He should have left Alien alone

Rating: 3/10 (21 July 2012)

Ridley Scott is one of the greatest film makers. Prometheus is his crowning achievement. He must glow with pride at the honours showered on him. Yet I cannot shake off my suspicion that, late at night, he prowls the empty corridors of his vast mansion alone, a real life Charles Foster Kane, attempting to quieten his inner doubts. From his hand he lets fall not a snowstorm paperweight, but a tattered copy of a screenplay from the 1970s, and from his lips, falls not the word "Rosebud", but "Alien".
It was Scott's great fortune to make the best sci-fi space film ever conceived. But his misfortune to make it in 1979, before CGI. With each passing year, advances in digital technology brought miracle after miracle to the cinema screen. Jurassic Park, Star Trek, Terminator, Titanic - each new digital triumph must have felt to Scott like his Alien creature's acid blood, eating through his skin and bones and, eventually, even his artistic soul.
The technology now existed for Scott to re-make his greatest film using digital technology sufficiently advanced to live up to his original vision. Now at the peak of his powers, he could command with ease what he had to fight for in his youth: cash, locations, talent – but above all, millions of dollars' worth of computerised special effects – the one tiny flaw in his 1979 production, when compared to today's films.
And it was a flaw that would worsen with time. As technology improved irresistibly, his original film would sink further back into the prehistoric realm of movies made before CGI – destined one day to seem as naive and charming as Georges Méliès "Voyage to the Moon" of 1902.
He must have thought; while there is still time, while I still command respect from the studios and the money men, let me make sure of my cinematic immortality by re-making Alien using modern technology. And so we have Prometheus.
The opposing tensions that gave rise to the film were there in the making too. The goal was to recreate the terror of Alien, but it must be Alien in a new form. The film must be new, but it must also be old - true to the original.
The solution adopted was that used in the prequel to Star Trek in 2009, where J.J .Abrams had miraculously breathed exciting new life into the 40-year-old franchise by taking us back before the period we knew. But where Abrams had succeeded by playing in a nuanced way on what we already knew about the Enterprise crew, Scott merely reprised his previous most successful moments, now clothed in CGI finery. And not merely reprised them, but re-filmed them, shot for shot.
And so we had to sit and watch again the crew of a corporate space ship reawaken from cryogenic sleep, tended by a humanoid robot. We had the obligatory black ship's captain who was both anarchic and courageous.
We had the discovery of alien life – the same alien life-forms as before. We had parasites who invade their host through the mouth and burst through their abdomen to be born. We had a second-hand glimpse of the parasite in attack mode, seen only as a blip on a CRT screen. We had the android's head being ripped from his shoulders and lying on the floor in a pool of goo, still talking. All shot for shot from the 1979 film.
We also had shameless imports from other blockbusters. We had irresponsible billionaire John Hammond from Jurassic Park reincarnated as Guy Pierce's Weyland, first appearing as a hologram in a lecture theatre. We had the alien starship disguised as a pyramid from Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. We even had a "Luke, I am your father" moment. When we learn that Guy Pierce's Weyland (a Rupert Murdock-alike economic despot) is father to the icy-blond expedition leader.
The hero's journey was played out through a female protagonist. Deconstructing her name is illuminating. She is named Ellie - stolen from the main character of Carl Sagan's Contact, Ellie Arroway, and imported complete with the flashback to her dead father giving her life meaning. Her surname is Shaw. Shaw=sure. Ellie is the religious believer in the story and hence the only moral person who deserves to survive.
What has the addition of CGI done for Alien? The claustrophobia of the original has been replaced by a kind of cinematic agoraphobia. Everything is now on a grand and heroic scale. The alien ship is so vast you get lost in it (yet mysteriously, its deadly cargo is restricted to one tiny area). In flight it is as large a small city, yet when it crashes to the planet's surface it's like a small tinny gasometer falling on you – you just dodge behind a rock and you're Okay.
There are also genuinely miraculous CGI moments, not least of which is the heroine performing a Cesarean section on herself to deliver an unwanted alien pregnancy. The trouble is that none of these jaw-dropping creations advances the story or adds to our knowledge. They are there not because they are necessary but because they are now technically possible.
Even if everything I say here is correct, does it matter? Does it in any way detract from Scott's magnificent achievements? I want to say "No, of course not" but I have a horribly queasy feeling – a little like John Hurt catching up on his missed breakfasts – that something isn't right. It's as though Michelangelo had a second crack at the statue of David in expanded polystyrene, or Gustav Eiffel chose to rebuild his tower in pre-cast concrete sections. Modern but brutal.
As one of Ridley Scott's greatest fans, I wish he had left his masterpiece alone, and left me with my memories of Alien untarnished. The film making is flawless. The film is pointless.