I’m half way through Season 1 Ep 1 of “Alien Earth”. I’m watching a tracking shot down a hallway in the ship that has crashed.
I’m noticing suddenly that just about all of the hallways in the spaceships in all of the Alien movies are octagonal.
Now, for visual impact and feel of claustrophobia, it makes sense. But-- to build enormous spaceships whose every wall and support panel is almost all solid opposed to the widest opening possible ( which therefore would make each wall panel lighter/ less expensive to manufacture) seems wasteful in the extreme.
Not sure that this particular artifact in the entire universe of Alien is H.R. Geiger or Ridley Scott. Either way, it suddenly seems ludicrous.
Is it a stupid design element? Or just brilliant Art Direction even if it makes no sense?
The most important thing about designing a movie spaceship interior is don’t make it look like the inside of a building or the inside of a submarine. Octogons only make sense because they are not really found anywhere in real life.
Obvious art direction, the look, the feel, matters most, and it also slightly evokes the hexagon of beehives, which I suspect was considered a good thing?
Still as a logical construction - stacked octagons leave smaller squares between them on four sides for various conduits to run?
The octo and hexagonal design elements going back to the original Alien movie are a deliberate design choice.
Structurally, I think they are also meant to evoke something like a bee hive. Interconnected modules with omni-directional strength. Like you would expect in a space ship operating in zero g that could potentially move (and thus encounter stresses) in any direction
100% on with your last sentence. Geiger, no slouch, created animals that were quite insect-like in many ways. The idea that the architecture would … subconsciously support a beehive structure is really appealing to me.
Given that the hex- and octa- structures are in the human habits (like the Nostromo’s mess hall and M.O.T.H.E.R. control room, which also has a golden color to it), perhaps the humans are meant to be the “bees”. Each one busily working on their tasks for the greater hive in perfect coordination. At least until they encounter this grotesque invasive species the disrupts everything.
Also from a strictly structural point of view, chamfering or beveling edges reduces stress. So what would have been a rectangle shape ends up more of an octagon.
As an art director, I’d love to get a chance to design a spaceship. And no way would it look like the original Enterprise, with everything rectangular, looking like a Space Hyatt.
I’m impressed when the designs have a stated reasons for their shape. As I recall, the space station on Deep Space Nine was originally built by another race (Cardassian?), so the style and even the proportions are clearly not human.
I think Ridley Scott was an Art Director or Production Designer (or maybe Cinematographer) before he was a movie director. I’m sure most choices are for atmosphere and cinematography reasons, and not based on scientific authenticity.
The set design for Nostromo was based around actual scrap WWII bombers. If I were faking up a spaceship corridor using cylindrical plane bodies plus flat panels of intruments, pretty sure some kind of polygonal cross section would come to mind pretty soon.
Highly gifted Art Director. He’s the only Director I’ve ever heard of who sketches all of his own storyboards, costume ideas, etc. Not that he won’t entertain the ideas of others. But man, when that Director hands you storyboards, you’d better nail every element in it…