Reviews of Alien (1979) and related work

• Sequel: Aliens (1986)
• Sequel: Alien III (1988)
  • Version: Alien 3 (1992)
  • Implementation: Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay (2019)
• Sequel: Aliens (1988)
  • Spin-off: “Aliens: Lucky” (1996)
• Sequel: Alien: Resurrection (1997)
• Spin-off: AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004)
• Sequel: Alien: Covenant (2017)
• Document: “Memory: The Origins of Alien” (2019)
• Fan film: “Alien: Monday” (2024)
• Sequel: Alien: Romulus (2024)

Alien (1979)

Horror of a kind that plays upon a wide variety of intuitive aversions, set in an uncommonly realistic far future.

The director, Ridley Scott, would go on to make Blade Runner (1982), hailed as the seminal cyberpunk film once William Gibson had consolidated the genre in Neuromancer (1984). One of the brilliant features of Neuromancer is the absence of space exploration within it: humankind has made it to a few Lagrange points and built some colonies for the very rich, but there is realistically no talk of going further because physics prevent FTL, and extraterrestrials are held over to the coda.

In Scott’s two great SF films, humankind is going further, but with little change in mentality or social structure. This is the next best thing for a foreseeable-future scenario barring SF’s later infatuation with transhumanism. The biggest corporations operate on a greater physical scale, but technology has not been made intuitive, there is no political unification, and to whatever extent there is extraterrestrial life, regular humans go on living as if it didn’t matter. Outer space is not the thought-provoking chain of wondrous adventures seen in Star Trek (1966) or Star Wars (1977). In Alien, outer space is a void, with the very occasional piece of engineering coasting by, silent and grimy. Interstellar travel is significantly faster than light, but significantly slower than conventional cinematic science fiction, here in the first film. The major innovation is the purity of the social and economic extrapolation: It’s brainier than a standard horror film.

The most annoying flaws are found among the special effects, including the rubbery fingers of the creature and the triple(!) explosions of the Nostromo’s reactor, but there are weak parts to the script as well. Why does the company accelerate an entire refinery to some multiple of c instead of shipping the refined product? The ability of the creature to grow from the size of a foot, seemingly without eating, is unexamined. More profoundly, it is objectionable to suppose that the first “peer” humankind might find will be both absolutely hostile and humanoid in its basic nutritional compatibilities, shape, speed and size, including a small mouth that is obviously maladapted, on a head that is obviously impractically shaped. It’s less alien than it is implausible. The baroquely greebled miniatures, while very impressive indeed, are not realistic either. The plot loses a little too much credibility, and therefore loses the possibility of real horror, to get its psychoanalytical tinge.

The flaws are unsurprising given how closely this film is based on Planet of the Vampires (1965). The “space jockey” corresponds to the skeletal giants of the earlier film. The facehuggers in Alien resemble the pair of hands of one such giant seen at the entrance to an alien ship. The U shape of the jockey ship echoes the prongs on the Argos and Galliott, etc. It is as if Alien were written in part on the basis of a thoroughly digested, faded memory of Italian kitsch. This does not make Scott’s film any less impressive. He and O’Bannon replaced almost all of the bad ideas with good ones, but the main improvements are in execution, not imagination. Perhaps the best part of the execution is to take ILM’s amazing weathering from Star Wars and apply it to a less fantastic, working-class environment.

References here: Outland (1981), Armored Trooper Votoms (1983), The Ballad of Halo Jones (1984), Gall Force: Eternal Story (1986), “The Ship” (1996), “The Ascent” (1996), Pushing Ice (2005), Adventure Time (2010), Rick and Morty (2013), Stranger Things (2016), Life (2017), “Zygote” (2017), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Story of Science Fiction (2018), Faith and the Flesh (2019), Seven Worlds, One Planet (2019), Alien: Romulus (2024).

moving picture fiction

‣ Aliens (1986)

Review refers to the director’s cut.

Aliens was directed by James Cameron, whose latest achievement at the time was co-writing Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985); not a good sign. In relation to the first film, this one does about as much right as it does wrong.

