On the inevitable disappointment from Neill Blomkamp doing Alien 5

There's a great article on A.V. Club here about the problem with franchises like the Alien series and the sort of disappointment that fans inevitably set up for themselves. I'll lave no comments on it other than to say that I very much agree with Jesse Hassenger's perspective on the issue, as I have lived through the hype and expectations of all the films under discussion.....and also liked Prometheus very much, despite certain flaws and plot/storytelling problems.

The Eternally Mutating Alien

This is still bugging me. It might help if some sort of explanation was forthcoming in the Alien-verse (Prometheus-verse?) but I think the rationale may change from one film to the next, or dictated purely by the whim of the FX artist or video game art/design lead. So I present a collage of alien heads over time, as they have mutated from one movie to the next:



The alien as he looked in the original movie...also the "stalker" type in A:CM



The alien look from Aliens, Alien 3 and the warrior type in A:CM




The Protoalien of Prometheus. I loved Prometheus, but after months of reflecting on the movie I have to say, I really wish that they get a good screenwriter for the next script, one who likes a challenge in creating a bridge movie that explains WTF was going on in Prometheus and how it all leads directly to Alien.

I mean.....is this alien what comes out of an engineer, or is just a literal protoype, a stepping stone for the genetic virus toward the final master race model?

So many unanswered questions that are floating around, but not, I suspect, because of any master storyline, instead because they were making it all up as they went along. I really wish they'd sprung for a novelization. Never did a movie need a movie-tie-in novel so badly as Prometheus.



AvP: Requiem alien warrior. Note that his bony skull is not quite as pronounced as the earlier pic (two up). But it's all good as the AvP aliens are from an alternate reality, the one which contains the mustache twirling Spock.



The dog alien of Alien 3. Not entirely sure what made this one unique other than that was "born" more physically developed than other aliens usually are.



The painfully stupid human-alien hybrid of Alien: Resurrection. If we assume it's a product of the alien gene-stealing element and not a product of the insane and incompetent mad scientists that also cloned Ripley, then it ruins my theory (below) that the aliens might steal the most useful genes in host organisms.



The equally stupid albeit slightly scarier Predalien. Noteworthy for bypassing the egg-face hugger-hatchling snake process, going right to a new "vomit up alien embryos right into the host" process instead. This is the only instance we see of aliens hatching more than one progeny from a single host, which is another curiosity of the species....you'd think they would be capable of generating multiple hatchlings from a single face-hugger implantation. My theory is they are, but not in humans (not enough room or "resources" in the host to sustain more than one baby alien at a time).

If the predalien supports the gene-stealing theory, then it does in fact make one wonder what sort of reproductive processes predators are supposed to have.



The Alien Queen in Aliens. Pretty spry for her time. Still, I never did understand the xenomorph development stage very well. I mean it's easy enough to explain: think army ants who need to capture other bugs that they then expose to hatching larvae, and those larvae sink into the hosts to plant a second larvae, which then hatches. Sure, I get that....but only one larvae per host? That's a population that is limited in expansion by the number of other species around it. Very bad survival trait, if you don't mind my saying so.



The Alien Queen in AvP. A terrifying tyrannosaurus Rex in the guise of an alien. Apparently not able to survive the crushing depths of the ocean, even if she is more than capable of escaping orbit. She was, however, able to survive for untold millennia in Predator cryostasis, apparently. Speaking of which, the Alien vs. Predator films don't even fit in well with the canon Predator universe. Keeping aliens for some rite-of-passage event on Earth is directly comparable to a big game hunter who keeps a private kennel full of lethal asps inside a petting zoo.

I saw this last one happen in real life. It was actually messier.

There seems to be a suggested theme in the movies that the aliens steal DNA or adopt characteristics of their host species. This is never elaborated on (no scientist type seems to step up and mention this) but is rather simply assumed*. It's a good example of artistic expression trumping a good story, I feel. Now, taking into account the reveal in Prometheus (that the aliens may be a genetic third or fourth generation byproduct of a hyper-mutating genetic virus of some sort) it does raise interesting questions, such as "if they can adopt species characteristics that are useful, then why don't they borrow...say....bigger brains for more intelligence, or better adaptive/reasoning skills?" For that matter, why don't the aliens simply adopt a better reproductive system?

I suppose the answer will be revealed in a future Prometheus sequel, but I would imagine the real answer is: they are actually stuck with a limited range of adaptive traits. Specifically, they are bred for war and genocidal extermination, and the engineers created the virus to breed monsters of a destructive nature, so the virus seeks out traits that are calculated to be the most damaging to a target species. Maybe? It's all speculation at this point. A byproduct, in truth, of nearly forty years' worth of different film makers and script writers dipping their hand in the pot.

Here, let me confuse you (source unknown...wish I knew who did this)

*Except, of course, in Alien: Resurrection where it's sort of the whole impetus of the movie, to the point where they are cloning Ripley from some ill-defined source of her DNA (attained magically) to extract alien DNA from her clones. Oh that movie makes my head hurt. I think the novels imply as much, too....but for the most part 95% of the Alien tie-in novels have been little more than poorly-conceived paid fanfic. Um, IMO. There are some exceptions, though.

