1960s, Action-Adventure, Fantasy, Scifi, Television

The Man Trap (TV, 1964-66)

Creator: Gene Roddenberry
Directors: Robert Butler / James Goldstone / Marc Daniels
Screenwriters: Gene Roddenberry / Samuel A. Peeples / George Clayton Johnson

By Roderick Heath

As a boy in Texas in the 1920s and ‘30s, Gene Roddenberry was a voracious fan of the sci-fi and pulp storytelling of Edgar Rice Burroughs and E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, stirring the desire to become a writer. After stints as a US Army pilot during World War II and a civilian pilot for Pan Am after, his third crash convinced him to try another profession. He joined the police whilst also pursuing his writing ambitions, blending the two when he landed a job as technical advisor and then writer on the TV show Mr. District Attorney. Roddenberry soon found himself in demand, eventually quitting the cops in 1956 as his career stepped into high gear working on shows including the popular Western series Have Gun – Will Travel, defined by roving heroes and self-contained episodic storylines, and showed equal talent for wheeling and dealing behind the scenes. Some of the quirks of personality and fortune that would define Roddenberry’s professional legacy were already manifesting, particularly frustration in constantly developing and pitching series ideas no-one wanted to produce, and getting sacked from the show Riverboat before even a single episode was made, because of Roddenberry’s fierce objection to the producers’ wish to not feature any black actors on the show despite being set on the Mississippi in the 1860s. On shows he ran or tried to make happen in the early 1960s, Roddenberry met many actors he would later reemploy, including Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, and DeForest Kelley.

Since the mid-‘50s Roddenberry kicked around variations on the idea of a contained ensemble drama set aboard modes of transport, including an ocean liner and an airship, adding increasingly fantastical elements and the idea of a multi-ethnic ensemble. Taking inspiration from models including the 1956 film Forbidden Planet as well as Smith’s Lensman and Skylark series and the spacefaring stories of A.E. Van Vogt, Roddenberry merged his various concepts into the one project, revolving around the exploratory adventures of a starship. He added the idea of a lead character based on C.S. Forester’s omnicompetent naval hero Horatio Hornblower. The name of the starship, Enterprise, allowed Roddenberry to reference both the early swashbuckling days of the US Navy and the awesome modern aircraft carrier that represented Cold War America’s military and technical might. He called the proposed series Star Trek. Roddenberry gained the support of Lucille Ball, a close friend whose Desilu production company urgently needed a successful show, and took it to various network chieftains, pitching it as “Wagon Train in space” to make it seem more familiar. NBC decided to back a pilot, selecting one of Roddenberry’s scripts, “The Menagerie.”

Rechristened “The Cage,” the pilot was shot in late 1964, and sported Roddenberry’s lover and future wife Majel Barrett as the starship’s first officer Number One, and Nimoy as a vaguely satanic-looking alien officer named Spock. Jeffrey Hunter, former acting protégé of John Ford whose career had ironically been stymied after playing Jesus in Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1963), was selected to play the Captain, Christopher Pike. “The Cage” failed to win over executives and test audiences, but unlike so many of Roddenberry’s projects NBC clearly saw potential as they agreed to produce a second pilot, albeit infamously telling Roddenberry to “get rid of the alien with the pointy ears,” and swapping out Hunter’s intense and thoughtful captain for someone with a little more swagger and bravura. For the second pilot the network chose a script Roddenberry had developed with Samuel A. Peeples, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and this time paved the way for the show’s eventual premiere in 1966. Oddly, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” would be the episode screened third: the first broadcast episode proved instead to be “The Man Trap,” written by George Clayton Johnson. The show had many similarities to Irwin Allen’s series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and had a rival in Allen’s next production Lost In Space, which had a more juvenile tone but a similar basis in a spacefaring team encountering character often existing in the blurred zone between sci-fi and outright fantasy. Much like its major rival in TV sci-fi annals, Doctor Who, the show suffered through initial low ratings to surge as a surprising cult hit for the first two years of its three-season run, although the real key to its persistence in pop culture proved to be its popularity in syndication in the 1970s.

“The Cage,” “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and “The Man Trap” therefore all present inception points for the series and varying stages of drafting for its eventual, settled template. “The Man Trap” was probably selected to screen first because of its relatively straightforward monster-on-the-loose plot, and also because it sported Kelley as the ship’s Chief Surgeon, Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy, not yet cast on “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and so orientated viewers to the essential line-up more quickly. “The Cage” was eventually, cleverly repurposed for the show on the two-part storyline with the title of “The Menagerie” restored. “The Cage”’s negative was hacked up for use on the show, and the complete version was thought lost. Roddenberry pieced together the full episode combining the colour footage used in “The Menagerie” and a black-and-white workprint, the form in which I, and others, first saw it on video, before a pristine colour print was later recovered. One irony of this is that I think I’ve seen “The Cage” more than any other Star Trek episode, and it stands very close to being my favourite iteration of the entire property, only rivalled by certain episodes of the various series and movie entries like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). “The Cage” stands somewhere between the divergent tones of the original series and its eventual successor Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-93), but also exists in its own peculiar pocket, a place of surreal delights. The re-emergence of the pilot even did much to set the scene for the reboot represented by The Next Generation, a hint this universe could sustain different modes and resonances.

Many familiar aspects of the show were already in place for “The Cage,” including the Enterprise, the presence of Spock and the general infrastructure of the series’ fictional lore and tech like beaming and phasers, the boldly colourful designs and cinematography, and Alexander Courage’s inimitable theme music. The differences however suggest a whole different version of the show existing in a ghostly parallel dimension to the familiar one. Spock, whilst already invested with his familiar look (although it would be toned down afterwards), isn’t the nerveless rationalist of renown but a rather more youthfully impassioned and demonstrative crewman; the trait of chilly intellectual armour is instead imbued upon Barrett’s Number One. McCoy isn’t yet present, nor is Nichols’ Uhura, James Doohan’s Mr Scott, or George Takei’s Sulu. Indeed, one particularly interesting aspect of “The Cage” is that its emphasis is more on gender diversity than racial, with Pike caught between the diverse potential love interests of Number One, and the younger, more callow Yeoman J.M. Colt (Laurel Goodwin), who would be supplanted in the show proper by Grace Lee Whitney’s rather sexier Yeoman Rand. Roddenberry had also left the door open in his scripts to making Spock and the Chief Surgeon female, although eventually in addition to Nimoy John Hoyt was cast as the doctor, Phillip Boyce.

Star Trek arrived as a summation and condensation of Roddenberry’s eminently commercial yet singular artistic personality, one reason perhaps why it immediately overshadowed everything else he did: some creative people are destined, and doomed, to arrive at one vital crystallisation of their imagination. Roddenberry’s experience whilst still a very young man as a leader responsible for lives had a deep and obvious impact on his storytelling, and sometimes used the show to explore aspects of his experience, like the episode “Court Martial,” which evokes a crash Roddenberry had during the war and its aftermath. Ironically, Roddenberry would be caught constantly trying to reassert his control over the property and confronted by the way the input of other creative minds would sometimes prove to understand the nature of its popularity better than he did himself, most particularly when Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer rescued the film series it birthed in the 1980s. Roddenberry’s thorough steeping in the kinds of character relations and story basics familiar in TV thoroughly permeated Star Trek, in the panoply of ethnic and job title archetypes, the thematic and narrative similarities to the Westerns he’d worked on, and the basics of how the crew of the Enterprise work and live together.

The opening images of “The Man Trap,” the very first glimpse of the Star Trek aesthetic TV audiences would actually see, envisions the planet M-113 as a desolate place scarcely trying to look like something other than a set, with Fauvist skies and soils and Ozymandian ruins. It’s a psychological environment of the kind many a Surrealist painter laboured to describe, plucked out of the collective unconscious. A place at once wild and filled with traces of vanished grandeur. This edge of stylisation, of the dreamlike infusing the very texture of the universe, is one of the original show’s most specific qualities and one sadly missing from its many progeny. Aspects of the signature look had already been mooted in “The Cage” where Pike and Spock discover and ponder strange blue flowers that vibrate with alien music, although the landscape was more prosaic with a grey overcast sky and rocky forms like a stretch of the American desert. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” offered visions of the remote Delta-Vega, an outpost of super-technology resembling an oil refinery grafted onto an alien shore.

The sense of landscape was one area where the show took clear inspiration from Forbidden Planet, which offered similar vistas and the concept of the id made solid and animate. But the emphasis on rugged and far-flung environments was also clearly part of the show’s inheritance from the Western, including John Ford’s iconic use of Monument Valley, a place the show never visited, preferring the more economicaly adjacent Vasquez Rocks. Star Trek hinges upon evoking and inflating to newly fantastical scale the same sense of awed fascination with the raw bones of the American land, the scarps and mesas and jagged geometries of the western deserts, along with the same uneasy mix of celebration in freedom and wealth of space and conflict over the viability of colonialist enterprise, as drove the Western. Often this was interspersed with depictions of deceptively placid Edenic zones where the flowers are beautiful and deadly.

Roddenberry was already beginning to play the subversive games the show would become famous for. Early in “The Cage” Pike explores his general depletion in spirit and mind from years of commanding the Enterprise with the sympathetic Boyce, who’s rather older than McCoy would be and yet less crusty and combative, instead offering a clear-eyed wisdom more like the characters in The Next Generation. Number One’s stern and heady veneer toys with the familiar figure of the eminently meltable iceberg akin to the female scientists seen in ‘50s sci-fi films like Them! (1954) and It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955), but notably the episode doesn’t undercut her as a figure of command, as Number One has to lead the crew after Pike is kidnapped. The pilot was directed by Robert Butler, an ultra-professional TV director who would go on to an odd and sporadic feature career including making movies for Disney like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1970) and Hot Lead and Cold Feet (1978) as well the trashy action-thriller Turbulence (1997). “The Cage” sees the Enterprise, exploring unmapped regions of the galaxy, attracted by a rescue beacon to a desolate planet dubbed Talos. Believing they’re rescuing the crew of the Columbia, a spaceship that vanished years earlier, Pike leads a party down the planet, where they encounter the bedraggled survivors and their makeshift encampment.

Pike meets the strikingly beautiful Vina (Susan Oliver) amongst their number. She leads him away from the camp on the promise of showing him something interesting, only to deliver him into the arms of a race of bulbous-skulled aliens who knock him out with a gas gun and take him down into the earth via an elevator hidden within a mesa. Pike awakens in a cell with a transparent wall, and the Talosians tell him he’s to remain part of their zoo of fascinating specimens. The Talosians have immense gifts of telepathy, able to plant completely convincing illusions in the minds of others: apart from Vina all the survivors prove to be mirages who vanish once Pike is secured. The Talosian who oversees the zoo, The Keeper (body of Meg Wyllie, voice of Malachi Throne), tries to influence Pike into taking Vina as a mate and accepting his fate to breed and produce a race of servile humans who can help the Talosians, who have become incapable of any kind of practical activity, restore their planet. Attempting to rescue Pike, Number One and Spock set up a powerful energy weapon fuelled by the Enterprise’s engines and try to blast open the Talosian gateway, but seem to fail.

Pike is carefully characterised as a captain with a sterner, steelier exterior than his eventual successor, but also quickly reveals to Boyce his sense of guilty responsibility for losing several crewmembers on the barbarian planet Rigel 7 and his recent tendency to pensively contemplate quitting his job and pursuing less demanding and more profitable pursuits. This contradicts the one steady constant of his successor James T. Kirk’s character, his complete and unswaying dedication to his ship: Kirk’s angsts, once explored, would rather tend to revolve around the threat of losing the ship, his authority, and his friendly comrades. The episode hinges around Pike’s sense of purpose and energy being restored by having to fight for his freedom and identity. The Talosians force him to re-experience a battle he had on Rigel 7 with a hulking warrior, the Kaylar (Michael Dugan), but this time in defence of Vina, outfitted as a classical damsel in distress. Pike eventually grasps a contradiction, that base and primitive emotions like murderous rage can stymie the Talosians’ psychic powers, and fosters them in himself whilst aware this means stripping away his own civilised veneer. “The Cage,” “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and “The Man Trap” all share distinct fixations and story elements, particularly with psychic powers and chameleonic, reality-destabilising talents. Dualism and the dangers of deceptive appearances would become obsessive themes for the show, and a great deal of its genre-specific ingenuity would be expended in finding new angles to explore them.

