This past week in celebration of Alien Day, I had the opportunity to see Prometheus and Alien, back to back, on the big screen. I’ve always recognised that Prometheus isn’t exactly the greatest return to sci-fi for Ridley Scott, and that the script has huge issues, but I’ve always enjoyed it well enough. When it’s immediately followed by the original classic though, I finally noticed something I’d never thought about before which, in my mind, is the biggest issue with the prequel. The production design.
The original Alien isn’t just iconic for a masterful control of suspense or its perfection of the “don’t show the monster” ideology. It created a world that felt real, felt lived in, and felt like a real place our species could one day make it to. It wasn’t a story of space monks with light swords or a space utopia, it was the story of seven ordinary working Joes, in a broken and busted ship hauling raw ore through deep space. When what we see on screen feels relatable, feels plausible, is when we can really enter the world. We stop worrying about “lol this spaceship doesn’t make sense” and we start worrying about the predator stalking its corridors. And that realism is the work of Ron Cobb.
Cobb acted as a concept artist on Alien, and contributed heavily to how this spaceship worked. Not just designing corridors and airlocks, but designing a standard suite of language-less symbols that fill the Nostromo. These are never mentioned, referenced or even used by the characters but their presence alone shows you that this world is real. Those symbols mean something, and are the difference between studio set and space ship. In Prometheus, these symbols are nowhere to be seen.
The spaceship Prometheus is totally unlike the Nostromo. It has vast areas that seem to contain nothing of use. It has a basketball court, a pool room, a lifeboat with full library and bar, and apparently an entire secret living quarters. Sure it’s a luxury liner for a scientific expedition founded by one of the richest men in the world rather than a tugboat, but it lacks any form of internal logic to its extravagance that could allow the viewer to believe it exists. Cobb’s original work manages this so well you could take screenshots from Alien and tell people it’s from a navy ship. It doesn’t look like a space ship, it looks like a ship – in space.
And then there’s factors outside of the tactile. Should you glance at a monitor on board the Nostromo, you’d see something like this:
It may be retro and 70’s, sure, but I have no doubt you understand it. It’s not likely you’ve flown a spaceship before, but “deorbital descent” immediately conveys what’s happening on this screen. Here however, is a screen from the science lab in Prometheus:
Total gobbledegook. Absolutely none of this is even remotely decipherable outside of the Weyland Corporation logo. When that flashes by on a monitor, nobody is thinking “ah hah, the scientists are doing a volumetric scan!”, instead that job falls to a line of dialogue that probably had better things to be doing with its screen time. The interfaces in Alien are clunky buttons exactly like the spaceships of our modern world, and the interfaces of Prometheus are hologram tables, wrist computers and balls of magic light. The world of the Prometheus exists on hand-waved technology and never becomes something we believe could truly exist; none of it seems usable, functional or even space-worthy. Oh, and Prometheus is set 39 years before Alien.
Not that the lack of Ron Cobb can be singled out as the source of this nonsense of course. Ridley Scott himself was behind the idea of the Prometheus being a high tech advanced facility, and even that the graphics should feel alive – in a foolish attempt to re-connect with the other integral half of Alien’s concept design.
Because of course, there was another concept artist on the original Alien. The inimitable H.R. Giger was responsible for everything alien – and it’s that disconnect between man-made hunks of steel and the organic vagina-caves of the derelict spacecraft that’s key in conveying the extra terrestrial nature of what they’ve found. While it may be dark and dirty, the Nostromo is still angular and manufactured. The alien is rounded, imperfect, and dripping with goop. Nothing makes the Xenomorph feel more threatening than seeing something so unfamiliar – so alien – amongst a setting we recognise as real.
Unfortunately, the same sense of design blindness is present in Prometheus’ aliens. I mean I honestly don’t even have the words for how fucking moronic this looks. The engineers are designed as our ‘ancestors’, beings that eventually, through millennia of DNA hocus-pocus, became us. The design somehow manages to both misunderstand how humans evolved at all and snub Giger’s entire language for what “alien” in the Alien universe means, while landing squarely in “swollen bee-sting vampire” territory. Even the designs that were cut out of the film were better than the final product. Yes they’re supposed to represent perfection like the statue of David, but there’s a reason Michelangelo carved him from marble and not celluloid (availability of materials for one). It simply does not work on any level; whether meant to be perfect or powerful. For some inexplicable reason the film opens with an engineer in broad daylight, before immediately dying from self-sacrifice. It doesn’t instil a sense of dread or make you think “wuh oh these guys gonna axe some swedes”, but is almost laughable. When he finally shows up again to the tune of gothic choir music, despite literally tearing people’s heads off, there’s no threat to him. The film never recovers from an artistic failure that should have been vetoed before production even began.
Really the only right approach to Prometheus’ design would have been the Rogue One method. Say what you like about the story and characters, but Rogue One nailed the set design so hard that it’s paying child support. Managing to not only replicate the original universe (and time frame) it was placing itself in, but to also expand and extrapolate from that to create new instantly familiar places and ships. Prometheus aimed to answer the big question of the space jockey’s origin, but misses that connective tissue on every beat – from the design to the story to the film-making.
Unfortunately for whatever reason, it seems Scott is either ignorant of or wilfully advancing from what made Alien so good in the first place. Alien: Covenant promised to be a better attempt, it took on the Alien name as if to validate to fans that this would be the film they wanted. Yet from what we’ve seen, it continues to miss that all important atmospheric craftsmanship, and I dread to think what that means for what we haven’t seen. So yes, I’ve already bought my midnight ticket.
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