Alien (1979)

luka

Well-known member
Is that the titilating lesbian vampires one we curtailed our first ever viewing of citizen kane for?
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
Okay so it went Predator (1987), Predator 2 (1990), Alien Versus Predator or AVP (2004), Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem or AVPR (2007), Predators (2010) and The Predator (2018).

Then you have Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992), Alien: Resurrection (1997), the aforementioned AVP "franchise," Prometheus (2012), and Alien: Covenant (2017).

I'm worried. Where do we go from here? I mean, clearly these movies just keep getting better, so we have to take it somewhere, but it's like we're running out of space.

I'm thinking something along the lines of Get These Goddamn Aliens and Mutant Fucking Predators Off of Me! (2022 or so), or maybe Aliens vs. Predators vs. Alt-Right Incels with AR-15's: World War Meme (2020... election propaganda, weird immigration allegory overtones).
 
Last edited:

version

Well-known member
Someone made a short film where a bunch of Templar Knights go up against a Predator.

Predator: Dark Ages - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4171544/

Follows a group of war-torn Templar knights who are put to the test against a strange beast that stalks the lands of England. This battle is what Myths and Legends are made of. An independent fan film.

 
Last edited:

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
It's one of those (rare?) horror films that actually sticks to the dictum of 'less is more' and creeps you out by implication, rather than explicit displays of gore, most of the time. Which makes the gore all the more shocking when it's really used.

In terms of comparison to The Thing, it's hard to say which is more effective as a horror film, I think, because they're effective in different ways. In Alien you don't see much, whereas in The Thing you see *everything* - it's total gore-porn horror maximalism - whenever the organism is actually transforming or attacking someone; but when it's quiescent, you see literally nothing, and the fear derives mainly from paranoia and the uncertainly of who has already been got. The horror is also very much sexual in Alien, all about rape and involuntary pregnancy, whereas it isn't in The Thing, as version already noted. Thirdly there's the location: in Alien there's the a sense of fear for the characters due to their precarious and isolated situation, whereas in the The Thing we're very much on Earth, and it's just good fortune the creature is, for now, confined to Antarctica - but for how long?

Here's a thought, though: both films are ultimately about parasitism, about an organism that invades others, bends their bodies to its will and ultimately destroys them - is it a coincidence both were made around the time that the Aids pandemic was exploding into the public consciousness?
 
Last edited:

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Perhaps an underappreciated alien-as-parasite/pathogen horror movie (that also doesn't show much explicit gore or grossness, AFAIR) is The Andromeda Strain, which predates the other two by a decade and is, I suspect, based at least in part on Lovecraft's 'The Colour out of Space'.
 
Last edited:

version

Well-known member
Apparently Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil, that insane Island of Dr. Moreau documentary) is directing an adaptation of The Colour Out of Space starring Nic Cage.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I think that Alien (like Solaris) used that dirty, industrial feel for spaceships that hasn't dated as much as more gleaming visions of space. Probably a small part of it. Plus the facehuggers and the parasitical impregnation was simply a terrifying idea.
Anyone see Inseminoid?

 

version

Well-known member
I think that Alien (like Solaris) used that dirty, industrial feel for spaceships that hasn't dated as much as more gleaming visions of space.

I think that was one of the many missteps of the Star Wars prequels, we jumped back thirty years or so and suddenly everything was encased in chrome.
 

droid

Well-known member
We all know how Alien (and probably bladerunner) wouldn't exist if it hadn't been for Jodorowsky's Dune? There's a bunch of articles about it online. Dan O'Bannon's book goes into it in detail...
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Though on the other hand maybe it would have been clean thirty years before, then it got dirty for the actual ones. Or maybe I'm making excuses, I never made it through the prequels to be honest.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
One of the many ways the prequels sucked was over-reliance on CGI for the space scenes, which weren't a patch on what was achieved in 1977 using models on wires and primitive analogue editing tech.
 

version

Well-known member
2001 is an interesting one. It isn't really gleaming or rugged, just sort of clean and minimal, and it's aged remarkably well.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
2001 is an interesting one. It isn't really gleaming or rugged, just sort of clean and minimal, and it's aged remarkably well.
I think all the space stuff that has aged well - Solaris, 2001, Alien etc - did all the fx they could physically do and made a conscious decision not to try and do the stuff they couldn't manage. Star Wars is the exception where I believe they gambled on some technology coming together for the space fights and luckily it did.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
2001 is an interesting one. It isn't really gleaming or rugged, just sort of clean and minimal, and it's aged remarkably well.

I thought there was 2001-ish, or at least Kubrickian, feel to the set designs in Blade Runner 2049. Which was sonically and aesthetically excellent, I thought, but badly let down by an unengaging plot, over-reliance on action and explosions and Jared Leto's ridiculous pantomime villain.
 
Top