This also connects to an aspect the Star Trek franchise has long been running away from with a guilty smirk, the pleasurably dirty secret of the original show, as an artwork preoccupied by and deeply riddled with sexuality. Down to its curvy-pointy designs and title fonts, this pervasive erotic suggestion was part of its essential texture as a drama aimed at the protean zone between the theoretical and the psychological. The way Spock was amalgamated with Number One gives a faint credence and explanation for the oft-fetishised erotic arc many viewers often felt existed between Kirk and Spock. In “The Cage” the subtext is scarcely buried, as the Talosians overtly try to appeal to Pike’s libido by reconstructing Vina in various fantasy scenarios as different kinds of woman, from lady fair to be protected, partner in an idyllic Earth marriage, and as a green-skinned dancing girl of the notoriously lusty Orion peoples, performing for Pike in his own private harem. Vina plays along with such manipulations for motives that only become clear at the episode’s end. These scenarios are all drawn from Pike’s experiences or the fantasies and potential lives he confesses to Boyce in their early conversation. Again, “The Cage” delves further and more boldly into such conceptual conceits, offering a plotline that’s also in part a witty meditation on Roddenberry’s lot as a TV maker, sketching scenarios in hunting for appeal to the audience’s needs and desires, the correct balance of elements needed to persuade and enthral. “Almost like secret dreams a bored space captain might have,” one of Pike’s illusory guests in his harem notes, making explicit the idea we’re seeing common idyllic fancies made flesh.

“The Cage” also deploys the prototypical metatextual and mythopoeic storytelling that would permeate the show, with its myriad references to classical mythology and Shakespearean drama, and the constant games with the characters’ sense of their essential natures and their perceptions of reality in a way that also allowed the actors playing the parts to explore other aspects of their talents. At its best Star Trek seemed to genuinely seek to pattern itself after classical mythology as functioning at once as rigorous storytelling with a hard and immediate sense of form and function, whilst also operating on a level of parable and symbolism, incorporating a dreamlike sense of alien worlds and bodies as charged with qualities the viewer knows and feels with a strange new lustre. This approach would, in the series’ lesser episodes, manifest in a succession of corny political parables (“The Omega Glory”) or clumsily revised myths (“Elaan of Troyius”). “The Cage” also marked the first of many allusions to Plato’s parable of the cave, in regards to the limitations of knowing reality through the senses, and the motives who those who might manipulate others through this disparity. True to the subsequent show’s fame for incorporating social critique, there’s also an implicit self-critical note for Roddenberry and television in general, in the way the Talosians’ basic aim is to make Pike sit still and consume fantasy in order to make it easier to manipulate him into doing the bidding of and fulfilling the needs of controlling masters. Seeds for darker and more explicit variations on such a theme, like John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) and the Wachowskis’ The Matrix (1999). With the added sting that the Talosians themselves have become addled consumers of the fantasies they generate, cut off from action just as surely as their captives.

“The Cage” reaches its climax as the Talosians forcibly beam down Number One and Yeoman Colt and present them as alternative mates so Pike can take his pick. The Keeper notes their divergent qualities and potentials like a particularly dry car salesman whilst also simply forcing Pike to recognise the way his mind has, consciously or not, always cast a sexually assessing eye over his female crewmembers, and vice versa. This move by the Talosians proves their downfall however, as the women were brought down with their phasers, and whilst these seemed to do no damage the Keeper tries to retrieve the discarded weapons. This gives Pike a chance to take him captive, and he threatens to throttle him if he doesn’t release them. The dispelling of imposed illusion allows the captives to see the actual, devastating damage their weaponry made upon the Talosian infrastructure. But Pike is also forced to see Vina in her true physical state: terribly injured when the Columbia crashed, she was rescued and repaired by the Talosians but at the time they had no understanding of what a human should look like, leaving her a twisted and haggard travesty, and only the Talosians’ abilities to conceal this gave her any chance of finding companionship. This forlorn punchline is amplified by the Talosians themselves, recognising that with the humans proving too intransigent to serve, they’ve lost their last chance to save their species. The episode does leave off with a grace note as the Talosians recreate Pike in illusory form to give Vina company.

The revised version of the storyline seen in “The Menagerie” offered the events of “The Cage” as a flashback set 13 years in the past, with a different actor cast as the now-disfigured and paralysed Pike for the present-tense scenes. “The Menagerie” had Spock commit mutiny for the sake of honouring his old commander, taking him to Talos so he can live with Vina and believe himself restored to his unbroken self, a surprisingly clever bit of repurposing even if it dispelled much of “The Cage”’s surreal intensity. The image of Vina as the Orion dancing girl became one of show’s most iconic images, often featured in the end credits of episodes, encapsulating the show’s mystique on many levels. For the second pilot shot nearly a year after “The Cage,” Roddenberry had to find a new lead as Hunter had dropped out. Eventually, the Canadian former Stratford Festival alumnus turned minor Hollywood star William Shatner was cast as Captain James Kirk, whose middle initial, glimpsed upon a conjured tombstone, is given in the episode as R. rather than the eventual T. Far from being introduced at a low point or riven with doubts and guilt like Pike, Kirk arrives as the starship captain entering his prime, confident, quick in mind and body, the perfect man of action who’s also the rare man of intellectual poise. Other essential roles and performers were added, including singer and actress Nichols as Uhura, the communications officer, James Doohan as chief engineer Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott, and George Takei as Sulu, initially a science officer but later recast as the ship’s helmsman.

“Where No Man Has Gone Before” and other early series episodes revolve most fixatedly upon Shatner as Kirk, dominating the rest of the cast. Eventually the essential relationship of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy would form, with Spock representing reason and McCoy instinctive humanism, and Kirk constantly trying to balance the two. This shift was informed in part by the impact made upon the showrunners by the way many female viewers surprised them by preferring Spock as the alluringly cool and thoughtful heartthrob, a conspicous contrast to the type of James Bond-inspired man’s man so common in pop culture at the time, although the potential appeal of Spock was already plainly in the show’s thoughts in the earliest episodes. A certain caricature of Kirk has emerged in popular lore as a brash and chauvinistic he-man, pushed hard by J.J. Abrams’ 2009 cinematic reboot. The caricature sadly excises Kirk’s other, more vital and nuanced traits, and even his image as a womaniser neglects the edge of frustration and pathos, even tragedy that so often attached to his romances. To be fair, Kirk as a character often suffered from the way the show would make him into whatever any given episode’s writer needed, sometimes presenting a nuanced philosopher-king and at other times a reactionary cold warrior. Eventually some of the later films, particularly when Nicholas Meyer was writing him in The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), would unify his facets successfully.

Shatner’s presence as Kirk also represented a compromise between Roddenberry and network executives as to just what the hero of the show should be, schism written into his very being. For the time being Shatner had to impose unity upon the character, developing Kirk’s edge of almost self-mocking humour alongside his edge of hard will and imperious ego, mercurial wit of mind and body invested in his signature, wryly challenging smile, signalling his refusal to take things too seriously, a mechanism that allows him to function in situations that might crush others. Shatner matched his voluble physicality to his inimitable speaking style with its elastic, often sprinting cadences and juddering emphases, to describe the way Kirk has mastered the difficult art of making his masculine vigour and the racing motor of his intellect work in concert. In “Where No Man Has Gone Before” he’s contrasted by a similar type, Gary Lockwood’s Gary Mitchell, serving as the Enterprise’s helmsman. Their eventual conflict has an aspect of doppelgangers clashing, Mitchell symbolising what might result if the side of Kirk that allows him to function as a commander, his sense of innate exceptionalism in authority, was ever encouraged to overwhelm the rest of his character. And, by extension, delivering the same lesson to the audience, all presumed to see themselves to some degree or other in Kirk.

Despite his frequent frustration with Shatner’s Kirk, the character certainly engaged Roddenberry’s pervasive interest in what made for an ideal leader figure, a notion he must surely have been contemplating since being pushed into such a role as a young man and then serving in institutions tasked with service and discipline, making friction against the side of his personality concerned with humanitarian and egalitarian ideals. The show managed to offer reflection on the conceptual tension in the episode “The Galileo Seven” where Spock, obliged to take command when he and other crew crash land on a strange planet, finds himself bewildered when he does everything right according to his sense of logic and expedience only to find the other crew detest him for his tone-deafness to their emotions, whereas they trust Kirk implicitly. In the same way, Kirk was required to help get the audience invested however much he cut against the grain of Roddenberry’s ideals. The bulk of representatives of the Federation and Starfleet hierarchies apart from the Enterprise crew are portrayed as pompous and oblivious blowhards through the original series, shading the show’s mythologised utopian streak in a manner that might well have been informed by Roddenberry’s personal observations about rank, as well reflecting Roddenberry and team’s stormy relationship with their often aggressively bemused network bosses.

“Where No Man Has Gone Before” counters Butler’s stark and dreamy approach with more forceful and flashy handling from James Goldstone, who go on to have a feature film-directing career dotted with some underregarded movies like Winning (1969) and Rollercoaster (1977), and strong guest star support from Lockwood and Sally Kellerman. The episode’s title proved so keen in describing the essence of the proposed show it was quickly incorporated into Kirk’s opening narration. Despite the crew’s nominal assignment on a five year exploratory mission to “strange new worlds” and seek out “new life and new civilizations,” the Enterprise would nonetheless often be found performing more prosaic tasks in well-travelled areas. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” does at least start with the Enterprise preparing for a daring tilt at the edges of the known, whilst also repeating “The Cage”’s gambit as the ship picks up a signal leading to the wreckage of a long-lost ship, this time the USS Valiant, and recover what proves to be an ejected flight recorder. The first moments of “Where No Man Has Gone Before” offer immediate definition of Kirk and Spock’s divergent yet magnetised personalities as they’re glimpsed playing three-dimensional chess, kicking off a running joke in the show where Kirk always beats Spock at the game despite the latter’s vast intellectual prowess, through Kirk’s illogical tactical genius. Joining them on the bridge as an alert is called are the Chief Surgeon Dr Mark Piper (Paul Fix) and shipboard Psychiatrist Dr Elizabeth Dehner (Kellerman).

Spock delves into the recovered record of the Valiant’s end and through garbled passages discerns the ship was driven beyond the galaxy’s edge. There it struck a powerful energy field that killed several crew and left one strangely affected. The Valiant’s ultimate destruction seems linked to enigmatic requests for information about ESP abilities the Captain made to the ship’s computer, before the Captain made the ship self-destruct. Deciding to trace the Valiant’s path in the hope of finding more wreckage, they encounter the same energy field at the galactic frontier. The barrier almost fries the Enterprise and Mitchell and Dehner are both struck down by shocks, seemingly correlated with the degree of latent ESP ability both have been measured in, with Mitchell the most affected, left with a bizarre silver glaze over his eyes. Taken to the sick bay and watched over by Piper, Mitchell seems otherwise unharmed and reveals rapidly growing psychic abilities, allowing him to consume the ship’s computer files at speed and revealing telekinetic power too. Eventually it becomes clear Mitchell is evolving into something very powerful and dangerous, and in a desperate attempt to keep him from taking over or destroying the ship Kirk spirits him to Delta-Vega, a planet supporting an automated lithium refinery, to maroon him. Dehner also develops the silver eyes and incredible power, and aids Mitchell in freeing himself.

“Where No Man Has Gone Before” mediates the tones of “The Cage” and the settled show: Shatner-as-Kirk retains some of Pike’s restraint and pensiveness, although by the episode’s end he’s more thoroughly and specifically designated as an action hero. Where “The Cage” allowed Pike to be identified in a sardonic manner with tiger-in-a-cage intensity and thwarted strength, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” sees Kirk taking on the nascent superman in a fistfight regardless of the long odds. Spock is now firmly defined by his devotion to logic, but not yet stoic dispassion. The climax, in which Kirk battles Mitchell who’s now powerful enough to refashion pockets of reality, sees the rogue mutant conjure up a grave for Kirk complete with carved tombstone, a semi-surreal touch of a brand the show would regularly invoke, in a universe filled with incongruous sights in far-flung surrounds. The weird sexuality likewise is contoured into the direct flow of plot. Mitchell and Dehner, initially defined by gendered polarity – he’s aggressively flirtatious, she’s haughty and heady so Mitchell dismisses Dehner as a “walking freezer unit” – are soon united in new, exceptional identity, their glazed silver eyes signifying a perverse bond in their post-human state. That bond is ultimately ruptured when Kirk makes desperate appeal to Dehner as he battles Mitchell: Dehner aids him in attacking Mitchell and briefly nullifying his powers, at the cost of her own life.

“Where No Man Has Gone Before” maintains a muscular, cinematic force and it’s easy to see why it, rather than “The Cage”, ultimately provided the right blueprint when it came to getting Star Trek up and running. Though not nearly as layered and intriguing, it fulfils the necessary task of presenting this particular wing of sci-fi dreaming as one defined by potent, active characters and forces representing a dialogue between stolid settlement and wild possibility, fantastical yet familiar-feeling in many basic aspects. Goldstone taps the image of the silver-eyed Mitchell for moments of creepy punctuation, as in a fade-to-black that leaves only the eyes glowing, and when he looks into a security camera and Kirk realises he is looking back at him through the camera. Mitchell was the perfect antagonist to lay down this blueprint as a normal man stricken with godlike talents, underlining the emotional meaning not only in Kirk having to kill him but in presenting vast new stages of drama through a human-sized conduit.

