Tag: aliens

Alien: Romulus (2024)

Alien: Romulus: I liked it and it worked, except for the bits that didn’t, three stars. Mark it down to two point five stars for the surprise cast member.

More? Okay strap in. Spoilers ahead. (BTW I did one of these for Prometheus too.)

Facehuggers… why’d it have to be facehuggers?

Right about the middle of the film there’s a set piece that pays off the swarms of facehuggers we saw earlier on. They’re sitting around like scorpions and our heroes need to get through the room. What to do? Lets infer they hunt by heat and sound (sure, they don’t have eyes, why not) and then we just need to make the room body temp (ugh that would suck) and walk real slow and quiet.

And they do. And the facehuggers sit around, tensing up when the characters gasp at a dead body or scrape against furniture. Slowly, slowly through this room… it’s a good tense sequence, a thoroughly engaging moment. Don’t breathe or they get you.

But it’s also, on a deeper level, kind of inert. It takes the nightmare of a spidery alien thing that latches on to your face, and makes it a video game obstacle. It’s tense, but not uncertain: the idea is good so it’s obviously going to work, and it’s obvious they’re not going to keep it going all the way because that wouldn’t be exciting, so you’re just waiting for the moment when they drop the ball and run and just make it, because it’s obviously not time for any of these characters to die. And so it proves. But the development and resolution to this set piece, while absolutely matching expectations, is executed well so you have to respect it anyway.

That’s Alien: Romulus. Make exactly the right moves, the safe moves, match the temperature. Then a mad sprint for the end.

The Stars My Destination

But morgue what did you THINK of it??

I liked the babby.

I liked the ship manoeuvring around the facility to different airlock connection points.

I liked the solves: Rain’s smart ideas in desperate situations.

I liked the cold equations. That was a game that felt new, even though it was using old material, going right back to Alien. (But here’s a trick: in Alien, Ripley was the one who refused to open the door. In this film, Rain was desperate to open it. What the significance!)

I liked the characters. Cailee Spaeny’s Rain was a nervy centre of gravity and David Jonsson’s Andy was superbly layered. The wider ensemble were perhaps thinly drawn, but also engaging and well-performed, even the requisite Annoying One. 

I liked how they were believably smart, and they made good choices. The characters are teenagers but they’re not dumb teenagers. (I also note that the perplexingly widespread view that a proper alien film needs middle-aged protagonists disappeared without trace on the day of release.) They take risks but they’re, mostly, not foolish risks, they’re reactions to a desperate situation.

I loved the mining colony. Perfect.

And there were plenty of grace notes that felt sweet on the screen. Walking in bare feet on the sand in the cargo bay. Seeing the sun for the first time. The moment that quietly revealed the identity of the baby’s father. 

It delivered a solid story with proper stakes and I was on board the whole way. I liked it and it worked,

except for the bits that didn’t.

(It was an Alien film with too much Alien film in it.) 

(We’re not going to disturb anything. We are exactly the same temperature. We’re taking every single step with such great care. Don’t you see this is exactly what you want?)

Three stars.

i contain multitudes (derogatory)

Me: I just want creators to take big swings! To do stuff we haven’t seen before, to try and go to new places, even if it doesn’t work I want to see it!

Me after seeing Prometheus: not like that

Me after seeing the Romulus trailer: squeeeee

Me after seeing Romulus: huh. Hmm. huh.

factor analysis

The setup is this: a bunch of scientists set up a space lab to study the aliens, to try and domesticate them, and of course they end up getting absolutely monstered as the creatures run rampant and kill everyone. The film is actually about the folks on an independent ship crew who get caught up in the mess because they were willing to cut corners and end up buying a lot more trouble than they bargained for. Soon they have to find a way from one side of the infested station to the other, as time ticks down on them. There’s an ambiguously heroic synthetic, alien underwater POV shots, and a major set piece in an elevator shaft, but the final act of the film swerves in a completely different direction with the birth of a human/alien hybrid baby, pale and tall and weird as hell. Then it gets sucked through an acid hole into space, and the survivors get to contemplate an entirely new life together.

I am of course describing Alien Resurrection (yes I know you guessed it at line one shush). Alien Romulus is a remake of Alien Resurrection, and an accidental one, it seems, from some of Fede Alvarez’s comments. Which is fascinating, right? Because it shows that the water flowing downhill from Alien and Aliens leads to a consistent place!

Personal anecdote of relevance: In December 1997 I coordinated a big roleplaying game event set in the Aliens universe TM. A bunch of scientists had set up a space lab to study the aliens, and of course they got absolutely monstered as the creatures run rampant and kill everyone, the folks on an ethically shady independent ship crew had to find their way from one side of the infested station to the other time ticks down major set piece in elevator shaft ambiguously heroic synthetic ALL OF IT WAS THERE (except the babby). A bunch of us who were part of the game went to see Alien Resurrection on its NZ release one month after the game and there was widespread amusement that so much of what we’d created turned up there too. 

But it’s not a surprise, it’s just what follows from Alien and Aliens and Alien 3. It’s what has to follow. The scientists finally get the alien and it kills them and then i guess some nice people need to go across a spaceship. And maybe there’s a babby. 

(Prometheus did not do this. It did not follow from Alien and Aliens and Alien 3. It is best understood as a remix in which the big horseshoe from Alien was in fact an attempt to assassinate Jesus.)

(No, really, that’s actually the plot of Prometheus.)

This film tries to follow the water-downhill path from the Prometheus stuff too, but it couldn’t assassinate Jesus a second time so surprise, it ends up with Babby again. (GIANT BABBY! We’ve made TOO MUCH NOISE and the facehuggers know we’re here RUN RUN RUN FOR THE END!!)

