The Long Read: “Aliens” Sucks, Stop Making More of It!
For God’s sake, make something new!
If you’ve been living under some kind of movie-proof-dome for the last four decades, Aliens is a film-franchise that started with a sci-fi slasher movie in 1979 and has since proven itself one of cinema’s most redoubtable and indefatigable brands.
The plot to each film is the same: humans are somewhere in space doing working-class human stuff. Those same humans (usually through feckless numbskullery) end up stumbling upon An Ancient Evil. That Ancient Evil infects one or more humans, thus creating the titular “alien” creatures. The Big Bad Company that for some reason runs everything in the future is revealed to want these aliens for some reason, and orchestrated the humans running into them. The rest of the humans die horribly except one-or-two who make it out — usually by blowing stuff up or out — roll credits.
Why do I think this movie-monster should be part of a permanent outsourcing? Well, let’s start with the film that began it all…
The original Rid-iddley Scott film follows a bunch of blue-collar space Teamsters and their inexplicably dirty, steamy and dripping-wet space ship. They get diverted by Weyland-Yutani (The Company) to go to some moon or other. The Teamsters find a crashed ship and a bunch of eggs, which naturally Quentin Crisp wants to poke. It goes “blerp!” and spits out a hand-come-spider-thing that attaches itself to the Elephant Man’s face with its tickley, tickley fingers. It also somehow got through the glass on his space suit helmet without hurting Winston in any serious way… maybe it had a glass cutter?
The ship’s medical weirdo (Bilbo Baggins) goes meep-morp and insists that Caligula come on board. He studies the tickle-monster and clearly works out that it’s Bad, but also goes to great lengths to protect it. After a bit, it gets bored and falls off and dies. Thus endeth the saga of the tickle-monster.
The humans then sit down to a well-earned supper, before Hazel starts going a-humana-humana-humana and then pops! Turns out the tickle-monster left a little friend behind, which has now woken up from its nap and is cranky. The little squirt vacates John Hurt and whips away over the table as fast as a puppet on a wire.
Bummer.
The crew then try various things to find the “alien” and kill it, all whilst Sam Mussabini stands in the background tenting his fingers and chuckling. Unfortunately for them, the alien has never studied physics and thus doesn’t understand conservation of energy. Despite eating nothing, it becomes about 50 times bigger — standing well over 7' tall. It kills a man in a hat taking a shower under some swinging chains (no, really). It kills the Captain with Extreme Peek-a-boo when he goes into the air vents to find it. It nibbles on another guy’s head more than is good for him. Lastly it gets tired of a lady (canonically trans!) who’s done nothing but blub since the start of the film and kills her, too. All that’s left is Dana Barret, and she ain’t afraid of no ghost!
Oh, and also Polonius was revealed to be a robot working for The Company (dun dun dun!) to capture the alien for… reasons. They smack him upside the head a bit, his head falls off and milk goes everywhere (no, really) and then they burn him whilst he smirks like a ghoul.
Pausing only to collect her cat (no, really) she sets the big, smelly spaceship to go BOOM whilst she runs to the escape pod. The ship goes bang not once, not twice but somehow thrice before Diane Fossey notices that the alien snuck into the escape pod with her and is now having a crafty nap on the table! The scamp!
She scuttles off to the cupboard to get a space suit. The alien shifts to get more comfortable, does a big yawn (he’s all tuckered out! Such a busy day!) and then gets a rude awakening when Dr. Augustine blows a load of steam right up its nether-regions (no, really).
The big critter is, naturally, cheesed right off by this. However, she opens the pod bay door and kicks the alien out. It tries to get back in by climbing into a rocket booster… which goes about as well for it as you would imagine.
Roll credits!
M’kay, snarkiness aside, Alien (1979) is a fine movie. It’s thrilling, it’s exciting, it’s unusual. It’s a slasher film IN SPAAAACE! Rid-diddley Scott gave the future a grimy, smokey, grubby look. The people there are just bods trying to do their jobs. The spaces they occupy are messy and humans are obviously being just as polluted and slovenly amongst the stars as we are down on Earth. The characters are likeable and, for the most part, act tolerably sensibly. Nobody does anything outrageously stupid. The creature itself set a new bar for horror by its outrageous, albeit impractical, lifecycle.
So: Alien (1979)? That ones okay. We’ll keep that one.
Next up is Aliens (1986)! This time, there’s more than one! Believe it or not, Robert Ripley’s space-pod got found a few decades later. She was in hyper-mega-super-duper sleep, and awakens to find that The Company (dun dun dun!) have started a colony on that crumby moon from the first film! Based on what she tells them, they send some prospectors out to the space ship aaaaaaaaand they promptly lose contact with the whole operation.
Uuuuh… lady, we’re sending some army men to go have a look-see, will you go with them and let ’em know what’s what?
Sure enough, they get to the joint and everybody’s dead (Dave). All except a poor girl who can’t remember if she’s British or American. Two very low cards, so it’s no surprise she’s not sure how to play them. “Newt”, as she’s known, becomes Ripley’s pet-slash-surrogate-daughter.