Lockwood and Kellerman are valuable presences in their one-off roles, clearly a cut above the usual run of TV supporting actor of the day, and Lockwood’s presence gives it an incidental connection to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a film that would take up aspects of Star Trek’s inquisitive reach and push further. Spock would be the singular archetype the show invented rather than augmented for pop culture, but he’s still an evolving and relatively muted figure, perhaps partly because Roddenberry had gone out on a limb to keep him in the series. Nimoy himself was still trying to nail down his characterisation, his voice pitched about a half-octave higher than the inimitable monotonous drawl he would develop. Spock nonetheless is already serving his chief function as the character who offers piercingly unblinkered analysis to Kirk, as when he tells him in no uncertain terms he must either maroon Mitchell or kill him whilst he still can. And yet the very end of the episode sees him admit to Kirk that he too feels a sense of a pathos at Mitchell’s destruction, a first sign that Spock’s surface tension hides undercurrents running deep and fast. Part of the legend of Star Trek revolves around Shatner and Nimoy’s rivalry: supposedly no less a personage than Isaac Asimov advised Roddenberry to overcome Shatner and Nimoy’s ego duels by making their onscreen characters inseparable.

“The Man Trap” iterates a plot the show would return to regularly, most notably in “The Devil on the Dark.” That episode would take the show’s nascent humanist spirit further in presenting the lurking monstrosity as entirely misunderstood, whereas in “The Man Trap” the alien creature is a more straightforward threat, although still voted a degree of sympathy as a forlorn survivor of a decimated species driven by its predatory needs, much like the Talosians. The theme of besiegement by an alien monster in “The Man Trap” echoes Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World (1951), and indeed restores the idea of a shapeshifting monster Nyby and Hawks excised in adapting John W. Campbell’s story. But Roddenberry and his team were trying to philosophically and practically reconcile that film’s propelling contemplation of prudently vigorous militarism in conflict with coldly inquisitive science. As he did for the two pilots and most of the first season, Courage wrote the incidental music, and his spare, sonorous, Bernard Herrmann-like scoring helps invest “The Man Trap” with eerie beauty, although Roddenberry didn’t like it, one of the first signs the show’s wellspring didn’t entirely grasp what made it good.

Appropriate to the plucked-from-the-Id aesthetic, the monster in “The Man Trap” is a sci-fi spin on the incubus/succubus figure, a creature that takes on the appearance of former lovers and friends to entice those it meets, plundering the libidinous and needy backwaters of the heroes’ psyches for its own purposes. Again, like many episodes subsequent, “The Man Trap” establishes the common refrain of exploring the lead characters’ emotional baggage and busy yet always foiled love lives, here most particularly in the case of McCoy, who sees the creature as Nancy (Jeanne Bal), an old flame who married the archaeologist Professor Crater (Alfred Ryder). The Enterprise is performing a routine visit to check up on the couple as they document a long-dead civilisation, and Kirk, McCoy, and a redshirt crewman, Darnell (Michael Zaslow), beam down for that purpose. McCoy sees Nancy as he remembers her, whilst appearing to Kirk as grey-haired and weathered as he less sentimentally expects, and to Darnell as someone else entirely, a sex kitten he met on shore leave. When Darnell goes off with the creature, he vanishes, and his crewmates later find his body, and medical analysis reveals he’s been entirely drained of salt. Other crewmen die in the same manner, and ‘Nancy’ takes on the form of one of her victims, Green (Bruce Watson), in order to be beamed up onto the Enterprise where pickings are plentiful. Uhura sees the creature as a fellow black crewmate who almost gets hold of her.

“The Man Trap” therefore hinges on the same conceit as “The Cage” in externalising the characters’ inner angsts and fantasy lives through the device of role-playing. The note of forlorn emotionalism is amplified as Kirk and Spock eventually uncover the truth, that the real Nancy was killed by the creature years before and the vampire has maintained a sickly symbiotic relationship with Crater. He’s kept it alive with his encampment’s stock of salt whilst it maintains Nancy’s appearance to please him. Crater’s remnant, lingering affection even for the mere semblance of Nancy is given further weight by his awareness as a scientist that the creature is the last survivor of the toppled civilisation he’s been studying, a parasitic monster that’s also pitiful. The creature stirs a similar emotion of heedless protectiveness in McCoy, one that almost prevents him from saving Kirk’s life in the climax as the creature turns on the Captain. “The Man Trap” establishes McCoy as a man so driven by his sense of humanity as a palpable thing that it can sometimes cloud his judgement, to the equal and opposite degree to which Spock would so often strike him as psychopathically detached. Crater and ‘Nancy’’s relationship reaches an inevitable end as the scientist is killed by the increasingly desperate creature, although the episode foils the potential tragic punch by having this occur off-screen.

When Kirk tries to convince McCoy that ‘Nancy’ is using him the creature mesmerises the Captain, Spock tries to intervene, making a brutal assault on the creature which McCoy sees only as violence perpetrated on Nancy until the creature easily swats the Vulcan aside. But McCoy still can’t bring himself to gun down the creature until Kirk starts screaming as the creature begins to drain him. “The Man Trap”’s director Marc Daniels would handle many episodes of the series with concerted energy, including perhaps the most famous episode, “Space Seed,” which would sport the first appearance of Ricardo Montalban’s nefarious supervillain Khan. The most intriguing aspect of these first three efforts at defining Star Trek is observing how much room they left to manoeuvre for the series, dramatically speaking, and the first half of the show’s first season, whilst erratic in quality, offered various characters and relationships to be enlarged upon at leisure. The second screened episode, “Charlie X”, starts with a memorably odd musical sequence in which Uhura improvises a song teasing Spock, as he plucks his Vulcan lyre, for his weirdly enticing and provocative coldness.

Part of Star Trek’s odd afterlife as a series ultimately lies in the way it never quite lived up to such promise, even though even at its silliest and campiest it was never less than highly entertaining. “The Cage” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before” have gravitas and a relative lack of the formulaic aspects that would both define the show in its halcyon days and ultimately retard its growth. One example of this would be the way the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triumvirate became central, resulting in most of the other characters being left sidelined beyond performing their stalwart crew functions. Famous as they rightfully are for offering multicultural role-models, figures like Uhura and Sulu nonetheless finished up largely wasted for great stretches. Meanwhile, despite the show’s seemingly limitless purview, a certain repetitiveness of theme and story set in, particularly once the show’s budget was cut and the scope reduced to battles against intruding forces on the Enterprise, and the episodic format prevented any appropriate sense of the characters evolving along with their universe. This proved the ultimate foil for the original Star Trek, one that finally helped kill it when it should have been entering its prime, but also informed the eventual revival and great success of a franchise. Today, it seems, the world has caught up with what Roddenberry originally offered. The most recent iteration of Star Trek, Discovery, has revisited “The Cage” and a series revolving around Pike, Spock, and Number One and their adventures together has been announced. Now there’s a cosmic irony even Spock might offer a smile for.

2010s, Action-Adventure, Auteurs, Drama, Scifi

Ad Astra (2019)

Director: James Gray
Screenwriters: James Gray, Ethan Gross

By Roderick Heath

Here there be spoilers…

James Gray has remained conspicuously earthbound throughout his career as one of American cinema’s least-appreciated yet consistently lucid and enriching filmmakers, a teller of tales rooted in a world too often crude and exhausting, with flashes of the sublime through the murk blinding as often as they illuminate. Produced by and starring Brad Pitt, wielding a big budget and spectacular special effects, Gray’s seventh feature Ad Astra represents a sharp leap in ambition, and yet it’s also an unmistakeable, remarkably unalloyed extension of his career to date, taking up his most consistent themes and painting them upon his largest canvas yet. Gray’s initial argot, evinced in Little Odessa (1994), The Yards (2000), and We Own The Night (2006), was an updated version of a brand of American film situated on the nexus of film noir and social realist drama, fare like On The Waterfront (1954), Edge of the City (1957), and The Hustler (1961). Such a stage allowed him to at once analyse dynamic processes like immigrant assimilation, upward mobility, and gangster capitalism, in conflict with the internal foils that define the individual person, matters of identity, morality, empathy. With Two Lovers (2008) he turned to a more intimate brand of character drama whilst maintaining his carefully modulated awareness of context, a mode he sustained even whilst shifting to historical settings and broader canvases for The Immigrant (2014) and The Lost City of Z (2016).

As I noted in writing on The Lost City of Z, Gray’s films are, in essence, ghost stories set amongst the living, tales of haunting gripping his protagonists in their desperate struggles to be born anew. Gray’s fascination with characters who find themselves bound to others – family, lovers, collaborators – in voyages into folie-a-deux perversity here takes on a form that’s become borderline obsessive in current American film, even its more fantastical wings, the figure of the lost and taunting father figure. The realistic special effects adventure and science fiction movie has also known something of a boom in recent years, prefigured by the likes of John Sturges’ Marooned (1969) and Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars (2001) and recently expanded by Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity (2013), Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015), and Damien Chazelle’s First Man (2018). The latter film was a biography of Neil Armstrong, the epitome of the cool, calm, collected type prized by organisations like NASA and utterly inimical to a showman like Chazelle. Gray tackles a similar personality in his protagonist, Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), who’s famed in the ranks the NASA-supplanting SpaceCom for the way his heart rate never goes over 80 bpm even in the most adrenalin-provoking straits.

The film’s opening sequence describes such a circumstance in a fearsomely filmed episode of spectacle, as Roy is working on a massive antenna reaching from Earth into the outer atmosphere for easy communications with deep space. A mysterious pulse of energy sweeping in from the void strikes the antenna, wreaking havoc. Amidst a rain of plummeting colleagues and wreckage, Roy manages to flip the switch on the electrical systems, preventing the whole structure from melting down, at the expense of being swept off the antenna’s side. Falling to Earth, Roy has to wait until the atmosphere becomes thick enough to stabilise his tumbling fall and deploy his parachute, trying not to black out. Even when he does succeed in releasing his parachute, debris rips holes in it, sending him into a chaotic spin, but he still manages to land without being badly injured.

After recuperating in hospital, Roy is called to meet with some SpaceCom brass (John Finn, John Ortiz, and LisaGay Hamilton), who admire his grit and ask him to perform a mission on their behalf. Roy’s father, H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), went missing in the outer solar system when he led a pioneering scientific mission, the Lima Project, to search for signs of alien intelligence. Long since presumed dead with the rest of his crew, Clifford has been hailed as one of the great heroes of SpaceCom’s history and the colonising process. But now SpaceCom believe Clifford might in fact still be alive, and pursuing some kind of anti-matter research that’s sending out the energy surges and might, if it destabilises, even annihilate the solar system. SpaceCom commission Roy for a very strictly delineated mission, to travel to Mars, the outermost outpost of colonisation, and broadcast a pre-prepared appeal to Clifford to cease the surges and make contact.

Gray’s version of a spacefaring future has a fascinating tint of the retro to it, as if torn from the pages of a theoretical book predicting space exploration and migration from the late 1950s. Visually, it’s a realistic mishmash of technologies both potential and shop-worn, showroom-fresh and salvaged for expedience. Initially, Roy is offered as the essential square-jawed action man right out of a comic book or pulp tale. The title references the Royal Air Force’s motto, at once evoking the elusively poetic as well as the valiant but narrow pretences of a martial ethos. Roy is deployed by SpaceCom, an organisation Gray amusingly initially presents as a cadre enveloped by a mix of Madison Avenue-like controlled messaging and militaristic caginess. Roy makes the voyage to the moon in the company of his father’s former colleague and friend Thomas Pruitt (Donald Sutherland), albeit one who fell out with Clifford precisely because he wouldn’t follow him to the extremes Clifford aimed for. Gray’s awesome vistas of the moon surface, with the gleaming lights of cities shining out of dark craters, gives way to Roy’s stirred contempt in noting the way the American moonbase has become something like an airport or shopping mall, replete with consumer outlets, with boles of tacky hedonism. Even the flight he and Pruitt arrived on was commercial, charging outrageous prices for petty comforts. This is one of Gray’s canniest notions, suggesting that space habitation won’t ever really take off until the profit motive compels it.

