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Quatermass and the Pit |
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Note: This article was originally published on my weblog in December 2001, and followed on from a brief
comment about The Stone Tape, of which there is a review
here and a
full script here.
The Stone Tape was written by Nigel Kneale, who is most well-known for writing the Quatermass TV series and movies, which concern the adventures of British rocket scientist Professor Bernard Quatermass. The best, and most widely available, is "Quatermass and the Pit", which first appeared on the BBC in 1957 and was remade as a film by Hammer ten years later. The story begins with fossil bones of a previously unknown species of human-like ape being accidentally dug-up by construction workers. Further digging reveals a strange object which is initially thought to be an unexploded bomb from World War II, but which turns out to be an alien spaceship - and the ape creatures were inside it. The movie has a shorter running time and more emphasis on action, so it moves along at a much faster pace then the original BBC version, which is more about slowly building tension. The changes between the two are basically to accommodate the requirements of a different medium, although the character of Quatermass is also played differently. On the BBC, Andre Morell portrayed him as soft-spoken and urbane, whereas Andrew Keir's interpretation in the Hammer version is (as the guys from Stomp Tokyo put it) "like a latter-day Professor Challenger, arrogant and theatrical". Morell is more convincing as a top government scientist, but Keir is more fun to watch. I like both versions but I think that overall the movie version is somewhat better, because it handles the exposition and linking narrative much more efficiently. It also handles the script's key line, "we are the martians", more deftly. In the BBC version this is spoken at the very end as Quatermass is shown delivering a TV broadcast to the nation to explain the shocking events that have just taken place to the public, while in the film it is an offhand remark made during a conversation. The latter works better because it just leaves the audience to ponder the full significance of the remark, while the former seems overly didactic. Within the story, its significance is that humanity's ancestors were created by Martians, who experimented on primitive ape creatures to enhance their brains. Mars was a dying world, and its insect-like inhabitants sought to preserve something of their race by engineering a new species on Earth to be their successors. However, that Martian inheritance includes latent psychic powers and with them a latent instinct to maintain the purity of the hive by killing anyone who is different. When the spaceship reactivates it also activates these Martian instincts in the people around it, and only a few can resist its control. But it is also a metaphor. In the standard alien invasion movie of the 1950s, a somewhat idealized world was threatened by an evil force from another planet. It is true to say that in America this represented a fear of Soviet attack (alien = commie), but it also assumed that evil was something that came from outside humanity, and violence and destruction only came from inhuman "others". "Quatermass and the Pit" is a deliberate rejection of that idea. It is arguing that the capacity for violence and destruction is something that exists within all of us, and is part of our human nature. They are human traits, not inhuman ones. The fact that not everyone is affected by the spaceship is a message of hope, that we can evolve beyond the savage instincts of our ancestors. But as long as human nature remains as it is,"we are the Martians" because everything that Martians represent is within us. |
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Last Updated: 1 Oct 07 |  |
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