• To start with, the physical presence of corporate representatives humanizes them, which is ambiguous. In cyberpunk, social problems are systemic rather than moral, but the appearance that Burke acts alone reduces that feeling of systemic problems just as the bureaucratic meeting strengthens it.
• The presence of intercorporate and national organizations, including the evidently US-derived Colonial Marines as opposed to a corporate security cadre, appears to weaken the corporate system. This reaffirms traditional national sensibilities in a capitalist environment, which is not credible, and therefore bad.
• The Marines are reasonably corrupt, which is good, but they talk about other more or less intelligent extraterrestrials (Arcturians) as if these are familiar, which is bad.
• Androids have advanced and are portrayed with much less technophobia, which is good, albeit only as a rich contrast to Holm’s superbly unpleasant Ash.
• An immaterial message travels the 39 or so ly in a week. The Sulaco seems to require about 3 months: FTL travel has become a lot faster, which is bad.
• The idea that Ripley would have left a beloved preteen daughter to go on an approximately two-and-a-half-year trip on the Nostromo is bad, mainly because it should have been clear in Alien, but also because it makes her look like a negative 1980s stereotype of a working mother, while no father’s responsibility is implied. She is simultaneously feminized by the addition of her first name and by her protection of Newt.
• The special effects are much improved, though some back projections are obvious. One is put to great use as fake nature.
• The hardware is justifiably the stuff of nerd legend, though speckled with technobabble and impractical details.
• The added concept of an alien queen detracts a great deal from the idea that the aliens are what Weyland-Yutani wants them for: weapons, designed to be deployed in the form of eggs, with no chance of reproduction independent of “space jockey” labs. The queen implies a life cycle that would require some extremely improbable conditions to have evolved naturally or to have appealed to intelligent designers, which is bad.

It does turn out that Ripley’s attack on the eggs is purely destructive, and the queen’s dread in that scene is a sign of empathy in her species, which would be good insofar as the species is natural. It weakens the moral dichotomy, which is good, but it blurs the worldbuilding, which is bad.

Like First Blood Part II, Aliens brutally adapted the franchise to the Hollywood trends of its time. I like how it refines the cyberpunk elements, and I do not mind the addition of 1980s military action and technophilia, but each of the good changes seems cursed with a flaw.

References here: “Conspiracy” (1988), Gunhed (1989), “The Siege of AR-558” (1998), Resident Evil (2002), Stranger Things (2016), “Men Against Fire” (2016), Story of Science Fiction (2018), Alien: Romulus (2024).

moving picture sequel fiction

‣ Alien III (1988)

William Gibson (writer).

Read in the “revised first draft”, from early in the year.

This is an unproduced, unfinished screenplay, one of many for the 1992 film. Curiously, it’s a lot like Aliens in that it does about as much right as it does wrong.

Gibson’s writing for the screen doesn’t have the mindblowing extrapolations he was doing in his novels at the time. Instead, it’s “Red Star, Winter Orbit” (1983): Commies in space, still falling behind the capitalists economically and scientifically, as they were in 1988. As Cold War allegories go, it’s really good, certainly head and shoulders above the likes of “The Omega Glory” (1968), but it’s still cheesy to see these Russian, East German, East Asian infighter stereotypes from 1980s action flicks, with “a blend of Mexican Socialists’ agitprop murals and Syd Mead” on the walls, written just a year before the Berlin Wall came down. How do you stay “five years behind” your rivals for 200 years?

The idea of the Sulaco spending just 85 minutes in commie space, course-correcting only after entering it, yet still being boarded, is also a little silly, again tugging at the franchise’s problem with degrees of FTL. The biology, on the other hand, is cool. Gibson went in the opposite direction from Cameron and Verheiden, away from a natural origin as megafauna, toward an unnatural, metamicrobiological origin as a weapon system. Apparently Ridley Scott had the same basic idea, at least of the creature in Alien being anthropomorphic because it had adapted genetically to its human victim. This is the more elegant choice, but Gibson overdid it, exceeding even the limits of plausible nanotechnology. In a brief scene, he has the alien organism melding with literal human DNA at the molecular level, suggesting something like a walking CRISPR/Cas9 miraculously compatible with a wide range of genetic materials. It’s not telepathic, thankfully, but there is no discussion of the limitations it would need to be safe to its wielder, and if it can reconstruct a genome in seconds, it seems like it ought to be smart, too.