The army men have, erstwhile, gone down into the basement to see what kinda neat stuff they have down there. Turns out, it’s a bunch of aliens. Also, the basement is where The Company (dun dun dun!) keep their big nuclear reactor-thingy! The boys can’t use their guns, or else it’ll go bang! Bum.
Some of them die, but the rest escape. In the process, their space-vehicle that gets them back-and-forth from the surface to their ship in orbit goes kablooey. Now they’re trapped, and once it gets the dark the aliens will come looking for them! Mostly! Double-bum.
The rest of the film is kinda an extended fight/chase sequence. Turns out The Company (dun dun dun!) Man who came with them was trying to capture the aliens, for his own adult reasons. Most of the characters die. Newt gets newt-napped by an alien so Rippers selotapes some guns together and goes to get her back. On the way, she meets the Alien Queen who is most definitely not amused.
Bishop, their robot pal, uses his robot-ways to bring another escape vehicle down from their ship and they all bundle into it. Back up in orbit, they realise the Queen has stowed along for the ride when she impales Bishop. Rippers blows this one out the airlock as well, job done. She’s faced down her monster, Newt has a new mum, Hicks The Army Man made it through and Bishop is probably repairable!
Roll credits!
Aliens (1986) is… also a good film. Possibly better than the first one. Ellen Ripley’s arc is brought to a close and, even though her biological daughter died whilst she was in cryosleep, she now has Newt. Much better. Many adventures, all thanks to Newt! Newt has a found-family, with the most charming of the army-guys being a sort of dad and Ellen her mum. Bishop proved he was lovely, not like Ash in Alien 1, and so redeemed synthetic people. He’s like the cool uncle or something.
Less a chiller and more just a straight sci-fi-action-romp, Aliens is a good night out. Okay, we’ll keep this one too.
“TWO whole films?” I hear you ask, “but I thought we were throwing them all in the bin?” Nah, these two are staying put. It’s what comes after that we need to seriously talk about…
Alien 3 (1992), The En-Three-enning, is, sadly, not about three aliens who try to perform a simple task before failing and turning upon one another in a blur of slapstick tomfoolery.
See by this point, Aliens had proven itself as a franchisable intellectual property. Whilst Kenner were making toys, and a pilot cartoon was in the works, the studio wanted more! MORE! MOOOOOOOAR!!!
They got some scripts written, didn’t really like them, got some more written, then kinda just threw some stuff together. Sigourney didn’t want to come back, so insisted that her character had to die in this one. They couldn’t remember who they got to play Newt, so they killed her character off. They didn’t care about Hicks, so he died too. Bishop turns up briefly, but don’t worry! He dies very quickly as well!
HAHAHA bet you feel pretty stupid now doncha? Caring about these characters and what-not? Well they’re all dead! Dead, I tells ya! Why? Because F*CK YOU, that’s why! BWAHAHAHAHA!
‘Kay, so this time round we have Rippers, Newters, Hickers and Bishers all flying back to Earth in their little spaceship or whatever. But it goes AWOOOGA! Looks like of those pesky tickle-monsters got on too!
When did that happen, I hear you ask? OFF SCREEN, so it doesn’t need to make sense! Shut up! They took the bus, okay?
So the ship goes DEEE-NOOO DEEE-NOOO and ejects everyone in a pod, which crashes on a lovely, friendly planet full of teddy bears and HA I’m kidding you, it crashes on the same kinda planet they always crash on: grey, raining, constant gale-force winds, no plants, and somehow both muddy and dusty. Hicks died in the crash. Check. Newt died in the crash. Check. Bishop’s there but looking peaky. Rippers is okay, though.
Apparently they crashed on a prison-planet. The prisoners live in a sort of weird monastic commune (a byproduct of rejected script ideas) where they till the land, such as it is, and try hard not to kill each other. One of the tickle-monsters gets loose and infects either a dog or an ox, depending whether you’re watching the original or Director’s Cut, and thus sets off a sorta rehash of Alien 1. But this time the alien walks on all fours, because it was conceived inside a four legged animal! Awww!
We get some, frankly, ghoulishly voyeuristic autopsy scenes when Rippers checks Newt for signs of tickle-monster face-tickling. She plugs Bishop into the mains to get him to work again, and he says some stuff before she unplugs him again. He’s dead too, now, right? Everyone got that? The robot-man you like is GONE and not coming back. Just like the pretty little girl and the nice army man. DEAD.
Get it? Got it? Good.
Rippers takes a trippers to the medical bay, and finds a nipper of a tickler hiding near her ticker, and boy does that put a crimp on her day! Somehow the tickle-monsters got onto the ship, and one infected her. The rest were killed in the crash, except the one that made the new four-legged alien. She has days, maybe only hours, before the one in her will choose to put in an appearance… and it’s a queen!
Some people get killed, they try to catch the dog/ox alien with like a net or something, then they pour hot metal on it (which REALLY ticks it off) then they pour cold water on it which makes it shatter. You know, like if you run a glass under the hot tap, then switch to the cold tap then the glass will break? Aliens are made of the same stuff… drinking glasses. That’s what they’re made of. So it goes crack.
