AA. VV.
Alien

Dan O'Bannon was really burned by the (frankly very predictable) failure of the famous Dark Star. I want to make a serious version! In Dark Star I parodied A Space Odyssey, and it turned out to be crap... Now I want to tell the story of a real spaceship with a real alien, something that scares, he must have said (more or less...) to his friend Ronald Sushett. And so the story becomes that of a planetary cargo, a space tanker like those in the golden years of Exxon, huge and with a minimal crew, which somehow gets infected by an indefinable and unstoppable organism. We bring the alien on board with an epochal stroke of genius: a full-scale rape, and we make it germinate and burst out of the body of a crew member. Imagine that scene, stuff never seen before!

Yes, but you know what, Rory? A few months ago I was in Paris with that crazy Jodorowsky who was trying to make his Dune... Let's not talk about how it ended, while I was there, I met a Swiss guy who was hooked on opium but oh, he created techno-organic nightmares to die for, not to mention Moebius and his crazy Fremen suits, and Chris Foss with his spaceships... And Ron Cobb? Damn, he makes incredible science fiction illustrations, and his ornithopter looked like a real project! We have to get help from these people!

Because the two immediately understood a fundamental aspect: this film risks becoming cheap trash if we don't give it a visual depth never seen before. An approach that paid off, with lavish interest.

Memory becomes Star Beast, Star Beast becomes Alien; Roger Corman seems like someone with lots of good intentions and nice words, but the money, is he putting in the money? Walter Hill's, David Giler's, and Gordon Carroll's Brandywine, which still holds on tight to the entire franchise with its ups and downs, seems very reliable, it's in with 20th Century Fox... But the three partners heavily revise the script, and rightly so: concrete people, experts in old-school action films, with more commercial ideas but at least one find that will be the second big pillar of the entire saga besides the alien... The three also find the director, an Englishman who impressed them with the attention to detail he demonstrated in his debut, which truth be told has nothing to do with science fiction. But... we can't find a distributor, this story seems to interest no one!

Everything seems stalled when Star Wars shakes the world and makes those at Fox say (more or less): "Listen, with spaceship movies we're making $$$! See that even Disney talks about black holes, what do we have in our hands? Alien? What is it? Is there a spaceship? 4 million! No wait, look, top-notch people are working on it, Lucas called me, even Roger Christian he said, and look at the storyboard this English lord is making... 8 million, green light!”

It's shot in London, at Shepperton, because English crews have an approach to practical effects and sets that are enviable... A series of labs and minds that between plasticine, gravel, latex, glycerin, real and fake rocks, and wreckage create three different worlds, all three as deep as space: the alien vessel, the desert planetoid, and the labyrinthine Nostromo. Among the smell of paint and balsa glue, the sheep's blood for the chestburster scene, and the oysters composing the facehugger roams Giger, all in black, who brings his mother to the set and cooks her chicken broth; Moebius makes a ten-day appearance, reworks the Fremen suits, and entrusts his visions to John Mollo; how beautiful that "quilted" style is: let's use it as a pattern for the interiors... That's Roger Christian; he bought two carcasses of BAC Canberra bombers, dismantled them and created spaceship corridors more realistic than ever. Please tell Cobb not to put too many details in the Nostromo projects, because Mr. Scott and producer Sushett are enthusiastic about it, but for us in the scenography, it's a nightmare! And also tell Scott that we Bray Studios people are taking care of the special effects because it's not like he can come here and hammer OUR props and film the models HIMSELF... Meanwhile, those three damned at Brandywine pulled a subplot out of the hat that Bannon can't stand, but it's brilliant and fits perfectly into the film: artificial intelligence!

Alien is all this and more; an industrial, anthropomorphic, urban nightmare (there's so much urban on the Nostromo, even if they're just flashes inserted as subliminal messages…), organic, maternal. It remains one of the most carnal films you can imagine, a triumph of metamorphosis, of human perfection, of the fusion between tissues. It tells of a silent space plowed like the Ocean that suddenly unfolds, like the abrupt awakening from a cryogenic death, the unknown horror. A seductive horror, made of soft curves of the white corridors glittering with LEDs, of enormous vaginas, blind penises with teeth that ejaculate Vaseline (Rambaldi did a work of art, guys...), sensual shapes made with cow bones... But what the hell does Giger smoke?? Shut up, his works are sublime, even if the most iconic creations have been quite reworked by Scott (adult xenomorph), O'Bannon (facehugger), and one of the actors, Skerrit, who suggested removing the little hands and slimming down the chestburster... Everyone contributes. Given the crazy trend, why not imagine the sexuality of an android, its carnal desires, its idea of penetration, its empirical and poetic envy for the purity of flesh represented by a being "unclouded by illusions of morality"?

Let's extend the finale with the direct confrontation between the asexual horror and the mother of all space heroines, the woman who triumphs where everyone else failed, who annihilates the flying city and everything left inside, and launches the morbid fruit of a forbidden and violent union into space.

There isn't Lovecraft in Alien, as some authors have clumsily suggested and some small-town intellectuals claim. There is form, flesh, triumph of man, greatness and misery of artificial intelligence, power of technology, there is space plowed like the sea that, however, around the corner presents you with the bill of all its mysteries; there's the woman, and therefore, for those who truly know HPL, there couldn't be a film further from Him.

There is a lost way, that I miss so much, of making cinema. Because it seems that between '75 and '78, around the sloppy idea of an alien on a spaceship, pulsating ganglia made of crazy ideas, visionary madmen, sexual suggestions, unlikely as they are abstruse historical connections were formed; the lasers illuminating the belly of the alien horseshoe are those used by Genesis for their '77 tour, and now serve The Who... But where can you find a forge that crafts such a microcosm anymore?

Alien is a film that means a lot to me, which fortunately marked my academic life and part of my professional life (now they're all memories...), and for me, it is essential. It shouldn't just be seen, watched, or appreciated; it must be experienced, it must be observed, it must be feared... A good kind of fear, don't worry...