I feel a bit dumb for not writing in for this podcast, since I had just a few weeks ago re-watched Alien (I had no idea it was going to win the fund drive, honest!) and wrote it up on this very website!
Thank you! I came here to make the same comment if no one else had. I can’t wait to hear Kelly’s impersonation of his mom telling us about the movie in a future opsis.
Aliens versus Fassbender(s), I would like to play that.
Holy crap, I just realized, Disney owns Alien now don’t they? Man I hope xenomorphs turn up at a theme park.
This makes me very happy as a movie idea.
-xtien
“I think it’s safe to assume it isn’t a zombie.”
Me, too, but it has to have Marvel superheroes.
-Tom
Don’t forget Jedi!
Fuck Star Wars.
-Tom
Yeah, I’d probably pay to see that too!
What happens when the Hulk punches an alien? What does the acid do to him? I HAVE TO KNOW!
Also, can we have Wolverine in this too?
-xtien
OK, so! Finally set aside a little time to listen to the podcast (I know, right?) and now I got something to say. I mean, I could talk all day about Alien, and the other movies, in fact I could probably string all my posts in so many other threads around here and make a totally tedious treatise on the movie. So, I’ll try to be brief(ish).
I totally don’t remember how or when I first say Alien. I know it was part of my general consciousness in that time, but I would have been too young to even attempt to try to talk my mom to take me to see it - though that did work with Aliens a few years later! I remember that a friend of mine up the street had an Alien toy, like a foot tall, fully articulated model of the xenomorph. I thought that was so cool but totally gave me the creeps. Also, I had seen the chestburster scene with Kane on TV before I saw the full movie - must have been some kind of compilation show I saw, with horrific moments from several movies? I forget the details. Anyway, I knew what the alien was and generally what happened in the movie and he was definitely my boogeyman way before I saw the full movie.
I was thinking about some of the plot holes in the movie you guys mention, specifically how the alien “knows” to go to the escape shuttle. Now, it’s been a little while since I watched the movie last, and I may be misremembering or even totally making this up, but I was thinking there were a lot of flashing lights there at the end after Ripley sets the self destruct, were those lights directing crew to the escape ship? Seems like that would be something that would be there, right? Like the lights leading to the exits on jet airplane. But I totally admit I may have inserted some headcanon there.
“How did the Alien get on the escape shuttle” is the kind of plot contrivance/coincidence I never give a fuck about. Maybe it just thought it looked like a cozy place for a nap.
If it ratchets up the tension/makes the protagonists’ lives more miserable, I’m perfectly willing to handwave it.
I love this comment. It reminds me of what my playwriting professor used to say in college, that writing a script (or anything dramatic really) was about sending your characters up into a tree and then throwing rocks at them.
He was probably quoting somebody else, but that really made an impression on me.
-xtien
“I can’t lie to you about your chances. But you do have my sympathy.”
That’s great for you, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a question worth asking. It does get to the core of “how intelligent exactly is the xenomorph” which is interesting to think about, in my opinion.
Badly paraphrasing Kumail Nanjiani: “I’m watching a movie and a guy spills coffee on himself - that’s me.” on a character empathy level, you don’t have to excuse bad luck.
I can understand the impulse, but it’s the kinda nerdy/lore stuff I’m less interested in. I care more about what the giant penis monster means rather than how it does what it does. Sure, preferrably there should be a perfectly consistent explanantion for everything, but it doesn’t mean I need to know it, and sometimes it’s way more effective to keep that stuff off screen and let your imagination fill in the gaps.
Again, that’s great for you. Not everyone shares that opinion.
Soren, I think you might be misreading Dive Cubed. The question about the Alien getting into the shuttle is open to interpretation that the alien is smart enough to have been listening to and understanding the crew’s discussions, and even being able to follow lighting signals in the ship. That’s not really nerdlore so much as a possible interpretation of the script, which leads to a different perspective on the story.
I’ve always thought of it as a predator working on instinct alone, and that the rape element – when you talk about what it means – was nothing personal. Just the inherent cruelty of nature. That’s what Ridley Scott seems to be getting at with the cat and alien just chilling looking at each other when Brett gets killed and when the cat carrier gets dropped at the end. (And also why Ridley Scott’s director’s cut is stupid for having the alien attack the cat carrier.) By my interpretation, the convenient alien placement and crew splitting up at the worst times and cat scares were just horror movie tropes, and eventually slasher movie tropes.
But Dive Cubed has me wondering if you could watch Alien with an interpretation that the alien understands what the crew of the Nostromo is doing and reacts to it? Is there other textual support for that idea?
-Tom
It would probably be a stretch to find textual support for my idea. It’s a little hard to put yourself back in that mindset - as you guys pointed out, nobody knew the life cycle of the alien, we kept getting freaked out at every step in its development. But just like Ridley Scott didn’t lay any clues along the way to indicate the xenomorph might be able to mimic Ripley’s voice at the end of the movie, I can’t really think of too many instances that would support it being much more than a primate. There’s that bit in Alien Resurrection where two aliens decide to murder one of their own in order to use its acidic blood to escape their cage. But that’s three movies, and several writers and directors, later. Like I said, I just think it’s fun to think about.
“How can they cut the power, man? They’re animals.”
Hmm, maybe they did cut the power…
-Tom
Surprised no one mentioned that in Aliens, we clearly see the Sulaco take off, and yet the gi-normous Queen somehow scuttles aboard and finds somewhere to nestle unnoticed till it spears Bishop.
I honestly just see this as another consistent superpower of the Alien’s: one sneaks aboard a supposedly inviolate vessel in every single movie of the tetralogy. Without the ship’s onboard computer alerting anyone (complicit?).
It’s a feature, not a glitch. Something more for Ashe to admire about it.