The machinery of retooling sleep

Rating: Null/10 (31 October 2012)

I have been following the Alien trail starting with Jodorowsky's collapsed attempt to make Dune, it seems so interesting to me, and this is very much an Alien film. The filmmaker's involvement with Alien 3 - prior to the Vince Ward phase - is pretty well known in fan circles, it seems at least the prison planet idea was his.
And this does take place in the same universe of deep-space corporate exploration and lurking horrors, though of course the fact cannot be openly acknowledged. Which means, with a small tilt, you can enjoy the film both as an effectively revamped Aliens as well as pretty clever cinematic annotation of those films post-Cameron.
A few things. Among several shifts from Scott's to Cameron's vision, a pivotal one was the transition of Ripley from a person who survived on the basis of steely-eyed reason and sense, to obsessed and emotionally damaged woman, the whole plot about motherhood also mirrored in the creature, much less abstract this go around both in terms of narrative and presentation.
Aliens 3 and 4 sought to extend this notion of locally internalized narrative opposed to the original's abstract fabric, both failed because of either a poor set of metaphors or creative dissonance among the filmmakers. The fans however seem to have made a pretty cool observation. A theory that has some traction in the Alien community is that both those films are cryosleep hallucinations of Ripley.
And you should know this was originally written around a female protagonist. What is the film about?
The film begins with the protagonist having a cryosleep hallucination as the vessel he is on board with others shoots through the 'back roads' of space. It is said that, in the inner space of cryosleep, only the animal side of the brain is active - so we encounter on the journey a lot of impulsive horrors and ugliness, both 'xeno' and moral.
He is a bad guy, but not completely without conscience. So the journey is about desired redemption and salvation, this is mirrored in both the Islamic passenger's hajj to New Mecca and the pilot's desire to redeem herself for an unscrupulous decision early-on - you will see during the crash landing shots of rapid eye movement inter-cut with disaster, reinforcing implied dreaming.
More. This is a desert world of three suns so perennial day, but complete darkness every 22 years - the catch is that 'horrors' can only roam the surface when it is night, and our team crashes hours before it happens. The coincidence will seem far-fetched and fated, unless of course you keep in mind this is his journey through his own back roads.
And all of that is nicely capped off by having our guy be able to 'see' in the dark where no one else can, because - karmic chain - he was in prison and had surgically enhanced his sight to keep alive.
Both his night-vision and newborn aliens have as their base a sort of bioluminescence, which is the way Twohy and his team envisioned the interiors of consciousness - writhing patterns of light in skulking darkness.
The catch is that, depending on what viewing skills you have honed, the above will either not register at all excepting the 'redemption' arc, or will seem slightly obvious and sophomoric.
The desert world is a big plus here, real sand and diffused light opposed to the usually fabricated studio space of Alien films. The creature on the other hand is much less memorable.