The New Alien Films Give Us Bad Answers to All the Wrong Questions
Ridley Scott has stated in multiple interviews that he chose to revisit the Alien franchise with Prometheus and now Alien Covenant to answer a question no one else had allegedly bothered to address: “Where do the aliens come from?” He says:
“When I saw Alien finally succumb after four films, which was a good run, then they also did Alien vs. Predator, after which I thought, ‘Uh-oh, that’s it’ — then I waited a couple of years, I went back and decided to resurrect it,” he said. “No-one actually asked where [the aliens] came from in the three subsequent movies, which is kind of ridiculous. That’s why good writers are good writers, they’ll ask a basic question like that and make that into a scenario.”
In another interview he claims his interest was re-sparked by asking where the Space Jockey came from:
So what changed his mind? ‘I suddenly had an idea.’ Scott’s arms are crossed over his chest and his posture is poker-straight (his dad was a military man). ‘No one had asked the question: who is the big guy on the chair?’ He’s talking about the nine-foot creature (fanboys call him the Space Jockey) whose fossilized corpse is discovered by the crew in ‘Alien’, but who featured in none of its three sequels. Scott says he started wondering about the creature and its kind a few years ago: who are they? Why are they there? ‘If I got underneath that, would it be enough to unearth a new story?’ Predictably, the more he burrowed into the new story, the less inclined he became to tie it to ‘Alien’. Now, he says, the connection is ‘barely in its DNA: you get it in the last seven minutes or so’.
Scott wanted to go back and really explore the origins of the xenomorphs, adding that, “We did Prometheus — that heaved it off the ground, and Covenant is a follow-through to Prometheus. We now know who created this, and why, and the next one’s a joining up of the storyline.”
The problem with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant is that the question Ridley focuses on and attempts to answer is, frankly, not a question the general audience had, nor is it what made Alien, Aliens, and (in my opinion) Alien3 work in the first place.
In competition with supplementary books and comics that flesh out plot or character (the Aliens comics by Dark Horse comics, first published in 1988, are a good example), films are rarely successful. The purpose of making canonical extensions is usually to address previously unanswered questions about a fictional world, something to which the creator only has access. However, not only does the question need to be one that the audience asks throughout the course of the story or series, but the answer to these questions should also not be the focus of the follow-up. Scott could answer questions about the origins of the Xenomorphs in the process of telling us a story about these new characters, but he instead attempts to use these answers as the entire justification for the new films, creating ham-fisted scenarios about characters that the audience rejects in order to accomplish that goal.
My main three problems with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant are:
- They focus on questions that were not essential, in relation to what made the originals so special.
- The “answers” provided are ambiguous, confusing, and only raise more questions — a puzzle, given Scott’s expressed desire to use these films as explanations for what happens in his original masterpiece.
- The answers he does attempt to provide demystify the creatures rather than make them more interesting.
The original Alien was a sci-fi/horror masterpiece. It worked because of its subtlety, thematic undertones, and a kick-ass protagonist we could all cheer for. Academics are obsessed with it. Here are just a few assorted academic pieces written about it:
- Abbott, Joe. “They Came From Beyond the Center: Ideology and Political Textuality in the Radical Science Fiction Films of James Cameron,” Literature Film Quarterly 22.1 (1994).
- Bell Metereau, Rebecca. “Woman: The Other Alien in Alien” in Weedman Jane B. (ed.) Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Lubbock: Texas Tech P, 1985).
- Berenstein, Rhona. “Mommie Dearest: Aliens, Rosemary’s Baby. and Mothering,” Journal of Popular Culture 24.2 (1990).
- Bundtzen, Lynda K. “Monstrous Mother: Medusa, Grendel, and now Alien,” Film Quarterly 40.3 (1987).
- Chien, Joseph. “Containing Horror: The Alien Trilogy and the Abject,” Focus Magazine 14 (1994).
- Creed, Barbara. “Alien and the Monstrous-Feminine,” Screen, Vol. 27, №1 (1986), also Kuhn, (ed.) Alien Zone (1990).
