On "Alien," "Aliens," and "Isolation"

On playing Alien: Isolation, I always enjoyed watching gamers with little or no familiarity with the movies marvel at the decidedly creepy atmosphere, or storm in with a first-person shooter mentality before quickly realizing how hazardous that is to their survival.

The blame for this lies at the source; Isolation took most of its inspiration from the first Alien movie, which is more akin to a horror flick than a sci-fi adventure.  There, the alien was implacable, mysterious, and vaguely malevolent; it was less a hostile creature than an abominable manifestation of our fears, sexual and otherwise.  This was Ridley Scott’s original vision, one embodied in the uncomfortable patchwork of rape and ruin iconography that is H.R. Giger’s xenomorph.

On the other hand, most of the media in the franchise take their inspiration from the worthy sequel, Aliens.  Like Starship Troopers, James Cameron's spin on the whole thing tapped into another symbolic fear - that of the Imperial Swarm, an antagonistic alien empire driven by instinct to seed and consume any and all worlds it encounters, with whom neither communication nor negotiations are possible.  Headed by an intelligent queen and staffed by powerful, bloodthirsty drones, such a “society” waves the banner of endless war: humanity is bound to an eternal battlefield against a relentless and incomprehensible enemy, with destruction - ours or theirs - the only way out.

This dual perception of the xenomorph - of preternatural malevolence vs. the enmity of eternal conflict - is the main dividing point between the first and second movies, and for years most video games followed the Cameron route, pitting the ubiquitous Colonial Marines and their trusty pulse rifles against the Queen’s drooling swarm.  I can understand this, since the hard-scrabble battles between bugs and bros as depicted in Aliens is a tad more photogenic than the slow-moving horror vibe of the original film.  

And this rarity is what makes the Isolation experience for me that much sweeter.  The fear from Isolation is completely unlike the jump scare to firefight set up of Colonial Marines, or any of the Alien vs. Predator games.  It is something more primal - the fear of being hunted; and not by some dumb brute, but an entity designed to be smarter, stronger, and more persistent than anything we’ve seen in the franchise for years.  And it is completely unkillable, shrugging off shotgun blasts and even spouts of fire that would have killed it dead in any other game, but are now temporary irritations at the very worst.  It almost had me believing that the blasted thing really was supernatural in some way.  And while I know Creative Assembly didn’t include a Queen for budget reasons, I was glad they didn’t all the same.  In Scott’s opus, the xenomorph was a terrifying blank from cradle to grave, with a creepy life cycle revealed only in the Director’s Cut. The presence of a Queen, like that of the Marines, would have veered away from the horror tone and into familiar Cameron territory.

Despite some of the mixed reviews the game received, I for one was quite happy with the mood and feel of the end result, and hope that we’ll get another trip to the more horrific side of the Alien franchise somewhere down the line.

The Visual Side of Writing

Tell me if this sounds familiar: you’re sitting at the writing table, pounding out the voices in your head for a scene or an interaction sequence, and you get stuck trying to find the right way to convey a dialogue.  What do you do?  Well, if you’re like most writers, you try to imagine what your characters are saying and how they come across.  You might agonize over tone, or flip-flop on the right voice, or worry whether or not you’re using the right words.  And always, always, you ask the same questions over and over: Does the dialogue flow nicely?  Do the characters sound believable?  Is it too wordy, or not wordy enough?

But I bet most writers aren’t thinking about how their characters look.  Body posture, gestures, the whole slew of animated stances and positions we adopt in our daily lives...these tend to get lost in the shuffle of wordsmithing and verbal manipulation.  True, most probably grant that a basic grasp of scene visualization is essential to almost every writer, but few truly take the time to develop the character as a visual entity in its own right.  This is really unfortunate, since often what we see factors considerably into how tone and meaning shift in any given exchange.  When it comes to character creation and interactions, observation of real people is just as crucial to the writer as it is to the artist, and usually what sticks out the most stands squarely on the nonverbal side of the fence.  This is true especially for writers working in a visual medium, where squeezing every ounce of detail you can into a scene helps to minimize confusion and push your point across more clearly to the rest of the production cast.

While you can probably write a whole book on the contribution gestures and body movements make to communication (and in fact, many scholarly-types have done just that) you can summarize the most important aspects as they pertain to visual writing under just three categories:

Hand Gestures

Remember that we humans are an animated lot, always waving fingers and twirling wrists at nearly every moment in a conversation.  Gesticulation is so second nature to us that we usually take it for granted, but adding a touch of it during a character exchange can really work wonders.  Though it may be hard to capture, try to observe the way people move during a particularly heated exchange.  Mimicking that on the page can add just the right spice for a dramatic dialogue.

Body Posture

Arm folds, head tilts, and hands akimbo are common sights to anyone with a modicum of human attentiveness, but body posture can take less subtle and more intriguing forms.  I have a friend who has a habit of crossing her legs while standing whenever she's talking to someone.  When I eventually brought it to her attention, she admitted having no clue she was even doing it.  These little quirks and their tweaking can bring an surprising degree of personality to the character creation board.

The Expressive Face

Whether it’s the smile in a person’s eyes or the finicky way they dart back and forth when speaking, there’s good reason to pay attention to the whole face, and not just the mouth.  “Uh-huh” can go from an expression of disinterest to one of rapt attention, simply by adding a smile and an arch of the brows, thus changing the entire tone and dynamic of the conversation.  This information is especially crucial for animators, who have the responsibility of rendering character motions into a believable and lifelike facsimile.

This advice may have minimal impact on the dedicated novelist - or even, to an extent, the comic book writer - but anyone working in television, animation, and film will undoubtedly find their writing enriched by donning the eyes of an artist, if even for a moment.  Never forget that God is in the details, so capturing the full range of human expression on page will really bring your characters to life.