The Films of 2016: Morgan

[Beware of Spoilers]

Morgan (2016) is the directorial debut of Luke Scott, Ridley Scott’s son. Genre maestro Ridley Scott is the film’s producer. These facts prove illuminating in terms of a deeper understanding of this particular science fiction/horror film.

Where other critics have made invidious comparisons between Morgan and Ex Machina (2015), or Morgan and Splice (2010), the films to discuss here are likely Blade Runner (1982) and Prometheus (2012).

In short, Morgan concerns mankind’s unease with his/her own creation: artificial people.  That’s a recurring Scott theme; one you can see through several of his genre master works (including Alien [1979]).

Whether we choose to term these unusual beings replicants, synthetics, or hybrids is largely immaterial. Nomenclature aside, they are children of humanity and yet, at the same time, not fully human. And even though they are “made” by man (specifically, corporations), man never quite trusts them, it seems.

In fact, as Blade Runner, Prometheus and Morgan make plain, man deeply and instinctively fears this brand of progeny. After completing the act of creation, it seems, mankind stands seems ready to commit an act of destruction, snuffing out that which he has given birth to.

In one way or another, Blade Runner, Prometheus and Morgan all revolve around mankind’s inability to accept his artificial child/creation as his own heir. In all three films, man has played God, but doesn’t seem to want to parent.

In all three films, parental figures also prove cold, emotionally unavailable, and largely self-absorbed, leaving the (artificial) child without the guidance he or she needs to mature adequately. In some circumstances, the children turn violent towards their parents because of this “void” in parenting.

Morgan is a fascinating and compelling genre film, but one made all the more so if the viewer weighs it as a crucial piece of a multi-decade Scott cinematic trilogy concerning mankind and artificial intelligence; an unofficial franchise dedicated to exploring the relationship between man and a being who, finally, could -- one day -- replace man.

Ex Machina was terrific (as was Splice, actually…) but it’s almost a shame that Ex Machina remains so close in the memory for so many. Some critics want to hark back to that particular film to put down Morgan as somehow being derivative or inferior. Instead, Morgan is merely the latest work of art by producer Scott to explore the parental dynamic as it applies not to biology, but an uncanny mixture of technology and biology.

These films ask us, explicitly: can we love that which looks like us, but is not, finally, a reflection of us, in terms of psychology?

Morgan reminds us that humanity cannot yet see an artificial child (or replicant one) as truly belonging to him; and thus truly possessing the same rights and privilege we reserve for ourselves and fellow organic creatures.

Instead, humanity views these beings as ones that we created, but which are less evolved, somehow, than we are.

If one gazes at Morgan is a prequel to Blade Runner and Prometheus, the film veritably opens up as a subject of analysis, with scenes that resonate beautifully across the “unofficial” Scott trilogy.

“Above all, preserve the asset.”

After a trademarked artificial/hybrid human – a teenage girl named Morgan (Anya Taylor-Joy) -- attacks one of the scientists caring for her, Dr. Greiff (Jennifer Jason-Leigh), an investigation commences. 

A no-nonsense risk assessment specialist, Lee Weathers (Kate Mara) is sent to Morgan’s remote, countryside facility on behalf of the corporation, SECT, to determine an appropriate course of action.

Lee’s mission may prove to be one of containment, shutting down Morgan’s experiment, or one of assassination, Dr. Greiff fears. Lee is noncommittal about her ultimate course of action, choosing to interview the scientists and staff about Morgan’s violent “temper tantrum.”

Another specialist, Dr. Shapiro (Paul Giamitti) also arrives at the installation to conduct a psychological evaluation of Morgan. He pushes her during that evaluation, causing a repeat of her violent outburst…

“There was joy in her heart before we shoved her back in that box.”

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) opens with a scene in which a law enforcement official administers a test, Voight-Kampff, to a replicant. It is, importantly, a psychological test. And it provokes a murderous response on the part of that replicant.

The central scene in Morgan deliberately reiterates this dynamic.

The arrogant, imperious Shapiro -- another establishment figure, like the blade runner -- tests the unstable artificial person, causing an explosive response by doing so. In both cases, the forces of authority trigger the key weakness of the child-like individual, a vulnerability based on psychology. 

The replicants and Morgan don’t “know themselves” and are unsure of “human” matters, like friendship, social connection, family, and parents.  In both cases, an attack on this psychological weak link results in the artificial person resorting to physical violence.

The scene in Morgan, however, plays like bullying. In Blade Runner, we are shocked by the replicant’s resort to violence. In Morgan, we are shocked that the artificial person holds back as long as she does.

Another connection to Blade Runner is revealed only in Morgan’s final sequence. Suffice it to say, Morgan gets the ending that Ridley Scott had hoped to give to the 1982 film, but was not able to, for reasons of commerce.

Specifically, the hunter or prosecutor of the artificial person is revealed to be an artificial person too. Once more, this revelation suggests two things: psychological instability on the part of this new race (and child of man), but also a second-class status for these people. They are assigned tasks no others would want, including the prosecution (and assassination) of their own kind. They have become murderous servants of man, killing their own brothers and sisters.