The moon has also become another stage for human fractiousness, with the many countries claiming various sectors of it locked in a perpetual state of quasi-war for the right to mine resources and defend domain. Despite the risks, the local garrison promises to get Roy and Pruitt aboard the interplanetary rocket, the Cepheus, awaiting them on a distant launching pad. As it unfolds, Ad Astra unveils itself as a variation on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its various adaptations. The use of voiceover to penetrate the lead character’s hard shell and ready habits of spouting sanctioned clichés certainly harkens back to Apocalypse Now (1979), although as an assimilation of Conrad Gray’s take feels closer kin to the Ron Winston-directed, Stewart Stern-written’s 1958 TV adaptation for Playhouse 90, which recast the tale as a generational conflict as well as a depiction of cultural collision and malformed hybridisation, making its version of Kurtz the adoptive father of Marlowe and paragon of enlightened, elevated values turned bestial shaman. Such a twist might be said to recast Conrad’s story as more specifically American, a contest between elders ensconced in a citadel of certain faiths contending with a questioning, seeking youth facing a wealth of possibility as well as the pain of impossibility. Gray has explicitly compared the film to a version of Homer’s The Odyssey a common point of mythopoeic reference for all these works, but one told from the point of view of Telemachus, the wandering, searching son.

Certainly Ad Astra plugs into Pitt’s recent, quasi-auteurist fascination with taking on roles that explore the mystique of certain brand of fatherly masculinity, echoing in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011) and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood (2019), trying to grasp at what made the old-school ideal of manhood tick in order to assimilate its might but also excise its sick spots. Pitt, who started off as a long-haired lover boy and despite his very real talent always seemed like an actor cast for his looks first and his ability second, has finally reached a point in his career, rendered just a touch leathery by nascent middle-age, fidgety anxiousness starting to light those cover boy eyes and a sense of weary humour in self-knowledge twisting up that former perma-pout, where his lingering potential is being realised. Gray already touched on Conradian territory with The Lost City of Z but also argued with it as he presented a white, western hero who finds himself constantly nearing but never quite grasping his quasi-religious goal in the jungle. Also like his last film, Ad Astra entails revising that film’s portrait of a son so determined to live up to his father and join his myth that he eventually loses his life with him in a mission to the edge of the known. But Ad Astra is also a film that suggests Gray has a surprising affinity with sci-fi, particularly the precepts of early forays in the genre that sparked its 1950s screen craze, like Irving Pichel’s Destination Moon (1950) and Byron Haskin’s Conquest of Space (1955), both produced by George Pal, as well as Haskin’s later Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964).

Haskin’s efforts to balance a stringent portrayal of what was then the largely still theoretical nature of spaceflight with a questioning, yearning sense of its meaning formed one of the first truly important bodies of work in the genre. Ad Astra can be regarded in many ways as a highly advanced remake of Conquest of Space, enlarging on that film’s detail-obsessed realism with all the arts of modern moviemaking, whilst also assimilating the theme of father-son conflict and madness inspired by confronting the void, and pivoting around key sequences like funerals in space where the eternal and the coldly immediate are both utterly tangible. Like Robinson Crusoe on Mars, it contends with space as an existential trap where the hero(es) contend not just with solitude and survival but with the conceivable limits of existence and their search for a divine presence. In Conquest of Space the father was also a much-heralded hero of space pioneering and his son condemned to dwell in the shadow of his legacy, and finally had to step and in save the day when his father’s seemingly rock-solid psyche gives way as he becomes convinced their journey to Mars is an act of sacrilege. Sci-fi had been on cinema screens since the near-coinciding birth of both forms, but Haskin helped forge a crucial question that’s propelled the genre ever since, certainly influencing sci-fi films as different as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Nicholas Meyer’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), not just in imagery but in a central, overriding impetus, a demand for transcendental meaning in the experience of spacefaring.

Gray obeys the picaresque structure of both The Odyssey and Heart of Darkness, as a succession of events leading Roy from the familiar world to the very fringes of the human sphere, passing through zones of lawlessness, conflict, and collapse along the way to various outposts testifying to a tenuous hold on a universe that might shrug them off. Gray mixes in aspects that retain some of the zest of a pulpier brand of sci-fi whilst twisting it to his own purposes. During Roy and Pruitt’s transportation across the lunar surface to the Cepheus dock, their moon buggy convoy is assaulted by a flotilla of vehicles from a piratical faction, in an action sequence that can be taken as Gray’s take on the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now. It’s also, like that precursor, one of those scenes you know to be an instant classic of the medium even as you’re watching it, through Gray’s depiction of speed and force as experienced from a rigorously controlled viewpoint, concussive impacts and swift, arbitrary destruction conveyed with a woozy blend of immediacy mediated by the strange, fluidic motion of low gravity. Roy’s cool under pressure asserts itself again, taking control of his buggy and managing to elude pursuers finally with a daring leap into the depths of a crater, a breathtaking moment where the vehicle swings in a languorous arc across the vast pit, suspended between past and future, death and survival.

The buggy lands without damage, but when he reaches the launch site Roy is forced to part with Pruitt, as he suffers a heart attack following the battle. Sutherland as Pruitt offers a paternal figure to “hold my hand” as Roy puts it, although Pruitt recalls Clifford calling him a traitor. Pruitt insists that Roy leave him and get on with the mission, passing on to him a thumb drive loaded with information SpaceCom kept from Roy, including videos that suggest that reveal, far from perishing heroically, Clifford turned despotic and suppressed a revolt amongst his crew through violent means, determined to continue research with a cabal of remaining loyalists. When the Cepheus stops to answer a distress signal from a drifting spacecraft against Roy’s initial wishes and instinct, he and the Cepheus’ Captain Tanner (Donnie Keshawarz) cross to the vessel to search for survivors, only for Roy to lose contact with the Captain as they explore the interior, in a sequence that slides steadily towards the truly strange. Roy finally comes across the Captain to find him dead, his faceplate smashed and face gnawed off by a baboon, one of a pair of such animals, desperately hungry and maddened, still alive on the abandoned craft.

Roy manages to kill both animals and gets back to the Cepheus, only for the second-in-command, Stanford (Loren Dean), to freeze up as the ship suffers a power outage during the landing on Mars thanks to another energy surge, once more forcing Roy to assert his steady hand and land the ship. On Mars, Roy encounters Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga), the administrator of the Mars colony who nonetheless doesn’t have sufficient clearance to be present as Roy is pressed into reading SpaceCom’s prewritten pap in a broadcast to his father. On a second attempt, Roy tries a more personal message, tentatively allowed by the controllers, but when they seem to suddenly be alarmed and try to swiftly send Roy back to Earth he realises he got some sort of reply. Helen extracts Roy from the room he’s locked up in and fills in the last piece of the puzzle confirming that Clifford killed many of the people on his mission including Helen’s own parents, in the name of continuing his mission. Determined to confront his father and doubting Stanford’s capacity to fulfil the Cepheus’ mission to stop the anti-matter surges by any means including an atomic bomb, Roy resolves to reboard the ship with Helen’s help.

Ad Astra self-evidently picks up where The Lost City of Z left off, in contending with the idea of exploration and the kinds of people who dare to make leaps into the beyond, tethering the venturesome exterior journey with an internal struggle. But where the previous film voted the explorer empathy in his social rage and visionary drive, Ad Astra counterpoints with the viewpoint of the abandoned and the betrayed. More subtly, it also extends The Immigrant’s confrontation with people on the borders of new experience whilst still mentally trapped within the old. Percy Fawcett’s determination to discover a lost civilisation and make contact with a wondrous populace at once distinct and familiar is here swapped out for the elder McBride’s hunt for alien intelligence, the quest for a confirming and affirming mirror. Gray sees pioneering as an act aimed as much in rebuke to the familiar as it is an expression curiosity about what’s unfamiliar, and as a process rooted in incapacity to live within a quotidian world, but which is always doomed to drag that world in its wake. Roy passes through the corporatized and commercialised moonbase, a scene reminiscent of Fawcett’s arrival at a jungle city with opera and slavery, surveying a zone where what was once charged with infinite mystery and potential has been colonised and subordinated by the more familiar pleasures and evils of the world. Roy notes that his father would’ve despised such a development, a cogent awareness of the debasement but also offloading any requirement to make a judgement of his own onto the moral abacus of the father figure.

Gray’s recurring mental landscapes are a warzone in the clash between identity and aspiration, enacted by people who sign on to repeat the journeys of their mentors and forebears despite many good reasons not to. Little Odessa and We Own The Night dealt with characters for whom the natural gravity of following a family legacy is both the easiest thing in the world to obey and also something his protagonists felt to be abhorred; Two Lovers dealt with the same proposition in terms less of material values but anchored instead in desire. The Immigrant’s climactic image of two people bound by a singular concoction of love and loathing heading in separate routes returns in Ad Astra more emphatically in familiar terms. Out Gray’s characters venture to places where traits of character that allow some to thrive and others to fail are mercilessly exposed, but Gray probes a common presumption in genre entertainment where those who question can’t do and those who do can’t question. Gray achieves something passing unique in recent mainstream cinema with Ad Astra, in creating vivid experiential cinema that’s also about conveying a state of mind rather than stating them rhetorically. The stages of Roy’s journey mimic his own self-reconnaissance, the visuals, at once hyper-clear and struck through a dreamy sense of removal, of mysterious abstraction in the void, and finally of hurt gripping like a vice in a cosmos vast and echoic, at once dwarfing and inimical but also lacking any meaning without eyes to see and minds to know.

As the pivotal figure for a tale of derring-do, Roy is initially opaque, reciting his carefully worked phrases and speeches to get approval from digitised psychological evaluations and operating with the kind of self-control and focus that’s readily mythologised as the ideal tool for government, business, and the military: a man who can do the job and obey exact parameters of behaviour as long as he holds sure the faith that the systems demanding such capacities work with flawless logic. Gray diagnoses Roy’s prized impassivity and coolness as aspects of a carefully erected psychological apparatus to guard against passion, a dam his father’s abandonment and vanishing forced him to build. Gray echoes the thesis essayed long ago in Howard Hawks’ canonical study of old and young American males, Red River (1948), where the old-school tough guy persona was found to be based in closet hysteria, a state of ferocity muzzled rather than controlled. Early in his film Gray notes Roy’s memory of his wife Eve (Liv Tyler) leaving him, a form in the periphery of his awareness, and the process of working his way out towards his father is also in part the process of working his way back to her. Being confronted with evidence that his father was not the paragon both he and SpaceCom needed him to be shakes something loose, and Roy’s hallowed calm shatters.

And yet the process of regaining his emotional reflexes ultimately don’t retard Roy’s daring and cool, where others around him fail and flail, as Gray seeks to analyse the difference between a kind of false stoicism and a more authentic kind. Ad Astra depicts a key part of coping with grief, where emotional reality is not denied but simply existed within, like the contained capsule of air that is a spacesuit. The counterpoint of Roy’s musing voiceover and his immediate experiences are reminiscent of Terrence Malick’s in this regard, although Gray avoids Malick’s more particular approach where his characters’ thoughts winnow out poetical essentials amidst frenetic associations. Faced with evidence of his father’s destructive actions, seemingly rooted in indifference to more paltry human needs, Roy recognises the same pattern of behaviour that has defined him, and he takes it upon himself to enact an oedipal drama on a cosmic stage. The myths Roy has accepted, which prove to have also been propagated by authority in order to retain its sheen of inviolable competence and purview, demand complete reorientation of his identity. Gray here seems to be getting at something absolutely vital about our time, the way spasms of reflexive rage and denial pass through many a body politic the moment foundational myths rooted in an idealised sense of the past and communal identity are interrogated.

Roy meets his essential counterpart and foil in Lantos, who has only been to Earth once, born and living on Mars, a biography that subtly bisects Roy’s path. Lantos is a citizen of the void, orphaned and static: alienation is the literal air she breathes. Lantos extracts Roy from a room where he’s been sequestered with a barrage of calming influences projected on the walls, like being stuck inside an animated ambient music track. Lantos’ gift to Roy is a new sense of vengeful urgency in his mission, compelling him to be the one who goes out to bring his father to account, even as SpaceCom try to bundle him off the mission once he renders proceedings personal. Lantos helps Roy in trying to get back aboard the Cepheus, a self-imposed mission that demands swimming through water-filled tunnels and climbing up through a hatch between the rocket exhausts. Even once aboard Roy finds himself in danger as the crew leap to apprehend him. The crewmembers try to shoot and stab Roy even as he protests he has no malicious intentions, but the jolts of the launching spacecraft in accidents that kill all three crew, leaving Roy alone with three corpses. This sequence, another of Gray’s superlatively executed action scenes, is also a study in the concept of aggressive action as something that works upon itself: SpaceCom, revealed as an organisation that ultimately prizes the appearance of competence and rectitude over the actuality, and its immediate representatives react with mindless aggression the proves self-defeating.