Together, this all-out bioweapon angle and continued physical movement toward the centres of civilization from the periphery of LV-426 enable an escalation in scale and intensity, continuing the trend that connects the first two films. The “air-scrubber” and the eco-module, reminiscent of Silent Running (1972), even suggest a trend toward the larger ecology of Earth, the logical end point. It’s fun to see this from Gibson, who tends to shy away from body horror and action in his books. Made thusly invasive and extremely effective, the threat reaches Lovecraftian proportions, rather like a fast-zombie apocalypse wrapped up in a pandemic of lycanthropy. This is perfectly appropriate, given the themes of cosmic isolation and indifference in the first film, but it’s inconsistent with the earlier films. As Tully says to Hicks in the script, it makes the survivors “lucky”, leaving no more plausible explanation for their survival up to this point. The relative consistency of alien morphology on Acheron is explained only by the lack of deliberate genetic experiments there, which is flimsy. The facehuggers seem to be left without any justification, since the eggs now shoot spores like puffball fungi.

Tully’s nice: A genetic engineer who “came out here to help design ecosystems” and has images of the beauty of nature on the walls of his claustrophobic room. Not a hippie stereotype but a realistic engineer in a realistic profit-driven system. Same with Spence, winning her races to get her job. When Hicks goes to meet Tully and finds Spence in the “construction zone”, I get the sense that the basic structure of the script is sensible and Fincher would have made a better movie out of it. The implied sequels also seem promising: Hicks says “what you wanna grease is the company”, for a fourth film on Earth, and Bishop suggests they find the point of origin and destroy it, for a fifth. Those films will never happen either.

References here: Alien: Romulus (2024).

text sequel fiction

‣‣ Alien 3 (1992) – previously

Review refers to the theatrical cut.

A return to basics, with weaponry inferior even to that in the first film and only one alien opponent. More artistically filmed, predominantly as near-monochrome (albeit orange) neo-noir (which is, once again, resonant with the cyberpunk subgenre), by first-time feature director David Fincher.

The script has an interesting history even before the lineage of credited rewrites on the one that went into production. Practically nothing remains from Gibson’s drafts and he is not one of the six credited writers. In the production version, the transition from Aliens has problems with plausibility but the resulting deaths of Newt and Hicks are unsentimental, which is a major strength of the writing, not a shortcut. After all, this is supposed to be an uncaring universe. Verheiden, who constantly emphasized how horrible everything is in his comic, did not kill a single one of the three survivors from Aliens, instead dragging them through one battle after another, which was far less plausible. The way Ripley picks up a new guy, and her hair, restore the feminism of her character, which had been undermined in Aliens. Gibson, and to a lesser extent Christmas, had Ripley awakening to a scene of traumatizing horror and then being carted off screen, which seems more cruel and conservative. In general, the acting is better here than anywhere else in the franchise.

The implantation of a new queen by an apparently ordinary facehugger, presumably born from the queen on Acheron, seems to confirm that the aliens are capable of reproducing indefinitely from any individual, as in Christmas’s version, contradicting the suggestion that the species was designed as a weapon. The Predator/“evil force”-like subjective camera, while charmingly prefigurative of the genuinely scary Alien versus Predator game (Rebellion, 1999), again humanizes the alien unsuccessfully: it just makes it less mysterious, without cuing empathy.

The best part comes last: vicious hermetic Terry English storm troopers and a human face (the ultimate representative of Weyland-Yutani is neither extraterrestrial nor artificial, hence the greatest threat is suitably systemic and internal), with even the original protagonist dying and achieving glorious parental closure. Everything is tied up in a rather neat package, reprising the Nostromo log audio. It’s problematic, but if it had ended the franchise, I would still have been very happy with it.

References here: Reviews on this site, “Gall Force: Stardust War” (1988), Aliens (1988), Story of Science Fiction (2018), Alien: Romulus (2024).

moving picture version fiction

‣‣ Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay (2019)

Tamra Bonvillain (artist), Johnnie Christmas (writer-artist).