At this point The Company (dun dun dun!) turns up, and the guy who runs the company looks like Bishop! Rippers nopes her way out of there, having no intention of letting these weirdos get their hands on the baby queen that’s playing skee-ball with her gall bladder. She jumps into the molten metal (what the hell a vat of molten metal is doing in an ostensibly agrarian prisoner society I have no idea) and dies. In the original cut, the queen pops out of her just long enough to see the boiling metal and hold up a Wile E. Coyote-esque sign that says “Eep!”. In the Director’s Cut, Rippers just dies.
Rightio, we cover everyone there? Rippers: dead, killed by the monster she defeated whilst completing her character arc in the last movie. Yum! Satisfying! Newt: dead, killed off-screen for narrative reasons after completing her character arc in the last movie. Yum YUM! Satisfyingier! Hicks? Dead. Bishop? Deadly-bobs. Paul McGann and various other Brit actors playing the prisoners? They all be mostly dead too. Dog Alien? Popped it’s clogs. Queen Alien? Pushing up the daisies.
Mmmm! That’s some satisfying writing there! No notes! Roll the credits and everyone will go home happier, wiser and perhaps even a little bit better.
Yeah, no, this one is pigswill. There are some interesting ideas, and none of them are developed. The deaths of everyone save Ripley in the first 4 minutes is just gratuitous: they couldn’t have survived, and been shipped off to a hospital? Or back to Earth? That way they’d still not be in the movie, but we the audience wouldn’t feel like a bunch of suckers either? No? They had to die?
Sigh.
Putting that to one side, Alien 3 is the start of a trend towards samey-ness. Hey, remember that first film? Let’s kinda do that again. The setting should be smokey, grimy, smelly and janky. And the people there should be uncouth, rough and low-life. And the Alien itself is just going to hang around in dark shadows waiting to bite people.
Because this is our third outing, too, it’s hard to not begin asking questions.
Like… these aliens, okay, they don’t really seem to behave like you’d think they would? They just seem to murder people, rather than capturing them for food or as hosts for reproduction? And what’s with the whole parasitoid nymph/tickle-monster/face-hugger stage? Isn’t that just a massive waste of resources? The aliens are based on certain wasps that lay their eggs in caterpillars… but the wasps don’t give birth to an entirely separate animal first to do that! It goes: wasp makes egg, egg goes in caterpillar, larvae hatches and eats caterpillar, larvae pupates into wasp. There isn’t a whole other random animal in the middle of the process, like: wasp makes egg, egg hatches into leopard, leopard lays another egg in caterpillar etc. And another thing, how does the alien see, given it has no eyes? Shouldn’t it bump into rather more coffee tables than it does?
Now before the Aliens-fanboys (they’re always men) jump in to mansplain to me that ugh ugh actually all this stuff is explained in duh comics and in duh books and in this game released for the Nokia 3310 and gets more explained-ed in Prometheus ugh that is fine: go be free and enjoy all that stuff. But, you must concede, there are a lot of weird things in these films that you only start to notice and think about after they’ve hung around too long. I’ve no doubt that, sure, issue #893 of “The Amazing Brain-Bums of Venus” included a canon short-story “Tim the Xenomorph and His Fantastic Sock Collection”, that explained all this but had to really do some gymnastics to get all the pieces to fit.
It has no eyes, but sees by pheromones! And heat! Okay, but coffee tables don’t emit either of these things? So maybe it… has eyes but its sight is just not great? What, so it evolved to detect pheromones, then walked into a bollard and banged its knee, so quickly knocked-up some half-baked eyes? Or did it start with the rubbish eyes, then decide to learn to detect pheromones because that’s… better for avoiding falling down manholes? Which it isn’t?
And why do The Company (dun dun dun!) want this thing, anyway? Oh oh for our biological weapons division! Eh?? This creature has done exactly the same thing every time you tried to catch it: three times now! Wouldn’t just making a plank with a nail in it be a more useful weapons research project than an unpredictable monster that kills everything it meets? …Apart from cats…?
And wasn’t there that deleted scene in the first movie, where the alien was cocooning the people it captured to turn them into eggs? I mean, that’s fine: it was a deleted scene, we know it’s actually The Queen that lays the eggs, right? Except that deleted scene ended up being referenced in the comics and the books and and and so now it has to be canon, too, if all that other stuff is?
Its lifecycle doesn’t make any damned sense! Nothing about these movies actually makes sense! See what happens when your film hangs around too long and starts giving you time to think about what you’re seeing?
Alien 4: The Re-Bumming showed up in 1997. Subtitled “Resurrection”, this one follows the same plot beats. The Company (dun dun dun!) want the alien for blah blah white noise. Several decades after Alien 3 (The Original Bumming), they’ve bioengineered them! Hurray! That will end well!
They did this by extracting Ripley’s DNA from the molten metal (…what?) and cloning her. Yay! Rippers is back! Sigourney must have wanted a new pool! But cloning her also cloned the Queen alien within her... Honestly, just go with it or we’ll be here all night. So now they ended up with a bunch new aliens and a new queen. Rippers is a bit more alien-y than she was before: she’s now permanently sweaty, can dunk basketballs real good and has mildly acidic blood.
