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2015-02-23 - AlienAn Article By Andreas Ingo |
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The Alien films. It used to be my favourite subject. It's coming back again, now with the new Alien sequel coming from Neill Blomkamp. I've seen the concept art and it's completely overwhelming. The best concept art of the entire series. It's the dream of Alien, the same direction that I went myself working on my books and scripts. This means it's completely surreal: Darker, more creative, and a sense of "rugged" realism to the art. This time Dwayne Hicks will return, Sigourney Weaver will play the lead character and the company will capture an Alien ship. The Alien is like a woman. Something that attracts you, scares you, even horrifies you, but in the end you can't look away: The good women. It doesn't matter how much you know about them, the mystery just deepens with time. Alien is like a love affair with death. It's hard to compare the individual movies. The first one was all about horror, the second introduced an action element and human drama. The third was all about dread and darkness, the last one introduced weird humour. Yes, they are different but connected by a single narrative. Not that simple but I hope you get my point. The fascination is hard to understand. They are like generic haunted house stories, different from the art films I've grown to love. Different because they are so unpretentious. They are not difficult on the surface: Something coming from a primitive part of the filmmakers brains. Something is just "right" about the way they are made. I have analyzed them countless times but I still have no answer. Most other films gets tired after some time but these films just gets better. Perhaps not for others but certainly for me. Once I thought it was all about the design: The space-ships, the Alien environments, the creatures and so on. The Great Unknown. But when I started to write scripts myself I discovered that it was rather about the characters and the story: Something just "clicked", you got an emotional connection to that which you saw, which made the horror so much more horrifying. But I'm beyond that. I'm too old to get scared by movies these days. It's something else. It all goes back to Alejandro Jodorowsky. Ridley Scott was hired as a director later. H.R Giger and Dan O'Bannon was involved from the beginning. That was a surprise to me! It all came from different people than Ridley Scott! It started not as Alien. All these people met and exchanged ideas. Jodorowsky talks about this in the documentary "Jodorowsky’s Dune". That movie was meant to be the film to kill all the others. A film with the ambition to take the viewers to enlightenment. To realize themselves! But it never got made. The studio wouldn't risk the money involved. Or was it something else? I have only seen interviews about it but you get the point. They went in another direction compared to everyone else. All people involved got free hands to do anything they wanted. It was all about taking it to the limit. Some of the best people working together in the same field. They were completely crazy. That's the origin of Alien. And the strange thing: I think it got even better with time. Because "Enlightenment" might make people happy but it's no life in it to me. It's a mental thing, an illusion. Why? Because you arrive at a concept of yourself that is really something coming into you: It's not your true essence. So you go into the world of sense and emotion instead. Down to earth. Into violence and death. Into the "cheap" thrills of a teenager dream. And the horrifying nature of this state of decay is pulling away the shield of unpurity, arriving at something else. That's Alien. The perfect killing machine. |
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