But Roy is also forced to regard the consequences of his own actions, which see him bringing death and mayhem in a manner not really that different from his father, in the single-minded desire to reach a goal without thinking too hard about what it might provoke, his determined aspect like a too-powerful engine amongst other beings who simply drift in existence. Roy’s voyage through space to Neptune sees him almost lose his mind and body in the decay of solitude, before arriving at last at the Lima Project station. Flares of energy radiate from a dish on the hull and Clifford lurks within, king of a drifting tin can where old musicals play on screens amidst floating corpses. Clifford proves haggard and baleful but still utterly lucid and readily confessing to Roy that his obsession entirely displaced any care he had for Roy and his mother, a moment that, amongst other things, extends Gray’s motif of phony speech contending with hard, plain, honest statements throughout the film: although Clifford deals out a cold truth to Roy, at least he respects him enough to offer it. In this part of the film I felt as if Gray’s inspiration was beginning to desert him even as his essential points came into focus. It might have been fascinating if he had taken Conrad’s (and Francis Coppola’s) cue and portrayed the remnants of Clifford’s personality cult engaged in atavistic perversity at the end of the universe in their awe and cringing before a blank vastness, rather than narrowing the experience to a generational confrontation.

Gray’s ultimate point is articulated through Roy as he comprehends his father has experienced the most gruelling loss of faith, sacrificing everything and everyone including himself for a quasi-mystical project that has yielded nothing, manifold planets of infinite variety and beauty mapped but none offering what Clifford was so desperately searching for. “We’re all there is,” Roy sums it up, with both the inference that the kind of bond tethering father to sun across the solar system is worthy in itself, but also making the task of holding onto human life both more precious and also more awful and despair-provoking, knowing what both men know about human nature, and the fragility of its toehold in the universe. As a climactic point, this wrestles with the same problem Haskin foretold in the 1950s as humanity looked out upon the universe and struggled with the loss of old limits. But it also makes a fascinating about-face from the general run of sci-fi, starting with those old Haskin films and progressing through the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and many more, where the religious impulse is sublimated into a more generalised sense of wonder and possibility, as Gray confronts a frontier that provokes despair in many, the probability that we’re alone and have to make do.

The images of Clifford and Roy hitched together in space, Clifford trying to tear loose from his son, inverts the climax of The Martian: the finite tether of human contact strained and broken, as Clifford demands the right to make his own end, obliging Roy to quite literally let go so he can drift off into gorgonized eternity. Roy has to synthesise his own good reason to return to Earth and face the music, summoning the ghostly image of his wife’s face as a reason to defy the void and launch himself through the planet’s rings to get back to the Cepheus, in the last of Gray’s astounding sequences, protecting himself against debris with a piece of panelling stripped to use as a shield. This touch seems in itself a closing of a circle even as it evokes a different Homeric figure, given Pitt played Achilles in 2004’s Troy but never got to wield that character’s civilisation-encapsulating aegis: here at last we get the cosmic hero, defier of fates. If Ad Astra sees Gray underlining himself in ways he’s usually avoided for the sake of trying to put across a film to a mass audience, particularly in some fairly superfluous concluding scenes, it’s still nonetheless a mighty, sparely beautiful, finally gallant attempt from a great filmmaker.

1970s, Action-Adventure, Horror/Eerie, Scifi

Alien (1979)

Director: Ridley Scott
Screenwriters: Dan O’Bannon, David Giler (uncredited), Walter Hill (uncredited), Ronald Shusett (uncredited)

By Roderick Heath

I can imagine opening a newspaper in 1979 and glancing at a review of Alien with its plot recounted in dry ink lines, or perhaps at a poster and beholding the infamous tagline, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” I think one would have been forgiven if the thought didn’t cross your mind that it would one day this film might be considered a major cinematic classic. Even when you know much more about it, the improbability still stands. Sold to prospective studios in script form as “Jaws in space” by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, a pair of young screenwriters who had happily looted the sci-fi B-movies and creature features they had loved as boys, Alien might have seemed something like a garish throwback in abstract, to the days when many a monstrous beast from space went on the loose was all the rage in drive-in fodder. After all, cinematic sci-fi in the late 1960s and ‘70s had generally taken on a more serious cast in keeping with the literary genre, complete with heightened social commentary and philosophical metaphors. Star Wars and Close Encounter of the Third Kind (both 1977) made studios everywhere enthusiastic for the genre for the first time since the ‘50s, however, because suddenly it was making giant piles of cash. O’Bannon had one claim to fame before helping pen the script originally called “Star Beast.” He had co-written, acted in, and helped make the world’s best-known student film, 1974’s Dark Star. But John Carpenter had gained most of the credit for that, leaving the high-strung O’Bannon chagrined and on the hunt for his own success. O’Bannon was particularly taken with the idea of returning to Dark Star’s sub-plot involving a rampaging alien stowaway, visualised in that comic film by a beach ball with talons, and playing this notion straight as a galactic horror movie.

At first the script seemed doomed to finish up as feedstuff for Roger Corman’s low-budget production farm, because its gore and perverse aspects turned off big studios. But as sci-fi properties suddenly turned hot, the duo sold it to producer-director Walter Hill and business partner David Giler, who had Twentieth Century Fox at their backs. Hill and Giler worked the material over, adding major subplots and changing character names. But they retained one notable corollary of the original script – the parts were “unisex,” and could be filled by any actors, male or female. Hill decided not to direct the movie himself, as he was too busy and inexperienced in special effects work. Picking the right filmmaker was the real trick, as they knew the wrong director might play it as schlock, whilst the right one would have to prove equal mastery over both the hard-edged, hi-tech realism and the mysterious, eerie, virtually surrealistic qualities the story offered. They found their man in a 42-year-old former TV commercial director from South Shields at the mouth of the Tyne named Ridley Scott. Scott had gained a reputation for turning simple advertisements into great visual artefacts, and had just made an impression with his Cannes-screened debut film, The Duellists (1977). He grabbed this opportunity with both hands. Scott and his ideas impressed the studio so much Fox doubled his budget. The result, far from being just another creature feature, is today regarded as one of the major works of sci-fi cinema and indeed modern commercial filmmaking.

O’Bannon and Shusett happily acknowledged remixing the futuristic terrors and beauties of It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), Forbidden Planet (1956), This Island Earth (1955), and even the far-flung alien graveyards and body-invading spectres of Mario Bava’s signal sci-fi/horror cross-breed Planet of the Vampires (1966). There was also some similarity to the creatures that menaced their way through the pages of A.E. Van Vogt’s stories “Black Destroyer” and “Moonbeast.” Although not based on an H.P. Lovecraft story, Alien remains perhaps the most effective channelling of Lovecraft’s imaginative palette on film, conjuring a universe of infinite mystery and threat, replete with glimpses of things and places beyond human reference. This is a realm of things that squirm and ooze and move perversely and seem engineered for climes beyond any natural law, glowering with infinite disdain for precious human individualism and acumen. Here there is only the terrible beauty of survival talent and the cold equations of necessity. The purity of Alien as a narrative lies in the way it pits instinct versus intelligence. The self-propagating concept in the title of Scott’s first film is taken immediately to a logical extreme: the duel at the edge of the universe, the essential struggle. Alien as a metaphorical work is in its way as extreme as Solaris (1972) in exploring the essence of humanity through conceiving its opposite, with similar precepts – isolation and a manifestation of the incomprehensibly other. Alien straddles the ever-blurry genre midground with horror by positing a haunted house movie in space mixed with no minor similarity to the slasher movie style that was just gaining real traction thanks to Carpenter’s Halloween, released the year before – a small cast stalked and killed one by one by a roaming killer.

The story is exceptionally simple on the face of it. The spaceship Nostromo, towing a combined bulk ore carrier and refinery through deep space back to Earth, is brought out of hyperspace and rerouted towards a remote and unexplored planetoid, source of a mysterious generated signal presumed to be a distress beacon. Captain Dallas (Tom Skerrit) and his crew, comprising flight officers Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), Kane (John Hurt), and Lambert (Veronica Cartwright), science officer Ash (Ian Holm), and engineers Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), are awoken from their cryogenic sleep. After confusion and some argument, they follow the protocol mandated by the ship’s owner company (unnamed in this film, later dubbed Weyland-Yutani in James Cameron’s sequel Aliens, 1986) and land on the planet. The Nostromo is lightly damaged during landing and Brett and Parker set about fixing it whilst Dallas, Lambert, and Kane venture out onto the stormy, hostile surface of the planet to track down the source of the signal. They come across a ruined spaceship clearly not built by humans, with the fossilised remains of an ancient pilot with a ruptured ribcage still installed in a kind of cockpit, and a collection of seed-like pods in the hull. Kane gets close to one, intrigued by signs of life within, only for the crab-like thing inside to spring out suddenly and burn through the visor of his helmet. The organism clamps itself over his face, holding him in a comatose state whilst keeping him alive. Ripley, acting commander of the ship, refuses to let Dallas and Lambert bring Kane through the airlock for fear of biological contamination, but Ash ignores her and lets them aboard.

The creature (again unnamed here but usually called a “facehugger”) on Kane proves to have deadly acid for blood and is impossible to remove without killing its host, but eventually it falls off by itself and dies. Kane awakens, seemingly fine, but as he and the rest of the crew settle down for a meal, Kane suddenly starts to spasm in agony. Something tears its way out of his chest – the larval stage of new creature that will grow to human size and begin killing or utilising rival life forms. The greatest question before Scott and the filmmaking team was what the title creature should look like. Reputedly, it was O’Bannon who suggested to Scott that he take a look at the artwork of Swiss painter H.R. Giger. Both men fell under the spell of Giger’s painting “Necronomicon IV”, which portrayed a bizarre demonic entity with a tubular head, spiny back, and penile tail. Giger’s disturbing, distorted, perversely eroticised pictures tried to render aspects of the subconscious and the surreal, murky and obscure and protean, and provided a vital catalyst not just for the alien’s design but for the aesthetic of the film as a whole.

Alien certainly belongs to both the sci-fi and horror genres, rooted in the solid conceptualism of the former but using it to annex the id-shaped atmosphere of the latter. If the film had been painstakingly created to reflect a certain academic shift in the basic imagery and concerns of genre storytelling it could not have been more precise, as the usually solid Freudian forms of sci-fi – all jutting phallic rockets matched to neo-colonialist visions written on the tabula rasa of space – gives way to a nightmarish zone filled with gaping holes and hideous babies that sprout from a man’s body. In this simple yet ruthlessly clever concept lies the aspect of Alien that instantly announced itself as contemporary, compared to the older genre works that inspired it. The alien monster is no simple, clean beast that stows away and rampages, but as a monster insidious and infesting, predatory and parasitic, instinctual and apparently not interesting in anything more than self-propagation but also possessed of a jarring, baleful brand of intelligence.

This aspect fit into a phase in sci-fi-and horror cinema where anxiety over the human body was becoming a driving concern. David Cronenberg’s early works like Shivers (1975), Rabid (1976), and The Brood (1979) had helped define and polarise this new, queasy style. The alternate title of Shivers, They Came From Within, perfectly reflected this motif, twisting the fear of the alien other expressed in titles of 1950s films like It Came From Outer Space (1953) into a motif of internal disorder and rebellion, evoking both the bodies corporeal and politic. Emerging even before the spectre of the AIDS epidemic, this new unease with disease derived from the strange new anxieties of the modern world, one where suddenly awareness of aspects of human life that had normally not been talked about in the post-Enlightenment age were suddenly common currency, many of them sexual, bound up with a time of rapid revision in understanding of gender and desire (also, notably, the superhero movie made its first real impact around this time with Superman, 1978, providing an antithesis).

Alien announced this style, dubbed “body horror,” in big-budget, mainstream cinema, as Kane is impregnated and torn to shreds by his own nominal progeny. This vision of perverted birth transplanted onto the male body comes after intimations of oral rape. The intensely sexual aspect of this was already encoded in a series of visual evocations and design refrains. The waking of the ship’s crew in the opening scenes is gently birth-like, guided by the ships supercomputer which is called, mischievously, MUTHR. The coddled human creatures nicely cocooned in the Nostromo and tended to by the maternal computer soon offered up as fodder for the sustenance of a creation that faintly resembles a human but also swiftly grows to blend into the interior of the Nostromo itself, with limbs and skin resembling the tubes and conduits and metal forms of an industrial zone. The human, soft flesh, red blood, is at the mercy of a thing that seems both monster and machine, something that evolves too quickly to be contained and too aptly to be positioned anywhere but at the top of the food chain.