Morgan becomes even more intriguing after a second viewing, when one understands the film’s outcome, and watches how the second artificial person navigates matters such as sexual attraction. On retrospect, the responses are completely understandable, given a synthetic person’s lack of understanding of or familiarity with human nature, and human interaction.

As for Morgan herself, she has much in common with both Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and Prometheus’s David (Michael Fassbender).

Like Batty, Morgan possesses a survival instinct, and the inability to control bouts of rage. 

Like David, she is both obsequious to her human “friends” and, simultaneously, able to betray them for an agenda if necessary.  Like David, Morgan also surrounds herself with human things: human music and art, in particular.  If David has a fondness for cinema, Morgan does for opera.

Blade Runner, Prometheus, and Morgan also feature three amoral corporations (Tyrell, Weyland Industries, and SECT), and three versions of “cold” parents.

In Blade Runner, Tyrell has given no consideration to his replicants, and the fact that they might wish to outlive their four year life-span. He is a father who has created life, but does not care about what happens to that life once it is out in the world.

Weyland, in Prometheus, is not much better a father figure. He treats David like the “lesser” child in his family, noting -- in public, no less -- that David possesses no soul. Also, he ignores David’s search for meaning in life, in favor of his own search for meaning. As the parent, Weyland puts his needs first, and expects David to put those needs at the top of his list as well.

And finally, we have the character that Morgan identifies as her mother, in Morgan: Dr. Cheng (Michelle Yeoh). Dr. Cheng, in the past, has murdered her own “children” (synthetic beings) when they became dangerous. When Morgan becomes dangerous too, she falls back on the same behavior. She shows no emotion, no caring, when she orders Morgan to be executed.  In fact, Cheng rejects Morgan completely, especially after Morgan has the audacity to call her what she is: “Mother.”

The three films in this unofficial trilogy all contend with one core idea: the meaning of life. Is it any different for synthetic beings than it is for organic ones?

Roy Batty wants to outlive his termination date, so that the things he has seen -- the memories he has accumulated -- aren’t simply lost, like tears in rain.

David wants to understand why he was created. And if he can understand why the Engineers created mankind, he will be one step closer to his answer. 

And Morgan is learning to become herself, intriguingly, through her interfaces with nature, in the wild. She rebels in the first place because her outside time, in the woods, is taken away. She cannot feel the same freedom to explore herself in the installation, apparently. Her closest friend is Amy (Rose Leslie), her “eco therapist,” who introduces her to the larger world, beyond her cell.

All three characters -- Batty, David, and Morgan – are very acutely on a journey of self-discovery; of transcending their built-in limits. In all cases, they are actually impeded by their creators/parents, who don’t seem to believe they are unique, sentient life forms.  Instead, these adults would rather destroy them for making a mistake than help them learn from that mistake.

Batty and Morgan, at least, don’t get second chances. They step out of their “role” and are hunted and exterminated.

In some senses, the theme of Morgan is similar indeed to that which we saw in Splice. Basically, it goes like this: we are ultimately treated by our children in the same manner that we treat them.

I feel that this too is a lesson, overall of the unofficial Scott trilogy. It is clear that corporations like Tyrell, Weyland and SECT will create artificial life, and trademark it. As they do so, they will also attempt to abrogate the rights of those they have created, either with mandatory termination dates, or through behavior which renders them second class citizen, and subject, finally, to bigotry. In Morgan, Lee notes on at least two occasions that Morgan is not a “she” and but rather the property of the corporation, lacking human rights.

The “children” in these cases are all treated badly, and -- surprise, surprise -- treat their parents badly as a result.  They learn from their relationships with their parents how to be duplicitous, how to be violent, how to kill.

Morgan is a coming of age story for a synthetic person (or persons, in the final analysis). Morgan’s uncertainty and instability mirrors some of the uncertainty and instability that human adolescents feel as they take the final steps before “growing up.”  This is significant, because everything about Morgan -- from her attire (hoodie, especially) to her attitude -- is familiar. She is the rebellious child/teen, testing the limits of the world around her.

Technically, Morgan is an accomplished work. The film features fine performances, especially from Kate Mara, and is suspenseful, and exciting. You may figure out the final twist in the film before it is revealed, but it doesn’t take way from the action, or horror. Luke Scott does a great job using visual rhetoric, conveying through imagery the point of the narrative. He does much here with reflections, and Lee and Morgan balanced against one another in the frame, mirror-images.

But Morgan succeeds best, I would argue, when one places it in the context of its sister films, Blade Runner and Prometheus. 

All these films remind us to treat our (eventual) artificial children with a sense of responsibility but also humility.

As J.F. Sebastian would no doubt remind us, there’s much of us in them.

At Flashbak: Kenner's Alien Action Figure (1979)

This week at Flashbak, I also remembered one of Kenner’s most unusual action figures: the titular xenomorph from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).