But oh to the noes to the max! The aliens get out! Death, running away, escape, near-misses, thrills and spills ensue.
Whilst that goes on, the new Queen is having a baby! Somehow she doesn’t lay eggs any more (because of Ripley’s DNA) and is up the spout like a human! Or… maybe she lays eggs too? Like, in addition? Whatever. So she has a “baby”, which is fully grown, that looks like a skeleton dipped in oatmeal. It takes umbrage at its mother and knocks her block off, then eats some guy’s head who’s nearby. Fine, I guess.
This “newborn” hybrid wotsit kills some more people, thinks Ripley’s it’s mother, and Rippers kills it by blowing it out of the airlock. Well, not exactly, but kinda. A tiny hole in the ship’s hull violently shreds it and sucks it out into space.
There’s more to it, but that’s like 90% to be honest. Also, the original hybrid was going to have a dong and a bajingo! Woah, Nelly — that would’ve been pretty fun and weird, amiright?
As well as being dumb, and repetitive, the fourth film in the tetralogy (not “quadrilogy” as was used in marketing at the time!) manages to introduce two new problems. Good for it.
The first is the tendency of the films to become increasingly gruesome. The previous instalments all had their moments of violence, but this was the point where it really felt like someone was just saying “okay guys, lemme hear all the grossest things you can think of and we’ll work them in! The more sex-oriented the better!”
The second is, somehow, making the aliens themselves even more mixed up and confusing. In top of all the previous “huh?” moments that started peeping over the garden fence around Alien 3, we now have a bunch more! So, do hosts absorb some of the alien’s DNA, and that’s how cloning Ripley brought back the Queen too? And made her sweaty and good at basketball? That’s not how humans work! From this point on, will all aliens be a bit like humans then? Or are there still original-recipe aliens out in the universe? If the hybrid felt closer to Ripley (still 99.9% human) than an alien (99.9% not human), and thus killed the queen that birthed it, why did it then go on to randomly murder humans? Shouldn’t it have wanted to be pals with us and hang out?
Let’s be clear, you and I, best beloved, both know the answer to these questions: we thought it’d be cool and gross and stuff and didn’t really think about it! In fairness, I can work with that answer. That’s okay. But at that point, we do know we’re talking about a trash movie don’t we? Like true motion-picture magic has gone out the window at that point: it’s just people birthing horrible creatures, others getting their heads bitten off and others dying in various other unspeakable ways. It’s not about telling a coherent story any more, is it, it’s just like a mad-lib sick-bag horror?
But, did this end the franchise and its increasingly tiresome baloney? Of course not! There’s nothing so bad that it can’t get worse!
Enter Aliens vs. Predator (2004), which feels like a warning sent back in time from the future to prevent the invention of cinema but that got lost en-route and ended up at your local multiplex.
This time around (hang on to your hats!) an expedition to the North Pole — or the South Pole, I forget — finds an ancient, underground pyramid! The humans go down to have a sniff about, but ermagad! There are aliens down there!
Tickle-monsters. Chests exploding. Aliens killing people. Humans running around like dipsticks. See, see THIS time the humans have found an ancient hunting ground for The Predator creatures (from that movie, Predator (1987)? The “get to da choppaaaaah!” one? And it’s follow-up Predator 2: Even More Predating! (1990)?). Predators showed humans how to build pyramids, because we’d never imagined triangles before I guess, and in return ancient civilisations would send some humans to be sacrificed.
Seems fair. “Triangles, you say? Yeah, why not. You show us these ‘triangles’ and we’ll let you kill some of us regularly forever.”
The Predators would stuff the humans down into the underground to birth some aliens, then The Predators would hunt the aliens and have a jolly old time doing it. Be vewwy vewwy quiet!
So: Predators show up. Humans are mostly just killed in pointless ways. One or two escape. Oh no! One of them was working for The Company (dun dun dun)! Blah blah blah, pew pew bang, splat!
Imagine a child holding two plastic alien toy figures and banging them into each other whilst going “grrr! Arg! I’ll get you! No, I’ll get you!” and that is far more enjoyable than Aliens vs. Predator (or AvP, for those without a second to spare).
It’s not quite as grotesque as Alien 4, or indeed AVP2, but it is stupid and loud and annoying. Are we bored of this franchise, yet?
Then, overhearing our conversation about how far these films have fallen since their halcyon days, Alien vs. Predator 2 (2007) asked a friend to hold its drink.
Right, so at the end of AVP one of the Predators got infected and a half-alien-half-predator popped out of it, okay? This is despite the Predators having and using technology that allowed them to very easily detect infected hosts and euthanise them. I guess… they forgot about it? Or it was on the blink? Anyways, the (sigh) “Predalien” does that clever thing these guys do where it eats nothing yet somehow grows to like 9 feet tall. It kills The Predators and crashes their ship next to Bumswizzle, North Oklabraskah USA, or somewhere functionally indistinguishable.
