The machinery of collapse

Rating: Null/10 (9 October 2012)

I am a big fan of the Alien franchise, it is quite possibly one of the most interesting journeys out there, the drifting of gas clouds from the giant collapse of the first Dune to the formation of new spaceworlds (one of them being Star Wars), and their eventual deterioration as Jodorowsky's fluid vision was swallowed into the Hollywood machine. It's really cool. You can follow the thread of Moebius from Bladerunner to how he affected Cameron and how that affects the current state of visual imagination. Or more easily, you can chart it through the Alien quadrilogy.
In Alien, the space was composed from different kinds of fabric, logic was dissonant, the alien was an abstract malignancy, transforming with the fabric, the journey collaborative to retrieve new vision.
The journey shifts in Aliens to one of practical logic and obsessively getting a job done, tension goes from an abstract fabric to machines (include the aliens), there is clean narrative, a single flow and workspace.
Now here's the deal on this notorious trainwreck that made the rabid Alien fanbase mad.
It really is a mess. It is not the much protested killing of Newt and Hicks that hurts it, this adds to your own disorientation and entering this alone, without familiar ground. The sex scene is just poorly handled, minor quibble there. The gaping plot hole of a new alien egg is a problem, but you would be able to make excuses if the thing swept you to excitement, logic always finds a way to presentably dress feeling. And it does in a small way expand the cosmology with Bishop II.
The problem is deep in the fabric of it, so even in its 'assembly' cut it's still a failure. The problem is that of the original Alien team, the only ones left were producers Hill and Giler, who may have contributed significant parts to the Alien universe, most notably the presence of droids, but they were money leeches, the farthest thing from visionaries. They came up with the prison planet idea. The film briefly passed through the Vince Ward phase of a wooden monastery-planet, of which they scraped everything except the theme of a millenarian religion, which they simply snowballed on top of their prison planet.
Giger was initially contracted, but eventually shafted in favor of inexpensive nobodies who repurposed much of his preparatory work. His concept for a new alien included translucent heads and aquatic xenomorphs, no doubt inspired by his friend Moebius' awesome work on Cameron's The Abyss.
Scott was contacted in the early stages, but wanted to effectively make Prometheus, there are statements to that effect as early as promotional interviews for the first Alien. So, a 28 year old guy was brought in to direct - smart choice, since previous films worked because they had passionate young blood working in them. Fincher had ambition, but no experience with designing narrative on the deep end and no one to really help him as Scott had.
You can read elsewhere on the truly hellish shoot, the endless rewrites, the $7m worth of unused sets. In simple terms, what happened is this.
You have a volatile world on page, in a constant state of (mostly poor) rewrite.
Fincher who feels insecure in this environment, and without narrative experience for overall vision, attacks each segment with as much short-term visual aggression as he can. He assembles but does not orchestrate.
You have an elegant design for the alien after Cameron's critters, but cheaply animated and blended in the environment, it is remarkable how little these guys accomplished with much superior technology.
And you have simply nondescript extrapolation into cinematic space, all these vast industrial locations, the labyrinth of tunnels and vents, the foundry, but they're all revealed in the same unexciting light. None of it feels lived, merely decorated.
And this translates in the actual film; the initial point is that disharmony has inexplicably stolen into a world of forced purity, the analogy being extended to the presence of Ripley among religious celibates. This has a lot of potential, for instance to expose purity as the vessel that conceals the real beast, but is forgotten in lieu of the obligation to visit different sets and parts of a loosely connected story.
We simply have different focal points of view and aimless energy spent running from one to the next; this is the most clear in the improvised chase through corridors near the finale, the gliding camera is superb, but it's a baffling new dimension.
It feels like we're tuning in and out of different episodes of a season of big-budget sci-fi TV.