Alien (1979)

[version]

This image has gotten very popular, see also The Last Of Us.

Our zombies are no longer rabid animals but something like the mind-captured individual become host for the Network, shedding spores

 

[sus]

Yes, shimmering scales. Dragon scales. Lizard scales. Cold perfection. Opposite of living mammalian warmth.

 

[0bleak]

That "we" include the missus? Good man!

he don't need the missus when cute brooke adams is the main character

 

[version]

The fascinating thing about the crystallisation process is the tension between the beauty of it and the fact it's killing everything, like being hypnotised by a steadily coiling snake. There's something similar going on with people like Giger and Antonioni and Lynch being transfixed by industrial machinery.

To pull it back to Alien, you get this happening in several of the films. These characters who see something beautiful in the creature, Ash admiring its structural perfection in the first one, Brad Dourif's character marveling at the birth of the hybrid even while he's cocooned into the wall in Resurrection.

 

[version]

Yes, shimmering scales. Dragon scales. Lizard scales. Cold perfection. Opposite of living mammalian warmth.

The prisoners in Alien3 refer to the alien as 'The Dragon'.

 

[version]

The central conceit of the crystallising jungle's absolutely brilliant and his descriptions of it are predictably incredible, but it's quite a dull read apart from that. The story isn't interesting.

“He had entered an endless subterranean cavern, where jeweled rocks loomed out of the spectral gloom like marine plants, the sprays of glass forming white fountains. Several times he crossed and recrossed the road. The spurs were almost waist-high, and he was forced to climb over the brittle stems. Once, as he rested against the trunk of a bifurcated oak, an immense multi-colored bird erupted from a bough over his head, and flew off with a wild screech, aureoles of light cascading from its red and yellow wings. At last the storm subsided, and a pale light filtered through the stained-glass canopy. Again, the forest was a place of rainbows, a deep, iridescent light glowing from within.”​

“The crystal trees among them were hung with glass-like trellises of moss. The air was markedly cooler, as if everything was sheathed in ice, but a ceaseless play of light poured through the canopy overhead. The process of crystallization was more advanced. The fences along the road were so encrusted that they formed a continuous palisade, a white frost at least six inches thick on either side of the palings. The few houses between the trees glistened like wedding cakes, white roofs and chimneys transformed into exotic miniarets and baroque domes. On a law of green glass spurs, a child’s tricycle gleamed like a Faberge gem, the wheels starred into brilliant jasper crowns.”​

​

There's a lot of Heart of Darkness in The Crystal World too:

Above all, the darkness of the river was what impressed Dr. Sanders as he looked out for the first time across the open mouth of the Matarre estuary. After many delays, the small passenger steamer was at last approaching the line of jetties, but although it was ten o'clock the surface of the water was still gray and sluggish, leaching away the somber tinctures of the collapsing vegetation along the banks.​

 

[sus]

To pull it back to Alien, you get this happening in several of the films. These characters who see something beautiful in the creature, Ash admiring its structural perfection in the first one, Brad Dourif's character marveling at the birth of the hybrid even while he's cocooned into the wall in Resurrection.

In Annihilation the shimmer's quite beautiful too. Hypnotically so. Bit of a reach but vampires--who are also coldblooded immortal perfect predators, as we've discussed--are famously beautiful; they glamourize you into submission.

 

[sus]

he don't need the missus when cute brooke adams is the main character

Brooke Adams is unbelievably adorable, this is true.

In my younger days I'd have made a thread for her. Wearing pinafores.

 

[sus]

Brooke Adams. Mimi & Joan Baez. Doe-eyd deerwomen.

 

[version]

There's some interesting stuff out there about the design process for the alien in the third film. They had Giger on board at first then fucked him over.

Fincher specifically wanted the Alien to have lips based on Michelle Pfeiffer’s — more voluptuous and feminine. The director recalled: “we did give it Michelle Pfeiffer’s lips. That’s what they’re based on. It always had these little thin lips, and I said to Giger, ‘let’s make it a woman when it comes right up to Ripley.’ So it has these big, luscious collagen lips.” Giger wanted the new creature to be “more sensuous” as opposed to repulsive. “The lips and chin on my new model are better proportioned and give the creature a more erotic appearance,” he said. “When the mouth is closed it looks very voluptuous, beautiful.” In addition, inside the creature’s dome, Giger introduced a series of elongated, vertical structures. According to him, it was a “finger-brain, which should move like when wind is blowing over the grain.”​