Here’s a snippet and the url: (http://flashbak.com/evil-brains-glow-dark-remembering-kenners-alien-figure-1979-53028/)

“…Kenner Toys -- flush from its huge success with the Star Wars licensing contract -- actually manufactured a giant action figure of the acid-spewing, face-crushing xenomorph from the popular, franchise-spawning, rated R horror movie. 

The written description to this H.R. Giger-inspired toy notes the alien’s “evil brains” that “glow in the dark.”

The same instructions sheet also instructed the kiddies to “press the back of his head on the bottom. His mouth opens and the gruesome teeth move forward.”

How many children could have possibly seen Alien, I wonder?  Did parents take their kids to see it?

Perhaps a more pertinent question is this: how many children wouldn’t be scared to death by a cat or dog-sized action figure with retractable inner jaw and an eyeless, human skull for a head?

Well, I didn’t see the movie (I was nine), and I still wanted the toy. Desperately.

I didn’t get it.

I feel like a lot of kids my age wanted the Alien toy too, whether or not they had seen the film, but apparently parents complained about Kenner’s masterpiece of horror and, legendarily, the toy sold poorly. 

The alien was thus pulled from toy shelves at the behest of concerned parents and terrified children, and a generation of psychologists grew rich treating the PTSD of innocent children who happened down the aisle hoping to buy a plus R2-D2, only to catch sight of this leering, plastic monstrosity.”

Continue reading at Flashbak.

The Films of 2015: The Martian

Based on Andy Weir’s 2011 novel of the same name, Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015) has now earned a number of Academy Award nominations including those for best actor (Matt Damon), and best picture.  

The Martian apparently directed itself, since Scott was not nominated for his significant role in crafting the film. 

But suffice it to say that The Martian’s nominations are well-deserved. This is a great science fiction film, and one of the two best genre films of the year (the other being Mad Max: Fury Road). 

Much superior to other recent “near future” films about the space age, like Gravity (2013), The Martian is, in a sense, a less-fanciful version or re-think of 1964’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars.  

In both instances, a lone astronaut survives alone on the red planet using his only scientific skill-set.  

Only here, of course, we don’t meet alien slaves or slavers, and the focus is much more on the possible than on the fantastic. Robinson Crusoe on Mars brought aliens, alien spaceships and other wonders into the tale of human loneliness and fortitude, whereas The Martian simply focuses on a key issue: Man vs. Nature.  

In this case, that "Nature" belongs to different and infinitely more harsh world than ours: Mars.

Thrillingly, The Martian is precisely the science fiction movie our country and our planet needs and deserves at this juncture in history, when politicians are thinking small, stoking fear and resentment, and focusing very much on petty Earth-bound matters.

The Martian deftly, and without apology, reminds us that no frontier is off limits if we dedicate ourselves to conquering it. We must merely possess the will to conquer it.

Perhaps it’s not that we are Star Trekkian-like perfect beings -- at least not yet -- but rather that the individual fear of death -- coupled with the human race’s fear of stagnation -- can push us to the next horizon, and then the one beyond that. The Martian is realistic in its approach, and yet optimistic at the same time. It imagines that mankind can achieve big things, and do it under his own auspices.

What are those auspices? Knowledge. Training. Endurance. 

And no less important, imagination too.

We need The Martian now, indeed, because aspiring politicians routinely suggest that they somehow know better than the scientists do. Even though they have no training, and worse, no curiosity about how the universe works.

The Martian is very much about what happens when a dedicated, imaginative scientist is given a challenge, and rises to the occasion. The film will, I imagine, inspire many young people to become astronauts, botanists, physicists, or the like. And of course, that's a very good thing.

So Scott’s film reminds us -- in a sadly anti-intellectual time -- how knowledge, not ignorance, can transform not merely our lives, but the planets themselves.

“This is space. It does not cooperate.”

On a mission to Mars in 2035, astronaut Mark Watley (Damon) is injured during a terrible storm. His commanding officer, Lewis (Jessica Chastain), is unable to find him in the blizzard and forced to assume that Mark has died. She leaves the planet with the rest of the crew.

Against the odds, however, Watley is not dead, only wounded. He manages to return to the astronaut shelter on the surface, and face the fact that he has been abandoned, possesses no way to return home, and that another mission to Mars is not due to arrive from Earth for four years. 

Mark possesses approximately thirty-one days of life-support, which means he will have to improvise, and -- after rationing his supplies -- grow roughly three years of his own food.

Watley goes about solving this food problem by planting potatoes (using his own waste as fertilizer), and then faces the next crisis: He will have to travel fifty days in cold temperatures, in a rover, to reach the distant landing site.

Back on Earth, meanwhile, NASA learns from satellite footage that Watley has survived.  

Now the organization must rally and determine a way to bring the marooned astronaut home alive.  

One answer involves launch a second rocket, but a brilliant young physicist comes up with a plan to redirect Lewis’s ship back to Mars for an extraordinary orbital rendezvous...