Virtually none of the listed articles mention the mysterious background of the aliens, nor do they touch on any of the creation mythologies that Scott peppered Prometheus with. Scott is absolutely right; no one seemed to ask where the Xenomorphs or the Space Jockey came from, because none of that mattered. That’s not what made the films so good, nor were these questions even remotely as interesting as the Alien-as-abortion-parable analyses (as seen with Elizabeth Shaw in Prometheus) we’ve been offered in the years since.
Who created the Xenomorphs? Prometheus suggests that it was the Engineers, ancient humanoid beings that inhabited LV-223, seen in Prometheus. At least, they created some black goo that reacts differently depending on what kind of creature with which it comes into contact. Here are some charts trying to explain it:
Okay so, was it the Engineers that created the Xenomorphs, or was it David in Alien: Covenant? The general audience is not given clarity on this topic, and a large part of the plot seems convoluted and vague because of this.
This brings me to my third complaint: the Xenomorphs, having been created or being a product of intelligent design (at the hands of the engineers or David), demystifies them. Here’s a brief description of Xenomorph biology:
The Xenomorphs’ primary weapon is their inner pharyngeal jaw, which is capable of shooting from their mouth like a piston with sufficient power to smash through bone and metal.[6][7] In fact, a common tactic used by the creatures to eliminate prey is to restrain the victim with their hands, immobilizing them, before killing them with a precision jaw strike to the head, piercing through the skull and penetrating the brain; this form of attack is colloquially known as a “Headbite”.[8] On several occasions, Xenomorphs have been seen to suspend the corpses of those that they kill from ceilings.[6][9]
Xenomorphs have segmented, blade-tipped tails. The sharp tip has been seen to vary from a small, scorpion-like barb[6] to a larger, flat blade.[7][10] Despite their seemingly flimsy physical construction, the creature’s tail makes for an incredibly potent weapon, strong enough to impale and lift a Yautja from the floor with seemingly little effort. The tails have been used variously as stabbing, slashing and blunt force trauma weapons.[6][10] Above the tails, the creature possesses several Dorsal Tubes on its back, typically consisting of two pairs — a larger upper pair and a smaller lower pair — often with a fifth, sharper spine in the centre below the base of the head. The exact purpose of these tubes is unclear.
Xenomorph blood is an extremely potent and concentrated molecular acid that can corrode on contact almost any substance with alarming speed. It is dull yellowish-green in color. The blood is in fact a component in a biological “battery” that provides the creatures with their energy,[15] and seems to be pressurized inside the body so that it spurts out when wounded, as a defensive measure. This blood can prove incredibly problematic when encountering Xenomorphs aboard a starship, as using traditional firearms or explosives to attack the creature will potentially cause its blood to leak out in sufficient quantity to eat through the hull of the ship.
Xenomorphs are badass. And you know what a badass backstory to their origins would be? Showing the audience what kind of environment a creature would need to live in to have evolved with literal acid for blood. These creatures are weapons, through and through; what kind of monster-infested hellhole did they have to live in to have grown pharyngeal jaws that can smash through bone and metal? Surely there’s a reason for a Xenomorph to be a killing machine, one that keeps on a path of destruction even after it’s dead. What other carnal, terrifying creatures would they have had to compete with in their natural ecosystems in order to become what Ash calls “the ultimate lifeform”? Show us that movie please.
You know what’s not badass? Being designed that way by some malfunctioning android in his spare time for reasons involving being angry at daddy. If Scott insists on giving us a backstory to a creature as legendary as the one we met in Alien, he should have at least made that story as maniacal, as tumultuous, as horrifying, as the creature itself.
Prometheus and Alien: Covenant aren’t good films for a million reasons, but the one cardinal sin they commit is having no reason to exist. The underlying concept which gave birth to these scripts was a bad one, and attempting to create a compelling narrative surrounding a question no one needed answered was doomed to fail from the start.