Read in 2020.

This is only about half the material in Gibson’s script, and nothing like storyboards. It’s not quite as pretty as Aliens: Nightmare Asylum (1989), but a lot smarter, and the art brings the ideas to life. The changes from Gibson’s version are almost all to the better. Tully’s fate is one exception: Here he freezes himself, somehow overpowering the influence of the complete rewrite of his body, including his brain; more sentimental.

sequential art text implementation fiction series

‣ Aliens (1988)

Read in 2020.

This covers the 1988–1990 span of the Dark Horse comic, across three series.

Dark Horse claims this was canon until the release of Alien 3 (1992), but that’s not really true. While it was coming out, the rights holders were actively commissioning unrelated scripts for a third film. Apparently, at least the middle section (now Nightmare Asylum) was relettered and reissued at one point on the pretense that its characters were not Hicks and Newt at all. That’s about the cheapest form of retcon I can imagine.

☛ More

sequential art text sequel fiction series

‣‣ “Aliens: Lucky” (1996)

Mark A. Nelson (artist), Mark Verheiden (writer).

Read in 2020.

sequential art text spin-off fiction

‣ Alien: Resurrection (1997) – previously

Review refers to the director’s cut.

To reboot the film franchise, Joss Whedon—a lighter man than Fincher, then known for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997)—wrote a script, and Jeunet et Caro of Delicatessen (1991) directed it. As usual, Marc Caro handled some design aspects rather than formal direction. They were good people, doing a job nobody should have done.

In terms of genre, this is a slightly picaresque, darkly farcical return to Aliens, shaped almost as a role-playing adventure. The cyberpunk elements are almost totally gone, in favour of generic far-future SF, along the lines of Alien III. Ripley is profoundly altered and the change is almost entirely toward greater power and sex appeal, which is neither probable nor conducive to horror. It is not unlike the reintroduction of the character on the last page of Aliens: Nightmare Asylum (1989), armed to the teeth.

The biology of the aliens is worse than ever, worse than Verheiden’s version and Gibson’s combined, even if we disregard the psychic hive-mind bullshit and the sudden ability to spit acid. It is implied that the aliens adapt genetically to their prey in such a way that nothing is guaranteed to be preserved, although the evidence is weak since the queen in Resurrection has not undergone a normal process of adaptation, and still has some features of the original. If true, as in Gibson’s version, this would further imply that the creators of the aliens wanted a servant that would eventually become a greater threat than what it was sent out to destroy, hence shifting the interpretation back towards natural selection. If it is natural selection, as it was in Verheiden’s comics, then it’s some new special-pleading kind of selection, not gene-centric like life on Earth.

The film might have been better if it had focused on the implications of the aberrant queen and her “sympathetic” offspring, instead of having Gediman—looking like Piter de Vries from Lynch’s Dune (1984)—blurting out the interesting possibility in a very poor cut. However, this remains a job nobody should have done. It wasn’t really an opportunity to conclude or save the franchise. That ship had already sailed.

References here: Story of Science Fiction (2018), Alien: Romulus (2024).

moving picture sequel fiction

‣ AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004)

Chimerical cash cow, very poorly sewing together the franchise with that of the lesser Predator (1987). The same crossover, usually with the same basic plot, has been done in several comics, novels and games, inspired by the ending of Predator 2 (1990). The only time it’s been done well, to my knowledge, was in the 1999 PC horror shooter. A straight example of post-Jaws “Book, Look & Hook” thinking.

moving picture spin-off fiction

‣ Alien: Covenant (2017)

Seen in 2024.

In the 2000s, established intellectual property became more important than ever to the filmmaking industry. Cynical producers felt that with a big-enough IP, you could write schlock, filter it through a focus group, and sell it to a crowd of casual filmgoers who just wanted “more”. The age of cinema was ending, they thought, and so you didn’t really need a movie anymore; you needed a title the crowd recognized, for a feeling of familiarity. Here, the title is “Alien”, repeated along with a set of visual motifs, and not the context that gave them meaning.