“I am going to have to science the shit out of this.”

In my introduction above, I compared this film to Gravity. I believe that film is technically and visually brilliant, but when you think about it -- and its dramatic point -- for an length of time...you encounter disappointment.  

Basically, Gravity is about how the entire space program is pulped in one day, but one woman survives, and learns to deal with her personal demons (the death of a child). It only took the destruction of every shuttle, station, and satellite in orbit for her to accept her past traumas.  

Worse, the film makes no notation that though it is a good day for Sandra Bullock’s character, psychologically-speaking, it is a very sad day for mankind, and humanity's efforts in space. The space program, in that movie, would have been set back years, if not decades. And yet, we are expected to cheer when the scientist arrives home safely on Earth.

All I could think about was the future lost, destroyed, or prevented by the incidents of that terrible day.

The Martian adopts a different and far preferable creative strategy. 

It’s a movie about people navigating challenges -- in bureaucracies and on Mars -- and figuring out how science, technology, and know-how can rescue people and break boundaries.

It’s not merely about survival and escape, while the space program crashes and burns as a consequence. The Martian is about how the space program can achieve great things, even though death is always a possibility.  

The film’s protagonist, Mark Watley, is given no facile “back story” to conquer. There’s no Hollywood bullshit here to attempt to falsely manufacture psychological drama. Instead, Mark must keep his vision trained squarely on the present, battling each problem as it arise. He then uses his wit, skill, and training to conquer it. 

Watley pulls together every scrap of knowledge and training he has, but even that considerable effort is not enough. We see throughout the film that man survives not just when he is smart and adaptive, but when he employs his imagination. 

Mark isn't depressed, brooding, or angsty about the set-backs and reversals he encounters. 

On the contrary, he keeps engaging his imagination,considering new ways to survive and thrive.

Uniquely, The Martian shares an opening shot with Scott’s Prometheus (2012).  

In both films, the camera hurtles (relatively low to the ground) across an inhospitable surface. In Prometheus, that surface belongs to Earth, as the alien Engineers attempt to seed it with their DNA. 

In The Martian, that surface is Mars.  

In both cases, knowledge, reason, science and technology ultimately re-shape that surface to accommodate or welcome life.

It’s on a huge scale in Prometheus, and a small one (for now), in The Martian, but as Watley trenchantly notes, by growing his own food there, he has, by definition, colonized the planet. He has taken the first step of introducing new life to Mars.  

The Martian and Prometheus are polar opposites, or mirror reflections in another significant way. 

In Prometheus, the search for God is what impels man to the stars.  

In The Martian, man survives a harrowing space journey not on faith in a supernatural being, but by faith in his own abilities, ingenuity, and know-how. 

The two films provide a kind of perfect yin/yang in terms of philosophy.

One is about the literal search for God, and the divine within. The other is about mankind -- through his knowledge -- evolving into something, if not Godlike, then at least able to brave the dangerous realm of outer space.  

It's no accident, or coincidence, that Mark Watley puts a crucifix (belonging to another astronaut) to practical -- rather than spiritual -- use during the duration of the film. He must use his imagination, training, and every material he has on hand if he wishes to endure. There is no time to worship idols.

The two films -- Prometheus and The Martian -- work well together in tandem, as a Ridley Scott double feature, actually. 

One is a horror film about what terrors could await us in space. Prometheus reveals to audiences ow small we are in the scheme of Cosmic Things. When we meet our Maker, we are not ready for the knowledge that flows from that encounter.

Its philosophical book-end, The Martian is a hard science fiction film that suggests how we will already know, by 2035, enough to survive and flourish in our first steps away from Earth. We will face challenges, and we will beat them back. And we will learn from our successes.  We will tell others (as teachers), and build on them.

One reason I appreciate the work of Scott so much (in Prometheus, as well as here) is that he is persistently able to craft images and symbols that resonate in the imagination.

Here, early on, an empty chair looms large on the Martian escape ship (and in our imaginations), a reminder that an astronaut has been lost.  

Again, the typical dramatic bullshit approach would demand histrionics on the part of the commanding officer, or shipmates.Instead, we get no words, just close-ups of anguish, and of that empty seat.

And in the film’s climax, Mark practically bursts out of his capsule into a whirling void (in orbit). His only way to survive (and get home) is to cut his suit open, and utilize the escaping pressure as a means of directing himself through that void. 

This is a perfect symbol for man’s capacity to reshape fate, and nature, to his desire. We are all on a spinning surface too (the Earth), but we can direct its future with our technology, our science, our imagination, and our know how. We aren't just passengers.  We have the capacity to exert power and control over our environment.

I suppose The Martian could have proven a rather dry, life-less experience as a one-man-show, but through its use of disco music on the soundtrack, and the buoyancy of Matt Damon’s central performance, the film brilliantly comes to life. 

