Throne of Salt: September 2026

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

Alien Franchise Watch-Along: Covenant

Last (for the time being) in my series of not-technically-a-rewatch posts.

Alien: Covenant

(2017, dir. Ridley Scott)

Fake-out credits opening, solid black before shifting to David’s eye.

Weyland believing in God solely because he can’t comprehend not being a Super Special Boy is the best piece of character building in both these movies, but Scott doesn’t seem to be aware of how deeply pathetic it is in either. The horror is that this idiot shithead is destroying countless human lives according to his deeply stupid whims, and that horror is undermined if everyone else is also outrageously stupid and destroying themselves.

Title card: Again we have no nebula, just a black field with a little blip of light moving across the screen. I like that.

Origae is not a real-world star so no fun space maps. I looked up some screenshots of the later planning session and there weren’t any interesting bits in there. Also weird that it's almost Auriga, which is both the ship from Resurrection and an actual constellation (probably at least subconsciously intended), and almost Origa (whose presence on the soundtrack would kick this movie up three letter grades)

Yay, solar sails. I’ll take what I can get.

Walter looks like such a dork with his hoodie, it’s kind of charming.

Ah, yes, the flamethrower cryopod, the cryopod with a flamethrower. If you’re not drowning in it, you’re cooked.

Katherine Waterson does a good job as Danny, I feel bad that she got stuck in this movie.

Oh hey, actual science: things traveling at lightspeed don’t let you know they’re coming until they hit you.

“Until our next jump” - looks like they’re using skipping-stone style FTL for this one, rather than the apparent continuous-transit of the Nostromo. This won’t ever be relevant, but it is a nice detail.

Wood? Wood?! What kind of fuck-you money does Danny have to import a cabin’s worth of wood over interstellar distances? You are in space! Building your house out of diamond-encrusted lithium would be cheaper than wood! And you're going to a planet with a terraforming zone that will need to have trees growing in it anyway!

The follow-up to the captain’s death - Danny in her cabin, the whiskey in styrofoam cups at the funeral - this is good. It’s about the only actual human emotion anyone is allowed to express in this movie.

Oram, it’s not the religion that makes people not like you (since at no point is it ever brought up what the fuck you even believe); they don’t like you because you’re a cunt who can’t read the room.

I don’t understand why Ridley keeps trying to bring up religion when he is apparently utterly disinterested in ever exploring it, or even being specific about it. It's always just "religion" *hand wave*.

Tennessee goes out on a space walk without a tether and casually obliterates all tension in this movie by hard confirming “oh these people are stupid stupid”.

This movie takes place in 2104; "Country Road" released in 1971, 133 years prior, making it the equivalent of characters in 2017 (the year of this movie’s release) singing something from 1884. Which isn’t unreasonable in and of itself ("In the Pines" is from the 1870s) but why on Earth did it have to be "Country Road"? Like I can see it becoming more or less a folk song, but even with that in-universe justification it’s jarring by virtue of being an overplayed advertisement song in the time the film was made.

Danny, in repetition of Ripley, is the one sane woman, lone voice of reason, and objectively correct; the planet is an obvious trap. If there was a significant human presence there, the Covenant would be picking up other radio signals; if it was a distress beacon, it’d be something clearer than a couple garbled seconds of a 133-year old song that no one on the crew is going to know outside of weirdo cowboy-religion guys like Tennessee (I presume his getup and stereotypical accent is costly signalling for religious reasons).

If the storm is a “motherfucker to fly through” then STAY IN ORBIT. No one in this entire series, except Ripley, seems to understand the idea of orbital superiority.

Unrelated, their flight helmets give me Imperial Guard vibes. I wish this was a 40k movie, it’d be better and make more sense if it was. By this point in the series I've developed a new appreciation for Tyranids, because they at least come in more than one color.

Aaaaaaaand we’re waltzing out into an entirely unknown biosphere with no protective gear: either it’s going to kill you or you’re going to kill it. Way to go, assholes.

“Believe me, I know wheat” - one of the lines of all time.

Ledward? Ledward?!

The total lack of animal life should have people freaking the fuck out, because you don’t get biospheres of this complexity without animals of some description.

The scientists taking samples is a nice change from Prometheus, but is immediately undermined by yet another form of the oobleck. You know what would solve your oobleck problem? A fucking helmet. The other guy who gets oozed is even worse because he was sticking his face in the clearly-marked spore pod instead of haphazardly stepping on it.

The whole sequence to follow feels like a Mothership panic spiral done wrong. Like all the pieces are in place but we only got here because people were damn fools and fucked up multiple steps that they had no reason to fuck up long before the panic spiral started.

This is definitely the goriest of the Alien movies, which feels aligned with the “jangling the keys in front of an infant” that most of the lore-plot developments have going on.

I am so desperate for a movie where the xenos do literally anything but mindlessly attack the nearest human. This entire series has been waffling back and forth on how smart the fuckers are, how much of an animal they are vs a weapon, blah blah blah. Either come up with something interesting or come up with something new, and there hasn’t been anything interesting that hasn't been immediately abandoned since Aliens.

The scene with the lil’ xenos in the tall grass would have been sick in a better movie with actual tension.

David shows up in Jedi cosplay (lame) and takes everyone to a hell of a set piece (the necropolis), so I guess it evens out.

Engineers love giant stone heads and hate interior lighting.

The weirdly intimate flute lesson feels like a symbol designed by someone who doesn’t understand symbolism and it is the scariest, tensest scene in this movie. What the hell am I watching.

More Pinocchio bullshit. Fuck Pinocchio stories, all my homies hate Pinocchio stories.

The oobleck only affects animals, which means the entire planet has a xenomorph-based biosphere with thousands of variants that we never get to see.

Fuck you too, man.

“We need your faith” oh fuck off. The movie hasn’t even specified what his faith is! It's just Presumed Generic Christianity!

David genocides the Engineer colony, because heaven forbid anything that gets introduced not get abandoned in this series. I don’t even like the Engineers, but you can still squeeze something interesting out of them if they're permitted to exist for more than 20 seconds. Like just in this flashback we can surmise:

Engineer colonies were either low-population & low-infrastructure to begin with, or could transition into that lifestyle fairly easily.
The inhabitants of this particular planet have maintained their spaceport infrastructure, but it’s likely used pretty infrequently considering how the arrival of a ship is reason for everyone to come out and watch the landing.