Covenant is that. It was sold with the name of Ridley Scott and expensive VFX, but its ideas are inescapably bad. Right from the start, when electrically charged neutrinos wreck temporary solar cells that look like solar sails, you can tell that the script’s four writers understood astrophysics and space exploration on the same level as typical writers of the 1940s. This is a razor-sharp contrast to Scott’s previous film, The Martian (2015), which was based on a one-shot novel.

I’m prepared to enjoy even schlocky SF if it sounds and look good. Here, there’s a cheap pulse-pounding beat for tension, and the actors struggle to interact with the postproduction CGI they can’t see. There is no point, no payoff, and no progress from Planet of the Vampires (1965).

References here: Alien: Romulus (2024).

moving picture sequel fiction

‣ “Memory: The Origins of Alien” (2019)

Seen in 2020.

I saw the 58-minute cut on SVT, not the full-length version.

Explicit references to precursors, aside from O’Bannon’s own Memory and They Bite, include At the Mountains of Madness (1936), “Seeds of Jupiter” (1951), The Thing from Another World (1951), It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), Planet of the Vampires (1965) and “Defiled” (1972). The type-written “Sources of Alien” list is visually quoted.

References here: Faktafel på SVT Play.

moving picture document non-fiction

‣ “Alien: Monday” (2024)

Seen in 2024.

moving picture fan film animation fiction

‣ Alien: Romulus (2024)

Seen in 2024.

Like Alien: Covenant (2017), this film is mainly intended to be more of the familiar, to such an extent that it hurts the end result. This one is just made with more care and more nostalgia. As a long-time fan I appreciated the callbacks in visual style, including the retrofuture industrial design. The fuzzy CRTs are well executed, compared to an awful job digitally reconstructing Ian Holm’s face. Still, the script builds too heavily on specific references like the one to Holm, and it continues to struggle with realism like the original.

The main strength of Romulus is not the design but the initial premise. Accidentally thawing some facehuggers is a perfectly good side effect of looting a refrigerant for an attempt to escape from debt bondage. I wish the script had stayed with that premise, gently adding detail.

The basic plot is patterned after director Fede Alvarez and writer Rodo Sayagues’s previous film Don’t Breathe (2016), about a group of morally grey-to-black youths getting into sexual and violent trouble for entering illegally to steal something so they can physically travel away from a bad life. The excessive integration of this basic plot into the franchise starts by connecting it directly to Alien (1979) in a nonsensical way. After the triple explosions of the scuttled Nostromo’s reactor, there would not be a dense cloud of debris, and after Ripley blasted the alien into empty space, it would not be able to correct its course anyway. The aped “Get away from her” line is from Aliens (1986), but this time, it’s Newt holding the pulse rifle, and sadly, there are no power loaders. There is both an unfriendly Alien-style android and a friendly Aliens-style android, in unlikely “Brothers”-esque oscillation designed mainly to generate a cheap drama of trust and betrayal. The life cycle of the alien species is unreasonably accelerated.

The last act’s human-alien hybrid is from Resurrection (1997), but its looks worse and is caused by the black substance from the prequels, Prometheus (2012) and Covenant, all of which is bad. Romulus tries to make a novel contribution to the life cycle, but it’s another bad one: Newborn warriors apparently moult, forming a new egg that looks a lot like a facehugger’s egg, but is even more vulval and vaginal, beyond the limits of Giger. The actual place, Romulus, is a research station that reminds me of Alien III (1988), perhaps because it has a mural, but also because it was a place for research on the alien organism, like Gibson’s space stations. There is less of Alien 3 (1992) in Romulus, unless you chalk up Andy’s stupidity as an allusion to the prisoners of the third film.

Limiting the immediate influences to the first two or three films would have left more room to focus on believability and character. It is an unrelated problem that the main plot involves an astronomical ring system that is also a belt sander. Just like the debris cloud from the prelude, it’s too dense, harking back to the asteroid fields of 1940s pulps. Instead of the bullshit last act grinding a smiling pink Slender Man against that belt, the finale should have borrowed more from Alien 3 and thrown in Terry English’s troops, coming to save the artifacts but finding a company colony in revolt.

References here: Terminator Zero (2024).

moving picture sequel fiction