i feel like the very dry, procedural emphasis in Alien is what makes the movie work so well but it’s also what always makes the xenomorph itself feel a little lackluster to me - like it’s the base level threat that causes all the other systems to start falling over under pressure (the ship computer and junky self destruct sequence, the robot acting weird, whose job was it to find the cat?? etc) but the tensest moments come from the failures of those systems, and once the alien itself reaches maturity i always have a hard time picturing it as anything beyond, like, basically an exceptionally large critter… like a more lethal version of the ball alien from Dark Star.
anyway obv not that the movie itself is bad but i do feel like The Thingy is weird and vague enough in terms of, how it works, how conscious is it etc that it has a bit more presence purely in Creature Feature terms, while Alien is more like an unusually small-scale disaster movie. i did kind of like how prometheus and uh the other one he did tried to re-inject some uncertainty about these things after the other sequels kind of formalised this very cut-and-dry life cycle.
ah i like this analysis, and yeah i think i was sort of nonplussed by the ‘horror’ element posed by the xenomorph itself. but the systems failure aspect is much more scary. kind of like the beginning of chernobyl where everyone is walking around picking up radioactive graphite and you’re like “oh fuck oh no oh fuck”
the horror is mostly in the environment they encounter the creature, how it seems perfectly tailored to fuck up a bunch of junk salvagers on a space tugboat, tldr the horror is capitalism not the giger dick monster
For me, I always found the first movie much more enjoyable to think about. Like I always read it as this weird movie about men not understanding pregnancy and being fucking terrified by it, but there’s a lot of stuff about the capitalism in there, and I’m sure other readings are possible too.
The second movie kinda removes most of that? Like aside from the beginning with Paul Reiser, it mostly pushes the anti-capitalist stuff into the background in favor of Hoo Rah dumbass space marines, and weird “does James Cameron every really understand his own maybe-not-even-subtext” questions vis-a-vis its relationship to Vietnam movies. It’s up there with Titanic in terms of hopefully accidental or at least horribly misdone messaging.
been on a licensed game kick lately and just wanted to let people know: the big reveal at the end of ps2 action game Predator: Concrete Jungle is that the MOTHER computer in Alien started out as a 1930s gangster’s moll who lived to be over 100 years old after accidentally drinking predator blood and then became a living supercomputer, before luring the same predator back to earth because she wanted to fuck it.
a funny thing to me after watching longplays of a bunch of alien adjacent games is just how many of the sequels in this franchise seem really inexplicably invested in the idea of making weyland from weyland-yutani into a character in the narrative
iirc Alien3 did it and also Prometheus and the Aliens Vs Predator movie and Concrete Jungle has a “Weyland-san” cameo at the end that it seems like you’re meant to be excited about and by the time of the 2010 AVP game he’s just randomly appearing to solve or create problems in the narrative throughout.
there’s something about this i find really charming, like a slow successive mutation of the very idea of “powerful faceless company” into something more legible, it’s as if people in the 2200s were making period movies where Visa Electron was just the name of one particular guy who roamed around indefinitely sending people out on missions like Lord British.
You better believe I’m watching this shit in IMAX with an extra large Pepsi and an Alien themed popcorn bucket. If Super7 get the action figure rights I’m buying em all. Don’t look at me while I’m in my Alien space!!!
Yeah I dunno, getting away from Ridley’s weird pseudognostic meanderings and just making a good old fashioned slasher might be healthy for the concept.
That said this director is a talentless hack so it probably won’t even succeed on that level.
