#prequels

Now, the extent to which Prometheus is a functional prequel to Alien is questionable. From what I gather, the Alien Franchise consists of a series of works that nominally follow one from each other but in practice tend not to really work as a coherent whole. I will own that I have personally only seen Alien, Aliens, Prometheus, and a couple of game playthroughs. I am aware of what happens in the other entries, though, and the point can easily be made with just the first two films, which exist in almost completely different genres. Alien is a taut monster-in-a-bottle story where extremely human characters face down their inexorable destruction at the hands of something inimical to their existence and also the super-hostile life-form picking them off one by one. Aliens is a dumb action flick with some gross special effects where Big Manly Marines go bug hunting. One could write a thesis on how the system of the company that exists within Scott's film (represented in part by Ash and Mother but far from equivalent with them) is reduced down to one corrupt executive in James Cameron's version, and I hope somebody has because that's not where I want to focus today.

Prometheus is likewise its own beast compared to Alien. Trading on hackneyed ideas about alien intervention in the origins of humanity is not a million miles away from the Hostile Cosmos framework we started with - we remain At The Mountains Of Madness - but the scope is pointed towards 'epic' in ways Alien simply does not attempt. And I will concede, through gritted teeth, that maybe this could have worked had it been conceived in isolation (heh). Perhaps there is some Platonic ideal of this narrative that could actually be made well.

But it wasn't conceived in isolation and the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced it serves as an excellent demonstration for why 'making a prequel' is such a singularly troublesome exercise. Because, look, has anybody ever come out of Alien wondering what happened to the space travellers whose remains the Nostromo crew encounter? Not 'who were they', not 'where they came from', but what happened to them?

This is not a judgement-free zone. If you answered with anything other than 'they got got in a previous iteration of the cycle now killing off the Nostromo's crew', you have failed at the film Alien. I am sounding the extremely loud buzzer and sending you back to the start. Absolutely everything we need to know about the derelict spacecraft depicted in the opening act is conveyed by the rest of the run time. The dead pilot with the exploded chest and the room full of eggs under some kind of protective field exist to signal the events about to unfold upon our hapless gang of working stiffs. It's textbook set-up, leaving no loose ends of any note.

Now before you start hitting the comments, I will direct your attention to my use of the word 'need' in the above paragraph. Within the story Alien, the mystery is the identity and nature of the killer. Watching the reveal of this constitutes the bulk of the horror that follows. There is a secondary question of why Ash goes out of his way to facilitate said horror, which receives the satisfactory answer of 'capitalism', but the initial pseudo-organic gothic rendering of a downed vessel on a storm-stricken world sharing a postcode with Hell exists to make us wonder what is going to come out of those eggs. That's it. That's all it has to do. We can fill in the gaps for ourselves later, the whatdunnit resolving into an equally neat 'probably this tall spindly beasty with teeth inside its teeth and a concerningly Freudian reproductive process.'

It is irrelevant to Alien where the derelict came from, who its crew were or what they were doing prior to having the plot of Alien happen to them. The curtains are that precise shade of HR Giger for the purposes of selling what a bad idea it is to poke around the smoke-filled wet egg room. Strange and mysterious, without being a mystery in the sense of 'something to be solved'.

Sometimes, in fiction, things are obscured because doing so sets the right tone. This is especially true for horror, where getting a full handle on what's happening often serves to lessen the tension. It is absolutely possible to evoke more horror from a full reveal but, crucially, Alien isn't doing that with the derelict. It's doing it only in a limited sense with the creature, which remains obscured and protean until the very final moment. In both cases, what the crew don't know dooms them and we, as the audience, get served a dose of the same via what we are not told.

A fairly simple principle of storytelling, you will no doubt agree, but have you ever stepped back to appreciate that we have an entire sub-category of media serving as a middle-finger to the concept of leaving space intentionally blank? In context of the original text, prequels are almost always unnecessary explanations. This is especially obvious in cases like Prometheus where the explanations are woefully underwhelming. The imagination is certainly sparked by that grim anatomical cathedral with its single, fused-in-place occupant. I do not blame anybody for wild flights of fancy regarding how the derelict worked. This just makes it more galling when the best the original director could come up with to fill in the gaps is a big white bloke in elephantine cosplay. Horror and awe are right out the window within moments of pressing play.

There is, however, a more general issue. Prequels show what was only told as part of the pre-existing story. Nothing in fiction is without intention and where events are merely alluded to, it is because that was judged the most efficient way of conveying certain information. If we are following Luke Skywalker's story, the exact details of how his dad wound up as the galaxy's grumpiest iron-lung user are far less important than the impact of the reveal. We are given all we need to get the most out of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (ditto on the original 1977 explanation and Star Wars).