The soundtrack, straight from a hedonistic time and place in America culture, lightens the mood, provides stark contrast to Mark’s travails, and finally, calls us back to the last time in history -- the heyday of the Apollo program -- when America looked to the stars, dreamed, and then made real plans to reach them. 

The disco music, in essence, makes The Martian a kind of sequel to the early 1970s, before the combined weight of Vietnam, Watergate, Three Mile Island, Inflation, and Oil Embargoes brought human dreams crashing back to terra firma.

The leitmotif of The Martian is simple and worthwhile. 

Life is hard. 

And life in space is even harder. 

If we want to endure as a species, however, survival in space and on other worlds is a virtual necessity.  We can cry and whine about how dangerous the endeavor remains, how expensive it is, or even how time-consuming it is. 

Or we can look at the challenges…and, using our knowledge as a starting point, imagine how to beat them.  

As one character here memorably notes, “you can either accept” the difficulty of reality, and the constant nearness of death, “or get to work.”

The Martian reminds us that it is time to quit the bellyaching.

Let's get to work. 

Movie Trailer: The Martian (2015)

Cult-TV Review: The Man in the High Castle (2015)

(Here there be spoilers...proceed at your own risk.)

The Man in the High Castle (2015) is a new and impressive pilot from X-Files writer Frank Spotnitz and director Ridley Scott. It is being featured as part of Amazon's second annual pilot season.

The filmmakers have worked with great skill and artistry to adapt the Hugo Award-winning 1962 novel by Philip K. Dick to a visual format. Dick’s story has been termed an “alternate history” science fiction story, meaning it ponders what might happen had history gone differently.  

In this case, the Axis Power won World War II, and have since carved up America. Imperial Japan now controls the West Coast, and Nazi Germany controls the East Coast, with a “neutral zone” in the mid-west separating fiefdoms.  

The series is set in 1962, some dozen or so years after the end of the war.

The Man in the High Castle pilot focuses primarily on two characters, one living in Japanese San Francisco, the other in Nazi-run New York, as they make separate, unplanned pilgrimages to Canon City, in the Neutral Zone. 

Making the journey from the west is Julianna Crain (Alexa Davalos).  

Making it from the east is Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank). 

Independently of each other as well, each character carries notable contraband: a film reel titled “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy,” which showcases documentary footage of the West -- FDR, and Winston Churchill -- winning World War II for the Allies.  

Since this did not happen, apparently, in Joe and Julianna’s particular reality, that means that the world -- reality itself -- is false in some way not yet understood.

The pilot episode commences in terrifying fashion, as images of American sovereignty and power are overcome by the relentless march of the Axis Powers.  

Scored to a morose, creepy version of “Edelweiss,” from The Sound of Music (1959), the introductory montage is unforgettable.  The funereal tone makes viewers aware that they have entered a world without freedom and liberty, where the face of Lady Liberty has fallen under a shroud of darkness. It’s an effective and ominous note to start out on, and the opening montage is quite powerful.

From there, the narrative moves crisply and cleanly o introduce this “brave new world” of the 1960s.  Rock Hudson and June Allyson are still making movies for Hollywood, but America is not the same country any more. 

Joe Blake seeks to join the Resistance movement in New York, while Julianna sees her sister Trudy gunned down in cold blood by the Japanese regime for her role in the resistance. Both characters take up the same odyssey from opposite sides of the country, and by pilot’s end, meet one another.  

And, of course, there’s a final twist that will leave you gasping.

The pilot also contends with the specter of a new Cold War. 

Hitler is aged and dying in this alternate reality, and his would-be successors (Goebbels, Himmler, and Rommel) are scrambling for power. This means trouble for Japan, because many in the Nazi hierarchy believe that the U.S. should not have been partitioned. Instead, it should have been taken for Germany. Accordingly, nuclear weapons stand ready to bomb the Japanese island as well as San Francisco.  It’s possible that the world will plunge into an all-out war…again. 

Some characters in the drama believe that they can use the I-Ching, an ancient divination text, to determine what shape the future will take.

In the original novel by Dick, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy was a book, not a film, but I liked this update and change because TV is a visual art-form, and the existence of a documentary film establishes better than words on a page would that the world featured in the series could be false, or perhaps, merely one world in a massive multi-verse. 

If a series should develop, the exact nature and origin of this book will no doubt be a major plot line.  How did get to this universe?  Is this universe real?  Is it a game?  A simulation?  A parallel reality? 

A clever and intelligent writer like Spotnitz can spin the narrative in any tricky direction, hinting at multiple possibilities, and keeping us on our toes for many seasons. Certainly, the pilot episode is well-crafted, particularly in its attention to small details.

For example, there’s one scene of utter horror that occurs while Joe is on the road. He stops his truck, and speaks to a police-man. 

Ash suddenly falls from the sky like snow. 

Joe is perplexed, and the policeman reports that a hospital is nearby. And Tuesday is the day of the week that said hospital burns cripples, the terminally ill, and other “drags on the state.” 