Oh and there are some tickle-monsters, too. I forget where they come from. It doesn’t matter.
A bunch of humans team up to try and survive whilst the aliens kill everyone in voyeuristically ghastly and tasteless ways. At the end, the government nukes the place. Like in the 2nd movie, when they say “take off and nuke the site from orbit”? You know, that other much better movie that I probably shouldn’t be reminding you of, because it will juxtapose with this one and highlight just how wrist-slittingly awful it is?
Like, kids get infected and burst open, pregnant women get their embryos eaten from the inside, it just goes on and on and leaves you wondering if the creators of this monstrosity are genuinely sadistic psychopaths.
Thank God this one was so bad that the studios couldn’t sanction more: the AVP franchise dropped dead in its tracks and has, mercifully, never been reanimated. Everyone keep an eye on Jeffrey Combs!
Ah, but the first two films were good, weren’t they? They did make a lorra lorra money, didn’t they? Wouldn’t you like to maybe do those again? What if we got Rid-diddley-doodley Scott back? Maybe film-man will make film good watch for us, yes?
AVP was dead… but not Aliens. 20th Century Watervole drove a dump truck full of money to Scott’s house and he agreed to make the 7th movie in the franchise: Prometheus (2012)!
The British kook was set to return to the Alien universe and finally answer that one, burning, intractable question that we had been asking for forty years since that first film flickered into life on the screen! He was going to finally… at long last… tell us about this corpse we saw on that abandoned ship in the first movie for like 42 seconds!
Yes. At long last. The origin story of a body in one scene from a film from the 70’s! By God, aren’t we lucky? Finally, we would know who and what the “The Space Jockey” (as fans dubbed it) was!
When the Teamsters in the first film go into the abandoned ship, but before John Hurt gets a face full of alien wing-wang, they happen upon a strange humanoid corpse that seems to have been a biomechanical part of the ship! The desiccated skeleton’s chest-bones are bent outwards ominously!
That’s foreshadowing. That thing there? Foreshadowing. It’s called foreshadowing. With the bones? And the bending outwards? Foreshadowing. Like a hint. A hint about something coming up later. It foreshadows it. Foreshadowing, that’s what that’s called.
Because everyone who saw that film came away saying “eh, it was okay, but who was that guy with the sitting in the chair and being a skeleton? Did he like asparagus? What was his inside-leg measurement? What did he think of the Star Wars prequels? Did he prefer his salmon skin-on or skin-off?”
Prometheus takes everything before: the stupidity, the vapid characters, the pointlessly gruesome violence and body-horror, and cleverly wraps it all up in a ponderously joyless two-hours of ecclesiastical navel-gazing.
Scott decided that the only reasons anyone had for liking Alien (1979) were the horrible things the alien did to human bodies and idiots dying idiotically. He swung around to the amp and dialled both of those up to 11, baby!
So, in the near future, Dr. Shaw is a lady. And a doctor. Of something… maybe history? She finds some cave paintings that depict stars. And then some other paintings that depict stars in a different part of the world. Based on this she… deduces it’s a map? An intentional map to God or the creator’s of humanity or some smug goofballery like that?
We can agree, if nothing else, that space is big. It’s called space, after-all, not bijou. Based on some crude cave drawings this person is planning to travel through space for a million-billion miles and actually get somewhere in particular. Man, that’s dumb. That’s like my giving you precise directions to an exact geo-coordinate in someone’s sock drawer in Timbuktu by drawing three socks on the back of a postage stamp in luggage marker.
Somehow this crackpot proposal gets the backing… of Mr. Weyland! Of Weyland-Yutani! The Company (dun dun dun)!
…you know, from the other movies?
Yeah, there you go, you like that doncha?
So they fund, build and staff a spaceship called “Prometheus” — ‘cos that guy’s story ended so well for him — and off they fly. Off they fly to… the next moon over from the moon in the other movies!
You know, the planet in Alien 1 and Alien 2? It’s the next one over?
Yeah, there you go, you like that doncha?
And there they find… another bloody pyramid. Argh! Oh and also a spaceship like the one in the first movie.
…you know, from the first movie?
Happy? Happy.
They map the pyramid using like laser balls or some rubbish. Then these two scientists get lost (despite, you may recall, the laser-ball-mapping which clearly creates a 3D image for the team to use), meet up with a hammer-head-worm-dick-monster-thing and try to pet it. No, really. It kills them and goes into one of their mouths.
No reason, it just does. It doesn’t do anything once there, nothing happens while it’s there. It just does it. You know, like oral rape? Like the tickle-monsters do?
…you know, like in those other movies?
Good good, got you back again.
Inside the pyramid is some black goo. It is, canonically, referred to as black goo. It’s some sort of bioweapon but its powers are… well, unclear is putting it mildly. One early scene shows us a race of human-like aliens using the black goo™ to seed life on Earth. It’s also mutated local earthworm creatures into the hammer-head-worm-dick-monster for… reasons.
It mutates one of the scientists into a kinda baboon, but like a baboon that’s gone bad? You know, really past it’s sell-by date? It attacks the other humans, but they kill it or it trips over and dies or something I forget.
