Tag: alien

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Alien: Bloodlines

This is a review of Alien: Bloodlines. Marvel now has the license to produce Alien comics! Lately, there seems to be a resurgence of comic companies producing licensed material – besides Alien, I’ve seen Predator, Godzilla, Conan, Planet of the Apes, etc. Anyway, the first Alien volume I read last year (not produced by Marvel, btw) wasn’t very good. If you don’t believe me, read the review!

How is this volume? I’m glad to announce that it’s solid. The action takes place sometime after the second Alien movie. Our hero Gabriel Cruz gets tossed from Weyland-Yutani, everyone’s favorite evil corporation, and moves back to Earth. Cruz is credited with bringing the Xenomorphs to earth – earth orbit, anyway. Is he a scientist or biochemist? No, he was impregnated by a facehugger, shoved into cryosleep, and had the baby alien surgically removed from his chest.

Anyway, Cruz wants to make peace with his son Danny, but Danny wants nothing to do with him. No, that’s not true. Danny wants Gabriel’s i.d. to get him and his radical friends onto the top-secret satellite orbiting earth that is chockful of Xenomorphs. Since Gabriel worked in security, of course he leaves his identification lying around his office instead of, say, a safe or locked cabinet. The radicals storm the satellite, and get more than they bargained for – or do they?

In the meantime, Weyland-Yutani sends Gabriel and two roadkill – I mean Marines – to the satellite. They are joined by Bishop (from the second Alien movie), because reasons. For Gabriel, it’s a rescue mission, but he’s well aware his superiors don’t give a crap and only want a Xenomorph. This leads to the scene where Gabriel shoots an infected man in the head to get a specimen, but the alien exits through the mouth instead of the chest, which leads to a Benny Hill style chase scene. Yakety Sax!

This is a good science fiction/horror comic. My main issue has to do with likability – i.e., nobody in this graphic novel is likable. I’m not sure why Gabriel wants to make peace with his son, but that’s his business; given their history, I have no idea why Gabriel thinks Danny wants anything to do with him.

Recommended for fans of the Alien franchise and fans of sci-fic/horror comics!

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Aliens Epic Collection: The Original Years

This is a review of Aliens Epic Collection: The Original Years, the meat of which consists of three miniseries published after the release of James Cameron’s Aliens movie in 1986. The main characters are Newt and Hicks, two characters from Aliens. These miniseries were published before the release of the third Alien movie, in which it’s revealed that Newt and Hicks are dead. They had to change their names in reprints of these series.

The plot: Newt and Hicks are back on earth. Fifteen years have passed since Aliens, with no sign of Ripley. Both Newt and Hicks have wounds, physical and psychological. Hicks’ face has been half burnt off by the aliens, and he now spends most of his free time drinking and brawling. Newt is in a mental hospital for shock. When Hicks has a chance to go back to Acheron (where the first two Alien movies took place), he jumps at the chance because reasons. He breaks Newt out of the mental hospital and takes her with him because they’re going to lobotomize her.

Turns out that everyone wants to get them some alien – corporations, the military, scientists, wacky religious cults. They get their wish when earth is overrun with xenomorphs. In the second miniseries, Newt and Hicks meet a military man who thinks he can train the aliens like dogs and use them to retake earth. That goes about as well as expected. In the final miniseries of the volume, Ripley returns with a plan to end the alien menace once and for all. Will it work, or is it just another crackpot scheme?

I read a few of these issues back when they were published. I might even have collected them, although I can’t say I remember. To be truthful, I recalled very little about these comics. If I did, it’s likely I wouldn’t have bought this collection. I do not write these reviews to be negative. Unfortunately, these comics just aren’t very good. The pacing of the individual issues feels off, and many of the characters are clichés and/or caricatures. Sam Keith does the art for Aliens: Earth War, and his pencils look great, but his character designs are very different from the first two miniseries. In some cases, his characters look like different people.

If you loved the Alien movies, you could read this. Or you could just rewatch the movies.

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Triple Feature of Terror: A Review of Alien!

ALF

I begin this review with an announcement: I have seen Alien about 82 times. Alien is one of my favorite horror movies, but at this point I’m a wee bit sick of it, so I will try a different format for this review. There will be almost no plot summary at all.

