Space Truckin' – The Nostromo (2012)

Summary

The Nostromo towing its refinery through the inky blackness of space. “I was really influenced by three films,” Ridley Scott told Fantastic Films in 1979, on the subject of the Nostromo and its claustrophobic corridors. “Not so much in terms of Star Wars, but definitely from 2001 and Dark Star.” The latter film, directed by a young John Carpenter and written by, and starring, Alien writer Dan O’Bannon, was an inverse, comedic take on 2001 – where Kubrick’s film was cold, sterile, clinical, and philosophical in scope, Dark Star was cramped, crowded, shabby, dirty, irreverent and yet also elegiac. “There was a great sense of reality, oddly enough, in Dark Star,” continued Scott, “especially of seedy living. It showed you can get grotty even in the Hilton Hotel if you don’t clean it. Everything starts to get tacky, even in the most streamlined surfaces.” “When we did Dark Star,” said O’Bannon, “which was in the wake of 2001, we thought we wanted -partly for the novelty, partly because it was realer, mostly just for laughs- we wanted to show this once-sterile spaceship in a rundown condition, like some old bachelor apartment.” For O’Bannon, Dark Star‘s ‘used universe’ was not as strong a visual element as he had hoped, and Star Wars’ “didn’t come across all that clearly either.” For Alien, O’Bannon instructed Ridley Scott that “if we want this spacecraft to look industrial [and] beat-up, you’re gonna have to make it about three times messier to the naked eye than you wanna to see it. And Alien probably was the first time where an audience clearly saw a futuristic machine in a run-down condition.” The design of the Nostromo and the ‘used universe’ aesthetic would be drawn from O’Bannon’s earlier sci-fi effort, coupled with the realism of Kubrick’s Discovery One. “It’s futuristic,” Scott said of Kubrick’s approach to 2001, “but it’s still hung on today’s reality … In two hundred years things won’t change that much, you know. People will still be scruffy or clean. They’ll ...