of shrill stage-school precociousness (unsurprising, since she wasn't a professional actress and Aliens was her only film) and partly thanks to her relationship with Ripley. I don't understand how this film can have been released in 1986, yet still be the best example I can think of when it comes to action heroines whose emotions aren't portrayed as weaknesses. It seems blindingly obvious that a thriller is more gripping when there's more at stake, but while Ripley juggles panicking space marines, murderous aliens and a newly-adopted child, most action stars nowadays are still motivated by the good ol' invisible wife or daughter being either kidnapped or assassinated in the first act, leaving the hero to run around shooting things for two hours.

"Real strength and unpredictability comes from not having an obvious weapon." -- Sigourney Weaver.

Aside from Ripley, Burke may well be my favourite character in Aliens. He's just so perfectly unlikeable. From the moment he first appears onscreen, it's immediately obvious from his demeanour, his soulless management-speak, his hair, and yes, his clothes, that he's every 1980s stereotype of a spineless corporate worm. Weyland-Yutani are so influential that it's far more effective for their power to be shown second- or third-hand rather than having some CEO show up onscreen. Burke's amoral yuppie scheming was the perfect way to develop on the first movie's portrayal of Weyland-Yutani without having to throw in too much exposition. You already know he's a dick. Look at him! His neat tie! His popped collar! Compared to the thoroughly blue-collar characters we're familiar with from Alien, he's very obviously The Man.

Anyone who's been reading this blog for more than five minutes will probably know that I love both suits and sci-fi. When the two meet, I tend to pay attention. Science fiction set in the near future and/or in space (ie... most science fiction) tends to have a bit of a problem with suits because they're an easy way to let audiences know someone's stuffy and/or going to a formal event, but it's kind of implausible to suggest that people will be dressing the same way in 100 years time as they are today. The happy medium is some type of suit that looks recogniseable but with some significant alteration. Firefly manages this quite servicably, with collarless and lapel-free suits, but Aliens remains in keeping with it's generally un-futuristic costume design with Burke's auto-popped collar: the universal signal for entitled douchebaggery. As I said: perfect.

Finally, I can't help but post this:

It kind of slays me that the shoes worn by Ripley (and, I think, Bishop) in Aliens are Reebok tie-in merchandise. I mean, that more than anything illustrates how much of a Hollywood blockbuster this film is when compared to the slow-paced, adult thriller that was Alien. Quite apart from that, this Reebok ad was based on the real Alien poster -- ie, a poster for a sci-fi action movie that depicts two female characters, both in mud-covered overalls. When was the last time that happened? Ever?

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