So this feels promising! We have the messy data of Alien being resolved down to distinct variables. We’ve solved it, the true meaning, this is a star map, and it points the way to – no wait wrong film – this is the distilled core of Alien, the special juice, the black goo – no DAMMIT – 

Another day older and deeper in debt

FILMMAKER: I want to explore the nature of humanity itself in the context of a hostile universe and strange alien life inimical to our own, and the ways in which our own societies enact and succumb to structures that treat us with the same indifference,

THE STUDIO, ENTHUSIASTIC: yes and then something burst out of chest?

A few years ago a Kiwi journalist sparked a big round of twitter discourse by wondering if Alien was a horror film. I said it was, but only because of the company sending the workers into danger. Otherwise it was a science fiction film with monsters. This argument was not mounted in entirely serious fashion, but it has something serious at its core: the Alien film series is about work.

It’s about working a shitty job for a big company, it’s about working as a soldier and going where you’re told, it’s about working at a prison with nowhere else to go, it’s about working freelance and taking dubious contracts that eventually bite you in the arse. The alien is just an expression of the bosses failing to take your safety seriously.

(Prometheus, of course, is also about work, presenting the answer to the question “What if everyone was highly paid but extremely bad at their jobs?”)

(Alien Covenant is not about work, that film is about “what if two Michael Fassbenders kissed?”)

Alien Romulus begins on a mining colony that is a grimy, crowded nightmare of industrial labour exploitation. Rain is an indentured worker, trying to earn her way out of the planet. The company can just change the terms of the deal. It’s brutal, and honestly it feels like an excessive caricature until you remember, like, history. 

So this is the Alien film most about work since the first one. But really it isn’t actually that much about work? That’s the context for the desperation of the protagonists but it doesn’t really shape the narrative other than that. Rain doesn’t actually do any work that we see, and it’s not clear what the crew of the Corbelan do either. This mining outpost seems incredibly cut off from anywhere, nine years from resupply, and beset by illness and lack of care that mean workers die easily. More tellingly, there’s a super-strong robot on a hard-labour work site where everyone keeps getting sick, and it is left in a junk heap because *checks notes* it reliably follows simple instructions? These are details, little handwaves that make the plot go, but they feel off. You have the company in the mining colony trying to get the most value from everyone, you have deadlines and quotas and warnings, you have Andy overexploited not derided, you have someone take notice that a hauler is burning a bunch of fuel on an unauthorised mission… that’s how you make it about work. And Romulus doesn’t.

Look who’s talking now

Alien isn’t about WORK you idiot it’s about REPRODUCTION. It’s about hard organs penetrating orifices and vulval openings and something alive kicking the inside of your ribs. It’s a man having a nightmare imagining what if he was pregnant instead of his wife. It’s about the irreducibly gross content of our bodies, all that bone and intestine and teeth, and how that’s what life is, and what if we remixed life so it was just bone and intestine and teeth, what would that look like, oof, pretty freaky, *riiiip* 

There are two babies in this film. Three female characters and two of them give birth. There’s also a weird bit where the annoying guy sticks an instrument into the giant alien vagina and tries to electrocute what’s inside it which is, i’m pretty sure, not actually a political commentary but it felt pretty weird.

The big babies then eat their mums. 

So this is the Alien film most about reproduction since the first one. But really it isn’t actually that much about reproduction? The baby in the lady is a motivation to go see the sunrise/to open the door PLEASE, but the biggest plot clang in the movie is when Kay decides to inject herself with black goop because the weird android who just let her get taken by monsters said it might be useful, when Rain who she trusts was like NO DON’T. The film could have sold this beat, but they didn’t take the time to do so. If Kay is struggling to get to cryo, bleeding out, her body failing her, she’s fading on the floor everything going blurry and she touches her belly because that’s her motivation not to give up and THEN she takes the goop and injects it and with that coursing through her system she rises up and SURGES to the cryo chambers… An easy solve. Its absence is just another of the ways this is all not deeply felt. It doesn’t feel right.

See also Navarro’s experience as a host for an alien creature. She gets grabbed by a facehugger, it gets yanked off her but maybe she’s already got one inside her? She and Bjorn make a break for it then, what, six or seven minutes later there’s something coming out of her chest?

The rapid gestation time of the alien is very different to what was presented in the first three films (although in Alien Resurrection a similarly rapid gestation was seen, there’s that film again). Obviously, this process needs to move at the speed of the plot: Romulus is on a tight countdown, and you can’t do a slow gestation that fits. (A famous deleted scene from Aliens was removed for this exact reason.) And you know what? It doesn’t actually matter that it’s different. Let it be different! Gestation time of an alien creature is the kind of detail that should not be held sacred, it does not need to be slabbed in canonical perspex! Except.

The problem with a rapid gestation time is it undermines the whole sensibility of this kind of body horror. Maybe just at a subconscious level, but still in a way that can be felt. The horror of the facehugger laying an embryo inside you and that bursting out your chest isn’t just that something’s in your throat and then something punches out your ribcage, it’s that you are a host for this thing. It is using you, parasitising you, growing from you, using you as part of its own reproductive cycle. Kane was so hungry, but apart from that he seemed fine to everyone, even to himself. That’s part of it, that’s important.

The incredibly short embryo time is a dramatic necessity to make the thrill ride work, but it takes away the sense of process. Gestating inside the body for less than ten minutes? What can any organism get out of that? Sure, black goo accelerated life cycles accumulating mass from the air itself etc., but it feels wrong. It feels weightless. Navarro should feel hungry. Her baby should use her, not just wreck her. That’s how you make it about reproduction. And Romulus doesn’t.

