Whether or not it's officially billed as a prequel to 'Alien', Ridley Scott's 'Prometheus' is bound to be judged in the light of it Kim Newman unravels the connections Alien (1979) may be celebrated as a Ridley Scott film, but it had many creators. Screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Ron Shusett originally thought that, in the wake of Star Wars, they could sell Roger Corman a script called Star Beast, a gloss on a couple of well-remembered quickies: Edward L. Cahn's It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), a monster movie about a stowaway vampire creature picking off the crew of a spaceship en route from Venus to Earth, and Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires (Terrorenello spazio, 1965), a 'shaggy God' story about astronauts exploring a fog-bound world where they find a crashed alien spaceship and its skeletal pilot - and eventually become the ancestors of humanity. Some similarities between the Star Beast script and sections of A.E. Van Vogt's 1950 novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle (a title that resonates even more with the purpose of the good ship Prometheus in Scott's new film) led to an out-of-court settlement in Van Vogt's favour - though it seems that O'Bannon and Shusett had in fact drawn on a clutch of sources in an attempt to create an archetypal horror-in-space picture, rather than simply poaching from Van Vogt. After all, they must also have seen various episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea or Star Trek in which sundry monsters get aboard the submarine or the spaceship and slaughter lower-billed characters before being defeated by the stars. It's unlikely that the screenwriters were as familiar with Doctor Who as Ridley Scott, who was originally set to design that show's second series but had to drop out (and thus missed the chance to create the Daleks, a job that earned pop-culture immortality for Raymond Cusick). But the lifecycle of the Alien organism has parallels with the Wirrn, the parasitic giant wasps that incubate in cryo-frozen humans in the 1975 Doctor Who serial The Ark in Space. As a franchise, Alien is as enamoured of chases through spaceship corridors as the BBC's flagship sci-fi horror show, and fans can list other points of similarity. (And here are two: it's certainly odd that Dr Elizabeth Shaw, the Noomi Rapace character in Prometheus, has the same name as the assistant, played by Caroline John, who co-starred with Jon Pertwee in his first season as the Doctor. 1997's Alien Resurrection, meanwhile, revealed the humanoid robots who feature throughout the series like to call themselves "autons" - just like the animated shop-window dummies featured in Spearhead from Space, the 1970 serial that introduced Pertwee and John.) The structure of Alien has prompted many readings of the film that note its parallels with the 'body count' slasher films initiated by Halloween (1978), and it's often been referred to as 'a haunted house movie in space'. However, as James Cameron's sequel Aliens (1986) underlined, the format is older and more versatile. The plot about the unit separated from a home base - picked off one by one by a mostly unseen enemy and riven by tensions within the group that make one or more of the men as much a danger as the external opponent - goes back to Philip MacDonald's 1927 novel Patrol, set in Mesopotamia (yes, modern-day Iraq) during World War I and drawn from the author's personal experiences. The book was filmed as a 1929 silent and a 1934 John Ford talkie under the title The Lost Patrol and has been remade ever since - officially and unofficially - as a variety of western, war, action, adventure, jungle, horror and science-fiction picture. If variations on this one story have a genre tag, we should call them lost patrol' films. John McTiernan's Predator (1987), for instance, is an Alien imitation that's even more obviously fitted over the grid of MacDonald's plot. No wonder that film spawned a franchise which wound up intertwining with the Alien films - though Prometheus huffily renders Paul W.S. Anderson's AVP Alien vs. Predator (2004) and related films uncanonical by contradicting their version of the origins of the Alien species. In fact it's possible that Prometheus even contradicts Aliens, Alien2 (1992) and Alien Resurrection too, which lumps it in a little sub-category of sci-fi reboot/ remake/prequels that includes Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace, Star Trek, The Thing (2011) and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Like all those films, Prometheus is as much fan fiction as it is a re-adaptation of original material. It's weirdly concerned with filling in gaps and answering
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long-standing mysteries that might have formed the topic of pub conversations after viewings of the previous films but which, in the context of the drama, are as irrelevant and to-be-skimmed-over as the 'great whatsits' of thrillers that Hitchcock called macguffins. When asked after Alien what he would like to explore in a sequel, Scott picked on the so-called 'Space Jockey' - the dead giant humanoid alien pilot with a burst chest found in the crashed spaceship along with the alien eggs - and said he'd like to know where he came from. (Well, if he'd asked the screenwriters, they could have told him that the alien pilot came from a Mario Bava film.) In Alien, we're to assume that this whole story has happened before to the Space Jockey's people, just as the 1982 The Thing plays a joke on its status as a remake by implying that what happens to the American Antarctic base has already played out at the Norwegian facility (prompting last year's redundant remake-cum-prequel).
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