Meanwhile, the ship’s robot David is up to mischief! Like the other robot in the first movie? The Bilbo-Bot? The Bilbot, if you will? Yeah that one. We like stuff we’ve seen before, don’t we?
He takes some of the black goo and infects Shaw’s boytoy with it. It kinda gives him the flu, a bit. But then he boinks Shaw and she’s suddenly pregnant! Yep, we’re doing that pseudo-sexual-pregnancy-body-horror-stuff! In a very uncomfortable-to-watch scene, she undergoes an emergency extraction and a mechanical arm removes a sort of squid-thing from her.
Ack no, squid-thing is cross! Run, run she must! That’s the end of squid-thing’s ballad for now, but it’ll be back later. Chekov’s squid-thing. It’s a plot device.
One of those humanoid alien “engineer” dudes is still alive, and he starts killing people. Mr. Weyland tries to high-five it, and it kills him good. Then it rips of David’s head. Er, some other people probably die, too. Like I think Idris Elbow is there as the Prometheus’ captain, and he and the crew do a suicide run and all die. Deep.
Charlize Theron, in a ground-breaking role as a white South African blonde with a personality defect, runs about a bit and gets squished by a rolling space ship. No, really.
The engineer bloke finds the squid-thing, which has now grown to an enormous size, and they get buuusy… in a non-consensual kind of way. Shaw picks up David’s head and they decide to travel the universe looking for the engineers and their world. Then the last thing we see is the engineer dying when a creature that looks a lot like an alien (from the first movie!!11!) blurps out of him. Roll credits!
At this point, it is just like watching a car accident. Each time I think “well, it can’t possibly be more confusing and stupid than the last time” and each time, boy, do those film makers sure show me.
If you’re trying to keep up — bless you for a hero — the aliens (xenomorphs) come from eggs. Which are laid by a queen. Well, unless it’s from an egg that’s made from someone in a cocoon. And the aliens don’t come from eggs, they come from like DNA stuff that a fingery-spidery-tickle-monster thing injects into a host through their mouth. And it’s those guys that come from the eggs. They don’t eat anything, so it’s not clear how they survive. Doesn’t look like the full-grown ones eat either, to be honest, they just kinda murder people. Or drag them off to be hosts. AH, but, you see, there’s also the goo. The black goo. The goo that’s black. That makes people turn into baboon monsters! Except when it doesn’t. And it makes ladies have babies! And the babies are squiddly-diddly! But then those squiddly-diddlies can inject DNA stuff — like the tickle-monsters — but not exactly. And that makes things like aliens. Kind of.
All this utter bilge is packaged up in poe-faced seriousness with a grim tone ribbon, like a neatly-wrapped Scandi-Noir true-crime story. Except that the characters are all complete nincompoops who act like they recently donated their whole brains to medical science.
Turns out Squiddly-Scott didn’t know how to save the franchise. Which is a shame, because 20th Century Wombat really love franchises! Oh, they love them so dearly! Especially the parts where the money comes in, and then they can roll around in the money and throw money at each other and giggle like school children. They love those parts more than anything.
Great McGillycuddy.
So then they made a sequel to whatever the heck Prometheus was. Ugh.
But don’t worry! Because this time they definitely knew what the problem was! It wasn’t gruesome or nihilistic enough! Well, we’ve got ya covered this time old buddy, old pal, old Scoob!
Alien: Covenent (2017) follows a colony ship (the Covenant) burping its way through the cosmos to get to — heck I dunno, Lewisham or something. They get hit by a meteor storm and it’s quite the to-do. Damaged, and with the original captain dead, they pick up a transmission from this lovely sounding Robot-Man called David!
He says he has just some lovely things to show them, and animals, and popcorn, and balloons! All colours! And they float, too! …They all float…!
They go to The David Planet (Planet Dave, if you will). They walk about without any space helmets, because like what even is a germ? I’ve never seen one. It seems that David and Shaw discovered the planet of the engineers, and then David killed them all.
It’s not clear why, he’s just a dick I think.
He killed Shaw, too, in case you were worried about having to like “care about a character” or whatever. She be dead, and he be using her for some of his “experiments”. Experiments to create… the perfect organism!
Like, like in the first film? That’s what the Bilbot calls the alien?
Good, sorry to slow you down.
Whilst this unfolds like the world’s least welcome origami trick, some of the peeps from Covenant are sick! Spores got into them! Ho ho ho, it’s time to show ’em all that the “chestbursting” scene from 1979 has finally been topped, and that the topping of that scene is the only reason this film is happening and why anyone would want to see it! We assume!
Like, this little white goblin guy pops out of one guy’s back, then another out of another dude’s neck. Okay, while we’re here, here’s another thing: how long is this stupid process meant to take? In Alien 1 it took hours — maybe days. By the time of AVP, it seems to take like 20 minutes? Now, in Covenant, it takes about as long as a Costa coffee machine takes to make a latte. Except when it doesn’t. Except when it does. Whatever is more dramatic! No, wait, no, not that… we’ll explain it in like a comic or something. It’ll be fine.