Okay fine so what is it about then mr clever brain

The company creates a gigantic and incredibly well-resourced space station science analysis centre and conducts elaborate experiments there that could change the nature of human existence

And then it goes wrong and whoops i guess that’s the end, it just floats there and is forgotten, no distress beacon no company ship going to investigate no automated check in noone who knew about it and wanted to go find it nothing, “Well it was a secret project” but even secret projects like EXIST “and then they lost it because it was so far away in space” well yes but why would you set up your secret project nine years or whatever from company oversight that makes no sense you can put a space station anywhere you’d make it more accessible than that just for supplies, “harumph harumph it drifted” ok yes that explains everything except doesn’t the film begin with a mission that manages to find one Nigerian visual artist floating in the vastness of space, even if he is nearly 7 feet tall that signals a bit of commitment to finding things that are drifting,

And the facehugger chestburster timeline, and Andy being ignored, and the crew just being able to fly up there without anyone noticing, and how does any of this square with Aliens, if this whole Romulus thing has happened and the company not only got an alien it managed to breed and cryo store huge numbers of aliens and figured out how to synthesise the black goo out of them, it did the full science and won the prize ring and hit the hammer to ding the gong, if this all happened BUT THEN a bit later on Carter Burke and Ellen Ripley are facing off over whether the same company will get its hands on an alien… doesn’t that make those stakes, the ones in Aliens, the ones Ripley sacrifices herself for in Alien 3, doesn’t it make them feel a bit…silly?

When you start looking at it, all of it, carefully, none of it makes sense, not without a lot of special pleading. That’s the problem with plugging stuff into gaps. When you have a gap, and you stick something into the gap, if you zoom in you have just created a bunch of new gaps all around the thing filling the gap. (I think this is called ZeNo More Gap’s paradox.) (No More Gaps is a popular gap filling product here in New Zealand, this is a very good joke, thank you.) (If you think the joke should be Xeno’s Paradox you have committed a nerd reference and you have to sit in the corner.)

So why plug this story into the gap between Alien and Aliens? Nothing in Romulus needs to be before Aliens. Right? All of it could come later. All of it. But it’s in between. So why do it whyyaa]ggh

we must hold godfather part 2 responsible

FILMMAKER: We begin in deep space, the cold expanse of stars, and a space-travelling ship enters our field of view, its metal curvature and hard corners a mighty achievement of humankind, our ambition reaching so very far yet dwarfed and humbled by the immensity of 

THE AUDIENCE, EAGER: when does burst a chest tho

There have been five* films with gigerian (please pronounce both gs as in GIF) aliens in them since Alien Resurrection, and a new TV show on the way, and every one of them is set in the past.

*no i’m not going to talk about those two**

**they are in fact in a separate continuity***

***hahaha sob no really they are officially in a separate continuity and if you know what “in a separate continuity” means i’m so so sorry we have to sit in the corner with the other nerds

Five films and a telly series gone backwards. Plus the only one of the video games anyone ever cared about. backwards. (some of the other video games do go forward but only by a tiny tiny increment so you can also be colonial marines shooting aliens wheeeee)

So much backward. What makes it so hard to go forward?

Here’s part of the answer: the aesthetic attractions of the original. Setting Romulus between Alien and Aliens gives you unselfconscious access to the design specifics of those films. When you see in a five star review of Romulus the phrase “all the love and care that went into it” it means “they made the console buttons big and chunky and different colours like in Alien and they used the pulse rifle sound effect like in Aliens”.

Here’s another part of the answer: fandom, in the aggregate, doesn’t want to go forward, it wants to plug gaps. It wants to mark out the edges of the Thing Fanned, then fill every tiny inch of it with precise/baroque detail, expunging all ambiguity and uncertainty. Full perfection will be achieved when the Thing Fanned is completely explicated, when no CinemaSins video is possible. In 1977 the clone wars was a phrase that fired the imagination and imbued everything with rich potential, and in 2024 the clone wars is an incredibly dense page on wookiepedia. Of course Full Conceptual Saturation can never be achieved, see ZeNo More Gaps’s paradox above, ah but the journey! Also the very important business of complaining online when it seems like stuff from outside the edges might get in, like yuuzhan vongs or woke.

Here’s the biggest part of the answer though: Alien is a bad IP.

I do not like Alien Day you cannot make me like it

Alien is a phenomenal film. It puts a great character in a vivid environment facing off against an extremely memorable creature. Everyone thought it was brilliant. Let’s do another one. 

Unfortunately, that construction doesn’t allow for an easy sequel. If you want to keep the great character, how do you contrive them back into the same narrative? If you keep the creature, does it just do the same stuff all over again to a new bunch of spaceship dwellers? Sure it’s not easy like Star Wars 2 where you just say Darth Vader builds another death star, but come on it’s not rocket science, look at Jaws 2! Roy Scheider vs A Shark Again! And pretty soon we’ll have Jaws 3 and Jaws 4 and the idea of the eternal Jaws franchise is so obvious and undeniable that it’ll be the premise of a hilarious visual gag in the hugely popular sequel to the hit family film about mummy-son incest vibes! 

So we’re gonna do Alien Twosies and it’s going to be great!

(SIDETRACK: The only good franchise IPs are about JOBS. If it’s a job, you can keep making new stories. If the story is an interruption to a job (Alien) then repeating it is going to be hard work. Good job IPs in films:

  • James Bond (Bond’s job is to stop the new villain with the crazy plan)
  • Mission Impossible (Tom Cruise’s job is to stop the new villain with the crazy plan)
  • Friday the 13th (Jason’s job is to kill all the new people who came to Crystal Lake)
  • Knives Out (Daniel Craig’s accent’s job is to solve a fiendishly deceptive murder mystery)

No doubt you’ve noticed that this is also the recipe for like 90% of scripted television. The format is called the procedural: medical shows where you try and save this week’s patient, detective shows where you solve this week’s mystery, lawyer shows where you try and win this week’s case, navy intelligence shows where you do whatever navy intelligence people do i’ve never watched any of those.

