Fundamentally Misunderstanding the Assignment

I'm so, so tired of the Alien franchise

Few movies are flawless. Some of my most cherished films are deeply flawed, but the highs shine so brightly that they are a ten out of ten in my eyes. For a film to be truly flawless, it has to be something remarkably special. It means it surpasses the promise of its premise it set out to deliver. Everything from concept to execution to dialogue to atmosphere to mood to acting to visuals is unmatched. 1979’s Alien is one such film. Even the very title is perfect.

I want to examine the way the movie’s name is translated into Russian. The Russian language has multiple ways to refer to an alien, or extraterrestrial. The Russian title of the film is чужой (chuzhoi, which means alien in the sense of something being unknown, strange, or foreign. Another word for alien in Russian is инопланетянин (inoplanetyanin), meaning “from another planet”. You also have внеземной (vnezemnoi) meaning “extraterrestrial”. Lastly, there is пришелец (prishelets), meaning someone/something that came from another place. By naming the movie чужой, the Russian translation of the title is making it abundantly clear that the focus of the movie is on the mysterious, unknown nature of the alien, and not just about it being a creature from outer space. The English title serves the same function, but unfortunately, many viewers and, consequently, many of the people responsible for making the endless sequels, prequels, and spin-offs, fail to grasp that.

Growing up, images of the xenomorph were firmly established in cinematic culture. I knew what it was before I’d ever even seen the movie. It’s so ubiquitous to movie history in the same vein that most people could recognize the Imperial March even if they’d never seen a single Star Wars movie. When I watch a seminal movie for the first time, I like to put myself in the mindset of a viewer back then, experiencing it for the first time without all the baggage we have in the present.

The premise is unbelievably simple. It’s a slasher movie set aboard a spaceship. That’s all it is. There isn’t lore or an extensive history, and there doesn’t have to be.

Let’s make a checklist of why this movie works. For one, space is inherently scary. You have to add very little to already have the viewer feeling on edge. 2001 achieves this masterfully. Secondly, the claustrophobia of being on a spaceship. Claustrophobia is a wonderfully effective tool for horror. Thirdly, you have that pervert H.R. Giger’s wonderful designs.

Even before we see the creature itself, everything on the planet LV426 is off. The shapes of the rocks are all…wrong. The shade of gray is off-putting. Even the derelict spacecraft they find on the planet looks like some sort of ungodly violation. Giger’s biomechanical phallic and vaginal designs that are prevalent in the film never give you a chance to catch your breath. If it wasn’t bad enough being millions of miles from home, nothing about the strange spaceship you encounter screams “hospitable”. If something, ANYTHING, could just look normal, you might get some small sense of relief, but the movie never gives you that.Your intuition is telling you to run, but you can’t help but explore just a little further.

You come upon this giant open space in the ship. There’s a twenty-foot fossil, seemingly fused into its seat. Was this intentional? Was this due to a millennium of fossilization, or was this creature bioengineered to attach itself to the ship? We don’t know, and I’m glad the movie doesn’t answer this question.

Humans have conquered the ability to traverse the stars, sure, but this creature and this ship are so beyond our comprehension of biology and technology. This thirty-second scene is able to achieve so much in terms of atmosphere and intrigue without any useless exposition. Our crew is out of their element, and from this point on, it’s never going to get any better.

Does knowing the extensive backstory of these fossilized alien entities make this scene more compelling? If you saw 2012’s Prometheus, you know the answer is a resounding no. Knowing that these weird, elephantine things were giant, bald, albino humans who actually used black goo to create life on Earth makes everything kind of shite.

In this derelict ship, our unwitting crew stumbles upon rows of eggs, but even the eggs don’t look right. Sure, we register them as eggs, but they’re just different and grotesque enough to cause discomfort. From the way they open to the sound they make as they’re opening, it’s all just so fantastic.

Look, I’m not going to be one of those reviewers who just give a literal recap of the movie. We’ve all seen it, but what too many people fail to grasp is what made that first movie a timeless classic.

The way the creature gives birth is such a violation of our bodily autonomy. It’s all the worst things about having a parasite amplified by a million.

One of the best aspects of being limited by the technology of their time was having to be clever about how they utilized the full-grown alien. They couldn’t show it running down corridors, doing insane acrobatics, and crawling on walls. So, what do you do? You keep it in the shadows. You give only quick glimpses of it. If you were in a tight, enclosed location, what’s the last thing from your nightmares you’d want to run into? It would look something like this.