Also, whilst I have you in that headspace, does nobody notice these quite large creatures growing inside them? Or is the implication that they are fine, then all of a sudden POP it happens all at once? Covenant makes it look like it’s an “all at once” sort of deal, which just raises more questions! These things are meant to be alien, not magic!
Grr. Yeah goblin things, they kill some people nobody cares about. The Covenant’s Robot Man (Walter, who is a duplicate of David) tries to help. David manages to infect someone with a tickle-monster, which creates pretty-much the xenomorph we know from the other films.
You know, from the other films?
The humans escape on a space vehicle and book it back to the Covenant to leave orbit and head back for whatever it was they were aiming for originally. It was too many scenes ago, no living human being could possibly remember.
But oh noes! It’s not Walter they’ve come back with! It’s D-D-D-David! And he’s a d-d-d-dick! And he’s d-d-d-doing stuff! He smuggled some embryo tickle-monsters on board, and now that everybody is in cryosleep he’s going to do… muhahahaha AHAHAHAHA AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!!! …something. Roll the credits.
So, the alien in Alien 1 is from a species created by David? But that ship they found in Alien 1 is thousands of years old! Also why do the tickle-monsters come in embryo form, now? It’s eggs, isn’t it?
Oh, and spores?
Why do the… so, why are there spores now? David did that with the black goo? But, it turned Mr. Man into a baboon and made science-lady pregnant? Why did it make flowers do spores? And why’s there no Queen?
Don’t they need a queen? Do they just like having her around, for tourism or whatever? Or for her strong soprano voice?
Why is David such an ass-hat? He’s got real problems. Not right in the head, that one, I can tell you. Also somebody should have referred to Walter as Walter-the-Wobot. I can’t do everything for these people!
Here we are then. Black goo. Spores. Stuff. Things. And people who die, horribly. Did we make the good-movie yet why not?
Just like Jason in that Halloween on Elm Street movie, whenever you think he’s dead you look back and the body is mysteriously gone… ready to come back for another sequel!
Gawd.
Well, here we are in 2024 and scuttling towards the streaming-services is Alien: Romulus! Don’t you worry, kids, we’ve definitely ironed out all the problems now! We know exactly what was missing from the last 6 attempts!
DIGITAL. NECROMANCY. Buckle-up, cowpokes.
Our story starts on planet Bumswizzle VI. Or Bumswizzle V… whichever one we marooned Khan on. Rain is hanging out with her nice Robot Man brother (Robrother, if you will). She and this little cadre of assholes she knows discover there’s a derelict ship coming into orbit, and if they can nab some cryosleep chambers they’ll be able to blow this popsicle stand!
The Company (dun dun dun!) own Bumswizzle VI and are forcing everyone to toil underground in the Flat Cap Mines or something. Our heros can escape their fate! So they hop onto a little space ship they happen to just yanno have and go up into orbit.
Why does nobody stop them, from The Company (dun dun dun!) that wants to keep them as indentured slaves? Why does nobody else go after this derelict ship? Shut up, that’s why. The Asshole Associates brought Rain because they wanted her to bring Robrother. As a robot, he’ll be able to interface with the doors and locks-n-stuff. They have no intention of taking him with them after that, and are quite clear about this and what they think of him.
“Hey, you, stupid Mr. Robot Man! We’re only using you to get into this ship! Then we’re leaving you behind because you’re gay! And smelly! We hate you! Now help us, pleeeease.” Yep. Solid plan. No notes.
Upon arrival, it seems it wasn’t a space-ship but rather a space-station. Why was it floating through the cosmos? I dunno. It’s in two halves: Romulus and Remus. This is not important and makes no impact on anything, yes really.
Whilst bumbling around, they switch some stuff on which activates… THE TICKLE-MONSTERS! The little tickley-tykes attack and manage to boink one of the gang! You’ll never guess which one, because we put her on the poster with the alien rape-monster on her face! Oh you’ll be so surprised when you work it out, yes you will.
Oh and it’s in the trailers, too.
…surprise! *Woody Woodpecker noise*
Whilst that’s all… erm… percolating… the Getalong Gang meet Rook! Rook is a charming abomination unto the Lord, whereby Bilbot Baggins (from the first movie? You remember the first movie? DiCaprio reaction gif etc.) has had his now dead visage digitally slapped onto some wanker. And we got AI to do his voice. Ha! Back in the old days, you had to go outside with a shovel to rob graves! The modern world is a wonder!
Bilbot2 explains that they’d been out in space for 20 years looking for the alien from Alien 1, whom they had dubbed (sigh) “Big Chap”. Ignoring the lunacy of finding a person-sized creature in all the vastness of space over twenty years of drift and as-good-as-random movement from micro-asteroid collisions, they managed to find (sigh) BIG CHAP.
