Supermallet

The clincher is when Ripley becomes acting captain and goes to Mother and looks up the directive to the science officer. It's typed out, something to the effect of "Detour to LV-426. Capture specimen. Crew expendable." The company knew exactly what the Xeno was, and where to find it.

lopper

The movie Life is the best "Alien" film released this year. I feel like a lot of people, including myself, probably skipped it in theaters, but it's actually really good, and absolutely worth a watch.

That's it. I'll show myself out.

Toddarino

One thing I happened to notice was in the scene at the end with the sleep pod. It was probably just the way it was lit, but Fassbender looked just like Lance Henriksen's Bishop.

Alien
Aliens
Alien 3
Prometheus
Alien Covenant
Avp
Alien Ressurection
Avp Requiem

fumanstan

I wonder how the poor box office returns for this movie affects future sequels. It's going to make considerably less then Prometheus it seems.

d2cheer

This will probably be the last one until a reboot after Scott passes...

lopper

The budget for this seems relatively smaller than I expected (98 mil), and it's already made 168 mil worldwide. I'm sure marketing dollars are not accounted for here, but I'd guess it could still make a profit here.

As disappointed as I was with the movie, I'd still like Scott to do just one more to bridge the gap between Prometheus and Alien. I'd hate it if they left the story open like this.

Abob Teff

I've been deep diving on podcasts, just started reading the "Alien" novelization, and have been slowly digesting some of the extras from home video. It took me a while to come back, and I still don't really want to talk about Covenant ...

I disagree with Supermallet's assessment. I have always thought the events of "Alien" were a fluke. I have never found anything questionable about having a standing (albeit covert) contingency should a space vessel encounter "the unknown". I don't think any of the events leading up to finding the alien species were pre-planned. I do not recall anything from the first film that would lead one to believe it was deliberate (like "Aliens").

Josh-da-man

Watching Alien, it's pretty obvious that Ash and, by extension, his superiors knew what the crew of the Nostromo would find. Especially when we learn, in an offhand comment, that he was just transferred aboard the ship. Maybe they were just looking for that particular beacon without knowing the exact planet, just the general vicinity. As much as I love Alien, that is probably its greatest sin: it's a really cockamamie plan on the part of the company.

And as much as I love Aliens it just digs deeper into this, where W-Y sets up a colony on LV-426 some seventy years after the first movie. If they knew the xenomorphs were on LV-426, then they would have doneva second attempt to recover them instead of waiting just forgetting about them and setting up a human colony on that planet.

W-Y would have to be able to trace the Nostromo and find LV-426 was the place they were looking for if they didn't already know it. All modern day freight trucks are rigged with GPS, so they had to have been tracking that shit. Even if they had no clue and had that protocol planted in all of their androids, when the Nostromo was lost, that would send up a pretty big red flag.

Supermallet

And this is from the Alien Wikipedia entry plot synopsis (which I know isn't necessarily conclusive but it's a reasonable shorthand):

brayzie

The dialogue between Dallas and Ripley seems to definitely imply that The Company knew about it, because why assign Ash at such a convenient time?

But I'm watching the scene with Ash's head and he doesn't say that he was specifically assigned to the Nostromo for that mission.

But I still say it can be interpreted the way I initially thought. Special Order #937 could have been issued once it was reported about the thing attached to Kane's face, or it could have been issued once they got the homing beacon from the derelict space craft and The Company just assumed there must be some sort of alien life to be brought back.

What Supermallet is arguing makes more sense with the clues we're given, but it doesn't make sense from The Company's POV. If they already know about the planet, already know there is a certain type of species there, why make such meager preparations like having Ash assigned the ship BEFORE the ship rerouted?
If they knew about it that far in advance, it would make more sense that they would send a special kind of bio-weapons divisions ship to make sure they secured the alien specimen properly.
If they know about the alien in advance why risk some inexperienced space truckers to obtain a highly advanced and dangerous alien specimen? They're leaving way too much to chance.
And if they knew about it before the Nostromo rerouted, why forget about it for 70 years, putting a colony on LV-426 only to wait until Ripley is found to go looking for it again?

I think it makes space far more scary and mysterious to have the Nostromo come across the derelict's beacon by accident, and THEN have The Company screw over the crew once they find out an alien species is there. If Weyland-Yutani already know about all this I feel it robs the film and story of something.