The alien in this movie is not a mindless monster. From the way it moves and how it reacts to things, everything about it is so bizarre. It’s almost like it’s an ALIEN. When we finally see it standing upright and it’s walking with its hands out before itself, almost as if it’s underwater. Or how about the scene where Ripley believed herself safe in the escape pod, only for it to turn out the alien was (napping?) in between all the cables. It doesn’t even seem aware or concerned with her presence there. Was it napping? Is it simply unbothered? Is it waiting to strike at her? Also, these aliens aren’t even killing to eat. They aren’t hungry. So why do they kill? Is that their purpose? Are they born simply to kill and reproduce? Why were all those eggs in that derelict ship? Don’t tell me to watch Prometheus. We don’t need to know the answer to these questions. The real answer is: space is absolutely terrifying, and we should think twice before our hubris tells us it’s open for our exploration.

Beyond demonstrating how gross giving birth is, and how anatomy in general is quite disgusting, the alien represents the hostility of space itself to human beings. Our arrogance convinces us we can conquer space. The alien shows us we can’t.

Many people love Aliens as much as or even more than the first film. It’s a lot of fun. It has many memorable moments, but I contend that the problems with this franchise started all the way back then. Cameron (and I emphasize, he crafted a very good movie) took everything that was unique and intriguing about the creature from the first film and turned them into generic movie monsters to be used as cannon fodder. Each sequel that came after chipped away at the awe of the creature. The more we learn, the less interesting it all becomes.

When Scott returned to the franchise, he made it so every goddamn thing we saw in the first film was connected to our own creation, and the xenomorph itself was nothing more than an experiment made by an android from Earth. It was all so poorly handled and misjudged.

Last year Alien: Romulus came out to generally positive reviews, with some calling it the third best in the franchise. No, it isn’t. I have a soft spot for both Alien 3 and Resurrection. Both are deeply flawed, albeit interesting movies.

Leading up to the two-episode premiere of Alien: Earth, the first TV series in the franchise, the praise from critics was overwhelmingly positive. I was dubious, but I never go into something wanting to hate it. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked the recent Naked Gun movie after finding the trailer abysmal.

In my head, I imagined what the worst-case scenario for the first two episodes could be, and that’s exactly what they delivered. The first ten minutes are essentially a condensed remake of the first film. The exact same ship interior, the retro-future technology, the same sound effects, a dinner scene with crew banter, a guy who looks like Yaphet Kotto, and even an orange goddamn cat. This is the laziest type of nostalgia bait. The only purpose it serves is to trick dumb viewers into remembering something they like, so hopefully that part of their brains registers what they are currently watching as belonging in the same category.

We also get quick glimpses of a full-grown xenomorph in action. They completely skip the lifecycle of the creature. Yes, I understand we, the audience, are all very aware of the egg-to-facehugger-to-chestburster-to xenomorph evolution of the thing, but the characters in the fucking show aren’t. Seeing as the series is meant to take place two years before the first movie, this should all be new to them. The show just skips over all of it. We see the xenomorph without any context. Imagine being a viewer using this as your introduction to the franchise. You’d lose so much of what made the first movie a classic. The xenomorph is just thrown at you with zero fanfare. Isn’t that lame?

Beyond that, we get slow-motion shots of it jumping and running around, like it’s cool? It’s filmed the way Captain America or Superman would be filmed. It’s very bizarre. We see it killing a bunch of people, and it’s neither scary nor exciting.

One of Covenant’s biggest flaws was that it fundamentally misunderstood not only what makes the xenomorph scary, but also how to effectively film it. Seeing it running around outside in broad daylight with green trees behind it is not conducive to being scary. Earth suffers from similar problems. We simply see too much of it and in environments that aren’t suitable for this type of shit to be frightening.

Equally piss poor is the decision to make the primary characters all androids or synthetics or whatever. So much of the first episode is bogged down with characters asking who they are, what they are, what it means to be human and holy shit this has all been done to death already. For fuck’s sake, both Prometheus and Covenant ran all that shit into the ground, then we have stuff like Blade Runner, West World, Ex Machina, The Measure of a Man, and on and on. It’s so trite at this point. This show adds nothing new to to conversation about sentience and artificial intelligence. It wants you to think it’s deep, but it’s schlock.

Also, our main cast of merry friends are all children who had their consciousness transplanted into adult, synthetic bodies, so get used to insufferably cringe dialogue of actors pretending to be children.

The show isn’t scary. We see too much of the xenomorph and too often. The characters suck. The dialogue isn’t good. None of the sci-fi elements explored or fresh or original. Everything about it is just so, so derivative.

None of it works. It adds nothing new to the table, but here’s the thing: I don’t want anything new. I want them to stop. Clearly, they won’t, but as Andor showed, there is no excuse for bad or lazy writing. Expanding on the lore and history of the xenomorph and the universe around it is a terrible mistake. Remember Heath Ledger’s Joker? Is there anyone out there who actually thinks he would have been a more effective villain if we got a concrete backstory on why he was the way he was? It’s been nearly forty years since the second film and almost fifty since the first, and nobody has figured out how to make this franchise interesting.