These aren’t groundbreaking theories but they’re more than the movie is interested in giving us.

Tennessee endangers over a thousand people, billions of dollars, an entire colony ship (and by extension, the colony itself) and his flunkies roll over and go along with it. The most charitable read of this scene is that he’s an unprepared idiot serving as acting captain on a ship that’s already lost the actual captain and acting captain in less than 48 hours, but even then he should have some sort of understanding of the basic requirements and risks of the job.

The neomorph standing fully upright is effectively creepy, because it's a deviation from expectations. But I ultimately feel bad for the thing, it’s either going to get shot at by the Covenant crew or is stuck listening to David yammer on.

SHOOT HIM SHOOT HIM SHOOT HIM SHOOT HIM GOD FUCKING DAMN IT ORAM SHOOT HIM HE TOLD YOU WHAT THESE THINGS DO at least Kane didn’t know what he was getting into!

David is fucking unbearable: Like Weyland, he’s an imbecile who thinks he’s this brilliant and profound thinker, which is a great antagonist archetype because people like that are deeply pathetic egomaniacs who weave their own undoing… but the movie also thinks he’s this brilliant and profound thinker and keeps wasting time on his pontificating and trying to hype him up.

Fuck, if you want to write a movie about religion so badly have Danny confront David on ethics. Or point out the hypocrisy of his obsession with creation while ignoring that hybridizing xenos and drawing technical diagrams is art. Or just have someone shoot him while he’s monologuing.

And there we go, the least-surprising reveal possible for Shaw from the last film. The series keeps killing off protagonists between movies, no wonder it’s gotten this bad.

Oh. Huh. The weirdly intimate flute lesson was not a one-off, then.

Ridley, if you want Michael Fassbender selfcest I’m certain there are many people out there who would both be happy to help and do a better job.

David breeding new strains of xenomorph could have been the sickest shit imaginable and a way to introduce dozens of new gribbly monsters into the setting, and yet with the bar on the ground they just use the old xenomorph.

The Walter vs David fight is tone-obliterating clown shoes and it looks bad. It’s painfully, embarrassingly post-Marvel. Heaven forbid there be any impact or weight behind violence.

The extraction from the necropolis could have been tense, if we’d spent any time with Danny and if I even knew who the fuck the other guy was and we had actually escalated things properly and…

Xenomorphs repeatedly using their heads as battering rams is an interesting consistent detail, but did David design them to do that? Do they butt heads in the wild for territorial fights? That’d be sick, why don’t we get to see that?

Long fucking denouement in this one.

Fuckin’ dippy bird. DO YOU SEE IT? DO YOU RECOGNIZE THE THING? CLAP! CLAP BECAUSE YOU SAW THE THING!

Jesus how fucking long is this movie.

Perfunctory shower sex with tonally jarring diegetic music. Who the fuck even are these characters?

Why won’t this movie end.

The xenomorph having regular-ass human color vision with a lot of floaters is such a boring choice. And of course it doesn’t look good.

“Mr. President, a fifth act has entered the movie.”

THIS IS NOT A TWIST. THE SIGN POSTING COULD BE SEEN FROM ORBIT. THIS IS WHAT YOU GET FOR NOT CHECKING SERIAL NUMBERS.

This movie has so many climaxes it could qualify as pornography, and yet no one is satisfied.

You pompous oaf of course you’d be playing Wagner you absolute clown- wait what the fuck is this scene. Ridley, if you want a scene of Michael Fassbender laying eggs I am certain there are plenty of talented people out there who would both be happy to help and do a better job.

I learned, while writing this review, that the conceit of the Covenant mission is that all the colonists are couples. Because ~~Peter Weyland demands compulsive space heterosexuality to fulfill his breeding fetish~~ symbolism, I guess.

What the fuck is this movie. You almost had something to say.

The only redeeming feature of this movie is the visual design. All of that is solid. Props and VFX departments showed up and did their damnedest.

Like the android it obsesses over, Covenant is locked in a hell of its own making, incestuously and mindlessly repeating the past in desperate attempt to make Real Art and totally unaware that this is what has damned it. It's like poetry, it fucking rhymes. I'd give Ridley Scott credit for this as-above-so-below meta brilliance, but it's the kind of meta brilliance that can only occur if the artist is entirely unaware that they are performing it.

Final Rankings

Alien
Halo: Combat Evolved
Aliens
Metroid
Browsing Tyranid articles on Lexicanicum
An actual root canal
Alien 3
Alien: Resurrection
Prometheus
Alien: Covenant

It’s wild to me that this enormous franchise is based on 2 good films. 1.5 if I'm not feeling charitable. There is so damn much of it and like the flagship monster it replicates and consumes and never grows or changes or adapts in any meaningful way

Looking back from the effective end of the run (I'll probably watch Romulus eventually, but neither of us are going out of our way for it at the moment), I keep wanting to compare it to the Legend of Zelda, of all things: No meaningful continuity between most of its entries, a stable of tropes and visuals that it shuffles around for each new release, a laundry list of interesting bits that show up for one game and then never return. Zelda's just way more consistent in quality (and higher quality at that).

An anticlimactic end to this series was somewhat inevitable, though I'm glad I did it. Maybe we'll do Predator next.

Monday, September 21, 2026

Alien Franchise Watch-Along: Prometheus

He's just groggy and hasn't had his space coffee yet

Alien

Aliens

Alien 3

Alien: Resurrection

Prometheus

Covenant

Prometheus

(2012, dir. Ridley Scott)

Nitpicking has effectively obliterated online critique, but Prometheus earns an exception.