In general understanding: film is not meant to do procedurals. Film is meant to chronicle a transformative journey, an epic experience for a protagonist that leaves them forever changed, we know this because of the three holy books Hero’s Journey, Save the Cat, Story. Procedurals, with fundamentally static characters, are for TV and similar pathetic and weak and disgusting narrative formats. (Mission Impossible was a TV series. James Bond was a series of novels. Knives Out was inspired by series novels.) But if film is to be Intellectual Property That We Can Exploit Forever then that means it needs always sequels. This is the way of the world. Imagine that I build out this idea into a big elaborate joke making a parallel between the film where the Company exploits the aliens and here where the company exploits Aliens and I do such a good job that you laugh and also stroke your chin, why he made me laugh but also he made me think. SIDETRACK OVERRR)

Aliens matches the original because Jim Cameron came up with a whole bunch of fantastic ideas on which to hang a sequel and instead of choosing one he did all of them. He gave the good guys guns, he added a kid, he added a new big monster, he made it about Ripley overcoming the trauma of the first film, he advanced its thematic focus from childbirth to motherhood. (He also did this develop many good ideas use all of them schtick for Terminator 2. Please do note though one of his big ideas for Rambo 2 was “John Travolta as comedy sidekick” so they’re not all winners Jim.)

Anyway that’s how we got an incredible sequel to an incredible original, a brilliant follow-up that demonstrated sequels can go on forever and then we can make merchandise of the IP and every year on a special day that only makes sense as a film reference if you do your calendar the wrong way around like the USA insists on doing, on that special day we’ll release like some art prints and bobble head dolls!

Then there was Alien 3.

Cute kid autopsy scene

Everyone hated Alien 3, including everyone who made Alien 3, except me. Its reputation has been rehabilitated over the decades since and while it remains controversial a lot more people accept that I was right all alo^H^H^H see it as a good film now. The thing that upset people was that it felt like a careless and inconsiderately callous rejection of the hopeful conclusion to Aliens. And it wasn’t that: instead, it was a careful and considerately callous rejection of the hopeful conclusion to Aliens.

Alien Cubed’s bleakness makes Alien and Aliens fall into line with it as a coherent, if confrontational, tryptich. Alien depicts a horrific world where human life is worthless and unwelcome; Aliens depicts the same but still ends on a hopeful note with trauma overcome and a happy family of survivors blasting off to safety; and Alien 3 says nah remember the first one and even the bulk of the second one, the logic of this world is very clear, that hopeful note Jim ended on was too convenient because in fact and properly, everything is fucked, and let’s really lean into it and fulfil the promise made in both earlier films, and whoops it turns out the only thing you really can do is try to die right. So let’s all die.

Note that this trilogy forms an inversion of the story structure to which we are most accustomed from the three sacred texts Journey, Save the Story, and The Hero’s Cat: things are kinda ok, then things get really bad, and then through meeting the challenge things end up settled and good. Here, things are bad, and then through meeting the challenge things end up settled and good, but then they end up really really bad, THE END.

Given the development hell of Alien 3, my favourite factoid being at one point they had spent more than the entire budget of Aliens and they still didn’t have a single page of script they could shoot, given that chaos it’s a miracle it was about anything at all. But it was. My theory is that the emotional logic was so powerful that once the idea was in place there was no getting away from it, and it was just a matter of going there. Which is of course just the same as the film.

Alien 3 is a sequel that gathers up every implication of ‘Intellectual Property’ and chucks it into the molten lead furnace. There Is No Story Universe Here. The Alien films are about humanity encountering what’s out there and dying and it sucks and nothing comes after this. THE END. 

Then came Alien Resurrection, which was the first fanfiction Alien film.

They don’t let the alien wear a tuxedo any more because of woke

GAME MASTER: Tonight we are playing the Alien roleplaying game! We begin in a dive bar on a crowded colony world. The bartender nods, “Evening friends,” he begins,

PLAYERS, ENGAGED: We aim every weapon we have at his chest and get ready for something to burst out of it

In 1997 Dark Horse Comics had the Aliens license and they published a story in Aliens Special #1 by horror author Nancy A Collins that was a very amusing pastiche of Lovecraftiana, pasting the Mythos into an Aliens space colony context and identifying the jijerian creature with Mr Cthulhu and his friends. It was a joke told very well, and of course as any fule kno, also a friendly nod to the long-admitted influence of Lovecraftian ideas on the first Alien film. Very well done.

Alien has a canon now. Did you know that? A carefully maintained canon that says what happened in which year of future history and what planets are where and how the video game things interact with the elements of the unmade William Gibson script, for it incorporates, as well as the movies, all the new novels and video games and comic books and with a stretch it also incorporates all the other comic books and games and unmade William Gibson scripts and random paraphernalia from the past.

There’s a game, Alien The Role Playing Game, and it’s definitively part of the canon, and in one of the game books it catalogues the universe, and the Nancy A Collins planet is there, the Lovecraft joke planet is there, it’s part of the canon, it’s in continuity, officially when you watch Alien officially and canonically somewhere off screen there’s some canonical guys in robes and they are canonically chanting TU LI TU!

This makes me wince.

What does anyone gain from this? What does this give the audience? What is the point of canon?

The Sherlock Holmes canon shenanigans were created as a game, approached in good spirits with a wink and a nudge, and the satisfaction was in playing it cleverly and well. I like also to think of my friend Jon Preddle and his ridiculous/glorious Timelink project in which he assembles a full coherent continuity of Doctor Who, which mission he undertook for the brain-bending fun of it because of course Doctor Who’s approach to continuity is to lovingly point at the past and then immediately contradict it. That stuff is fun.

But an Alien canon, into which everything falls or doesn’t, an official future timeline? 

The point of canon is that fans like how it feels, but when they like that feeling over and over and over, it makes everything *smaller*. And it’s already small because the thing the punters pay to see is the chest being burst open by this one specific alien species. So the canon becomes an entire universe consisting of repeated encounters, over and over, like a wallpaper pattern.