Supermallet

I think the story could work both ways, but long before Covenant I always interpreted it as W-Y knew in advance and deliberately sent the Nostromo to LV-426.

inri222

An interesting read

http://www.popmatters.com/column/192...ga-went-wrong/

Deconstructing the Star Beast : How the 'Alien' Saga Went Wrong

Alien was a planned B-Movie that transcended its genre and spawned the rare sequel that is neither imitation nor complete deviation. Then the saga went to hell.

hanshotfirst1138

I got the impression that deliberately sent them them to have Ash get something profitable, but I was never sure if they knew exactly what it was or not.

Abob Teff

I see the perspective, but I'm not sure I agree. I still think Ash's programming/orders were an underlying protocol or uploaded after the fact as opposed to being premeditated. The premeditation just doesn't make sense.

I'm reading the novelization now ($2 on Kindle) ... I'll let you know how Alan Dean Foster saw it.

Josh-da-man

We can surmise that it wasn't standard practice to include an android in the crews of company ships (everyone was surprised that Ash was a robot), and Ash was a last minute addition to the crew. The implication is that he was there for this very reason.

He also knew what happened to Kane, which is he why he broke the quarantine protocol in violation of Ripley's order. His later dialog, after his head comes off, also gives the impression that he knew about the xenomorphs beforehand.

brayzie

Or that piece of dialogue was only included to add some suspense to the film, and foreshadow the Ash revelation.

Considering that the final result of ALIEN is cobbled together from O'Bannon's script and other various ideas, I don't think that there was some master plan to how this would all fit together.

I think it's best left slightly ambiguous. If the Company had some knowledge beforehand about the alien beacon, that adds another layer of hopelessness to the film. If the Nostromo just stumbled upon the beacon, and this shit happen, it adds to the randomness of space and the nightmare scenarios that are all possible.

But using that as a launching pad for Weyland-Yutani having their fingers in the mix from the very beginning, that just takes the whole alien-ness out of the whole franchise.

inri222

http://www.midniteticket.com/blog/in...metheus-part-2

From an interview with Alien co-writer/co-creator Ron Shusett

MT: In Alien you don’t describe the origin of the creature or the back story of the Space Jockey. These choices help give Alien a mythic quality where Prometheus spends a lot of it’s runtime attempting to explain these ideas.

RS: The first time you saw any idea of it was when Tom Skerritt was killed. He was grabbed and you didn’t know what happened to him. You just saw it so quickly but it was so powerful. Dan found Giger. He had never worked on a movie. While we were doing the script Giger was doing the designs for us over in Switzerland. We would send him pages and he would send back designs for what we suggested.

Giger did such a brilliant job it was not disappointing the first time you saw it. Finally in the third act you saw more of it but again Giger’s work was so brilliant it didn’t disappoint. That phallic shaped head and the inner teeth. It was a combination of not overdoing it, saving it till the end, and having a brilliant design. Not only did it not let you down, it lived up to all the build up.

MT: As a writer, how do you decide what elements of the story to explain and what elements to leave to the imagination?

RS: It’s a sixth sense. I can only tell you it’s not even intelligence or craftsmanship. You have to be born with an instinct for stuff like that. You say “How much will be disappointing and how much will be perfect”. Dan and I achieved that delicate balance. The interesting thing is that while we were writing the script, Giger was sending us these designs. That usually doesn’t happen. Usually you have a script and someone comes in and does it. When you’re collaborating with the artist who is going to design the creature you can say “I picture this happening here” and there’s a relationship. He would show us designs and we would realize how much we should show and how much we shouldn’t. That helped a lot too.

You mentioned the space jockey and Prometheus. We knew we should not try to explain the space jockey. We never thought in terms of a sequel. The first duty is to get the first movie good. There’s no sequel if it isn’t good enough. We didn’t bother ourselves with what that creature was it was or where it came from. It did the exact duty it had to. It shocked you. It awed you. It was fifteen feet tall and it gave real scope to the movie. When you saw real people against it you would say, “Wow, this is really a powerful, big scope move.” Just by that one scene and set. You saw it was not a model because you saw our name actors walking around it. We never intended to explain that.

I knew it would be almost impossible to do a prequel because you’d be so bogged down. It’s hard enough to do an Alien sequel as it is. To be bogged down with what the creature’s back story is, that’s what happened I think. Ridley and Dan and I said we were going to do this like a classic B movie. Don’t worry about symbolism. Don’t take it like “This is man turning against his body like cancer” or it’s male birth. Ridley said, “I want to do it the way you wrote it. An unpretentious edge of your seat thriller like every B-movie. Not an A movie that gets bogged down with a message and symbolism and a lot of extra character work. But I will make it look like Kubrick’s 2001.” That was the first day we met him. When he said that, even though nobody had any idea that he could do horror or mystery or suspense, we knew he was going to knock it out of the park. We could see from his reel that he could easily make it look brilliant.