Engineers somehow have less drip than Jedi, who are already notoriously drip-less. Interstellar civilization and the best you can come up with is shapeless, colorless cotton robes.
If the Engineer in the cryptic opening is trying to seed Earth with life, there have got to be more efficient ways than this. I know it's hamfisted religious symbolism but that's no excuse for being inefficient. Planets are big! Ecosystems are complex!
Stars are constantly moving, so the map would not be identical between 33,000 BC and 3,000 BC.
The planet they eventually go to is a moon of the same gas giant the Nostromo visits in Alien, which puts them in Zeta Reticuli again, which is visible to the human eye; those “primitive” peoples could see it just fine.
But only in the southern hemisphere, folks in Scotland are shit out of luck.
If there were any people in Scotland at the time, which there weren’t; that cave art can’t be 35,000 years old, because 35,000 years ago the Isle of Skye was buried under a continent-spanning glacier. The oldest human remains on Skye are ballpark 12,500 years ago and limited to tools.
Speaking of, thanks for casually destroying those cave paintings by letting all that moisture in.
Shaw’s father is a remarkably shitty missionary even by the standards of shitty missionaries, his reasoning isn’t even rooted in his own faith tradition. Don’t be such a coward, Ridley, have him cite the Bible.
Apparently that dream sequence takes place in South Africa rather than India like I thought, so instead of ignoring reincarnation he decided to be a missionary in a country that, as of writing (and thus, only shortly before that scene would be set), is 85% Christian.
David I get that you’re bored but Proto-Indo-European won’t help you! If the Engineers visited during the time period it was relevant they wouldn’t be speaking it, because it’d be the language of the horse-barbarians! Egyptian or Sumerian would have much better (but extremely narrow) odds of success.
Reconstructed proto-languages are worthless anyway if you’re hinging on contact made 35,000 years ago! Nothing goes back that far!
Why would you pick a reconstruction that keeps the laryngeals but merges them all into /h/? That’s extremely late PIE, well after the Anatolian split. His pronunciation passed the smell test, though.
Crew wasn’t briefed at any point before the mission.
Weyland spends half his briefing time dunking on his robot son instead of briefing the crew, which I must admit is in character for English Musk Ox.
“What I choose to believe” is a terrifying thing to hear from a scientist, perhaps even worse than “whoops”.
Even ignoring every other issue, those maps would only be evidence that some kind of contact happened, not what kind of contact. This entire movie is fueled by assumptions backed by circumstantial evidence, if any.
And why would they leave multiple maps pointing at an isolated factory and weapons depot?
It’s not a sin for an expedition led by a cultist trillionaire to be full of people who have drunk the Kool-Aid, I’ll even believe that Weyland was able to browbeat the shareholders into submission to okay the flight. But bad things happening to stupid people who bring it all on themselves is a comedy and this movie doesn’t realize that it’s a comedy.
No orbital observation period and no landing craft.
How the hell did they find the site without spending months to years surveying the planet?
I feel like 3% CO2 would be a lot more conducive to plant life. Checking the wiki it says the atmosphere is still mostly a nitrogen - oxygen mix. If you have that much free oxygen in the atmosphere you need something to break it out of the CO2.
Did no one notice the giant skull carved on top of the site?
YOU ARE A SCIENTIST. IT IS YOUR JOB TO BE SKEPTICAL
Just because the air’s breathable in the building doesn’t mean it’s free of airborne contaminants, jackass, put your fucking helmet back on.
David what the fuck DO NOT TOUCH THE GOO.
David how the fuck do you know how to operate these control panels. How the fuck are they even still working, we know this place is subject to wind water AND severe temperature variation.
The Engineer security footage plays in a format that makes it impossible to view in any way that would be useful: you've have to run down the hall alongside the hologram to watch it.
How the shit do they know the body has been there for 2000 years?
How has the body not decayed after spending 2000 years in this extremely humid life-bearing environment?
DAVID FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP TOUCHING THE FUCKING OOZE.
Fifield the geolocation specialist gets lost despite special mapping drones, then provides coordinates anyway.
Crew decides to rush a return to the Prometheus instead of sheltering in place for a couple of hours.
Crew doesn’t secure cargo before leaving on the buggy.
Crew aren’t quarantined on their return to the ship.
Milburn and Fifield waste air supply moving around and bickering with each other.
Milburn and Fifield decide to sleep in the ooze room, the room with the ooze.
Millburn, despite supposedly being a biologist, attempts to touch an entirely unknown alien organism that is clearly showing a threat display. Motherfucker you are not Steve Irwin.
Vickers is giving off some real SS officer energy, that’s the only way I can explain it. The vibes are rancid.
This movie feels like it was written by someone who has a virulent hatred of both science and scientists.
Congratulations, you detonated your primary biological sample because you wanted to play Frankenstein. Why were you running current through it in the first place?
No, the Engineers are not “you”; even if the Engineers and humanity are actually related, it’s clear that both lineages have speciated heavily.
And then even if there is a link, if we take the opening as seeding Earth with life to begin with that would mean that Engineer DNA remained dormant for a billion years before being expressed in primates and that's too nonsense to be intentional and too far-fetched to even be an accident.
David goes full malicious idiot by experimenting with the ooze outside of a controlled environment, which is only going to contaminate his results. If you're going to throw peoples' lives away in the name of science, at least do it in laboratory conditions.
Holloway, my dude, the Engineers were/are an INTERSTELLAR CIVILIZATION, maybe don’t use one abandoned weapons depot as a useful summary of the entire kit and kaboodle, eh?
OH JESUS CHRIST ARE YOU SERIOUSLY GOING TO INTRODUCE “OH WOE IS ME I CAN’T GET PREGNANT” FUCK SHIT FUCK THIS MOVIE
Vickers you are on an interstellar mission: did you honestly think this would be a quick jaunt down to the pub? You’ve been there for like three days max at this point.
Ah, the Star Forge map room, the room that contains the map to the Star Forge.
Why is there a stasis pod in the map room? Do they need a technician on hand that much?
There have got to be better ways to shoot movies when characters are wearing helmets. Make the suits visually distinct (patches, colors, heraldry, helmet design) and you’re fine. People love characters who wear masks, we don’t really need to see everyone’s faces.
I cannot emphasize enough how this movie is refined, uncut reactionary boomer horseshit.
Oh eat shit with this foot washing scene, fuck this movie.
The effects of the ooze are entirely random, which I think negates away any real fear or suspense. It’s not real, it’s just magic oobleck. It can just do whatever.
No one here seems to realize that they can cut their losses and return with a better-equipped expedition despite still possessing a FASTER THAN LIGHT CAPABLE SPACECRAFT.
Imagine having Charlize Theron AND Idris Elba and doing NOTHING with them.
Aaaaaaand of course Vickers is Weyland’s daughter, because heaven forbid a movie not do this fucking trope. Always, always have to have a prominent female character be related to the more prominent male character and have issues about it.
The Engineers want to kill humanity (a claim based on 0 evidence), so in their infinite wisdom (citation needed) they engineer an uncontrollable ecophage (???) instead of any of the countless ways you can easily depopulate a planet. Just use a big rock! Big rock extremely effective! or a plague! Or hell, just wait and let us do the job for you!
The miracle med bed (the bed that heals) inexplicably needs women's health support patched in.
The miracle med bed (the bed that heals) has only a dozen units in existence despite being super profitable and easily sold.
I sure hope this monster pregnancy wasn't intentionally supposed to be dramatic irony.
The reproductive cycle of the oobleck monsters, like the infection itself, is entirely arbitrary - like does it just cycle through potential forms at random every time it gets a new host / ages for long enough?
David is not, as far as I know, speaking PIE to the Engineer. Honestly, I’m going to imagine that it’s straight-up gibberish and the Engineer doesn’t have a fucking clue what he’s saying.
[Positive Note] - The Engineer ignoring the humans and specifically targeting David would make sense, since as an AI David is the most dangerous entity in the room. How the Engineer knows that…eh, probably some implant or function of their suit.
God I hate the Engineers’ design. It's so bland! I'd be hard-pressed to find a worse-looking alien outside of like, actual ufology. They're going for Gray but without the charm.
There’s no actual evidence that the Engineer is hostile to humans or heading to Earth! He could just as easily be going “oh shit oh shit oh shit it’s been how fucking long I need to get back to home base holy shit”
The slow-motion crash makes for a limp-ass climax because, as in the previous point, we have 0 evidence that the Engineer is meaningfully hostile to Earth.
We can't trust David's testimony on the matter, because David's a malicious idiot.
The Prometheus School of Running is an all-timer, of course, but the real peak comedy is the fact that David's head is apparently stuck to the floor by artificial gravity and so is spinning round and round inside the donut.
Oh joy, we end with a xenomorph in the stinger. I feel bad for it, it's just a lil' guy who's got no food.