Blake is eating a sandwich when this revelation occurs. Watch him closely as he regards his meal. His unguarded response (or lack of one) is a clue about his character's nature. But this little throwaway moment captures the terror and inhumanity of the Axis Powers more powerfully than could a scene involving Nazi soldiers and large scale combat. We understand immediately how this America is different from ours.  

Here, death panels are really…and burning every Tuesday.

The Man in the High Castle introduces a number of good concepts that could well serve a long-term series, including the belief that “fate is fluid” and that “destiny is in the hands of man.”  It would be incredibly intriguing to see this idea play out, across a Japanese/Nazi Cold War, and across a dedicated resistance movement.  

Already, The Man in The High Castle is extraordinary, imaginative television, dominated by strong performances, crisp writing and surprisingly good production values. On that last front, there’s a shot of Nazi Time Square here that will make your jaw drop.  

Let's hope this one makes the cut.  I'm still in mourning over Amazon's treatment of The After. Let's hope it doesn't make the same mistake twice. The Man in the High Castle could very well be the Game of Thrones for the alternate reality sub-genre...if Amazon doesn't kill it in the cradle, that is.

Cult-Movie Review: Alien (1979)

It is quite difficult to believe, but in 2014, Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) turns thirty-five years old. 

Alas, 2014 has also seen the passing of H.R. Giger, the visionary Swiss artist who designed the film’s titular creature, a “bio-mechanoid” creation of unforgettable shape and proportion.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Alien to consider on this occasion is that the Scott film does not seem to grow old in terms of its impact, even with the passage of time, even with the acute knowledge that some of its scares have become familiar ones in the pop culture firmament.  For Alien has been oft-imitated, and never equaled.

Consider that Alien “indicts big business,” (Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, page 920)) and that viewpoint has never been more popular than it is today.

Also, the 1979 film explodes our understanding of sex roles in the intelligent and unconventional presentation of its iconic survivor, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). 

Most importantly, perhaps, the film also creates a metaphor for the uncertainty America faced during the “crisis of confidence” 1970s. 

Here, the crew of the Nostromo is always battling the previous enemy, and never the next, dreadful iteration of the shape-shifting beast.

Whether one gazes at Alien as a simple “haunted house in space” movie, a social critique of Big Business’s callous disregard for workers, or as a trend-setter in terms of female roles, however, the film remains a masterpiece in both the horror and science fiction movie constellation.  The world it forges continues to feel real, vital and relevant, and its scares never cease to thrill and unsettle.

 In deep space, the commercial starship Nostromo is diverted from its homeward route when the ship’s computer, Mother, detects a distress call in a nearby solar system.  Mother awakes the crew from suspended animation, and the non-military men and women must investigate the signal on planet LV-426 or forfeit their percentage of the mission’s profit. 

The Nostromo lands on the inhospitable world and an expedition consisting of Captain Dallas (Skerritt), Kane (Hurt) and Lambert (Cartwright) finds a strange alien derelict there. 

Inside the macabre wreckage, a cargo bay is filled with leathery egg-like organisms, and something alive bursts forward from one, and seems to strangle Kane.  Kane survives, but as the crew soon learns on their return journey to Earth, the being has laid some kind of embryo down his throat, in his gut. 

The embryo grows and bursts out of Kane’s stomach, eventually becoming a seven-foot tall alien whose physical strength is matched only by its hostility.  One-by-one, the crew-members are killed or secreted away by the alien, which is hiding in the ship’s vent system. 

Desperate, one of the last survivors, Ripley (Weaver) plots a strategy to self-destruct the ship and return to Earth in a shuttle.

The story of astronauts accidentally picking up a monster in space is an old one, yet just as Star Wars gave the old swashbuckling Flash Gordon template new life in 1977, so does Ridley Scott’s Alien breath much new life into the monster-on-a-spaceship story of It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), Planet of the Vampires (1965) or The Green Slime (1968).

The director largely does so by pinpointing and focusing on the very quality that those films determinedly lack: a grounded sense of reality in terms of how human characters might behave while traveling on a spaceship in “the future.”  

So if George Lucas imagined a “lived in” universe for Star Wars, one that implied history, use, and even entropy, Ridley Scott carries that ball a yard or two further down the field.  He imagines and presents a blue-collar future, one where work-stations are trashed, where computer consoles make good coffee mug holders, where characters don sneakers and ball caps instead of snappy uniforms, where pornography is pinned-up on the personal cubbies of the personnel, and everyone sleeps in pods they call “freezers” rather than traveling at faster-than-light speed.

This daring visual aesthetic, termed “space truckers” felt new and unique in 1979, though Dark Star (1975), also written by Dan O’Bannon had put “slackers” in space and helped to begin the de-glamorization of life in outer space that Alien assiduously continues.  The effort to de-romanticize space makes life seem more immediate and real, and that’s the important thing here.