I am tempted by the maximal conclusion that there is therefore no point in prequels because they do in hours what it took the original mere moments. However, enjoying a good tragedy as I do, I should soften this to the more generous version: if you're going to attempt a prequel, you have to be making a point beyond retreading the existing information and, further, you must avoid devaluing it.

In George Lucas' defence, he did make a stab at the first part. The Star Wars prequels are a deeply clumsy reflection on the collapse of illusions about American democracy, but they are making an attempt.

Meanwhile Ridley Scott positions the derelict pilot as part of a species of precursor aliens who hybridise with the outcome of bio-weapon experiments to create the monster from the original film. Prometheus is a Rube-Goldburg machine for recapitulating the imagery that permanently scarred sci-fi in 1979 and nothing more. The whole Chariots of the Gods thing? A pretentious crutch serving only to dilute the reproductive horror, abstracting visceral physicality to civilisational concerns. The systemic inhumanity of a corporate structure? Eh, it's all this old geezer's fault, or possibly just the fact that robots don't have souls. That uncomfortable thread of rape and forced birth inflicted on a male character to throw into sharp relief all kinds of facets of the real world? Don't worry we do it to the heroine this time, in a series of beats I would consider extremely offensive if they weren't delivered with such drastic incompetence.

(The emergency c-section scene was about the only point I deliberately looked away because despite loving Alien, I am very squeamish about gore. This is not remotely a point for Prometheus.)

It starts with curtains, with wallpaper, with visuals that serve a particular plot and tell a particular story but do not have meaningful existence beyond what they add to Alien. To this it tries to add a new mythology, a meta-story within which the previous film can be repositioned. We are expected to imagine a network of Engineer experiments going wrong, a string of consequences spawning from David's tampering, a line leading from one unnamed planet to another, scientific vials prefiguring a nightmare hatchery. All this time and effort spent answering a question that was not a question in the first place.

The derelict's crew died because of the lifeform that sprang from the eggs, a remorseless predatory shape that infests and reproduces and removes any other being in its proximity, and maybe they found a solution, deep down in their ship, but along comes human curiosity and corporate greed and off we go again.

There is no deeper horror in being told the alien is a bioweapon of the kind Ripley speculated the company was interested in harvesting from it. I'd say there's less, since if it's artificial, that cuts against the idea there are some places in the universe where we are simply not meant to exist. Yes, I too love doing the fannish thing of collating details from a work and stringing them together into coherence. I'm all for making patterns out of oddly cast shadows. Yet there's a time and a place and when done at scale, it often ends in projects that miss the point.

In the middle of watching Prometheus (I did it in two sessions for practical reasons), I read this interview with Shuko Murase regarding his work on the Gundam Hathaway films. In it, he is asked about something he was told by original Gundam director Yoshiyuki Tomino: “Don’t make this about Newtype, make this about youth.” Murase's reply is as follows:

But, I feel that director Tomino has changed over the years. He had written the Hathaway novels quite a while before. I don’t want to sound disrespectful, so I say this most humbly, but I feel that he may have forgotten a little bit about the plot. When I, myself read the novel… I think that deep down that’s what he wished for, to have a story about Newtypes. But when I read it, it was all about Newtypes. If I removed everything about Newtypes from the story, it wouldn’t come together the way it does it the novel. To give a literal example, we have the scene between Gigi (Andalucia) and Hathaway in front of the pool at the hotel where they just briefly contact, and all of this information gets exchanged.

Reading this, I near shouted at the screen. Because the whole Newtype concept in the original Gundam series functions as a metaphor for the youth in a society. New ways of being, new ways of seeing, new ways of connecting with one another, all contrasted against the entrenched culture of the generation that controls the world and crushes its children into conformity. A lot about Gundam simply does not make sense if you can't make the mental substitution of Newtype = youth.

What Tomino was saying, it seems to me, is that the story has to be about youth, because Newtypes are not a real thing worth discussing beyond their metaphorical function (I would back this read up by pointing out that Tomino himself moved away from Newtypes while continuing to centre generational conflict). Asserting contra this that the story is really about Newtypes is to mistake the figure of speech for the content of what it represents.

Prometheus stems from the exact same sort of displacement. A confusion of artistry for theme. Of scene-setting for narrative. Rather than following up on anything Alien was talking about - on any of particular horrors that film explores - we have a story presenting itself as an explanation for the appearance of the monster. The very last shot of Prometheus sees the emergence of a proto-Alien. Not quite yet the 'xenomorph' we are familiar with, still a recognisable step in that direction.

But only in its aesthetics.

We have a little over two hours of faffing around to produce a visual effect that looks like an early sketch of the final monster costume from Alien and what does that add? What in this is worth losing the dread of the unknown, those vast, incomprehensible spaces deliberately left wide open in the original text?