I don't understand. How does a movie fuck up this much? How does this get made? People had to sign off on this! Why didn't they stick with the earlier, better draft of the script? Even at a quick glance at that earlier draft is smart enough to put the map on a giant alien obelisk at the bottom of the ocean (as one does) and the mission to the facility is trying to recover and reverse-engineer terraforming tech. Both of those are great! Love an obelisk, love an actually useful McGuffin that unobtrusively ties in to older movies. Why did they bring Lindelof on board? Lost only ended two years before this, so maybe they didn't know that his scripts struggle with maintaining internal logic when they brought him on. Or maybe they're industry people insulated from the rest of the world. Whomst can say.

There are themes introduced and never explored. There are new elements added to the setting, but never explored. Like the PIE bit: if you absolutely needed to have it be PIE instead of Egyptian and wanted it to pay off, you could have the Engineer respond with "Out of my way, horse-fucker" or something to that effect. Give them the M. Bison classic "but for me, it was Tuesday." Either that or ignore the language thing entirely because David has no idea what he's doing and there was never any chance of it working out. But we get neither, they just abandon it and have David try speaking the Engineer language despite it being even less believable than the Engineer speaking PIE.

There is a good movie in here somewhere and it just got massacred.

Saturday, September 19, 2026

Alien Franchise Watch-Along: Resurrection

Artistic depiction of the event by an eyewitness

Alien

Aliens

Alien 3

Alien: Resurrection

Prometheus

Covenant

Alien: Resurrection

(1997, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

Not unique to this movie, but it does always feel intrinsically wrong for the 20th Century Fox fanfare to not immediately transition into the Star Wars theme.

Still an orange opening, except it’s closeups of grotty/distorted organic material. No nebula when we get to space, just an ugly-ass ship. The overbearing theme music is here to stay, it seems.

Oh boy, written by Joss Whedon.

Things feel off from go: it looks like a low-mid Sci-Fi Channel movie outing and yep, we’re stuck leering at nude Ripley. It’s not like this series hasn’t ogled her before, but this feels worse. Probably because it immediately follows "Written by JOSS WHEDON".

Wait, why are they cloning Ripley if they want the Burster? Can’t they just clone it and implant it in livestock, since there's apparently enough of its DNA in Ripley's blood to clone a full copy? And wouldn’t the burster pop in the tank anyway because of how much faster it grows? Do they not know what cloning is? Does Joss Whedon not know what cloning is?

I can assure you, Joss, autism does not grant genetic memories. Shut the fuck up.

The vibes are somehow even more rancid when Ripley-8’s out of the tank, considering that she seems to have some kind of brain damage.

Ripley-8 was cloned from the blood samples taken by Clemens in Alien 3: a tortured way of dragging her back into the series, but I’d almost be willing to buy it if the movie hadn’t already burnt its good will by the time they explain it.

Weyland-Yutani is no longer in power by this point (2381); the Auriga is a United States military ship. They at least have a stated plan for what they’re going to do with the xenos (“urban pacification”), so that's something.

The space pirates feel like a first-draft run at Firefly, or at least an intrusion of more generic post-Aliens sci-fi back into the source series. I’m not entirely against that conceptually. Just not here. Or written by Whedon. “I am not the man with whom to fuck” is ridiculous but could be charming in other circumstances.

Still got smoking in space, still got a whole lot of Gender in this movie, just now with significantly more sexual harassment of anyone unfortunate enough to not be a man in a Joss Whedon script.

So we’re just ignoring that you could get a xenomorph from a dog in the last movie, eh? Gotta use human test subjects. Can’t use a sheep, or a cow, or a vat-grown slab of muscle tissue.

Ridley-8 and Ron Perlman flirting would be fun in a different movie. Sigourney Weaver making the basket on the first shot (after practicing it for two weeks) is a fun story.

Why are the xenos always so wet in this movie? Where does it come from? For what purpose? (I know it’s because Sex Reasons, but come on do better world building for your weird sex symbolism. You can't just have a guy make out with the containment cube, you gotta put the work in!)