This is how we end up with Amanda Ripley as an active character (IMO the worst idea anyone has ever had in connection with the Alien films and I include the Kenner toys in this). This is how we end up with a whole novel about the Vasquez character from Aliens called Aliens Vasquez. This is how we end up with Alien Romulus with chunky buttons and the pulse rifle sound effect and Andy saying Get away from her you bitch 37 years before Ripley says it. Worst of all, this is how we end up with a bad face swap animation of Ian Holm in his Ash costume saying “perfect organism” over and over. (Deducting half a star, but no shade to Ian Holm’s estate, get that bag why not.)

All of this, the canon, the references, the godforsaken face swap animation, all of it could be cut from this film and none of it would be missed. None of it is load bearing. It’s all extraneous, it’s all there to scratch that itch. It’s there because Alien is a story universe with fans now more than it is a film named Alien (and a film named Aliens and even a film named Alien Cubes). And it takes this film and makes it slow when it should be swift. It hurts this film. And it is all the more frustrating because it’s such an unforced error.

But apart from that I liked it.

(Okay also the black goo/meaning of life stuff is a story element that fights against the format of a “claustrophobic slasher house” horror, as both Prometheus and Covenant discovered, and Ian Holm saying it’s a miracle cure isn’t enough to fix that here.)

(I wanted moments of silence. I wanted the camera to gaze upon the alien creatures, instead of taking them for granted, I wanted to see the characters take a breath.)

(Facehuggers have the ability to acid their way through barriers, which we saw in the literal first seconds in Alien when facehuggers were introduced with the critter melting right through Kane’s faceplate, so when that one scared Rain at the window but just scrabbled there… but Jim Cameron waved that off in Aliens too so, fine.)

(The x-ray torch gets used precisely once and it would be better if it was just in the teenager ship all along it didn’t need an intro scene.)

(Apart from THAT I liked it.)

This book belongs to _____

“The Alien universe is a richly designed and expansive science fiction possibility space where all human endeavour and frailty has stretched out across the galaxies, an imagined future channelled through the deeply grounded and inimitable industrial design work of such luminaries as Ron Cobb and Moebius and imperial-phase Jim Cameron, but with a particular interest in the point of view of the humble ordinary worker as opposed to heroic explorers or leaders who often become the focus of narratives in such imaginative environments; as such it is uniquely positioned to provide a humane and relatable engine for unbounded storytelling. Also in every story a little phallus with teeth gotta burst out of someone’s chest.” – The Official Alien Publications Guide and Story Bible, presumably

I have a children’s storybook about ants, called Cyberantics. It’s about a scientist who creates a clever robot ant and sends it into an ant hill to learn all about ant society. “What a fine little ant,” the scientist says at the end. At the back of the book, there’s a biography of the author, and it’s a bit weird, because it turns out he was born in 2131.

This book is an Alien book from the story universe of Alien. Alien Romulus didn’t have to be this way. 

Romulus isn’t about anything except the Alien films, plus that jarring bit at the end when it’s about the Prometheus films, and it is built to desperately display that aboutness, barreling the camera flop sweat wink to reassure the fans that it can be trusted do you hear this bit of music it is from one of the previous movies, as if that will keep the facehuggers calm.

It’s doing Alien very well but it’s also about Alien, and that means there’s too much Alien in this Alien film, Alien-ness on all sides, crowding everywhere, all that matters is to think about the Alien, so don’t breathe, stay calm, and step in exactly the right places. The room is the same temperature as you. 

and also

the title of the first film 

is an adjective.

Aliens: How Burke takes his coffee

Jim Cameron’s Aliens (1986) is a meticulously-assembled thrill ride, absolutely loaded with enriching details. My favourite of all of them is in the coffee scene.

It’s early in the film, and Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) has returned to normal life after her horrific experiences in Alien. In this scene, the smiling corporate functionary Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) comes to ask for her help. With him is Lt. Gorman (William Hope) of the Colonial Marines. They try to persuade Ripley to return to the alien planet.

There is so much going on in this scene. Watch it closely:

As the characters talk, the main physical action of the scene is Ripley making coffee for the two men. She pours out two mugs (which are transparent – a lovely, and useful, piece of prop design) and hands black coffee, unsweetened, to these two intruders.

Then she goes and pours for herself. She stirs her cup, which suggests she has added sweetener, but she hasn’t offered any to these unwelcome guests.

Lt. Gorman stands straight-backed, holding his mug politely and without interest. He rests against a table for a time, but doesn’t really move. At the end of the encounter he thanks Ripley for the coffee, even though he hasn’t touched it.

Burke, meanwhile, sits down, stands up, walks past Ripley, walks back, sits again, talking talking talking the whole time. It wasn’t until I watched Aliens on the big screen that I realised what he was doing. He’s putting milk or cream in his mug! I love it. My favourite detail in the whole film!


This is, first and foremost, just some blocking, something to get the characters moving around the space so the scene doesn’t seem static. But the film really makes it work. Burke taking his coffee white is a great character detail, suggesting he shies away from undiluted intensity, especially compared with Ripley, who is living in an unfiltered world at this stage of the film. Look also at how he does it: Burke stands up, walks past Ripley into her kitchen without asking, helps himself to her kitchen supplies, and then parks himself back where he was. He’s not showing overt dominance here, he’s just acting like someone who is used to being able to do exactly what he wants, when he wants – a much more subtle and dangerous way of manipulating a situation.

There are plenty of other great details in the scene that fire up red flags about Burke: he sits down without asking, and when he sits down, he starts touching something of Ripley’s (an item of clothing I think), playing with it with his fingers until Ripley snatches it away from him. When he’s up again at the end, having pushed Ripley into an outburst of emotion, he tells her “shhhh”, and puts his hand on her arm, and whispers that he hopes, as a favour, she’d think about it. This is why you never really trust Burke; the film is throwing lots of subtle signals, over and over again, that he will not respect your boundaries and he will smile while he takes advantage of you. 

It’s actually an interesting move in terms of filmmaking – surely the obvious thing to do is have Burke be trustworthy from the start, so his heel turn comes as more of a shock? I feel like Cameron’s made the right call here though, letting the only surprise be the sheer scale of Burke’s mendacity rather than trying to force the audience into going against their instincts and trusting a company man. It also means we never have to compromise Ripley’s character by having her trust someone and be betrayed.