However, the face full of rocket that (sigh) BIG CHAP got in Alien 1 didn’t slow him down. Neither did 20 years in space. Nor did 20 years with no food or water. God these movies are so cretinous. BIG CHAP (sigh) woke up and killed most of the people on board. They finally subdued it — as evidenced by its corpse neatly hanging from the ceiling — but its acidic blood burnt a whole in the floor and caused all manner of problems. Also it made some more tickle-monsters. Or Bilbot2 did, it’s not clear. He was trying to extract The Black Goo™ from (sigh) BIG CHAP to fulfil Mr. Weyland’s (of The Company (dun dun dun!)) dream of immortality!
I mean this is serious Skeletor territory, isn’t it? Real “I’m going to tie this rope around He-Man’s leg, then tie the other end to an arrow, then shoot the arrow at the moon, then the moon’s gravitational pull will deliver him into the clutches of my giant clockwork squid!” energy?
Bilbot2’s role as Exposition Bot completed, and enough vague baloney allusions to previous movies woven in amongst the loose threads and rotting pilchards, our team have to escape. Same drill as every other movie: humans got somewhere, oh no ancient terror, buncha people die, one or two escape.
In addition to the new alien, there are a bunch of other aliens! Hiding in the cellar! Like in that other movie! It’s unclear if these are the progeny of (sigh) BIG CHAP or Bilbot2’s Magical Mystery Goo, but we may as well just throw that on the pile of other twaddle that doesn’t make sense.
Blah blah, run run run. Oh no, pregnant lady got captured! I’m sure this won’t get weird and gruesome! Also, we’re in a dangerous place (a space ship) so we can’t fire our guns (just like in that other movie!!!) so we have no choice but to fire our guns. In zero gravity. Bibble bibble, my old man’s a mushroom etc.
They’re pretty much free at the end, but pregnant lady got badly bonked. Luckily, they have some of that Black Goo™! Surely that will help!
The backdrop to all of this is the station’s failing orbit, whereby it’s shortly going to crash-bang-wallop into the planet’s rings. All that Nimrods Anonymous need to do is get off the station using the same little space ship they came on!
heh heh, TWIST tho! Turns out that Black Goo™ they gave pregnant lady did some stuff! WEIRD stuff! She’s okay, mostly, but she’s now like SUPER pregnant! And she gives birth to it, and it’s like an egg, man! An egg! Rain grabs it and runs off — presumably to flush it down the toilet or whatever — but she stumbles and it rolls away. It peeps open, and what looks like a human baby is within! Then it falls down a hole.
Naturally she has to go find it and, equally naturally, in the space of 2–3 minutes it has grown to about 10' tall. The creature is another hybrid (LIKE IN THAT OTHER MOVIE!!!) with a human face, a tail, biomechanical bobbins on its back and a sort of bitey-tongue thing. It’s also, naturally, murderous.
Seriously, why is everything in these movies just a Jack-the-Ripper analogue? This thing is about 5 minutes old, and already all it wants to do is violently kill whilst grinning like a bloody ape. Why? That’s not how any living creature works! It’s how B-movie slasher-flick monsters work! How did two genuinely great films come down to this silliness?
Hybrid thing kills now-not-pregnant lady and drinks her blood. Bleugh!
Rain gets it to fall down a hole and it gets some bad owies from the planet’s rings. Lastly they eject the cargo pod it’s in, with Rain scrambling to safety, and the hybrid thing is killed. Or not. Or whatever. I mean, we all thought (sigh) BIG CHAP was dead, right?
Rain and Robrother head off together to new adventures. Roll credits.
Seriously. Big f*cking Chap? Just call him Big Daddy and wrap him in a Union flag and be done with it.
Also, hey! Remember that first film with the awesome ending where Rippers blew it out the airlock? Ha ha, turns out she didn’t do squat! It was fine! Just biding its time! Bet you didn’t think we could retroactively screw things up any more after Alien 3, didn’t ya? Boy, did we show you!
And why Bilbot2, you ask? Why not just a different character? It didn’t need to be Bilbot, there was no reason to use Bilbot. Honestly, damned if I know. Something peculiar about legacy sequels, I guess. Some people don’t have a problem with it, I do. It’s needless and, as a result, stands out badly. Also, the deepfake effect isn’t great. I think it looks creaky, and it only came out a couple of months ago. In five years time, it’s gonna look bad.
Every time I think they have mined every character, every moment from every film — every time I think there is not another drop of acidic blood that they can squeeze from this critter, well the studio just shows up with a bigger lemon-juicer and the blood just keeps on dripping!
From Alien The Three onwards, these films have just retrodden the same uninspiring story. They’ve gotten more needlessly and voyeuristically gruesome, like that’s some sort of meaningful achievement that must be met to finally match the quality of the first two! The characters have gotten more poorly sketched. And all of it is hung-together with an ever-more muddled and nonsensical lore and gratuitous “hey, remember that?” moments.
For the love of God, let this franchise die. Make something new. Alien was new once, that’s part of why it was so effective! It’s not even that gory, it was just different and unexpected! Do that. And leave old Bilbo alone, too. I know his wife was okay with it, and it’s good you asked her and everything, but reanimating dead actors to replay roles from forty years ago is just needless and weird… and, as a result, even more gross.
This is Kaylee, last survivor of the “I Hate Aliens” club, signing off.