Prometheus

Caught the midnight show...I opted for a straight digital affair, eschewing the 3D glasses. Having seen Avengers both with and without 3D, I felt that the 3D looks a bit too unreal...anyone else experience it like I seem to, in which the 3D seems to mess with the "field of vision" too much, creating a sense that everything is sort of unreal and toylike? Well, while the 3D effect is certainly interesting, I was going to have none of that to distract me with Prometheus.


There's no way to talk about Prometheus easily without spoilers, so I am going to proclaim that this movie is certainly worth seeing and is the best entry in the franchise since Aliens.

Now to announce this:

SPOILER ALERT AHEAD!!!!!!!

There, you have been warned. Okay, my observations about Prometheus. Also, a lot of questions. Lots and lots. This film is all about answering questions we've had since 1979 with a hundred more questions.

1. Ambitious movie, far over-extended its reach. I don't mind it leaving unanswered questions, but by the closing credits there were more unanswered questions than there were evil alien microbes running around on LV223.

2. I'm trying to figure out if the prometheans (alias the jockeys, pilots, or engineers in the movie) at the start were seeding earth in some incredibly ancient period, or if the film was implying that everything we know about paleontology is completely wrong. They glossed over the archeological observations so briefly that they didn't really raise any odd questions there (one can just assume that the prometheans were visiting earth until quite recently) but I couldn't really determine if they were implying that the seeding of life on Earth was a relatively recent phenomenon or not. I am leaning toward, "this happened sometime at the dawn of life's manifestation," or possibly that the seeding (and maybe even later re-seedings) tie into the five major extinction events in our geologic history....but then, these are the sort of unanswered and possibly unanswerable questions the film likes to raise. If you assume that the prometheans made life hundreds of millions of years ago, that makes them a positively ancient species, and it suggests that the modern militant prometheans who have weaponized life are a new phenomenon...or maybe not....the significance of the opening scene, with a pure, unaltered promethean giving himself over to the elixir of creation to seed Earth with his sacrifice is fairly significant, and implies a very ancient, godlike civilization with some rather unique rituals and processes. Plus, the ship in that opening scene was decidedly not like the later u-shaped warships found on LV223 (and later on LV426 in Alien).

3. If the human DNA is identical to jockey/promethean DNA, or close enough to call it a day, then that implies that the ultimate goal of the seeding of Earth was to end up with humans. This suggests that DNA is more programmable and far-reaching over time, I imagine. Which means, probably, that all the junk DNA in our strands could also include "alien directional programming" placed there by the prometheans/engineers (the seed of life goo we see a lot of in this film). Either that, or there's something even weirder going on. Maybe the substance of life mimics/extracts a path for life from its host, thus the reason the engineers sacrificed someone, to "seed" the path?

3. Is LV426 in the same system as LV223? Are they both moons of the ringed world? It is not at all clear that there's any relation to the two other than similar cataloging convention, best as I can tell. LV426 could be in an entirely different solar system. I'll be catching this movie again, see if I can spot any evidence that it implies this is the same plantary system for both moons. Come to think of it, I don't recall it ever being established that LV 426 was described as a moon in the past. Time to rewatch the series.

4. The "thing" at the end (okay, the alien-like fellow, if you're reading this without having seen the film, shame on you). Not quite an alien as we know it, but awfully similar. Implying, I guess, that the "substance of life" (the weaponized bioweapons the prometheans were stockpiling) creates all sorts of weird stuff, but when it works with prometheans as a host it comes out sorta Giger-like alien looking? The mural in the "tomb" as the one scientist describes it has an alienesque image....which leads one to wonder, had the prometheans realized that all life they have seeded eventually becomes like them and creates new life, which in turn leads to this one final, destructive form? Am I reading too much into it? Is this why the promethean doesn't like the android? Is the substance of life, the weaponized biostuff somehow programmed to create the ultimate destructive lifeform, and it sort of gavitates toward the alien-physiology? Is it that all these lifeforms we see are related to an alien ecology that the prometheans have extracted the weaponized biostuff from? Too many damned questions!

5. I appreciated that the android was unabashedly amoral and determined with no effort to cover it up. We all knew he would be, and it was nice that the film didn't beat around the bush about it.

6. Why did the head explode and what was up with that anyway?

7. What did the android hope to accomplish by contaminating David's drink? Was he hoping the doctor would have sex with Shaw, and that that led to the impregnating alien? What made him think that would even work? Was he able to analyze the bioweapon stuff and see it for what it was? Did he think it would lead to the birth of a promethean, or was he just screwing with them? Why was he so nonplussed about her efforts to remove it? Why wasn't anyone all that concerned during that entire sequence? Was it really simply that the people of Weyland were that reverential to their geriatric boss? Why was Wyland played by a younger man in an old man's mask? Why not just get a old man to play the role? Why the hell would a high-tech auto surgical machine that was inside the special self-contained compartment of the Charlize Theron's hidey hole not be programmed for surgical procedures on women?