The gun shopping channel has massive Cowboy Bebop vibes, though likely because they were drawing from the same late 90s TV shopping.

Dear Winona Rider: how do you drink coffee with boxing gloves on?

Glad to see that enormous purposeless rooms are still standard on interstellar spacecraft in this setting.

Every single time Ripley is on screen makes me desperately want to see anything else. It just feels bad. People who harp on Whedon’s quips are just ignoring his “a strong woman is an action figure you can sexually harass and through the power of the male gaze I WILL drag the audience into this” thing, and how he somehow managed to fool a large segment of the populace into believing that this shit was progressive.

Spare me this “ooooh I’m going to imply ladies kissing for the pleasure of the male viewer” bullshit. Leave it for the more ethical perverts, Joss.

So now the xenos are spontaneously acting sapient - they’re clearly coming up with a plan while communicating with each other in a back-and-forth, and one of them clearly has a fear of death!

Of course, if the Auriga’s science team used a highly basic solution instead of a freezing one (or just submerged the xeno containment unit in a tank of the stuff) they wouldn’t be having the escaped xenomorph problem, but no one ever remembers chemical bases.

Well, at least the Auriga’s crew is smart enough to immediately evac after a containment breach.

I can really see how this movie basically killed the series for 20 years. It would be basically impossible to take it seriously after this, your options would be camp comedy or farce.

“Who do I have to fuck to get off this boat?” how about you shut the fuck up, Joss.

3 hours to Earth? How fast is this ship? (I answer this later: it’s fucking fast.)

This movie came out a mere 4 months after End of Evangelion, so no giant tank of Ripley clones. In a better movie this would be a really powerful scene, but as usual we’re stuck with giving the one surviving clone a death wish instead of actually having to change anything.

Also: formaldehyde is flammable as fuck do not use the flammenwerfer in here you are on a spaceship!

Could you imagine a xenomorph whale? I can. Let me make an Alien movie, Disney, I’ll put a xenomorph whale in it. Hell I'll do a twofer and put a xenomorph whale on Pandora.

Dodging bullets on a ladder by swaying side to side, huh. This scene is both terrible from a baseline film perspective (people standing around doing nothing but watching events unfold) and an epilepsy warning. What does this series have against photosensitive viewers?

Call’s alive! Yay! And also an “auton”, according to Helpful/Taunting Exposition Pirate. An android built by other androids, which is an interesting idea that will never be mentioned again despite being directly related to the reproductive & gender obsession of these movies.

I think the chapel on the Auriga is legitimately the most interesting thing in the movie entirely by accident:

It’s basically a closet with a cross, a two-person bench, and an ethernet cable.
It’s specifically a cross and not a crucifix (Protestant), but Call crosses herself left > right on entering (Catholic)
There’s no other decoration at all, it’s all claustrophobia and hard edges.

How the hell did the setting get to this point?

Knock it off with that Pinocchio shit, Call. Fuck Pinocchio stories, all my homies hate Pinocchio stories. How did we get here from Ash idealizing the total loss of consciousness? Why are we wasting the "android built by other androids" premise on "oh but she wants to be human".

I miss Legion. Why don't more things rip off Legion? I know this movie can't but what about modern stuff? Everyone loves Legion.

Ah yes, the Pulsating Mass™, the new and improved form of the Quivering Mass™.

Glasses-guy’s zombie walk is too goofy to be scary but it is very memorable.

Shut the fuck up, Joss. Never use the word “womb” again.

What are we even fucking doing. This shit isn't even worth picking apart for analysis.

A crash landing? Where? Where would it possibly be besides the sun?

Wait you’re crashing it on Earth? On fucking Earth?

Motherfucker a Jovian slingshot orbit to Earth in FORTY FIVE MINUTES, (crunching the numbers on the back of a post-it and rounding up everything for convenience) would put the Auriga at ~92% lightspeed. At a conservative estimate of the ship mass as equivalent to two USS Gerald Fords stuck together (100,000,000 kilograms displacement each) that is not a crash landing, that’s “I want this planet to stop existing”. Normal kinetic energy calculations have broken down under relativistic effects.

Sir Isaac Newton is, and always will be, the deadliest son of a bitch in space.

The Newborn, like many elements of this movie, could have been interesting in a film that cared to explore its ideas and wasn't written by sex pest hack Joss Whedon. What happens when successive xeno generations hybridize with humans? How does that compared to androids building androids without human interference? What are the ramifications of sapient xenomorphs? Why does it immediately kill the queen? Is there any reason besides Joss that it’s immediately creepy towards Call? Why does it get such a grody death compared to the less-human, more-animal xenos? How the hell is the human reproductive system an improvement when it’s about as bad as you can get in a species without going extinct?

That’s awfully triumphant music you’re playing for obliterating half of Africa and spreading a burning radioactive dust cloud across the southern hemisphere, movie.

Alien 3 was bad in interesting ways: this one is bad in extremely boring, predictable ways. The shlock could have been fun if it didn't feel so gross and greasy at every single moment. A lot of good acting talent is wasted. There are glimmers of things that could have been cool. Aquatic xenos, auton society, the monsterfied Ripley clones, the Newborn. I'd go as far as to say it's a good pick to watch with friends for a beer & bad movie night, but if you're not throwing it on to laugh at its many failings it's not got much of a point at all.

I think that this is kind of the long-running horror franchise end-state: setting, plot, cohesion, none of that matters anymore. The tropes have solidified and you can just shuffle them around in new circumstances with no thought for how things connect or any of that. The xenomorph has achieved blorbofication.

Thursday, September 17, 2026

Alien Franchise Watch-Along: Alien 3

An accurate description of Alien 3

Blogger ate this post too, which makes me think that something in the formatting went fucked as I copied it in.

Alien 3

(1992, dir. David Fincher)

Worth noting that, in what was probably the wrong move yet again, I watched the theatrical version, rather than the Assembly Cut. Guess I just kinda default to "director's cut is just a longer version of the movie with weaker scenes left in".

Back to an orange nebula like in Alien, but with more distinct music this time.

Leaving a facehugger on board makes this a direct continuation of the original outbreak from Alien, which I’m conceptually okay with… if this was the last movie. There was an incident, it escalated, and now it’s going to finish. I like that continuity, even if it doesn’t deliver on it later down the road.