Sci-fi had generally been a realm of gleaming newness and minimalist chic ever since Things to Come (1936) posited the future as a gigantic shopping mall with a slight Bauhaus edge. This presumption often (though not always) went unchallenged in sci-fi cinema until Star Wars intrigued and impressed genre creators with its “lived-in” vision of a futuristic age (albeit past) that looked functional, busy, often banged-up and dirty. The script for Alien envisioned a future of space travel that has devolved into something much more familiar than cosmic swashbuckling, one where working stiffs ride the highways of deep space hauling around loads of resources, worrying about pay and bills and getting home to loved-ones. This was taken up not just as a background detail but an entire holistic mission by Scott and his designers. Surely Scott’s background, his intimate familiarity with the reverse face of the age of industry and technology, told him something different about what a spacefaring future might look and sound like, gleaned from a youth staring out at the ships on the Tyne and the decaying industrial landscape of England’s midlands, sights that told him how little some spacefaring future was likely to look like the brochures. Aspects of Alien’s look retain the sleek and clean aesthetic of high futurism – the womb-like confines of the stasis pod room and MUTHR’s control room. But these abut the factory-like interiors of the rest of the ship, grimy, functional, and cluttered. The alien planetoid itself – once again dubbed LV-426 in Aliens but left nameless here – is a place straight out of the dark places of the psyche, with its roiling volcanic forms. The horseshoe-shaped space wreck is perched atop a peak like Dracula’s castle gone Analog Magazine, with an interior that is a polymorphous zone of strangeness. Such contrasted landscapes chart both the psychic and physical realities of contrasting life forms.

O’Bannon’s collaboration with Carpenter on Dark Star had envisioned men on a mission wandering listlessly through space destroying rogue planets in a deadpan satire on the Domino theory, with its main characters so bored and alienated they’ve swapped personalities several times. It made for a sci-fi landscape virtually unheard-of before. Similarly, the humans inhabiting the Nostromo are there purely to ensure the smooth running of the machinery and deliver the load of processed ore to Earth, casually observed, highly ordinary people. Even Ripley, eventually to be canonised as one of the great action heroes, is here just a woman with a slight edge of competence, intuition, and coolness under pressure that lets her survive where all her fellows eventually fall. One common concern of the diverse filmmakers involved in creating Alien, particularly Scott and O’Bannon, was this awareness of social and class conflict and also the individuals perpetrating such schisms. Dallas as captain (and the most Dark Star-esque character) knows his job and can do it virtually in his sleep, preferring to bliss out alone with some classical music and escape the bolshy niggling of Parker and Brett and Ripley’s by-the-book sternness. Of course, that streak had the potential to save the whole situation, as her refusal to let Kane and the facehugger aboard is correct both according to the book and instinct, if not sheer reactive empathy. Ripley is first really defined by this act, an attitude of caution that seems unfeeling whereas Ash does the “humane” thing, although it will eventually be revealed that he’s not only obeying the company’s agenda but is also a more literal tool of a distant but still consequential power, as an android posing as human.

Ripley’s adherence to principle as well as rules and Ash’s actions in countermanding her seems at first merely a moment of tension in outlook and a road-bump in the chain of command on an already lackadaisical hierarchy – Ripley confronts Ash over the point and pushes Dallas for action but he simply wants to go home and avoid more headaches. But it proves instead the pivotal action that unleashes disaster, and Ripley’s cold act is proven the wise one. This aspect, the human capacity to act both rationally and instinctually according to given situations, is pointedly contrasted with what Ash celebrates it for, its “purity” as a creature of raw survivalist nerve and shark-like purpose that sustains its life cycle through other creatures, a form of exploitation equated with the business of business that motivates all that befalls the Nostromo. The crew themselves are defined by their mixture of camaraderie and interpersonal tension, and also by their varying levels of interest and complicity in that system, from Dallas, the man in charge who’s all too aware how little power he really has, to Parker and Brett constantly bringing the “bonus situation,” their own concerns purely mercenary, a mode of realistic cynicism adapted neatly to the exigencies of a job that demands spending years in forced sleep drifting through the ether. Alien is littered with sharp vignettes, like Parker insistently stealing back “his” chair and brushing it off after Ash has occupied it, Brett’s half-interested parroting of Parker (“Right.”), and Ripley telling them both to fuck off as they try to jerk her around as member of the superior flight crew. The film’s pivotal, immortal sequence when the crew settle down for dinner with the revived, apparently well Kane is a rare moment when the crew are all relaxed, happy, and on level ground, a seeming resumption of normality shot through with relief that gives way to epic horror and tragedy.

Alien’s defining quality is rooted not simply in its thrills or its imaginative palette, but in its slow, patient, nerveless storytelling, so different from the mad rush of images in much contemporary filmmaking. Scott’s return to this fount, Prometheus (2011), although fine in and of itself, was disappointing for those of us hoping for a stylistic rather than thematic extension, a project revelling in the creation of miasmic atmosphere and slow-ratcheting dread. The normally propulsive Cameron honoured the model with his follow-up in its deceptive blend of quiet and intensity with Aliens before hitting the gas. The opening shot of Alien, a slow, abyssal scan of the dark planetoid silhouetted against the rays of its sun, with barely audible music and the slowly compositing title of the film across the width of screen, immediately roots what follows in a mode of interstellar gothic. There’s a powerful echo of William Blake’s “The Ancient of Days Setting a Compass to the Earth” in its image of a dark sun and the evocation of cosmic powers gathering, as Scott primes the viewer for a dive into an age where the dark, satanic mills and apocalyptic dragons of Blakeian verse have become universal state (and Blakeian ideas and images recur constantly through many of Scott’s subsequent films).

This gives way to the Nostromo making its way through space, and much is made, in a manner reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968; doubtlessly deliberate as per Scott’s avowed Kubrickian fetish), of the sheer mechanical intricacy of the ship’s efforts to get from space onto the planet, at once ungainly and majestic. Jerry Goldsmith’s seafarer scoring reinforces the way this moment seems at once a super-technological event and a throwback to a days of laborious transport on the whims of the wind and tide. Goldsmith’s scoring, which was subject to conflicts with both Scott and the studio, is nonetheless one of the film’s less-appreciated achievements, defining the eerie, sonorous mood at the outset before swelling to offer overtones of not just menace but also elegy, even romanticism, as these far-out labourers find themselves cast however incidentally as pioneers and adventurers. His music rises to crescendo during the attack on Lambert and Parker where the dramatic furore of the scoring offsets the almost languid, slow-motion quality of the horror, this death-dance where you can do nothing but watch as a grotesque hell-beast sizes you up and prepares to lunch on your brain. And then, no music at all – only the sounds of unimaginable terror, piped through to Ripley as she rushes to a rescue that only come too late. All of it, a master class in the use of film’s sonic textures as well as visual.

The film’s opening minutes, similarly, say much about what can be done even when nothing is happening. Tracking shots through the ship’s interior, resolving eventually on the forms of the crew in perfect stasis, computers clicking to life before humans, toy baubles bobbing up and down according to the thrum of the constant engines: Scott evokes presence by absence, the eerie chill of a haunted house, the crew already dead but not yet knowing it. The ship’s name of course was taken from Joseph Conrad’s novel, a tale of an ordinary but great man ruined by greed, and a step removed from the heart of darkness. The hunt for the creature commences after its gruesome birth, with the crew at first assuming they’re only dealing with a small, nasty vermin. But soon Brett, assigned to track down the ship’s cat and mascot Jones, encounters the alien, having grown into a gangly, man-sized monstrosity that rips his forehead open with a recessed, springing jaw.

Dallas ventures into the ship’s air duct system to track it down, only to be outwitted and attacked, his fate ambiguous (in the later director’s cut, revealed to have been cocooned alive as a meal or host body for another alien). Brett’s ill-fated hunt for Jones and its jolting climax makes for one of the film’s best scenes, in part because of Stanton’s shambling, ineffably hangdog refusal to act like he’s in a horror movie, perfectly depicting a man worn comically ragged by a lifetime of bullshit work suddenly reaching its end in a way no-one could ever see coming, seen as a series of eliding yet hideously suggestive glimpses of obscene creation and violence. Scott uses his search as an excuse to shoot the Nostromo’s darkest reaches with its filth and dripping water in a way that evokes the feeling of such an environment not just as a tactile space but a way of life and a working world that somehow also spills over into the dreamlike. The alien is first glimpsed dangling from some hanging chains and yet the plain sight of it doesn’t register for several viewings precisely because it looks like so much of the mechanical. Dallas’ hunt for the alien is a more traditional horror sequence in which tension is built not just by the carefully utilised claustrophobic space Dallas scrambles about in, but the register of the tracking sensor that shows something zeroing in on him, yet remaining chillingly unseen and elusive until it appears at the least expected moment in one of cinema’s greatest ever pure “boo!” moments.

Ripley is next in command, and is left the one who has to make a call on what to do now, cueing my favourite moment in Weaver’s performance. This scene depicts Ripley, shaken and grieving after two severe shocks but at the same time coolly taking charge, pacifying Parker and registering her disbelief with Ash’s responses, contrasting the increasingly brittle Parker and Lambert and Ash’s inhuman cool. Suspicious of Ash’s reticence with ideas for catching or killing the monster, Ripley consults with MUTHR only to learn the company has instructed that the alien be returned to Earth with the crew considered expendable to this end. Ripley angrily strikes Ash, only for Ash to chase her down and try to murder her, starting to leak not blood from a graze on his head but milky white fluid – the sign he’s actually an android. Although it displeased O’Bannon, Hill and Giler’s decision to introduce Ash as an android was inspired, as it gave the film a jolt of narrative complexity and surprise, as well as one of Scott’s best whisper-to-a-scream sequences, particularly when Ash is revealed, having silently entered the control room and now standing next to Ripley when she’s just read the shocking orders in MUTHR, to tell her that, in spite of the evidence of her eyes and mind, there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of it.

Ash plays a very similar role to HAL 9000 in 2001 as the electronic entity on board who proves nearly as dangerous as any other threat, and he introduces another common conceptual wing of the sci-fi genre alongside space travel and alien life – the artificial human. But where HAL was a proto-consciousness destroyed by its own confusion born of being perched between states of being, there is nothing confused about Ash or his role, as simulacrum contrived to be indistinguishable and as a proxy to carry out dirty work, a sleeper agent representing both the interests of the company and his own fascination for the alien. Scott would of course return to the theme of the cynically created android being in Blade Runner (1982) and push several ideas nascent here to a limit, particularly the question of how moral in the human sense one could expect such a sentient creation to be when given life to by entirely different creative forces. Ash intellectually votes a kind of loyalty to the alien precisely because it’s more like him than the humans around him, with the keynote word of “purity” signifying something both fascistic and atavistic in that loyalty, with the hint that there’s always something machine-like to any lifeform, in compulsion to survive in itself and to reproduce to extend its genome.

The alien is a sophisticated but also utterly simple expression of this essence. Parker and Lambert must stop Ash killing Ripley, with Parker decapitating him with a blow. But the android still deadly, until Lambert finally fries him with an electrified prod. The physicality of this sequence is tremendous, particularly as it serves in part as a repeat-cum-revision of Kane’s earlier demise, echoed in the ripping apart of Ash and the exposure of his vitals, except now the human form is substituted for something else – the company man revealed as unholy chimera of literal milk for blood and circuitry, the strength and wicked concision of the android physique suggested as Ash rips Ripley’s curls from her head, forms his fingers like a vice on Parker’s chest, and tries to choke Ripley with a rolled-up magazine. The image of headless Ash still trying to kill is as vital in its way as the alien itself in depicting the maniacal heart of this tale, animating the essential notion of a universe turned animate and hostile, of creation turned insane. When they briefly revive Ash to glean information from him, his mocking smile and cold humour (“I can’t lie to you about your chances but…you have my sympathies.”) give cold comfort but also a fire to the last three crewmembers. They resolve to abandon the ship and blow it up, ensuring there’s nothing left of the alien to pose a threat, or a boon, to anyone else. The climactic scenes see Alien’s pitiless logic still in play even as everything seems to spiral towards incandescent terminus. Parker and Lambert’s scrambling eagerness to survive creates a racket that attracts their nemesis. Ripley finds herself trapped on the ship she instructed to turn off, the intelligent but insensate MUTHR now calmly counting off minutes to self-destruction regardless of Ripley’s screams for awareness.

Only Ripley is fated to live, to become the emblematic survivor, the eternal neo-Odysseus voyaging home and battling demons of the underworld at every turn. Scott and company had the guts to take up that original notion of O’Bannon and Shusett’s and even take it a step further in a way, making her the film’s pivotal figure without rhetoric or cliché: she became the great archetype of a modern heroine because she simply is. Ripley’s force and character are made apparent long before she has to take up the mantle of command and then the face the axis that will make her either titan or afterthought lunchmeat. To a certain extent this idea wasn’t so radical, particularly as Ripley serves the role of “final girl” already being codified in horror movie terminology. She would become the archetypal warrior mother in Aliens, Boudica with a pulse rifle. Here she’s just another member of the crew, blessed only with a slight advantage in muscle of body, mind, and spirit that allows her to survive.