8. Obviously many more films can be made now about revisiting LV223, unless there's some suggestion that Weyland hid his actions and destination from everyoneback on Earth....but that still leaves the fact that the two archeologists uncovered and published (did they? I would postulate they did) data on the astronomical observations of countless unrelated cultures over a wide period of time.

9. Is Blade Runner part of this universe? I would suggest that there is absolutely nothing at this point that excludes Blade Runner from the Prometheus/Alien universe, and that it kinds fits well, barring that 2013 date everything takes place in.

10. So I wonder what did actually kill the prometheans in the base? The bodies suggest a lot of crazy stuff going on, experiments out of control, all that. Did the head explode because it was contaminated with the biomatter, or the bioweapon was mutating it, but not in the self-sacrificing way we saw at the opening scene? No one dies of a chest-bursting event until the very end, barring the fact that Shaw sort of had an event, but it was a more transormational stage. The proto-alien that pops out of the promethean could bust through the promethean's transhuman exoskeleton, pretty tough cookie.

11. Hmmm, I just realized that if the prometheans are visiting Earth over many thousands of years, and they are telling primitive humans about the star cluster in question that is where LV223 is, then they were technically laying a trap for humanity. That, or they thought originally that they were offering them a positional location, for when humanity advanced to the stars, to come meet them. But how does that jive with the Captain's very astute observation that LV223 felt like a munitions stockpile for biowarfare weapons, and the subsequent revelation that it was clearly designed to dispatch ships to inhabited worlds to seed them with the bioweapon? Does this mean its something of a trick? Are the prometheans really creating worlds to destroy, or destroying and remaking their creations if they are dissatisfied with the results? Are they in a period of cultural decline, or have they had a social revolution where the old creator culture was wiped out and the militants remain, snuffing out the countless seeded worlds as they find them? Does this explain why by the time of Alien the idea of inhabited worlds that don't need terraforming is a rare proposition? Too. Damned. Many. Questions!!!!

12. One gripe; wish we'd seen a bit more at the end of Shaw and the Head figuring out how to pilot the ship before taking off, just for fun.

Okay, I'm exhausted from asking questions that this movie offers no answers for. I do like that it was willing to lay out so many conundrums and leave no resolution to them, though.* That was definitely in keeping with the spirit of the original Alien. Those who have dismissed this film for its inability to tie everything up in a neat bow are rather missing the point of this kind of movie. A tight film gives you closure. An expansive film leaves the door wife open. Prometheus kicks the door down and burns it.



*Except for the dumb questions, like why the android spiked David's drink, or the deluxe surgical machine wasn't programmed to operate on women. WTF.

Prometheus, plus a John Carter Rant: maybe they should have called it "A Princess of Mars?" Or spent less money?

First, the good: Prometheus. Looks clearly like it will be set in the same universe as Alien (nothing we didn't already suspect from leaks) but even more so than might have been otherwise expected. It kind of has some Mass Effect style influences as well, I noticed. I am really eager to see this.

Now for the rant!

Well it looks like John Carter flopped, and having seen and really liked that movie I am disappointed, as it means that the likelihood of more films like this are dramatically reduced. Same thing of course for last year's Conan the Barbarian, which while admittedly a problematic film in some regards was hardly so bad (in my obviously eccentric and non-mainstream opinion) as to warrant all the knocks it took. Oh well....so much for the revival of the classic pulps in modern film.

As a guy who spent most of his childhood in the late seventies and early to mid eighties, it cracks me up to see these two films get negative reviews or even to do so poorly. I remember when films that look 1/100th as good as these, with a fraction of the acting talent or story would somehow rocket to success. I mean, Beast Master, fer cryin' out loud! (I liked Beast Master, for the record). Galaxy of Terror. Seriously.

I guess what a lot of 70's and 80's films had going for them was actual dearth of cash and FX, though. When you're making the FX with rubber and animal guts and glue, and your story is going to be primarily carried by the weight of the actors then....who am I kidding??? John Carter had better storytelling than 80% of the drek I was forced to watch in the 80's. Oh well.

Maybe it's the actors. The two guys they got for John Carter and Conan both have a certain look that might not be all its cracked up to be anymore. Maybe they should have been clean-cut space marine/football jock looking dudes. They could have pulled that off with John Carter, I bet (not so much with Conan, which suffered primarily for comparisons to the original Arnold film). And maybe they should have done these movies on half the budget, or maybe focused more on traditional special effects as much as possible, realizing that their real target were older audiences, and that apparently a lot of us are grumpy about CGI effects these days.

Eh, who knows. I'll admit, I'm still amazed Disney spent as much as it did on John Carter, an untested property that had minimal recognition outside of a core slice of SF fandom and which was then not even properly titled in a recognizable way to many people.

But hey, Prometheus is up next! I saw the trailer. If that movie doesn't do well I'll just have to conclude that movie going audiences are a bunch of rubes who don't spend cash on anything that isn't made by Michael Bay or doesn't involve street racing or dirty dancing.