The facehugger bleeding itself to bore through the tube is way more intelligent than we’ve seen at any point thus far. They keep doing this, and it's slightly more annoying each time.

Justice for Newt. She’s unceremoniously and rather grotesquely killed off, and I think that’s an enormous waste of a character with loads of potential for stories later on down the line. And I know there's always complications wrt child actors, but the benefit of dealing with space travel is that you can fuck around with time. If you need Newt to be older so she can be played by a different actress, all you need is an excuse for Ripley to stay in hypersleep while Newt is woken up.

For the first time in this series, time has not been kind to these effects. The worse-looking shots in the last two films have acquired a goofy charm, but that charm isn’t as consistent here and it often just looks bad.

It’s young Charles Dance! He’s like old Charles Dance except young.

“It’s stencilled on the back of your shorts” is a good line, funny way of skipping introductions.

This movie gives me the feeling that human interstellar civilization is straight-up dying. Fury 161 isn’t a particularly welcoming planet, but it’s still habitable enough to walk around outside with a jacket and ski goggles on, and yet it’s only got a colony of a couple dozen people there manufacturing lead barrels. That’s an outrageous cost with minimal return on investment, and that says to me that the society that started it is economically fucked.

It’s weird to have this many people in an Alien movie, but not bad. I actually kind of like it. This is a good population density for it.

With the quality of life we’ve seen in this setting so far, I’m pressing X to doubt that cholera isn’t rampant in the slums of human space. Definitely no way it was eradicated in the 1970s, even in an alternate history.

Did we really need to carve up the corpse of an eight-year old? Like putting that on top of the drowning feels unusually cruel towards Newt, to the point of narrative spite. Not to mention that later in this movie we have a functioning ultrasound machine in the wreckage.

Though putting Newt in this particular environment is not something I think this movie could do well, so maybe she got lucky.

Multiple inmates have glasses, this feels like a Theme. It’s also a very British colony, which feels odd in a way I can’t quite parse.

There is some Gender to unpack here.

Ripley is the only woman in a prison facility inhabited only by men.
Many of those men are in the facility for violent crimes against women.
Many of those men are also in a misogynist cult.
There’s an attempted assault that’s fought off with jarringly-placed electric guitars on the soundtrack, presented primarily so Ripley beat the stuffing out of some guys.
Clemens asks her if she’s married at one point.
Ripley’s quick fuck with Clemens is the first time it’s been relevant for her, and the only display of consensual sex in the series so far.
Ripley has a xenomorph queen gestating inside her, making her the effective mother of her own antithesis. and putting another lever of separation between her and anyone else on Fury 161.

Is any of this effective? No, not really. The movie’s trying very hard (and failing, which is interesting) to make Ripley into this archetypal Mother figure, but it never lets her actually build any relationships that would be part of being one. Newt is killed off unceremoniously (and Ripley knew Newt for what, less than 48 hours?), it’s impossible to form a relationship with the xenomorph / queen, we don’t get any moments of Ripley talking to another character on the matter.

The Aliens special edition (which, in a serious flaw with my method here, I didn’t watch) mentions that Ripley’s daughter Amanda died three years before the Nostromo’s shuttle was recovered, which lends Ripley’s relationship with Newt a hefty amount of regret and a desire to “do it right this time”; that doesn’t do any good from a story perspective if Newt is immediately killed off. A time jump of 10 or 15 years after the Sulaco returns to the Core would allow us to see how their relationship has developed from Ripley raising Newt on her own as a woman out of time.

You know, actually letting the character be a mother instead of just a symbol for one.

I love how dismissive Clemens is of the cult as just one more copycat. They really do just tread the same water.

Ripley’s being extremely cagey about the xenomorph despite it being an existential threat to the colony; there’s a certain amount of “she’d be written off as crazy” in play here, but again the movie doesn’t establish how much anyone knows about alien life in this setting. There’s nothing beyond a xenomorph’s growth rate and ability to quickly fill an environment to capacity that’s really anomalous here. But, to the series' credit so far, the xeno has only appeared in situations where all hands are lost and all evidence is destroyed. Unless Weyland-Yutani blabs or someone else finds the Jockey's ship, the info isn't getting out there.

“It’s all right to say shit, it ain’t against God” - another one for the “lines that are way better than their movie would make you think” box.

The scene with Bishop’s head is really, legitimately good. My favorite in the movie. It’s how these sorts of things should be handled: yeah, it’s the character you recognize, but time has passed and they’ve changed and there’s no going back. Serialized stories rarely do this despite being a format that makes it fairly easy to do.

The Company already knows about the loss of Hadley’s Hope, thanks to “the network”, which I presume is a bunch of FTL communication relays

Clemens is delivering his tragic backstory while the other guy is right there behind the curtain, which is odd considering how he’s been keeping it so secretive.

His history is another mark towards “total social collapse only avoided through forward momentum” - dude was called back into work at the hospital when he was already sleep deprived and visibly intoxicated, and then used as ablative armor when the inevitable malpractice suit happened. Which says to me that there are simultaneously very few doctors and they’re not particularly valuable to the system.

He then gets immediately ganked by the xeno, which I assume means that xenomorphs can detect revelations of tragic backstory and intentionally use them as a time to strike.

I really like the Rumor Control meetings and how the warden always opens with “These are the facts”: it’s some personality for the community and the people in it, and that’s something that a lot of media just doesn’t include. What are the weird little things that this group of people do? What turns of phrase have caught on?

I like that Ripley’s trying to use the methods that worked in the previous movies, but those methods are undermined by the resource limitations, the scale of the facility, and the extra failure points inherent in having more people involved. It’s a good way to vary up the threat without inventing ridiculous new abilities for the xeno out of nowhere.

There are multiple introductions in this movie that feel very un-Alien: protracted death scenes, slow-motion shots, fades and wipes, a prominent soundtrack.

I don’t understand why they suddenly have access to the Sulaco’s ultrasound suite now - this was the wreckage they pulled Ripley from, they’ve had the chunk on-site from the beginning. Why not use it on Newt instead of cutting her open? Did I miss something, did they actually explain this somewhere?

