The machinery of narrative

Rating: Null/10 (18 September 2012)

You simply cannot fail to study the Alien films. Individually, they range from great to below-average, but the journey and transformation of vision is fascinating and precious. It starts with Dune, the scrapped Jodorowsky version. The ambitious project collapsed, scattering the team of visionaries. In the meantime, Star Wars came out through the more business-savvy Spielberg-Lucas model and convinced execs that something like Dune can be done if you build with dedication from bankable parts instead of trusting genius.
Alien was brilliant - all about the dissonance of different kinds of logic working in discovery of the same thing.
This is something else entirely. The second explosion was that the Star Wars-Alien success was so immense, pieces of their mechanism rained all over Hollywood: new SFX worlds, ambition, coherent mythology. Several Scott-originated ideas for a second Alien were quickly proposed, most of them dumb (eventually retooled into Prometheus). Lucas had his own. Meanwhile, the Roger Corman factory was hard at work picking apart the films to build their own miniature models. The story goes that a young truck-driver, awestruck by Star Wars, decided to pursue screen writing, and naturally drifted to Corman's stable.
Anyway, young Cameron got his break doing second unit work in the Alien-inspired Galaxy of Terror, which led to the Piranha gig. Long before any of us would know him as mogul and overambitious despot on set, the guy was a workhorse, a whiz-kid of DIY filmmaking. And he was getting hands-on practice right in the middle of an assembly-line where he had to puzzle about dressing and refitting all those spare parts. And you can again see all of that in the finished film here, only his second one.
Nevermind the shift of tone from horror to action and war. We go from Scott's journey of dissonant discovery to one of efficiently getting a job done. From the shared adventure to uncharted space and new vision, to one woman's obsessive vision of something she knows and has to exterminate.
As a result, you go from a film of multiple individually-perfected fabrics and different machinery, remember in Alien you went from Giger's biomechanoid alien ship, to the clean Kubrick-space of Mother's room, to the scrapyard maze of Nostromo's bowels, and different cameras for each space, to one man doing all, one fabric of camera and one practical logic throughout.
There is no dissonant intrusion of alien- space and logic, like you had when injecting Moebius and Giger- fluid disharmony into Scott's clean vision. Both humans and aliens exist in the same workshop-space, and that blue-collar workspace of junk, papers and spare parts everywhere must have been the feel of the Corman factory of disassembling vision for study that Cameron intimately knew.
And that emphasis on making something work shows in the creature itself (the product of vision) and the introduction of narrative for the encounter with it.
In the original, you had the volatile omnipresence in shadows of something mysterious and ever-shifting that was not human at all, but an abstract being you understood had inscrutable biology and purpose. There was no narrative, we knew nothing about it.
In Cameron's practical vision that's scaled down from near-metaphysical presence to a much more understood critter, understood both in terms of structure (beehive and presence of a Queen, Cameron-designed no less) and understood in terms of story, motherhood. Meanwhile Ripley herself in that outer space of unreason is slaying her own darkness.
Those are not at all bad choices: clarity in both mechanics and narrative logic, practical purpose, no dissonance, efficient tension.
It is just different to the original journey, less dangerous. It is a workingman's assembly-vision of what he does, building worlds. It works, he was extraordinarily competent with the parts. So competent in fact, that Spielberg himself had to sit down and take notice.