Alien (1979)

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vershy versh said:
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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Annihilation is such a good reference here

Solaris too

I haven't seen the others but am queueing
 
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There is often a sense in these films that something ancient and dormant has been waiting biding, we uncover it.

A seed an incubation. Pyramids in Antarctica. Thing frozen in ice. Or uncovered from desert sands. Or hidden in jungle like Kong. Or on the seafloor, the Deep.
 
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Primordial, that's the word Jafa uses it's the right word.

Yes it happens in the future but really it's a haunting by our past. Some Jurassic reptilian thing. Darwinian Hobbesian state of nature. Precivilized. Serpentslither under civilization.
 
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"Bomb them back to the stone age." Radioactivity reinstating the age of dinosaurs (1998 Godzilla). Regressive mutation. Like what the acid does in Fear and Loathing.
 
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Europeans traveled across the sea back in time to a New World which was really a peek into prehistory (really an Old World)

Spaceship sets out across cosmos in 2001 or Prometheus tracing our ancestry back to our creators. Or back to the original radioactive mutation (the stoned ape, Vico's lightning, the Monolith) that turned us from animal to human, set us on our course, so that

In our beginning we find our end

And at the source at the point of contact with our birth we start the process of our own destruction
 
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vershy versh said:
Have you seen The Lost City of Z?
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No but I watched the trailer so I think I sorta see how it's related

It all goes back to Conrad right. Traveling upriver to the source. Finding a heart of darkness. It's exactly the plot of Prometheus.
 
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It's all a continuation of Romanticism it's the Sublime over and over again, seeking contact with an awe-some Nature, with God, with the Old Gods, and then when you find it it smashes you to pieces. You wish you'd never left your polite tablecrystal clothnapkinmannered society behind.
 
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Space stories that are seafaring journeys. Into the unknown. Leave home cross over bring something back with you.
 
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sus said:
In our beginning we find our end

And at the source at the point of contact with our birth we start the process of our own destruction
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Its interesting thinking about AI existential threat fears. That our computers could overpower us. Which comes up in 2001. and triunal brain/lizard-as-primordial.

We call both lizards and computers cold. In opposition to ourselves as warmblooded breastfeeding mammals.
 
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Outerspace is cold the hearth

The Poles are cold the heart is warm



Clock and entropy are the cold timekeepers, heart is the warm timekeeper
 
Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
North Water too

Alien was hugely impactful on release and hard to articulate the impression made, more akin to An American Werewolf in London due to special effects design, a film also starting with and chronicling a journey

Alien had its mission crew who you knew were mostly expendable, casting was spot on (android had to be English!) and you got the camaraderie of ship life is established early on, so none of the solipsism of Silent Running’s existential themes of incongruity and green environmental concerns

almost a supreme qlippothic shadow to ET’s glow in the dark sex toy finger and Elliot’s bmx crew in the sky, even the title font shifting into perspective - - fwiw the sequel Aliens is daft pap with far less suspense and more yeehaw crash bang wallop but still fun and quotable, just wish the makers had known when to leave a tale told



the first tv airing of Alien here was an event in itself because half our school saw it mimicking pushing fists under and up into a ball as a shirt/jumper chest bulged
 
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