​

As Giger had not been wholly satisfied with the Alien’s tongue in the first film, he redesigned it. “The tongue of the first Alien was, in a way, not organic,” the artist said. “It was a tube with these teeth in front. It was really not [the best].” The new tongue was conceived with the appearance of a sword or a spear. “When it opens its jaws the tongue inside the mouth is more like a spear — also very suggestive — which penetrates the head with greater velocity, snagging bits of brain. From Beauty to the Beast.” The creature’s jaw structure would literally transform for a ‘kiss’ — with its tongue penetrating the skull of the victim and, upon returning, dragging shreds of its innards.​

​

StarBeast — Alien³, the Beginning

Alien³ underwent a long, articulated creation process — which saw several scriptwriters elaborating their own screenplays, only to be replaced — one after the other. Going from William …

monsterlegacy.net

​

 

[sus]

Jurassic Park is part of this whole symbology too. Return of primordial, coldblooded, reptilian predators. Nature that natures, i.e. gets out of hand and can't be controlled, begins reproducing. The same way Weyland-Yutani keeps trying to control the xenomorph and failing. Genetic engineering fears. Lableak psychology.

 

[sus]

(In Bladerunner the cold-blooded mimics are called Replicants)

 

[sus]

Tossing another theme into the mix.

Scott Scobie:

> At the end of [the opening] scene, the crew, summoned and brought forth by Mother's voice, emerges from "hyper-sleep," the state of suspended anima tion in which they traverse the vast interstellar spaces. The symbolism of the glass-shielded "pods" in which the crew sleep is again that of the womb: an enclosed, protective, inner space within "outer space." In the second film, director James Cameron reinforces the point by making a lap-dissolve from the curve of the glass shield to the curve of the glowing "mother" Earth (the only glimpse of Earth, incidentally, in all three films). At the end of both the first film and the second, Ripley will retreat into this womb: a motif on which Alien 3 plays some very dark variations."

As Scobie argues, the "birth" of the crew from their hypersleep wombs signals the beginning of the story. Narrative begins when the hero leaves the safe boundaries of inside for the wild outside, or else when the wild outside intrudes on the boundaries of inside. In the case of Alien, we get both: The ship is also an "inside" amniote which keeps life alive in space and is intruded on by the alien. This alien reproduces by penetrating the boundaries of flesh, impregnating bodies parasitically, and then bursting out once the incubation period is over.

 

[version]

As Giger had not been wholly satisfied with the Alien’s tongue in the first film, he redesigned it. “The tongue of the first Alien was, in a way, not organic,” the artist said. “It was a tube with these teeth in front. It was really not [the best].” The new tongue was conceived with the appearance of a sword or a spear. “When it opens its jaws the tongue inside the mouth is more like a spear — also very suggestive — which penetrates the head with greater velocity, snagging bits of brain. From Beauty to the Beast.” The creature’s jaw structure would literally transform for a ‘kiss’ — with its tongue penetrating the skull of the victim and, upon returning, dragging shreds of its innards.

 

[version]

Jurassic Park is part of this whole symbology too. Return of primordial, coldblooded, reptilian predators. Nature that natures, i.e. gets out of hand and can't be controlled, begins reproducing. The same way Weyland-Yutani keeps trying to control the xenomorph and failing. Genetic engineering fears. Lableak psychology.

There's a new dinosaur in the latest one that the director's said's a failed cloning experiment partly inspired by the xenomorph.

 

[dilbert1]

I love the piece that plays when she encounters the alien.

Oh its so good, we were lamenting how the rest of the soundtrack was that cheesy acoustic guitar on account of what great work they did with that piece. Co-produced by one of the Portishead guys

 

[version]

One angle of approach with Aliens is colonisation. The alien tends to be billed as the invader, but in that one it's colonists getting themselves into trouble and the people at the top sending in the marines to exterminate the locals.

Interesting to compare it with Avatar as both feature Weaver in that crew-member-immersed-in the-local-customs role @sus has been talking about, but what that immersion looks like is very different.

 

[sus]

Yes I wish at least one of the sequels filled from the aliens pov. Just trying to tend its brood and psycho monkeys shows up

 

[dilbert1]

he don't need the missus when cute brooke adams is the main character

I won’t dare comment on Adams in her presence!!!

 

[dilbert1]

The major difference between The Thing and Annihilation is the latter's ambivalent about whatever the alien's doing. The emphasis is on change rather than destruction.

Yeah even with both using of the idea of the alien mimicking earthly forms, Annihilation‘s playing with “refraction” where the The Thing devours and replicates. The former’s neutrality definitely plays with your sympathy more but may also be even more perverse, the way Portman’s double is left for dead just as it comes into being, totally blank and without any reason for existing. An uncanny rather than superficially grotesque abomination. Although of course the effects in the Carpenter are spectacularly entertaining if less cosmically imaginitive