Alien (1979)

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version

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I watched AVP: Requiem last night - strange film. The characters were as flat and poorly written as you'd expect, but some of it caught me off guard and seemed quite 'daring', namely that they showed a kid being killed by a xenomorph, a pregnant woman being impregnated by the hybrid followed by three chestbursters popping out of her and the military nuked the entire town, killing pretty much everyone.
 
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DLaurent

DLaurent

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Someone To Watch Over me is my favourite Scott. Very low key. I rate it higher than Alien or Blade Runner. Shame his oeuvre has so many bombs. His directing style suited the 80s aesthetic so much.
 
sus

sus

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Well let's get down to brass tacks: this film is hilarious.

Guy Pearce in an old man suit appears out of nowhere, says "i want immortality," and then gets bludgeoned to death with Michael Fassbender's still-conscious severed head. This is funny. No, it's the funniest film I've seen in theatres since District 9.

Weyland's death is a stock ironic comeuppance played for extreme camp. The film glosses over it because it know that this is a trope. The glib speed with which it dismisses the search for immortality is the same with which it dismisses all the other characters' motivations. Dude say he wants money? DIES. Dude says he wants friendship? DIES. These aren't random deaths. They are equated by this same tone and attitude. Humans are stupid and die because they're stupid.

David reads Liz Shaw's dreams and then tells her straight up: you are a shallow character. Her dream looks like a hallmark card. "Your entire motivation is that you're infertile and your dad died of Ebola. I just summarized it in two sentences." The moral: robots don't have souls, and neither do people. But the robot is smarter because he understands this. If you've seen Blade Runner, you know what the warm-toned recording of the dream of a happy family means. It means she's a replicant.

"It's a quote from a movie I like."

Look at the specific quote from Lawrence of Arabia: 'the trick is not minding that it hurts'. David's character feels everything the humans feel, but he doesn't mind it. He's built up his ironic distance, he constructs his own identity and puts on an incredibly campy performance. The whole film aligns with his POV. As I said in general chat, Prometheus is a masterpiece of straight-faced camp.

The very first shot is quoted from 2001 (it's a quote from a movie I like). Prometheus is transparently Scott's grand statement on Science Fiction as a genre. It's not 'hard' science fiction. It's "Science Fiction", deeply embedded in quotation marks. The Prometheus/Pandora myth is like Scifi 101, first day of class. It's THE example of mythological proto-scifi. It's referenced in Frankenstein, the first piece of Science-Fiction literature. Alien references it. The films that Alien references reference it. The films that reference Alien reference it.

So the characters fly into space seeking all the answers to their questions, and what do they find? A rational, promethan man locked in an unending struggle against a irrational, pandoric vagina monster. Just slapping against eachother until there is a literal, onscreen shuddering climax and postcoital release. Again: this is funny! You can imagine people staring at this scene and saying "hmm... what does this all mean?" Or, better yet: "how did the squid monster grow so big without a food source?" - just angrily looking for logical clues in this prolonged sequence of a vagina and penis locked in combat.

Scott's grand statement on sci-fi is to issue a moratorium. The point of Prometheus is that these stories pretty much always boil down to the same basic archetypal conflict. The humans are painfully mundane - they are all artificial. Only David sees through the guise and understands that he's a character in a movie. This is a loving ode to gleefully bad sci-fi.

Important scene: Naomi Rapace looks at some bleeps and bloops on a screen. Two bar graphs allign. "This is it," she cries. "This is everything!" We cut back to the bar graph, and watch it bleep and bloop a while longer. Wow, what an impressive bar graph. Next scene, it turns out she just wants to get fucked.

There are two distinct scenes in the film of wacky dames who just need a good deep-dicking. One gets an abortion, the other crushed by a huge black protuberance. A guy smokes pot and then dies instantly. This is Friday the 13th logic. The class conflict in Alien is notably absent. All these people are rich idiots, so we're not supposed to cheer for them. Idris Elba, the closest thing to a 'lower class' character puts on a Southern Accent, says YEEHAW! and rockets his ship into a wall to save the day. Michael Bay would give an approving nod.

Why is there a zombie scene? Because it's wonderful slapstick. He gets shot like fifty times and his head gets run over. I couldn't stop laughing. But more importantly, the 'zombie' exists to shows us what Charlie was turning into. For a second, I though it was Charlie, back from the dead. Again, this treats the characters as slightly interchangable.

There are at least two shots lifted straight from Luigi Cozzi's (in)famous Italian Alien ripoff Contamination.