Interesting also to compare to the way you are made to feel about the Marines. The stink of untrustworthiness that Burke carries with him doesn’t spread to them; they might be on the same mission, they might have the same goal in this very scene, but the audience comes out of this sequence with a cautious trust in them that Burke is never afforded.

And some of that storytelling work is done with the colour of a mug of coffee.

I love this film.

Prometheus (USA, 2012)

Mostly awful.

More? Okay. Here’s what I put on Facebook and Twitter:

Prometheus: I really liked it! Except for whenever any character said or did anything.
Or when the film explained anything at all,
Or when it linked to or referenced any other movie.
Apart from that it was great!

(The visual experience was wonderful, and that is best experienced in the cinema. I sort of do recommend it, in a bizarre way. It’s a deeply incoherent film. And it is trying to do something, which is more than 95% of big films ever do. I dunno man. It’s a weird, weird movie.)

Still here? Ooookay. Let’s go.

BALD RIPLEY
Cinefantastique June 1992
Twenty years ago, round about now, I bought the June 1992 edition of Cinefantastique. It was the first solid information I would get on the sequel to my absolute favourite film, Aliens. I’d seen an early trailer on Entertainment Tonight but apart from that, I knew nothing.

The coverage was a revelation. Cinefantastique was not a puff-piece magazine, and it did not pull its punches.[1] As it recounted the bizarre story of the production of Alien3, I was forced to accept some uncomfortable truths. Principally, this: the loyal soldier and the brave girl saved by Ripley’s heroism? They die in the opening credits of the new film. Get over it.

Cut to: sitting in the movie theatre with my buddies. The lights go down. The film begins. And those opening credits that heartlessly destroy the loved characters from a previous film? I love those credits. I still think it stacks up as one of the best opening sequences I’ve ever seen. All around me, though, the reception is not as positive. Right there and then, everyone else finding out that the guy and the little girl are dead. The movie doesn’t care. It just kept going at them. No wonder they start to hate it.

The hatred didn’t last. About a decade later, it started to pick up some respectability, and while it’s still little-loved, it’s also rarely hated any more. But it took a long time for that first rush of thwarted expectations to even out. I often wonder if that magazine was the only thing that spared me from the same initial response. Expectations matter. More than that: expectations are part of the film experience.

Expectations have been a big part of Prometheus, too. Is it an Alien prequel or is it not? What will Ridley Scott have to say this time? What is that big human-looking face? Does the trailer really give away 98% of the film?

So what were we expecting?

LES COUSINS DANGEREUX

Let’s get this right out of the way, then: Prometheus is not an Alien film. And that’s fine.

“Star Beast” was into development when the word “Alien” was noticed just sitting there in the script, waiting. It’s a great name, both an adjective and a noun, and it completely captures the theme of the film, that… waitasecond, I’ve already written about this. Let me quote myself.

[In the 1979 film] there was a whole biologicial technology in evidence that was truly alien, whose provenance and purpose was left unexamined. Thematically, this was the ground on which the B-movie monster stalked. The idea of alien-ness – the beauty and terror of the deeply different – was portrayed in a dense ecology of incomprehensible detail, all clearly part of some unreadable plan. A monster rose up and killed the film’s lonely humans, but the message was not that alien life is inimical to human life; the message was that alien life is not measurable against human life. These are different orders of nature, existing at right angles to each other. And, by extension, the message was that humans are not the masters of all they survey. Even these star-spanning future humans command only a small and humble domain. It’s a message of warning against hubris. We humans are just one limited mode of seeing in a universe which makes no room for us. Or, shorter: we do not matter.

– me

Ridley Scott has done something completely different here. In fact, what he’s done here is the direct opposite of what he did in Alien. In Prometheus, it is announced in the opening scenes that humanity does matter. We are being invited to visit these mysterious aliens, who have shepherded us throughout our history, and who maybe created us.

There are no aliens in Prometheus. There are only cousins.

Ridley here portrays an intergalactic order in which human existence is comprehensible, and part of a grand plan. We have a place in the plan, we just don’t know exactly what it is. This idea is thematically incompatible with Alien.

This makes it somewhat distracting that the film-makers, over and over again, draw links between the two. Places, scenes, moments, from the 1979 film are repeated in the 2012 film. These quotes are all shallow and surface material. The new film is tone-deaf to the content and mission of the old. It reimagines these surface elements to address entirely different, incompatible, concerns.

Prometheus isn’t an Alien movie. It’s an Alien remix.[2]

THE CHERRY ORCHARD
Among the many memorable characters created by Monty Python, my favourites have always been the Gumbys. The Gumbys are shouting, staggering, inept, thuggish, helpless morons. Perpetually bewildered, they break everything around them while bellowing obvious, tragic expressions of their discomfort and failure.

On the Monty Python album that a friend dubbed on to tape for me in early high school, the Gumbys appear in an amazing sketch: an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. It’s two minutes, give it a listen if you never have:

Friends, this is a fair representation of the human action in Prometheus. Prometheus would in fact be a more coherent and satisfying experience if every line of dialogue was overdubbed with Gumbys saying “Sorry,” “I’ve broken it,” and “My brain hurts”.

I really feel like this can’t be emphasised enough. The dialogue and behaviour of every single character defies understanding. It is hard to think of any action by any character that even faintly resembles real human behaviour. This is not an exaggeration. Every line, every action. Every character. Every single scene. All of them. For an entire film. Beginning to end. ALL OF IT.

(Well, I can think of two exceptions, both involving Idris Elba’s space captain: (1) when he puts up a christmas tree, and (2) when he asks another character if they are a robot. That’s it. Maaaaaybe when Noomi Rapace’s space archaeologist puts herself on a medical chair, too. Maaaybe.)

