Dystopic Future: The Set Design in Alien

Dystopic Future: The Set Design of<br>Alien

By Kevin McCorry

Twentieth Century Fox Release on May 25, 1979.<br>Directed by Ridley<br>Scott.<br>Produced by Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter<br>Hill.<br>Screenplay by Dan O'Bannon.<br>Starring Tom Skerritt, Sigourney<br>Weaver, John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton, Veronica Cartwright, Ian Holm, and Yaphet<br>Kotto.<br>Music by Jerry Goldsmith.

Alien , a dark thriller overlapping the science fiction and horror genres, was one of the top science fiction films of 1979, a year when audiences were filling theatres to view such Star Wars -inspired action-fantasy films as Moonraker , The Black Hole , Buck Rogers in the 25th Century , and Superman . Suspenseful and shocking rather than action-driven, Alien arrived with much advance publicity, speculation on the look of the title creature, and rumour about its macabre way of procreating.

This Ridley Scott-directed opus boasts high production values channelled not into space battle scenes and flashy explosions, but into set designs and detailed model spaceships, intended for slow camera pans to show the intricacy of futuristic architecture and the horrible irony by which a beastly creature easily makes this technological layout its own and stalks a seven-person crew. It kills them one-by-one, before the last remaining crew member, Sigourney Weaver's courageous Ripley, manages to dispatch the alien into space, after having destroyed her crew's mothership, the Nostromo, and its cargo in her earlier attempt to neutralise the creature.

The story of Alien is not original. The notion of a malevolent, devouring, otherworldly creature is common to the science fiction genre, and comparisons to the events in Alien can be found in the American-Japanese "camp" classic, The Green Slime , and such television series as Space: 1999 and Doctor Who . A Space: 1999 episode involving a tentacled alien monster invading a deep-space probeship and ingesting one-by-one the hapless crew, leaving only one survivor to return to Earth and a sceptical public, bears striking similarity to the story plot of Alien and the opening of its sequel, Aliens . Space: 1999 and Alien were both filmed in Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, England, and models and visual effects for Alien were provided by such people as Brian Johnson, Nick Allder, and Martin Bower, three key contributors to the aesthetic of Space: 1999 .

The detachable, modular design of the Eagle spaceships in Space: 1999 was a precursor to the appealing realism of the modular Nostromo, whose detachable lander and escape shuttle give the impression of a spaceship tractable to human activity and diverse conditions. Unlike the sleek, fixed shell of the bulky Starship Enterprise in Star Trek , models in both Space: 1999 and Alien are detailed, with many projections and indentations, and separable, like an organism that can detach and reassemble its component parts, or "organs", when circumstances dictate. This motif of the "organic" spaceship is vital to the narrative of Alien , allowing the Nostromo to shed its bulky cargo and land on a hostile planet, and permitting escape in a small shuttle when a desperate Ripley decides to detonate the Nostromo in hope of destroying the creature in the explosion.

Alien 's unique appeal lies in the stylish design of these models and the equal intricacy in the construction of interior sets. Technology, with abundant computer panels, consoles, and power system circuitry, is blended with human comfort, for which the ship is fitted with plastic, cushioned seats and bulkheads and adorned with hanging collages of jingly crystal and girly pictures from magazines, yielding a "trash-culture-of-the future" motif that Scott would later use for his 1982 opus, Blade Runner .

In opposition to the future proposed by Stanley Kubrick's 2001- A Space Odyssey or by Space: 1999 's immaculate, bright, and purely scientific Moonbase Alpha, Alien proposes a dystopia, rather like that of Blade Runner , where migration into space is not motivated by exploration for furtherance of knowledge, but by the eternal profit margin. The Nostromo crew are mercenaries, paid cogs in a machine of economic power. Individuality is tolerated to some extent, as seen in the casual, personalised garments, for example, crewman Brett's Hawaiian shirt. To perhaps foreshadow the revelation of his android nature and coincide with his strict adherence to corporate directives, Science Officer Ash's costume is the most official-looking and uniform-like. Still, Company badges are on garments worn by all of the crew, signifying a technological capitalism whose quest for gain has been extended into interstellar space and left its "mark" on all of them, a capitalism that despite its futuristic aspects, continues to encourage decadent consumption, hence the trash-culture evident on the ship.

Decadence is most evident in the crew's smoking and sloven eating habits. A haze of cigarette smoke that...