PROMETHEUS

In Space, God Will Punch You

Aliens is one of those movies that people talk about, alongside The Godfather Part II, The Empire Strikes Back and The Dark Knight, as a rare example of a sequel that surpasses the original film.  Well if the Alien franchise got so lucky the first time, it made up for that with everything since.  Alien 3 was famously over-budget and underwhelming, Alien: Resurrection proves you shouldn't let French people or Winona Ryder anywhere near venerable horror-sci-fi franchises, and the less said about the Aliens VS Predator films the better.  The series already went off the deep end with clones and mash-ups, and although other series like Friday the 13th and Leprechaun have the option of sending the monster into space for later entries, they don't have that luxury here.  Going back in time is not usually the strongest move for a long dormant franchise so how about a prequel!  Even a shitty movie couldn't do much damage to the franchise at this point, and it's important to note that, because this is a shitty movie.

The pedigree on this film is solid.  Original director Ridley Scott returns.  All-star cast.  Lots of money spent well, on things like sets and props.  Effective marketing.  But it definitely feels like a different movie that became an Alien movie.  The plot concerns warmed over ancient astronaut theories that some executive noticed were getting big ratings on the History Channel.  The twist here is that our creator aliens (called Engineers) later decided to get rid of us, and cooked up some Xenomorphs to do the dirty work.  My guess is that in the original script, the method for eliminating Earthlings was something else entirely, but one studio note and quick re-write later, the MacGuffin became Xenomorphs, and an expensive R-rated philosophical sci-fi flick suddenly became marketable.  The recognizable, iconic, and pre-sold imagery of the Alien, with his double jaws and elongated eyeless head, are the bait here.  The trap is a shoddy film.

The story is predictable while simultaneously containing poorly defined and unpredictable characters.  Aliens creating life on earth is a great theory for pissing off both creationist and correct people but story-wise it lends itself to some odd situations.  For example, how about the lead doctor-man on this mission?  He is disappointed that he didn't get to speak to any of the Engineers.  Speak-speak, like with words.  He thought he was gonna talk to them.  Maybe he's not so crazy, because later on, somebody does talk to the Engineers.  This next problem I would call a spoiler but it's way way way way way way too stupid to be a spoiler.

Imagine meeting your creator and all he wants to do is punch you.  Well that's what happens here.  I'm reminded of something that Master Shake of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force once said (bad sign for this movie) that if he was ever resurrected from the dead, he would "run to the nearest living thing and kill it."  Well when our intrepid explorers wake up our God alien, he just yells and punches and chokes and slams around for a while.  Talk about underwhelming.  The fake god at the end of Star Trek V had more interesting shit going on.  These aliens mastered intergalactic travel and life-creation millions of years ago, but their fall back plan is punching?  What the fuck?  No plan B?  This movie has aspirations of 2001: A Space Odyssey style profoundness but when Dave Bowman saw the monolith floating around Jupiter it didn't start punching him.  Long story short: this movie is fucking stupid.

You've come a long way, baby.

~ Why are the first two films so great?  Because there is more to scare you than just goo, fangs and claws.  Science fiction had always suggested that extraterrestrial life of any kind might be unknowable.  These films suggest they might be terrifyingly unknowable.  They could know more understand us than we could understand them.  They were pitch black, the color of our nightmares, and they used us as disposable husks to breed more of themselves.  Do they have culture, art, science, technology, do they even have thought? Even the 2nd film, Aliens, weakened this slightly by revealing a queen alien, which established a hierarchical society, and also showing her following Ripley and attempting to exact revenge.  By the third movie, the alien was killing people without even cocooning them for future use from the facehuggers inside the eggs that a queen might lay; the alien was just a confused, vicious animal or a deranged psycho killer now.  By the fourth movie, who the fuck knows, but the aliens weren't terrifying, or unknowable, or even insectoid.  The AVP films treated them as mere action figures, and now they have become bait to sell ostensibly unrelated projects.

~ New themes introduced late in a series are problematic. For one thing, Ridley Scott already made a film about the uneasy relationship between creator and creation and it wasn't Alien (obviously).  It was Blade Runner.  So he combined two of his great movies into one bad one?  Please don't teach that trick to any other influential directors.  Why not try the opposite?  He could combine GI Jane and A Good Year into some sort of... I dunno...  He's the legend, he can figure it out.  Oo!  Legend!  How bout combining that with Body of Lies?

 ~ If the numbers hold true, James Cameron should revisits the Alien franchise in 2019.

~ Pointless mysteries with no answer? How could that be true about a film with a script from one of the creators of Lost?

~ At least they kept up on the robot naming pattern.  The first android was Ash, played by Ian Holm.  Then Bishop played by Lance Henriksen.  Then Call, played by Winona Ryder.  And finally David played by Michael Fassbender, who settles nicely into third place, well ahead of Ryder, but nowhere near Holm or Henriksen.  David is a strange robot though.  Who built a quippy androgynous fop robot that yearns to be Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia?  Was it me?  I do really love that movie.  Maybe it was me.  I do know that you should never put  footage from a better movie into your crappy movie.

~ Charlize Theron is overqualified for the Paul Reiser role but if you saw January Jones as the White Queen in X-Men: First Class (also with Fassbender) then you welcome any pretty blonde lady who can play a frosty bitch.

~ There is an important scene with a flamethrower scene that could have generated major tension and suspense, but it goes by way too fast, with the obligatory slow motion people screaming "No!" and lunging towards the victim.  They wasted a perfectly good standoff.  Also, I don't remember anybody talking about it later, so I guess it wasn't that big a deal that somebody got french fried.

~ Idris Elba did a great Baltimore accent on The Wire, but he must have grown overconfident, because he attempts one helluva Texan (I think) accent here.  His character is named Janek, so he must be one of those Black-Polacks they have down there.  He also says he owns one of Stephen Stills's original accordions.  Get this man a spinoff!

~ There is one bravura sequence that I think works very well, on its own and in spite of itself, where Noomi Rapace races against time to make an automatic surgery pod extract an awful alien abomination from her pulsating stomach.  Bloody, suspenseful, and just a little over-the-top so you can laugh a bit to let off steam; this should have and could have been stretched out at the expense of pretty much anything else.

~ Alien: Resurrection disappointed me on a emotional level, this disappointed me on an intellectual level.

~ This film contains hundreds if not thousands of minor inconsistencies with the Alien universe.  Some of it is the same stuff that hurts most prequels, like superior technology in the past, or revealing that random events from the first movies were anything but random.

~ This is one of those movies where people are constantly asking each other for confirmation/explanation of things:  "So that monster eating me...  its bad?  And God made it... or... what...  to eat us?"

~ Guy Pearce is in this.  I first saw Guy Pearce in LA Confidential in 1997.  That movie blew me away.  Thirteen year old could not understand why it lost so many awards to Titanic.  Current me doesn't understand that either!  The problem with that movie making me a fan of Guy Pearce is that I haven't seen him in anything even remotely as good since.   Actually you could say that about Kevin Spacey too.  That movie might be the peak for a buncha people.

~ SPOILER This film concludes with a bad CGI shot of a Xenomorph, an alien creature introduced in the 1979 film Alien, who proved so popular that he still turns up in movies over 30 years later.  Here's to 30 more years buddy.