Also he said, “I want to watch with you and Dan every classic B-movie that you recommend to me so that I get the rhythm of how the scares work.” The only A one on that list was Hitchcock’s Psycho. All the rest were B-movies. That’s what scares you the most. These old time B-movies that make you jump in your seat. He absorbed exactly how he could make all the scares work from watching all these classic B-movies. I realized he was going to do it exactly how we had imagined it and that it would be amazing. This was a half hour into the first meeting.

james2025a

I have been watching and listening to Kermode for decades, since he used to be a regular on the Culture Show on BBC2 in the 90s, and for me he is head and shoulders above every other reviewer. I don't necessarily agree with every review, but he makes them damn entertaining and informative. His reviews for Jason Statham movies, the Iron Man movies or especially the Pirates of the Caribbean movies are hilarious. I look forward to the reviews of the Pirates movies far more than any of the films themselves.

And i totally agree with what he is saying in the video. Part of me likes the idea of seeing the history of the Engineers, but the idea of all the movies interlinking with humans (and Ripley) always sucks. The reason why Ripley was such a strong character in the first two movies was the fact that she began as a regular person who was very much out of her depth but through sheer will overcame something that she was vastly superior to her. Then in the next movie she realized that the only way for her to truly ever overcome the trauma it had left her with was to face it head on and conquer her fears.

inri222

I found this YT comment on Kermode's review hilarious


Karl Karlos1 month ago

Can't wait for the JAWS prequels. Where did the Shark come from? Who are his parents? So many important questions...

Buckaroo Banzai

I finally saw this at the cheap theatres. I'm no film critic so bear with me here.

I found it to be better than Prometheus simply for the introduction of the actual Xenomorph. Overall I felt the story was a little bogged down in "promethean" overuse of philosophy. When did the Alien franchise move from scary as fuck realism (I know, I know, aliens!) to a philosopher's watered down technobabble rehash? The David/Walter interaction was enjoyable but the "surprise" ending was an eye-roller. Some of the crew interactions were promising but the non existent back stories, especially for the married couples, made me not care when they were blown up or eaten. I guess the biggest letdown of the entire film for me was that the Xenomorph we know (and love) was a creation of a sinister Android. Part of the mystique of Alien to me was that we had no idea who the space jockey was and where (or how far) it came from. After all that I have to say negatively there were many moments in this movie that almost achieved the feeling I had in Alien/Aliens but Covenant never quite found it's way into my heart. If I have anything to add it is that this movie is still better than anything in Alien Resurrection, for a canon sequel that movie was a stinker imho.

I really wish that Alien 5 had been made instead of Covenant but it truly shows you the hold that Scott has on the franchise. I hope in the next prequel-sequel that there's way less talking and way more killing.

Here's my list:

Aliens
Alien
Alien 3
Alien Covenant
Prometheus
Alien Resurrection
AVP:R
AVP

Daytripper

A pretty interesting online comment that I found:


Killing Shaw and the engineers destroyed any hope I had for this film. It sweeps away any potential answers about the engineers, their intentions, or their interactions with humankind. Shaw was the one and only link that connected the audience to the film. She was the protagonist, not Daniels. The explanation that David killed her despite loving her is lazy writing. It shows a lack of depth in his character development and undermines his character arc, while halting Shaw's completely. David had no problem sacrificing people in the first film in pursuit of science. Are we to believe he experienced love and grace and remained unchanged? Then he truly is inferior to mankind. Shaw was barren. You cannot develop a functional reproductive system from an incomplete/damaged one. This is Ridley Scott giving a huge middle finger to an audience who was disappointed in his lack of depth in doing anything more than raising thoughtful questions in Prometheus. Anyone can ask questions, I paid to see your answers, Mr. Scott. "They want Aliens? I'll give them fucking Aliens." Great, Ridley. Then let the other director give us Alien 5. Time to retire, bud.

inri222

That's what happens when you have incompetent writers being supervised by a director who only cares about how pretty the images look.

Abob Teff

... and a director who instructs the writers to quit providing answers and rewrite the script to be vague ...

inri222

Another lazy half assed attempt to explore the origins of the alien.
In some ways better than Prometheus and in others worse.

1.5/5

Ranger

Was it Ridley Scott's fault that Hannibal sucked?