Prometheus owns.
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sus

sus

Moderator
The derelict was originally storyboarded to be a pyramid, and later under Ridley, became a temple-complex of ruined steps and broken columns and hieroglyphs etched on cliff walls. Crescent moons like scythes—two symbols of death—show up constantly in this film; the derelict is one example. And what is so particularly haunting about the first Alien—and about Prometheus, the prequel which follows its example—what is so particularly haunting are the ruins. The ossified, stone Space Jockey collecting dust. The pile of bodies outside the airlock, inevitably breached.
 
sus

sus

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These are stories that begin with an extinction: the extinction of our Fathers, the Engineers who made us. A massive, intergalactic species at the peak of its powers, fossilized. Eaten by this ultimate of efficient predators. And they are stories which will end, inevitably, with our extinction, the extinction of the Engineers’ Son. These are the first encounters, at the fringes of space, as we feel ourselves through the Dark Forest. The civilizational blunders and private greed which make our downfall certain. And the xenomorphs? Another Son, Cain to our Abel. Another of the Engineers’ creations, turning and killing their creator. Ridley Scott was obsessed by this idea: that the things we make might come back to destroy us. He compared it to Frankenstein. And now we are living in the age of AI.
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
presumably all based on his boyhood turns around the north-west, as the heavy industry that was the landscape slowly fell into a state of dereliction. the book i read by alex niven recently talks about this a bit
 
version

version

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sus said:
The derelict was originally storyboarded to be a pyramid, and later under Ridley, became a temple-complex of ruined steps and broken columns and hieroglyphs etched on cliff walls. Crescent moons like scythes—two symbols of death—show up constantly in this film; the derelict is one example. And what is so particularly haunting about the first Alien—and about Prometheus, the prequel which follows its example—what is so particularly haunting are the ruins. The ossified, stone Space Jockey collecting dust. The pile of bodies outside the airlock, inevitably breached.
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The time out of joint thing too, finding something more advanced than us has already come and gone.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
One takeaway I had from reading all of Jacob Clifton’s incredible Farscape recaps—let’s call it Clifton’s Unified Theory of Sci-Fi—goes like this:

Science-fiction is fundamentally premised on the horrifying discovery that the Other is inside you—has either always been part of you, or has recently got there—“contaminated” you.

(Contact and contagion: all these words share the Latin root -con: together; touching. See also connect, confide, collaborate, cooperate, coordinate, compete, combat, combust, conduit, commerce, commit, compadre, company, complement, and complex.)
 
sus

sus

Moderator
This theory helps make sense of the historical relationship between sci-fi and Westerns (think Firefly, Star Trek) and also the conceptualization of space as a colonized frontier, because the Unified Theory represents a frontier politics moral dilemma. There’s a reason all these stories happen in the provinces and ports, on asteroids and mining colonies, penal colonies and desert outposts and scrap metal junkyards. In uncharted territories and twilight zones. Maybe it’s Ender and the insect colony, or Skywalker learning Vader is his father. Maybe it’s Scorpius, stuck in Crichton’s head.

But the all-time archetypal example has to be the Alien franchise—all its pregnancy and parasites. Learning there’s an alien inside of you, feeding off you. And this stuff has a lot in common with what happens, germ- and disease-wise, when two radically isolated cultures (e.g. Europeans and American Indians) come into contact with one another. It’s related to the female psychology of giving birth—of becoming a host to a creature that is sucking the life-water out of you—(more sex as suicide)--this alien you are incubating, who comes from outside of you and yet is entirely its own thing.

(And the relation is fraught: the interests of mother and child aren’t always aligned, which over millions of evolved years leads to subtle forms of complicated warfare. Mothers' bodies will try to abort unhealthy fetuses; fetuses will send misleading signals, to extract more nutrients. Oliver Griffith, at the University of Melbourne, describes pregnancy as a "battle for resources," replete with enzyme-on-hormone violence.)
 
version

version

Well-known member
sus said:
This theory helps make sense of the historical relationship between sci-fi and Westerns (think Firefly, Star Trek) and also the conceptualization of space as a colonized frontier, because the Unified Theory represents a frontier politics moral dilemma. There’s a reason all these stories happen in the provinces and ports, on asteroids and mining colonies, penal colonies and desert outposts and scrap metal junkyards. In uncharted territories and twilight zones. Maybe it’s Ender and the insect colony, or Skywalker learning Vader is his father. Maybe it’s Scorpius, stuck in Crichton’s head.
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You've the shadowy presence of the corporation too. The crew and the alien are as much resources to be exploited as the mineral ore the ship's tugging.
 
dilbert1

dilbert1

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Watched The Thing last night and it ruled, similar vibes where a crew is in uncharted territory. Anyone got recs for what sci-fi in this vein I should watch next tonight, in the mood for that sort of thing
 
version

version

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dilbert1 said:
Watched The Thing last night and it ruled, similar vibes where a crew is in uncharted territory. Anyone got recs for what sci-fi in this vein I should watch next tonight, in the mood for that sort of thing
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None of them are as good as Alien or The Thing, but the first with that set up which come to mind are Sunshine, Event Horizon, Underwater and Annihilation. I'm assuming you've seen 2001. I liked Soderbergh's take on Solaris too. If you don't mind something lighter and studenty, John Carpenter did a film called Dark Star with Dan O'Bannon, one of the guys behind Alien, where you can see bits of Alien taking shape.
 
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