Hey, that Cinefantastique issue was the first I ever heard of James Blish’s idiot plot: “a plot which is kept in motion solely by virtue of the fact that everybody involved is an idiot”. I thought it a bit harsh as a description of Alien3, but it is a perfect description of what’s going on in Prometheus. Everyone is an idiot. The things they do aren’t just stupid, they are nonsensical in a way that almost loops around into coherence again, like a Lewis Carroll poem, where all the inexplicable ridiculousness becomes mutually reinforcing and disguises the fact that none of it makes any sense at all.

I can’t think of another film that is so completely front-to-end inane. Nothing but wall-to-wall Mr Gumby, start to finish. My brain hurts! I dropped it! Run away Mr Gumby!

What were we expecting? The characters in Alien don’t make great decisions but they sure aren’t idiots. But this isn’t an Alien movie! Okay then. Consider, um, Blade Runner. Or Lawrence of Arabia. Or pretty much any other film ever made.

TOMB OF HORRORS

Prometheus doesn’t have a plot, it has a location.

In the early years of Dungeons & Dragons, you’d buy adventure modules to play with your friends. These were always pretty much the same: a detailed description of a dungeon or other dangerous environment, filled with traps, treasure, and monsters, and usually with some underlying logic that could be uncovered through careful investigation. Every group that sat down to play would have a different story unfold as they entered and explored this dungeon. Character was important, sure, but the organising principle of the experience was the dungeon map, and the key that explained it. Everything in the game arose out of the location.

Prometheus takes this same approach to its story. There is no story except characters exploring, and reacting to, the environment. It may be the closest we’re ever going to get to a filmic representation of the Tomb of Horrors experience.

As a result, the film pays a lot of attention to its sense of place. It carefully and clearly establishes its external geography, showing how everything fits together in the physical space. It then purposely upends this in the twisting interior, echoing the way in which the characters get swiftly disoriented in the labyrinth. And then, perversely, it underlines the lack of clarity about the internal physical space by repeatedly showing a very detailed map of the interior.

Prometheus succeeds magnificently as an exploration of space. The visuals in the film are stunning. The environment is realised in a completely credible, deeply fascinating, fully atmospheric way. It is lit and shot and computer-enhanced with great skill. This is a visual effects triumph [3], and a sign of Ridley Scott’s mastery of this aspect of filmmaking.

Did we expect anything less?

HORSESHOES OF THE GODS

Reading that magazine helped me set my expectations right for Alien 3. Prometheus presents a similar challenge. If you go in expecting Alien The Prequelling, you will be disappointed. To his credit, Ridley Scott did a good job of trying to shift expectations. What I was expecting (hoping for, really) was a film that would make me think.

This is what we want film-makers to do, isn’t it? To stretch themselves, to try and make a big statement, to do something that will give us some meat. To his further credit, Ridley Scott has done this here, he’s gone in boots and all and tried to do something huge.

The problem is that the ideas Scott is pursuing are, not to put too fine a point on it, stupid. Go read Cavalorn’s LJ post [4] on the symbolism (major spoilers!) – I believe he’s identified what Ridley Scott was consciously putting into play for this film. And it’s just not pretty reading. Scott has left a lot of ambiguity around the answers to many of his questions, mistaking provocation for depth. The questions are provocative, sure, but there’s nowhere for any of them to go. They don’t mean anything. If the answer was given, you wouldn’t feel any different. It’s dead content, questions designed just to be questions. [5]

So don’t expect the love to grow for Prometheus, like it did for Alien 3. This is a movie that will shrink on reflection, and away from the immersive environment of a darkened movie theatre. Those expectations are going to be corrosive, because it’s a movie that can’t live up to them. The more it is considered, the faster it will disintegrate. (And not in a lifegiving way.)

It’s a failure. A huge, engrossing, foolish, stunning, disastrous waste of talent and skill that pushes you away faster than it can pull you in, that alienates you faster than it can speak to you. It’s a folly and all of its many flaws come down to the writing, on every level: the concept, the structure, the execution, the dialogue. The writing, of course; the simplest thing. A man with a pen and paper. The hardest thing, too.

Watch it, or don’t.

[1] Though I’ve long lost the actual copy, I remember so many of the details from that incredible set of articles. I believe that this was the origin of the phrase “development hell” as a way to refer to moviemaking by the hard road. Also memorable: interview with Lance Henriksen where he said “this David Fincher kid they pulled in to salvage this movie, he’s a talent. This film does not show what he can do. watch for him.” Henriksen called that one right.

[2] Yes, Ridley Scott would disagree, but why should we listen to him?

[3] Bias alert: I’m mates with a few people who worked on these visual effects, including the guy in charge of all the bits Weta worked on. So I am predisposed to kindness. I don’t think this is just bias, though – most reviewers seem to agree on this bit, while disagreeing on almost everything else.

[4] And how nice to see Adrian Bott’s essay being circulated all over the place. I was introduced to him in passing in 2005, but never said a word to him beyond hello. Mutual friends indicate he’s a very nice chap though.

[5] *cough cough* Damon Lindelof *cough* Lost *cough*

Alien Prometheus

All right. I am about to indulge in some full-throttle nerdery.

I’ve been watching over the last 3 days the trailer-trailers for Prometheus, the new science fiction film from Ridley Scott. It is set in the same world as his hugely influential film Alien.

The trailer-trailer displays a continuity of physical design, with people in Moebius-like spacesuits trudging through Giger interior spaces; the sound mix throws in the shocking and intense Alien note that anchored the very first trailers for the 1979 film. Heck, even the typeface is the same as that from the first Alien (and the Prometheus title echoes Jim Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens).

The early news of an Alien Prequel didn’t seem to fill many people with joy. The alien creatures seem played-out thanks to two lacklustre crossover films, and Ridley Scott himself is famously uneven in his output. But Scott’s approach has generated interest. He is exploring other aspects of the mysteries raised in the first film – namely, the nature of the “space jockey”, the enormous elephantine fossil encountered by the doomed explorers. The famous phallic-headed dual-jawed chest-violating alien, Scott says, will play no part in the new film.