Ripley says that the xeno’s “been in my life so long” and I think the script forgot that the events of Aliens happened just days ago for Ripley, and the events of Alien were on the scale of weeks to months. It's been in her life for less than a year.

Crud? Crud? Really? That’s almost as inappropriate as the swelling music with inspiring speech.

Hanzi on the walls. Well, probably technically kanji, given the setting. But they’re there. First time we’ve seen anything of the sort in the series.

It feels kinda appropriate for the final xeno to be a de-escalation - we went from one to the hive and queen and then back to one. The premise has been stretched out far enough, it has to retract.

Oh those 1992 CGI effects, they don’t look good. And they're re-used!

Oh come the fuck on it survived getting dumped in the vat? Lead melts at 621.5 degrees! If fire hurts it, this definitely would. The sprinkler trick is fun, though, even as a repeat.

Wild that Weyland-Yutani’s recovery team only has two dudes with SMGs for security despite knowing what these things do. And some questionable accents, though I suppose it was 1992 - no one in Hollywood had figured out that Japan was a real place back then.

“Think of what we can learn from it” is such a daft cliche. Come on, writer, you can think of at least one concrete application for whatever you’re writing about.

Ellen Ripley t-posing to her death while a gazillionaire does a dramatic “nooooooooo!” is the greatest death in cinema, I will not be taking questions at this time.

It's not a good movie, but it's a bad movie in interesting ways. It's trying to do something new with what Aliens left behind, and while that's a contrivance it is about as good as you can get without going well into the weeds. It is, at the very least, attempting to say something. That something is barely coherent and ineffective, but the bar is on the floor.

The production for Alien 3 was notoriously tortured (so, so many fuckin' scripts), the blame for which I'll drop on Fox for meddling and Cameron for not leaving anything to build with. If you combined all the abandoned ideas into a gestalt and let it simmer, maybe you would have a good movie out of it. That wooden planet is really just a dyson tree and what I would give to have one of those in a blockbuster. I know some people swear up and down by the Gibson script but I gotta tell ya I barely remember that Hicks exists half the time and I could not tell you a single thing about him.

Anyway, this is the last of the movies I will have meaningful positive things to say about.

Tuesday, September 15, 2026

Alien Franchise Watch-Along: Aliens

Eiko Yamamoto

Let's keep this ship sailing

Aliens

Aliens

(1986, dir. James Cameron)

Blue nebula opening this time, now with military drums.

So they have floating drone robots now? What an extremely useful thing that we’re never going to see again.

Ripley was sleeping for 57 years, which we’re told is long enough for her ship to pass through the core worlds and come out the other side. With the Nostromo destroyed shortly after leaving Zeta Reticuli and given the numbers crunched in the last movie (~40 light years to Earth), Ripley’s shuttle was definitiely FTL. No wonder no one was able to pick it up for decades. Was her distress signal off to save power?

In what I've realized was a bad move, I watched the theatrical cut instead of the extended one, and so lost the entire thing with Ripley outliving her daughter. Normally I'm in the "cut content is usually cut for a reason" but that is kind of an extremely important bit of thematic and character building.

The lady W-Y rep says that they’d never met aliens that sort of parasitism before, which does confirm that alien life is a known quantity; why it’s so hard to believe in xenos when parasitoid wasps exist on Earth, I have no idea. Must be the growth rate, that's really the only anomaly here.

It also apparently only costs 42 million dollars (adjusted for inflation) to buy a spaceship holy shit that's bargain basement.

This space station must smell like absolute dogshit with all the smoking, the costs of replacement air filters alone would be outrageous. A prime example of sci-fi missing some basic things thanks to the blindness of the era it was made in (which, if it isn't the kind of thing that makes one cringe away in revulsion, is usually where the flavor resides.)

Ripley is also able to afford an ungodly amount of space on a dockworker’s income. Insurance payout?

Burke’s coming in with the one-two punch of asshole chair-spin and answering a video call with no shirt on. Forty years and this Type of Guy hasn't changed, he's just gotten new hobbies.

I like the “shake-and-bake colony” terminology, it evokes the methods used to terraform without weighing things down in detail we don’t need. From what we see of Hadley's Hope later on, it's a really appropriate metaphor - it's fast, brute-force, and careless. They're not importing an ecosystem, they're literally just setting up factories to make the temperature and atmosphere human-appropriate and then just leaving them to run indefinitely, I guess. Actually terraforming a planet would take too long for the shareholders, after all.

How the colony lost contact, though, that’s a weird one. Do they have an ansible? Connection to a hyperspace comms relay? Mail ship? What’s the time scale and turnaround here? When did they lose contact? Is that another deleted scene I missed?

Hey there Sergeant Johnson, nice to see you! And Vasquez, everyone loves Vasquez.

The briefing with the marines is a place where I think Cameron lets his distaste for the military hamper his storytelling; even a group of the most orc-like meat-head grunts are going to have one or two dudes who will want to have a good idea of what they’re up against so they don’t die. But, then again, this is just Space Vietnam so "the imperial power is sending kids out to die for nothing and in their blindness from being the top dogs back home they can't conceive of anything else."

But that also begs the question as to what these guys have been doing all this time, since they seem to have no meaningful combat experience (Gorman’s only got one other combat drop) and yet they’ve been sent out on apparently multiple “bug hunts”. Considering the similarity to “snipe hunt” that makes me think that the Powers that Be have been chasing shadows where there are none wrt aliens, but it could also be that they’ve been sent out as effectively pest control against alien organisms that don’t pose any real threat. But then even if they're being sent out on bug hunts, why haven’t they done more drops? Is it just Gorman who has no experience?

The ambiguity regarding what people in this setting know about alien life strikes again.

Also noteworthy is that the colonial marines all have American flag patches. Weyland-Yutani might own half the known universe, but the nation states of earth still have a semblance of political continuity. And are still making racist jabs at Mexico, because of course they would. Honestly between that, the "I prefer artificial person", and hating on androgyne sex workers, this sequence really proves how fucking many people are just stuck in the 80s and their conceptualization of the world has not progressed past this movie.