It's capitalism again, trying to squeeze more dregs out of something that has been profitable in the past and must be again in the future, in perpetuity. Yet on the other hand, I find it fascinating how much prequel production logic tracks with the fannish impulse towards obsessive over-analysis. Both impute maximum information into background detail, spinning tales based upon a combination of the role those details perform and what ideas they spark in the mind of the viewer. Knowing the derelict came to be via a previous iteration of the Alien cycle becomes a springboard, a starting point for wild speculation, and with that comes the risk of misplaced importance. It's a hazard of being a fan of anything that one becomes so swept up in mapping out a fictional encyclopaedia, one loses sight of the meat of the original work.

Once we start talking about the crashed spaceship or the Newtype, not the things each of those represented, we are no longer creating for any reason other than the value we have assigned to a media franchise. The set is always dressed that way for a reason. The shade of the draperies is deliberately picked. But this meaning is contextual to the story being told. Pulling the iconography out sheers off its narrative role, its contribution to a constructed atmosphere, and even its very impact. Seeing a version of the derelict ship flying, intact and whole, is not of a piece with revealing it broken on a desolate rock, blasted by time and unknown history. These are never going to be the same thing, no matter the attention paid to visual continuity.

Prometheus reveals where Alien obscures, lingers on the grand sweep of history where the older film holds the focus on human flesh and failure, states brazenly things that were rushed, speculative whispers along the Nostromo's crew. At every turn, we find increasingly less reason to consider these two films in the same breath.

It is of course perfectly possible to tell the audience how a story is going to end with the intent to disturb. There's nothing wrong with doubling back, weaving past, present and future into a single message. But a prequel, as commonly executed, retrofits material that was neither intended nor required, purely for the sake of more. Expansion because there happened to be the illusion of space to expand into.

Even when the fates align and a well-made film emerges, the intent of the original remains a stumbling block. Rogue One is the first two paragraphs of Star Wars' opening crawl combined with the novel idea that the Death Star's fatal flaw was an act of resistance from a man trapped inside the Imperial machinery, and fair's fair - it does a good job of wringing a story out of that. Its underlying ethos however (of wide-scale cooperation between those suffering under the Empire, where no one person is necessarily the hero saving the day and extreme sacrifices are required to keep things going) is at odds with a trilogy of films built around the concept of 'the hero's journey'.

Does it add to Star Wars to reframe it as something other than what it actually is? Does bringing in more diverse characters to die ensuring the success of a super-powered white royalty ameliorate criticism of the original trilogy's focus or merely emphasise it? And if this is the best case we can expect from a prequel . . . then what?

Telling 'the untold story' makes for a dramatic tagline. But more often than not, we were told the story, in brief, in passing, to whatever degree was appropriate at the time, and as part of a larger tale with its own defined goals. The easy criticism has always been that these kinds of projects are thus unnecessary. That they remove the mystique or are poor renderings of grander visions alluded to in the short version.

Reflecting on a very bad case of this phenomenon, I'm left thinking about how it's impossible to retroactively expand on details without disrupting the original work. Even if Prometheus had been its own Platonic ideal, what could it possibly have done that wouldn't have devalued Alien? Horror eked from unpreparedness in face of the unknown and from systemic inhumanity evaporates when the unknowns are clarified and the systems, given a face. To continue enjoying Alien for what it is, what it does, what it says, everything positioned ahead of it by its successor has to be ignored.

The in-fiction explanation is rendered worthless by an unavoidable failure to gel with the out-of-fiction one. 'The curtains are blue because Fred the Precursor got himself killed in this particular way' vs 'The curtains are blue because that's bloody scary.'

Where does this leave us, then? I don't expect I will receive much push-back for saying Prometheus was doomed from the start. Nor is controversial to point out assuming the value of media properties based solely upon their aesthetics only serves the interests of people who want to make money off you.

There is an itch in my mind, however, over how the issues I've described also affect telling stories across multiple eras within the same setting, flashbacks inserted into ongoing series, or even sequels. Is this a matter only concerning a narrow definition of prequels (telling a story we were already told in brief) or does it apply elsewhere? I think the attempted re-contextualisation is key. A prequel may invite us to go back to the original work with new information, trying to redefine how we look at events. But that's not always the case, and when it is, it can achieve better success if the story truly wasn't told to us before.

(I'm thinking of the big retcons to Magneto throughout Chris Claremont's 70s/80s X-Men run, which accompanied major changes in the present rather than simply feeding back into past stories.)

Something to chew on. And hey, I dithered over finishing this long enough for the powers that be to announce Ebenezer, a film so cursed and unnecessary it surely classifies as unintentional performance art.