And even that may be in part due to the alien, as it’s heavily suggested, being canny is enough to use her to so what it can’t—fly the Nostromo’s shuttle away from the dying vessel. Weaver’s performance is both excellent but also less stand-out than the star-driven sequels, as Alien retains something of the Howard Hawks ethic of the ensemble as star, but also because Ripley is becoming, evolving, just as surely as the alien is, switched on by crisis and forced to work every cell in her frame to live. Still Weaver catches the eye at first with the blend of amusement and attitude she turns on Parker and Brett, and comes into focus as she interrogates Ash over his breach of discipline and, later, his seemingly negligent lack of urgency. “You’re still collating?” Ripley asks Ash, with Weaver’s reading at once emotional and beggared and exacting in her refusal to be bullshitted, before announcing a course of action to her fellows that signals both her emotional genuineness and her unfurling strength. It’s the moment Weaver became a movie star and Ripley becomes not just a character but a hero.

The breathless climactic scenes, as the formerly becalmed corridors of the Nostromo become a labyrinth of din and smoke, do graze the edge of impressive but empty hullabaloo on repeat viewings. But the sneakily appended final act is a perfect islet that repeats the film in miniature and punishes anyone who thought defeating such evil it would be so easy. Tough, resilient, almost androgynous Ripley strips down to her panties, suddenly, almost discomfortingly vulnerable, takes a deep breath, and prepares for sleep, only to find she’s trapped with the ultimate boogeyman. Much like Laurie Strode in Halloween Ripley is terrorised into a cupboard and forced into her make-or-break stand there, adapting tools and formulating a quick plan that needs profound courage to pull off and circumstances allow no other end.

The cunning of this sequence lies not just in staging a great twist that the entire film has, in retrospect, been conditioning the viewer for – is it just more quiet and methodical observation, or leading to something? – but in the way it underlines both human and alien as creatures refusing to surrender or abandon their essence. Ripley finds her warrior pith, fusion of dragon killers like St George and Perseus with the princesses they saved, as befitting a modern myth. The incredibly resilient alien still tries to survive in space, trying to find a way back into the shuttle after Ripley blows it out the airlock, still not give up the game until Ripley gives it a roasting with the shuttle engines, blasting it into the void. The last image, of Ripley returned to sleep, is sublime in its sense of circularity, the waking life a nightmare that be must contended with, and sleep the place where everyone is safe.

1900s, French cinema, Scifi, Silent

A Trip to the Moon (1902)

Voyage dans la lune

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Director/Screenwriter/Actor: Georges Méliès