In Alien, space travel is not a glorious calling or great mission to explore brave new worlds.  On the contrary, it is a monotonous and dull occupation.  Consider that in this future, corporations like Weyland-Yutani are still in charge, and the average astronaut is not a hero or a pioneer, but rather a guy (or gal) still trying to make a living wage and get his fair piece of the pie.  He makes it through the day on copious amounts of coffee, and swears like a sailor when shit starts falling apart.

In the film, Brett (Stanton) and Parker (Kotto) make this dynamic especially clear.  They are not “miracle workers” like Star Trek’s Mr. Scott, but overworked repairmen, putting out one fire after another and not immune to the idea of a work slow-down if they feel they are being taken for granted or abused.  In fact, Alien features a kind of upstairs/downstairs dynamic regarding the Nostromo’s crew. The bridge crew-members are, at least barely, responsible and dutiful truckers, doing their jobs with a modicum of professionalism.  But Brett and Parker sweat it out in the boiler room, making mischief and slacking off wherever they can.

           

The terror in Alien emerges partially but not only from the revolutionary design and appearance of the monster (as envisioned by Giger), but in the conjunction of that frightening unknown with the very-well known world of these ruckers.  If the audience had to imagine “futuristic mankind” and his advanced, perfect technology, the very threat of the alien would surely be mitigated.  Instead, Scott depicts a world of ships, wardrobe, people and environs that we all immediately recognize and identify with.  Because Brett and Parker, Dallas, Kane and Ripley are all immediately believable, that factor makes the crew’s encounter with something truly unknown, something truly alien, all the more scintillating.

The contrast between us “now” (but in space) and the alien itself also forges a nice contrast.  One species is single-minded and brutally efficient.  The other is…not.

The other aspect of the film that viewers today may take for granted is the fact that in Alien, the monster is never seen in the same form twice until the last few scenes. 

After three alien sequels, two AVP movies, and a prequel, people the world around can recite the Alien life-cycle from rote memory: egg, face-hugger, chest-burster, and adult or drone.  But in 1979, audiences had no way of knowing any of that, and so were unsettled because they could never be certain what the alien was going to “be” the next time they saw it. 

If the crew in Alien is recognizable as truckers in space or blue collar workers, the alien is utterly unrecognizable, even incomprehensible on first reckoning. 

So much tension arises in the film from the conflict between these two poles, of total recognition, and total lack of recognition. The alien’s constant shifting, its universal state of flux, seems to reflect the anxieties of a decade that witnessed three presidents in ten years, and upheavals in Vietnam, Iran, and on the home-front.  An overwhelming fear in the 1970s was that we didn’t know what, or from where, something else was going to hit the country as it was trying to get on its feet again. 

Would it be another oil crisis? Stagflation? Another political upheaval? A nuclear reactor meltdown? The indeterminate nature of the alien seems to point out, again and again, that the protagonists are falling behind, unable to catch-up with a problem that has spiraled out of control.

Today, we’ve seen so many aliens and so many shape-shifters at the movies that we’re inured to the concept and it no longer frightens us as it did in 1979, but Alien got it right, in revolutionary fashion.

The fear wasn’t that the alien would be familiar the next time we saw it, the fear was that it would be unfamiliar, that all our learning, all our experience with it would ultimately prove useless.

I have written about Alien’s subtext before, notably in my book Horror Films FAQ (2013), and sometimes it is a bit uncomfortable. 

But on a very basic thematic level, Alien also concerns sex, and a “perfect” being  that can use human sexuality and reproductive drives against prey for its own breeding and survival purposes. 

There are moments in Scott's original that appear to involve homosexuality, sexual repression, and sexual stereotypes or roles.  Again, this seems fitting considering the historical context. The end of the 1970s brought the disco era, and a new level of hedonism to the American public.  Americans had become more promiscuous, and the 1970s has become notorious, even, for its sense of sexual experimentation.  This idea has most often conveyed in films that focus on the decade’s “key” parties (The Ice Storm [1997[), wherein which married couples would swap partners for a night by randomly selecting car keys from a dish during a suburban party.  At the end of the 1970s, sex clubs such as Plato’s Retreat in New York had also become part of the new tapestry of the culture.

Given such a cultural background, it’s not entirely surprising that the monster in Alien should be a creature consumed with reproduction, and thus sex. To wit, John Hurt's character Kane becomes the first recipient of the alien's reproductive advances. British, whisper-thin and sexually ambiguous, Kane is depicted at one point in the film donning a white undergarment that appears to be a girdle; something that is distinctly "feminizing" to his appearance.

In addition, Kane lives the most dangerous -- or is it promiscuous? -- lifestyle of anyone in the Nostromo crew. He awakes from the freezer first, he initiates the mission to the derelict, and he is the first to enter the derelict’s egg chamber. Kane is well-acquainted with danger as (stereotypically speaking...) one might expect of a sexually-active homosexual man circa 1979.  Again, we’re talking stereotypes here, not reality as we understand it in 2014. 

But Kane‘s daring is rewarded with alien impregnation. He is made unwillingly receptive to an oral penetration: the insertion of the face-hugger's "tube" down his throat...where it lays the chest-buster. What emerges from this encounter is "Kane's son" in Ash’s terminology.