Complaints about his uneven filmic record aside, it must be understood that Ridley Scott is the only person who could make this story happen. No other filmmaker could get blockbuster money behind a science fiction film that is “a prequel to Alien but without the alien”. From the perspective of the Hollywood system, this would be an anti-movie, almost a Zen koan, an idea that utterly negates itself. Only for Ridley does it make sense. He can muster the finances with his reputation, and assert a new direction for Prometheus because he is the creator.

(At least, he is seen as the creator. Alien was of course a group project. O’Bannon, Giler & Hill all have a very strong claim to creation of the ideas explored herein. Giler and Hill are on board as producers, and O’Bannon – who always lamented the lack of recognition he received for his part in the film – passed away two years ago.)

I find the concept of Prometheus, as so described, incredibly enticing. The first Alien film was a monster-in-a-dark-house flick, but undertaken so grandly and in such a violatory manner that the alien creature seized a place as a cultural nightmare. But the film raised many other questions; there was a whole biologicial technology in evidence that was truly alien, whose provenance and purpose was left unexamined. Thematically, this was the ground on which the B-movie monster stalked. The idea of alien-ness – the beauty and terror of the deeply different – was portrayed in a dense ecology of incomprehensible detail, all clearly part of some unreadable plan. A monster rose up and killed the film’s lonely humans, but the message was not that alien life is inimical to human life; the message was that alien life is not measurable against human life. These are different orders of nature, existing at right angles to each other. And, by extension, the message was that humans are not the masters of all they survey. Even these star-spanning future humans command only a small and humble domain. It’s a message of warning against hubris. We humans are just one limited mode of seeing in a universe which makes no room for us. Or, shorter: we do not matter.

(There are clear parallels to the (heavily picked over) Lovecraftian Cthulhu mythos, where the fundamental secret about the dark alien gods is that they do not care about humanity; our inability to comprehend our cosmic insignificance tends to deliver us into madness.)

All of these elements were left unexplored in the other films in the series, which instead took the route of using the implacable alien creatures as symbolic engines, on which to layer this or that human-vs-? metaphor. In the second movie, they became the fourth-generation soldiers who eschewed a traditional battlefield and thereby negated military power and all the structures of hierarchy and control so embedded (referencing Vietnam & Afghanistan in the 70s). In the third movie, they became the idea of contamination, both in the sense of infectious disease, and of dangerous and wrong thoughts. In the fourth movie, they became (curiously enough) nature, or more precisely biological systems that through sheer complexity do not submit themselves to human control; and reproductive systems, the propagation of the human race, most of all.

There’s much to value in this approach, but the power of the first film was very much located in the directness of its meaning: the alien elements represented themselves.

Scott has noted in his discussion of Prometheus that the space jockey was untouched by the other films. Truth. But the mystery of the space jockey has been addressed in a number of ancillary stories. Of course none of these “matter”, but they can serve as examples against which we can measure Prometheus and speculate about what ground it might cover.

Thanks to licensing requirements, in all of these stories, the “Aliens” title is dominant, and as a result, the Giger creatures are inevitably prominent. In the extremely good 1980s comics written by Mark Verheiden, the space jockey is a conquerer, using the aliens to subjugate worlds (and this fate ultimately befalls our earth). In the less-well-known novel Aliens: Original Sin, the space jockey is one of a species of negotiators, entering a mutually beneficial trade deal with a human network. And in the even less well-known (and abandoned unfinished) comic series Aliens: Apocalypse – The Destroying Angels, human explorers discover that the space jockeys once dominated the galaxy using aliens as tools, with pre-human earth as part of their domain.

It will be curious to see how Scott charts his own course outward from the space jockey data given in the film; and
more pointedly, the way he uses these elements in a thematic and symbolic way. It’s also worth noting that the designers of the first Alien film deliberately loaded the space jockey with a specific symbolic weight. They tried to evoke positive feelings, sympathy and respect. It wasn’t meant as a threatening image, and had a kind of nobility to it. These were deliberate design choices, to contrast with the cold, unyielding threat of the other, nastier kind of alien.

(In the original schema for Alien, the space jockey was to be clearly portrayed as an innocent victim of the aliens; but script simplifications transformed this poor victim into the pilot of a craft carrying a cargo of deadly aliens, the very creatures that destroyed it. The ambiguity around the space jockey’s relationship to the cargo adds greatly to the sense of mystery, and immediately complicates any moral message. The original story would have been a lesser film on this count at least.)

So. As noted above, I find the concept enticing, and recognise that there is much to explore with the elements Scott has chosen as his focus. However, I am feeling great trepidation.

Because of the face.

It’s the central image in the poster, and was the first image released as a publicity still: a giant human face in an alien environment. This sets off enormous, raucous alarm bells for me.

See also the tagline from the poster: “The search for our beginning could lead to our end.” Our beginning? In another interview Scott namechecked Eric Von Daniken, whose Chariots of the Gods supposed that alien beings came to earth and taught us new technology. Is that what he’s doing here?

The face is not alien. The face denotes a different order of mystery, one that loops tightly back to earth and history of the human race – a tiny segment of time on one tiny planet in one corner of a vast universe. The face is hubris. The face asserts that in the vast deeps of space, among species whose nature we can only guess at, we still matter. We are not nothing – we are everything.

This, to me, is the biggest danger posed by Prometheus. Put another way: the message of Alien is, not everything is about us. I fear that Prometheus will show that Alien was about us, after all.

That would be a tragic reconfiguration of the 1979 film. And while the Alien films will always sit there pristine (if they can survive a Predator giving a helicopter ride to an Giger Alien, they can survive this), whenever I engage with them from now on I will hear Prometheus talking at me.

I hope it says the right things.