By Roderick Heath

On the 27th of December, 1895, Georges Méliès attended a special event arranged by the inventor brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière. The brothers had recently perfected the machine they called the cinematograph—a creation that combined functions of moving picture camera, processor, and projector—and had been showing off the results around Paris throughout the later weeks of the year. On this night, they invited various showmen and theatrical impresarios to see the results of their labours. The invitees were to be one of the very first movie audiences, and at least one of them would soon become a pioneer of a new art. The Lumières had conflicting aims in the exhibition. They were exposing their creation and hoping to stir interest and publicity, which would help protect it from their many rivals, including Thomas Edison. But they also had avowed high-minded, scientific purpose for their invention on the cusp of dispatching a corps of photographers around the world to shoot documentary footage and exhibit the results. Méliès was an experienced stage illusionist who owned and managed the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, built by that famous magician. Méliès had become a success thanks to his meticulous attention to his theatre’s running and ingenuity in providing its attractions. Like all of the impresarios, he was transfixed by the new mode of communication the Lumières presented, and he jostled with the owner of the Folies Bergère in trying to buy their camera. But the brothers refused all offers.
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Méliès got around this by travelling to London and purchasing another manufacturer’s projecting device, which he adapted into a noisy but working camera, at first directly copying the short films the Lumières had made and showing them in his theatre as a side attraction. Méliès discovered peculiarities in this new tool as he went along, as when his camera jammed whilst shooting a street scene. When filming was restarted, a moment of time had elapsed. When projected, Méliès saw the resulting jump and realised this basic quirk of the invention could be utilised to realise tricks similar to what he worked on stage. What was could suddenly become something else, only in the reality of film. Edison had already pulled a trick like this in one of his movies, but Méliès would make it the basis of a new expressive form. Méliès quickly found popularity with his new obsession far greater than what even his theatrical success could aspire to. He built a film studio in Montreuil, brought over his stock company of players, and began making movies with the verve and industry of someone who knew how to make and stage a show, as well as the quicksilver acumen required to adapt to a new medium. Most of his early works were only a few minutes long, but he tackled every subject he could, from ripped-from-the-headlines dramas like Divers at Work on the Wreck of the Maine (1898) and The Dreyfus Affair (1899), to titillating stag-circuit shorts like After the Ball (1897), and the proto-horror films Le Maison du Diable (1897) and Robbing Cleopatra’s Tomb (1899).
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Méliès’ work provides the bridge between the show business of one age, the theatre of belle époque Paris and the Victorian era stage fantasia, and the oncoming time of cinema. Illusionism was Méliès’ stock in trade, but it wasn’t just his love of theatrical stunts and sleight-of-hand that would influence his drift towards spectacle and the realm of the fantastic. His was a genuine love for and affinity with such fare, particularly what was called the “féerie” on the French stage—pageants and spectacles based in mythic and supernatural tales, imbued with a light and evanescent quality of transformative wonder, safe for young audiences in their colour, but also dusted with delicate, good-natured eroticism. Méliès captured the essence of this style as he began to specialise in stories exploiting his gift for realising fantastic imagery. In 1899 he made the six-minute Cinderella, an extremely straightforward telling of Perrault’s story. This proved so popular it gained him international clout and international legal problems, as the popularity of his works with pirates became increasingly galling. Under the banner of his production company, christened Star Films, Méliès began work on his most ambitious film to date, spending 10,000 francs and taking four months to create a film over fifteen minutes long. This odyssey was Voyage dans la lune, or A Trip to the Moon, inspired by ideas from Jules Verne’s novella of that title and H.G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon, via, perhaps, Jacques Offenbach’s light-hearted operatic spin on Verne.
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Méliès’ work dated quickly in its day, as the fast-moving tides of technology and taste almost resulted in its total loss, swept away just as CD-ROM and VHS have been in the very recent past. After Méliès fell into ruin and obscurity, his rediscovery came when cinema first started looking back over its shoulder at the past. A Trip to the Moon is so familiar as a totem of pop culture inception today that it can seem near to cliché. And yet it’s as tantalisingly strange, witty, and original now as it was a century ago, a broadcast from the very edges of technological memory and modern reference. Of all the things cinema has been and is now, a seed for so much lies within A Trip to the Moon. It’s an experimental work, feeling out the peculiar textures and tricks of this new expressive form recognising no limits, only a basic set of proposed rules and a governing urge. It’s a protosurrealist’s fantasia mapping out the universe as annex of the interior imagination. It’s a pure auteurist relic created by a man who tackled and manipulated every aspect of his burgeoning craft. It’s a work of spectacle driven by special effects and a desire to wow an audience with visual impact. It’s a spry and funny burlesque on the themes of genre fiction and the stuff of official mythology, as well as the new, exciting, more than slightly terrifying concepts of the age of mechanisation and expanding consciousness marking the end of the Victorian era and the onrush of the new century. Sixty-seven years later, humankind would actually pull off the adventure Méliès conjured.
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A Trip to the Moon commences with a gathering of astronomers. The presiding Professor Barbenfouillis (Méliès himself) proposes firing a manned projectile to the moon with a giant gun, much to the excitement and consternation of his fellow scientists. A rival argues with him, plainly decrying his plan as preposterous, an exchange that devolves as Barbenfouillis tosses papers and paraphernalia at his adversary. Others agree to the proposed expedition and the mad-bearded professor shakes hands with them. Like much of the film, this scene seems very simple, with the unmoving camera, the stage-pageant sprawl and mime-show action. And yet it’s stuffed full of allusions, sign-play, and waggish jokes. Méliès depicts not contemporary scientists in the strict, professionalised garb of Victorian science but as medieval alchemists sporting cloaks decorated with celestial objects. Immediately apparent in this vignette is the way sexuality becomes a refrain, and above all show business itself; A Trip to the Moon is a paean to its own evocation of showmanship as a triumphant value. Cute stenographers write down the scientists’ every word, and a line of trim-waisted chorus girls enter to give the senior scientists the gifts of telescopes, which then transform into stools for them to sit on.
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This fillip of visual humour has resonance, suggesting the way wonder is often transmuted into stolid function: these men are used to romanticising whilst sitting on their equipment, and their journey is glimpsed as something of a Quixotic tilt not merely at exploration but at regaining lost youthful pluck. Méliès surely hadn’t read any Freud and yet the phallic note in those telescopes is insistent, and recurs later when the chorus girls are needed to help fire off the gigantic cannon. The opening tableau pictures the scientific realm as a cabalistic enclave with roots in weird esoterica and antisocial elitism, but pointing the way forward with industry and inspiration. Perhaps there’s some hint here of the filmmaker’s cunning in regards to his audience’s understanding of forces rapidly changing their lives, an aspect that complicates the film’s usual characterisation as an epitome of an early twentieth century statement of bold forward-looking. Of course, Méliès is also aware that his very film itself is part of those transformative forces, and the very last shot conflates Méliès’ mastery of his new art and the act of heroic discovery. Barbenfouillis’ sketch on a chalkboard becomes great undertaking, as witnessed in the second and third tableaux, as they have their projectile built and great gun forged. The scientists immediately set about modernising themselves, changing out of antique gear into the clothes of Montgolfier-era gentlemen adventurers. Barbenfouillis and his cabal inspect their brainchild’s realisation in the second tableau, but the savants are out of place in this workaday environment, as one man trips over a tub to the great amusement of the workers.
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If A Trip to the Moon repeatedly envisions scientific endeavour and venture into branch of show business, these scenes carry a hint of Méliès’ respect for the process required to produce anything wonderful, as the painted backdrop behind the projectile recognisably reproduces Méliès’ own studio. But the arts of Victorian metallurgy and industry become mere cardboard and paintwork. A Trip to the Moon revisited ideas Méliès had first explored in his whimsical 1899 work An Astronomer’s Dream, which had similarly envisioned an arcane concept of a skygazer dreaming of star-riding nymphs and a frightening moon with a man’s face that at one point eats the dreamer hero. A Trip to the Moon reordered these touches into a more elaborate edition, with the film’s famous central image quoting but also inverting the vision Méliès had offered three years earlier, as a product of human labour careens into the eye of the man in the moon. A simple inversion of a personal joke, certainly, but also an idea that reflects a changed attitude. Suddenly, humankind is no longer so at the mercy of the universe’s caprices. An Astronomer’s Dream betrays a certain level of anxiety filtered through comedy, a sense of the world just beyond our ken as both enticing and threatening. The promise of A Trip to the Moon has been the key promise of cinematic scifi ever since, that wisdom and applied intelligence might turn threat into triumph. The dreamer has become warrior with the way of things. And yet, of course, the aura of dreamlike plunge and the image of the cosmic feminine remain powerful in A Trip to the Moon.
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Seven years had passed since the first time Méliès saw a motion picture. Cinema was coming together with Promethean fire, and still only a fraction of the distance of the path it would travel. To watch the earliest fragments of moviemaking, the work of Edison, the Lumieres, and the handful of other pioneers in the field, is to stare at the very liminal edge of any sense of the past in motion, and the fleeting illusion of human subjects caught in a moment of life, like some form of spiritualism. How much it would evolve again in the following decade and a half, in terms of the techniques of visual storytelling, shifting from Méliès’ mostly fixed camera to the aggressively mobile and expressive camera of the likes of D.W. Griffith and his generation. Méliès brought a school of illusion from the stage to the screen with the essential presumption that one could be used like the other. To him, the camera was conjuring device and an imaginary audience member in his beloved Théâtre Robert-Houdin beholding the wonders he and his creative team could parade before it. Lack of worry about where the camera was and what it was doing at least freed him to labour on his other effects, as the hand-painted settings and props sprawl across the screen, creating an alternate reality, mysterious, beautiful, protean.
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Whilst the film presents only 17 apparent shots with a resolutely rectilinear perspective, it consists in fact of many more: Méliès’ camera passivity is another, carefully controlled illusion. One irony of passing time is that today with many filmmakers competing to outdo each other in masking their technique in elaborate tracking shots and the like, Méliès’ efforts in creating an illusion of sustained reality from a rigorously direct perspective feels less antiquated on at least this level. We can also see the jumps in Méliès’ sense of the camera by looking back to Cinderella with its cluttered but also simpler mise-en-scène and basic camera tricks just three years before—here the shots tend to stand back further, but are also more cleanly composed and energetically arranged. The vibrancy of the sets also betrays a more confident sense of what the frame could contain, what the eye could handle zapping down at it from the screen. The film’s third tableau, a shot of the astronomers overlooking the enormous undertaking of forging the cannon, is relatively brief but one of the most fascinatingly realised and visually dramatic moments, with Méliès using forced perspective, plumes of steam and smoke, and streams of liquid metal. This is a direct transposition of a vivid passage in Verne’s novel, revealing Méliès as adaptor as well as free improviser. The basic visual presumption here is still theatrical, but the shot betrays an interest in conveying process, the art of construction and the spectacle of industry in itself, that has moved beyond the tableaux style into something more definably cinematic, a seed for the epic style in filmmaking. Méliès’ shifts from shot to shot come with dissolves, embryonic film grammar giving the film the mobility the camera lacks.
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The next three tableaux are the most familiar moments of A Trip to the Moon, indeed some of the most instantly recognisable in cinema history, endlessly excerpted and anthologised as they’ve been. The moon shot project reaches its moment of truth in the midst of public excitement and publicity coup. The scientists climb into their shell and a cohort of chorus girls load it into the great cannon, before a uniformed military officer (François Lallement, one of the Star Films cameramen) signals the gun to be fired. The shell flies through the ether, and the moon, envisioned like an illustration out of a children’s book with man’s face upon its dial beaming beatifically down upon the Earth, receives the interstellar slug right in the eye. These scenes again take Verne’s novel as blueprint, but subject it to a highly satiric attitude. The great business of conquering space is presented not as pure, stoic, Apollonian venture growing out of diverted military force but a carnival of enterprise that mocks martial swagger—the rifle-toting, trumpet-blowing, flag-waving marine entourage are girls who look like a rough draft for Mack Sennett’s bathing beauties (including Méliès’ lover and later wife Jeanne d’Alcy), sending a bunch of old farts to the moon with a gun blast that needs more than a little womanly priming. Méliès’ mischievous take on great nationalist adventures here betrays his background in drawing political cartoons, as well his impresario’s understanding that there is no event so great that can’t be sexed up a bit.
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And, of course, the man in the moon receiving the shell in his eye still blazes with comical and technical genius, one of the greatest sight gags ever to grace celluloid. This sequence utilised Méliès’ technique, pioneered on The Man with the Rubber Head (1902), of approximating what would become the rack or zoom shot (except that the subject was moved closer to the camera rather than the more familiar practice, because the camera was too heavy), to provide a sense of motion. That motion is to give a sense of zeroing in on the moon, which starts off as a vague, mysterious object, charged with enigmatic meaning, then revealed as an animate being who splutters with pain and offence once he gets the iron slug lodged in his brow. Méliès knew well it was a killer image, utilising it as iconography in the film’s last shot and as core advertising motif. Here we seen encapsulated in image and action not just a great piece of humour and a technical innovation, but a pivot of ways of seeing the universe, an idea that legitimises A Trip to the Moon as science fiction and not just playful fantasy. Méliès signals his conversance with a panoply of mythical figures as common motifs in theatrical fancies throughout, and knows his audience is too; the projectile is the hard smack of new scientific possibility right in the eye of a poetic worldview. The idea of landing on the moon is an act of blasphemy according to one unit of values and a simple jaunt to a strange place in another. One irony here is that the filmmaking Méliès was now espousing would soon mostly sweep away the theatrical world he was rooted in, and invent new pantheons of myth to fill in for what he counts as cultural lingua franca. Of course, the tendency of humankind to write its own image on the universe has never really left us. It’s core to understanding some of the most ambitious science fiction films, from 2001: A Space Odyssey’s (1968) depiction of interstellar destiny to Solaris’s (1971) sarcasm towards the notion in encountering the truly alien that can only mimic the onlooker, eternally retarding and frustrating understanding with the collaboration of our most parochial reflexes.
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Méliès offers this vignette as a kind of abstract, symbolic commentary on the idea of landing on the moon, only to follow it up with a different, more literal version of the same thing. The shell actually skids to a halt on the moon surface, depicted realistically as a craggy, brutal landscape, if also, not so realistically, as a place with a breathable atmosphere. The scientists climb out of the shell only for it to slide into an abyss, and, amazed by the sight of the Earth rising on the horizon, they settle down to try and sleep. Méliès revisits the core joke of The Astronomer’s Dream here as the snoozing savants either conjure up the spirits of the ether in their dreams or miss seeing them because they’re asleep, and again Méliès evokes the mystical way of looking at the universe with erotic overtones. The Pleiades look down in bewildered amusement, depicted as a flock of disembodied girls’ heads framed by stylised model stars, the snoozing old men still cheated of their true promised land. The moon goddess Phoebe (played by regular Méliès player and stage star Bleuette Bernon) and irate old Saturn argue over what to do about these interlopers, a fight Phoebe wins: she causes a gentle snowstorm that wakens them and drives them follow their shell into the abyss. The concept of the beneficent cosmic force overlooking sailors on the celestial ocean is, in spite of science fiction’s nominal agnosticism, a constant refrain in a lot of the genre’s screen existence, but Méliès’ sense of humour about the notion is rarer, the contrast of beatific Phoebe and ranting Saturn, who leans out of a portal in the side of the planet bearing his name, pictures the gods as comedy neighbours.
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Descending into the valleys of the moon, the explorers find an exotic and fertile world where strange transformations can occur—Barbenfouillis finds his umbrella takes root and grows into a colossal mushroom. Here Méliès turned to Wells for inspiration, borrowing his moon inhabitants called Selenites to provide plot complication lacking from Verne, whose space projectile had simply rounded the moon and glimpsed the possibility of strange things existing on the dark side. One of the Selenites, weird, crustacean-like hominids fond of leaping bout like acrobats, erupts from the underbrush and intimidates the scientists sufficiently to make Barbenfouillis strike out with another umbrella, causing the alien to explode in a puff of smoke. He does the same thing to a second Selenite, only for a small army of the aliens to give chase and capture the hapless Earthlings. The captives are bound and paraded before the king of the Selenites, who sits on a throne in an alien city, surrounded by his harem of moon maids. Infuriated, Barbenfouillis wrenches at his bonds and snaps them, grabs the king and hurls him to the ground, exploding him, before the humans run for their lives. Méliès provides a sense of propulsion and quickening rhythm here, spurning the languid, dreamy mood of the scientists’ arrival on the mood as the action becomes urgent. Here we have a resolutely linear, comic book-like sense of action as the heroes flee across the frame into different shots, chased by furious Selenites, but not yet offering simple cuts between the scenes, still delineating the change of scene with the dissolve. The result offers a kind of embryonic montage.
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Some have theorised Méliès intended A Trip to the Moon as a purposeful lampoon of imperialist practices and values, apparent in the bumbling but real aggression of the scientists crashing in upon a foreign culture and wreaking havoc. Méliès was probably aware of Cyrano de Bergerac’s own supposed adventures to the moon, part of his subversive method of mirroring absurdity on Earth. Méliès himself had spent time working as a leftist political cartoonist, taking aim official pieties and pomposities, and he had stirred fights in cinemas by explicitly taking a pro-Dreyfus stance with his film about the case. Later, with one of his last epics, Conquest of the Pole (1910), Méliès would be less abashed in poking fun at suffragettes and their opponents. A Trip to the Moon is filled with images smirking at the hoopla of nationalist intrepidity and the idea of timid humans faced with frighteningly wilful organisms. Whilst such readings might easily be taken to unlikely lengths, it is plain Méliès has a lot of fun transposing the template of imperialist-era adventure stories onto the moon, following the same basic pattern as any Tarzan story, but keeping tongue deep in cheek: the explorers tramp into the unknown, are captured by hostile natives and paraded before their overlord who embodies an archaic ideal of lordly domain, before the heroes make their escape. It’s certainly a long way from Wells’ portrait of the Selenites as a sentient race governed by resolutely different social and biological constructs. Blood-and-thunder plotting is, however, viewed through Méliès’ sensibility, the playful, naïve state of early cinema, and the traditions of the féerie, finding comic diminuendo in the fact that the Selenites explode rather than die realistically, and the easy manner in which Barbenfouillis breaks the ropes that bind him. Méliès’ moon bleeds but his Selenites disappear in puffs of theatrical smoke. The universe is alive but life is no more than a moment’s dream.
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Méliès nonetheless dashes with breathless art towards his climax as the scientists locate their craft and climb in, whilst Barbenfouilles labours to pull the shell off a cliff, finally succeeding just as a lone Selenite grabs hold of the shell and is dragged over the edge along with it, plunging back towards Earth. This moment suggests Jack and the Beanstalk as another fairy tale influence on Méliès, another story of a naïve man ascending to a strange land, whilst Méliès abandons any pretence to scientific realism in favour of straight fantasy logic. Méliès has the shell splash-land in the ocean, the only use of any real, outdoor location in the film with the shell and splash superimposed over real waves. The shell sinks into the ocean depths, actually a fish tank, and then is pulled back to shore by a ship—a sliding cardboard cut-out pulling a similar mock-up of the shell, from which a handheld puppet waves a flag of triumph. These effects are obviously incredibly primitive on one level, and yet ebullient in their zest and stirring in Méliès’ willingness to use any and every trick to tell his story in as visually inventive and dynamic a manner possible. Here is the essence of a delight in artifice as its own aesthetic value that many a much later filmmaker, from Terry Gilliam to Tim Burton and Michel Gondry, has embraced. Questions of realism or artifice were probably entirely incidental to Méliès considering the nature of early filmmaking, and yet one can’t help but feel he was the kind to choose artifice every time.
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The scientists make their triumphant return to their homeland with their Selenite captive, who is paraded before crowds and forced to dance, whilst Barbenfouilles is immortalised in statue as the conqueror of the moon, with the slogan “Labor omnia vincit” on the pedestal. Méliès retains hints of his acerbic side here, with an undertone of violence in the scientists’ success—the statue of Barbenfouillis depicts him with boot planted on the moon with the shell lodged in its eye, whilst the Selenite has been reduced to dancing bear. But the overall tone is one of pure elation, an envisioned moment of triumph that codifies all the confidence and joie de vivre not just of Méliès and his filmmaking team but of the young twentieth century itself, just starting to look up not just in fantasy but true ambition. Méliès evokes the masque dance used to end some theatrical performances in celebratory mood, and underlines his work here above all as an expression of carnivalesque joie de vivre, a work that stands above all as a tribute to the very idea of dreaming big. It was an apex of ambition and accomplishment for Star Films. Méliès had drawn on the theatre world he loved to help augment his vision, utilising friends who were singers in Paris’s music halls as his crew of scientists, beauties from the Théâtre du Châtelet as the cannon girls and star maids, and acrobats and dancers from the Folies Bergère as Selenites.
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A Trip to the Moon’s influence is incalculable—every special-effects spectacle, every alien that stalks the screen in every scifi film owes it a debt of gratitude. The influence hardly stops at genre borders either. Edwin S. Porter’s seedling western The Great Train Robbery (1903) would take licence from the film’s shunting film grammar, controlled theatrical viewpoint, and dashing action style, echoing on through a vast array of horse operas and action films. D.W. Griffith would state he owed Méliès everything. The director’s own masterpiece is perhaps a purer fantasy, made four years later, The Kingdom of the Fairies, still just as stagy in some ways but now overwhelming the cinematic frame with shifting planes of vision and effect, and conveying the essence of the féerie Méliès loved so much for cinema’s posterity.
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But it was A Trip to the Moon that made Méliès the most famous of early filmmakers and which will probably always define his contribution. The only problem with Méliès’ success was that it was so inescapable. He had changed the way a very young art form conversed with its audience and expanded its scope to become a zone of pure creative vision, diverting the form away from the Lumieres’ vision of a tool of veracity. He had set in motion processes that would make him the first real movie king and the first to be dethroned by shifting tastes, evolving styles, and the brusque way of business that would soon dominate what turned quickly from enthusiast’s pursuit to heavy industry. Méliès had employed all that his studio and the theatrical world of Paris could offer, but all that was doomed to be swept away or radically transformed by an age of movable entertainment feasts. The century for which he had provided a fanfare would indeed eventually see men land on the moon after times of grotesque tragedy and grand calamity. The flame of grace that still gutters within A Trip to the Moon, in its charming and naïve proposition of the future by way of the past, is that it remembers that moment when anything seemed possible for us. Labor omnia vincit.