But essentially, the alien forces poor Kane -- possibly a coded homosexual male symbol -- to act in the role he may already be familiar with; that of being receptive to penetration.

\

Consider also Ash (Ian Holm) and his sexual underpinnings. Ash is actually a robot, a creature presumably incapable of having sex. The film's subtext suggests that this inability, this repression of the sexual urge, has made him a monster too.

When Ash attacks Ripley late in the film, he rolls up a pornographic magazine and attempts to jam it down the woman’s throat. It's his penis surrogate.  The implication of this particular act is that he can't do the same thing with his physical member, so Ash must use the magazine in its stead.

And when Ash speaks of the alien life-form, he admits envy for it. One must wonder if this “envy” arises because the alien can sexually dominate others in a way that the disliked, often dismissed Ash cannot manage.

It is also significant that when Ash is unable to satisfy his repressed sexual desire for Ripley, the pressure literally causes him to explode.  The android blood is a milky white, semen-like fluid in Alien. And it spurts. When confronted with his own sexuality and inability to express it...Ash can't hold his wad.

The most hyper-masculinized (again, stereotypically-so) character in Alien is undoubtedly Parker (Yaphet Kotto), an African-American man who brazenly discusses “eating pussy” during the scene leading up to the chest-burster revelation.

Parker boasts an antagonistic, adversarial relationship with Ripley, one in which an interest in sex is clearly the undercurrent. Furthermore, the character is often-seen carrying an over-sized weapon (a flame thrower), another possible phallic symbol.

In another type of film, Parker might be the hero, the guy who saves the day.  But here he dies because of the stereotypical quality of male chivalry or machismo he exhibits. In particular, Parker won't turn the flame thrower on the alien while a woman (Lambert) is in the line of fire. The alien dispatches Parker quickly (mano e mano), perhaps realizing he will never co-opt an alpha male like Parker to be his "bitch;" at least not the way Kane was used.

As for Lambert, the most-traditionally (and -- bear with me again -- stereotypically) female character in the film -- she gets raped by the alien, presumably by the xenomorph's phallic tail.

Once more, the alien has exploited a character's biological/reproductive nature and used it to meets its own destructive, perverse needs.   

The monster is able to understand and kill each creature, essentially, according to their assigned, pre-programmed sex role.  Kane’s daring and promiscuous life-style is what exposes him. Ash protects and envies the alien because he can’t perform sexually at all.  Parker dies in an act of (in vain) machismo. And Lambert is the traditional screaming victim, unable to do anything but get raped.

And then, at long last, we get to Alien’s sense of brilliant non-convention, the character that explodes all the pre-existing stereotypes I have diagrammed.  Meet Ripley: a character written in the screenplay for a man but played by a woman (Sigourney Weaver). She is the only survivor (along with Jones the Cat), of the alien's rampage on the Nostromo and there's a case that can be made that the alien cannot so easily "tag" Ripley as either male or female, and that's why she survives.

She is perfect, like the alien itself, an apparent blend of all “human” qualities. 

Ripley makes irrelevant traditional sex roles or sex stereotypes, and please recall that I have discussed all the crew in terms of the culture’s stereotypes.  That’s because they are prey, and the alien hunts them by those qualities.  It can’t get a handle on Ripley because she exists outside familiar sexual dynamics. 

All the other crew members are somehow limited by their sexuality, whereas Ripley is the only character who successfully balances common sense, heroism, and competence. She is both strong and weak, in the appropriate measure, both daring and prudent.  Given this uncommon mix of stereotypically male and female qualities, the alien is not quite sure how to either "read" or "use" Ripley for its own nefarious purposes.  This, perhaps, is one advantage of our species: it can outgrow biology, and not act as mere slave to it.

In the final moments of the film, the alien does make a decision vis-à-vis Ripley. It recognizes and catalogs her as the best of humanity whether male or female.  She is kindred; a survivor. So the alien rides in secret with her aboard the shuttle Narcissus as they escape the Nostromo.

The alien could likely kill Ripley any time during that escape flight, but does not choose to do so. It knows it is in safe hands with her, at least for the time being. It uses her "competence," her skill (qualities of itself it recognizes in her?) to escape destruction...again establishing its perfection.

           

When viewed through the lens of human sexuality then, Alien is a film about the way that the reproductive or sex drive can subvert humanity. 

The film is a masterpiece in terms of visualization, in terms of how it approaches space travel and alien life, but more than it, it is a work of genius in describing what perfection might mean to an alien life-form.  It means not being easily tagged or cataloged as one thing or another.   The depiction of the alien itself recognizes the fact that it can be all things to all people.  The doorway to the alien derelict, for instance, is vaginal in appearance, and the alien skull itself resembles “the head of a penis,” (William Paul, Laughing Screaming, 1994).

So as the doors of sexual experimentation were swinging wide in the 1970s, Alien gave the world a monster to walk through that open portal…