|
The Divina Commedia, not at the bottom of the world but among the stars. The mining spaceship is named after Conrad, the crew just out of hibernation gulp coffee and grouse about bonuses. A distress signal beckons them to an "almost primordial" moon, where a stowaway makes itself at home in the face and chest of a luckless astronaut (John Hurt), a grisly parody of childbirth sets it loose. From translucent egg to spider-crab to screeching beluga larva to squid-minotaur, just the cycle for these cosmic catacombs. "What are my chances?" "Does not compute." Dan O'Bannon streamlines his own Dark Star, Ridley Scott floods it with mist and strobing lights for the indelible maze of flesh and metal. The creature levels the hierarchy, captain (Tom Skerritt) and navigator (Veronica Cartwright) and mechanics (Yaphet Kotto, Harry Dean Stanton) are equally torn apart. The warrant officer (Sigourney Weaver), as strapping as Juno, is best suited for the system of shocks, meanwhile the corporate android (Ian Holm) marvels at the glistening fiend: "Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility... I admire its purity." (H.R. Giger deserves co-auteur credit indeed.) Kubrick holds formal sway, in the stylistic framework are also Forbidden Planet, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Andromeda Strain. The vessel has vaginal portals along with a computer named "Mother," the lubricated bruiser prowling within would be a phallic figure even without its elongated crown and extending jaws. The utmost solitude and parasitic terror of outer space, "the Company" that contemplates the carnage and sees a potential new weapon, "all other priorities rescinded." Cryogenic slumber in the escape shuttle closes the nightmare, revivied by Cameron, Fincher, Jeunet and Scott himself. "The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand slimy things lived on; and so did I." (Coleridge) Cinematography by Derek Vanlint.
--- Fernando F. Croce |