Announcement #2: it’s snowing today, and I’m stuck in my apartment, so I had the wonderful idea to watch Alien, An American Werewolf in London and The Thing all at once. A Triple Feature of Terror! Later in this review I will discuss the mystical ties that bind these movies together. I call these ties the Web of Nostradamus™, but that’s another story.

The first thing that struck me on my 83rd rewatch of Alien was how tight the screenplay is in places. This movie was written by Dan O’Bannon, who wrote the screenplay for the underrated Dead and Buried. He also wrote and directed The Return of the Living Dead, THE GREATEST ZOMBIE MOVIE OF ALL TIME. If you want to know the origin of the belief that zombies crave brains, watch this movie.

What do I mean about a tight screenplay? When the crewmembers of the Nostromo check out the SOS, which is actually a warning, Dallas (the Captain) needs three crewmembers to investigate the signal. He can’t use the engineering crew, who normally get all the shit jobs, because they are busy repairing the landing ship. He also can’t use the Science Officer (Ash), because the movie later makes it clear that the science officer is the most important member of the crew. That leaves him, the second in command (Kane), the third in the command (Ripley) and the navigator (Lambert).

Dallas should have sent Ripley with Kane and Lambert; instead he pulls a Captain Kirk and goes himself. This is a good character moment for a minor player, showing us that Dallas isn’t a very good captain and foreshadowing his decision to send himself crawling through the air ducts. The screenplay hints that maybe Dallas has an unspoken thing for Ripley, who offers to go crawling through the air ducts. Dallas goes in her place.

But there’s more! O’Bannon damages the landing ship so that the two crewmembers most likely to be sent on the rescue mission will be unavailable. He also sets up the Ash/Ripley conflict; when Ash overrides Ripley’s decision to not let the crewmembers back into the landing ship, it creates tension between these two characters that pays off later in the movie. All of this is set up by the composition of a simple scouting party. I have a ton of respect for the level of thought that went behind this scene.

Of course, the second half of Alien plays things a lot looser. That’s because this movie starts as a science fiction movie and ends up as horror movie, and the final hour plays by horror tropes. I particularly enjoyed the sequence when Ripley, who earlier refused to let her fellow crewmembers onto the ship because it violated quarantine, risks her life to hunt down her cat Jonesy, who spends most of the movie scaring the shit out of the crew. Knowing cats as I do, I think it’s possible that Jonesy and the alien were working together.

I watched Alien with my own cat, and sensed his approval during the feline rescue sequence. When Jonesy appeared onscreen he pawed at the screen and then peered behind the television, searching for the interloper. I have friends who assure me this is a sign of great intelligence in felines, although I have my doubts. I once had to stop my cat from eating a garbage bag.

Speaking of stupid: people sure do stupid things in the second half of this movie. Besides cat chasing, we have characters splitting up, Dallas confronting the alien in the air ducts (he wins a Darwin Award!) and the crewmembers leaving the door to the medical facilities wide open when the face-hugger vanishes.

One of the most problematic scenes in Alien is when Ripley – who is portrayed as a strong, tough-minded woman (weakness for cats aside) – strips down to her underwear. I’m sure director Ridley Scott would tell you he needed this scene because it sets up the sequence when Ripley dons the spacesuit (which wouldn’t fit with her clothes on, I guess) and ejects the alien into space. Yeah, right.

Alien is a visually striking movie. Yes, there are the H.R. Giger call-outs, but this film also contains all sorts of weird phallic imagery, from Ash’s white blood to the alien itself, which is a walking phallus. One of the movie’s more bizarre scenes is when Ash tries to kill Ripley by jamming a pornographic magazine down her throat. Perhaps he’s imitating the face-hugger, which shoves a tube down its victim’s throat. Or maybe there’s an even stranger reason. I don’t want to know.

I know you’ve all been waiting for this, so here is the first Web of Nostradamus™ that mystically binds all these movies together. The novelizations for Alien and The Thing were both written by Alan Dean Foster, who has the same middle name as actor Harry Dean Stanton, who spends most of Alien smoking unidentified substances and looking like he doesn’t know where the hell he is.