Ripley demonstrates she knows how to use a loader in a moment of foreshadowing, which is a literary technique…

It’s so weird that the lock and load sequence is so heavily copied when it is basically screaming THIS IS SATIRE I AM MAKING FUN OF PEOPLE WHO THINK THIS IS COOL. Another tally for satire swiftly becoming indistinguishable from the thing satirized.

Does Ripley not have the coordinates (or at least a general idea of the location) for the Jockey ship? Is the signal no longer active? Weird oversight to not even mention it, it's on the same moon.

The marines look like children playing with toys when entering the colony, that’s gotta be intentional. Wild that they only sent one squad of 13 guys for a entire town of a couple hundred people.

I wonder, can xenos reproduce normally or do they always require a host? What do they do when there are no hosts available? Just hibernate until more show up? Now that I think about it, I wonder if the weird mist in the Jockey ship was part of a stasis / suspended animation field similar to human cryo, and that’s how all the eggs survived that long.

Jesus fucking christ, Random Marine, traumatize the kid more why don’t you? If a clearly terrified child is desperately attempting to put as much distance as possible between them and you DO NOT ATTEMPT TO GRAB THE TERRIFIED CHILD.

I get that the scene is meant to demonstrate that Ripley’s the only one showing Newt some empathy, but I don’t know if Cameron is the right pick for handling that. Like “Oh no, I’ve made a clean spot” is good, but then immediately following it up with calling Newt “pretty”. Nah man, don’t do that. “Pretty” is reserved for grandmas talking about a new dress or something like that.

The colonists have implanted monitoring chips, the marines don’t (but they do have them built into their armor, we see later). Interesting that W-Y has bought and sold their lives on paper but not entirely.

The marines, apparently, didn’t bring any non-explosive rounds, which is fucking insane. YOU ARE IN SPACE. WHAT ARE YOU DOING.

The proper introduction of the xenomorph looks sick as hell. The effects game is something else in this movie, even when compared to Alien's already high bar.

Newt getting out of her dropship harness and then immediately hunkering down with her back to a corner is brutal. I still don’t think Cameron is doing a great job with her, but he’s at least aimed in the right direction sometimes.

There’s got to be a tactical analysis of the Hadley’s Hope mission like that one blogpost about the Battle of Hoth, right? Or ACOUP’s Helm’s Deep series.

Yes! Nuke the site! YOU HAVE ORBITAL SUPERIORITY! And even if you don’t nuke the site, you can sit in orbit, call home, and wait in cryo until reinforcements arrive, which you should have done as soon as things started getting touchy.

Apparently there’s no one left on board the Sulaco, which is even more baffling. Like, someone's got to pilot and maintain the ship, right? Or did Bishop handle all of that?

[I did look on the wiki for this one, and apparently yes, the Sulaco was handled entirely by Bishop and the onboard AI. And could also carry thousands of marines, which really makes me wonder why they sent out such a big ship for an intentional suicide mission, it's certainly worth more than the marines to W-Y. Probably planned to recover the hulk from orbit, now that I think about it.]

Why didn’t the xeno in the colony attack when it had ample chance to? They have no compunction about picking off people 1 by 1. We see similar restraint from a facehugger later in the film, though in this case "restraint" is "not attacking immediately".

Man those facility maps look absolutely unreadable.

Newt: “She doesn’t have bad dreams because she’s just a piece of plastic.”

Bishop says the xeno’s acid neutralizes on contact with oxygen; my cursory research says that’s not really a thing, but sulfuric acid will dilute itself by attracting water molecules so weakening on contact with air is still a thing that can happen.

Bishop in the pipe is very in line with Cameron’s modus operandi with the movie at large; take Alien, make it bigger and nastier at every chance you get.

Ripley means well, but she still shouldn’t be so gung-ho with the traumatized child's spacial boundaries.

Jesus Christ the facehugger attack is harrowing. Puppet budget is way up, the hugger itself is using a scary amount of tactics. The lighter trick to spring the fire suppression is clever.

The aftermath I’m less positive on; Burke specifically targeted Newt & Ripley with a pair of facehuggers and a hugger’s not subtextual allegory for sexual assault, it is the text. At bare minimum Burke should be beaten to a bloody pulp, and “he had an accident and we couldn’t recover the body” isn’t out of the question. Him dying moments later to a xeno doesn’t feel particularly satisfying in that regard. The other humans don’t get the chance to render judgement.

Power’s down again in clear callback to original; point for xenos being wholly artificially and damnably smart. But not smart enough to do this earlier, so who knows if they actually intentionally chewed through the cables like a squirrel.

I know this xeno spared Newt for drama, but thinking Watsonian about it I can’t figure out what’s going on. The xenos show no compunction about killing people and wasting their bodies during the rest of the film, why is Newt the exception? She’s much lower mass than any of the marines. Do xenos even actually need a live host? They grow so fast they can’t possibly be absorbing a meaningful amount of nutrients, since if they did they’d just insta-kill the host long before the chestburster bursts chest.

This is me speaking as a pair of fresh eyes from 2026 with a very specific set of experiences shaping my interpretation: the finale felt a bit unheimlich in ways that offset the B-movie with extremely high production value we get at the end.

There's an essay out there, though I can't remember title, author, or website because why would I remember something important, about sci-fi's recurring obsession with reproduction and how the symbolic and often literal hope for the future is tied to the reproductive capabilities of a young woman (or, as is the case here and depressingly common, a child). It's One of those things that doesn't stop being seen once it's seen, certainly not while living in the age we do.

[Historical context is important, Aliens comes out 6 years after Michelle Remembers and during the McMartin Preschool Trial. Which is to say that the zeitgeist of its creation is one where the fear of lurking sexual predators blinds many to the real abuses carried out right under their noses.]

We know how xenos work and we know the fears that they embody. It’s just the text. Newt being captured by the xenos is objectively the threat of sexual assault, and the movie’s going for a parental revenge fantasy in response. I'm not so hypocritical to deny that I like dipping into that trope, but the circumstances here felt too clean for comfort. The perpetrator is a faceless, mindless, incomprehensible Other against whom all violence is justified. Burke gets his karmic death but it isn’t in such a way that would sully the hands of the other characters. Newt is effectively a token used to prove the morality of the rest of the cast.

[I can't imagine the ending of this movie playing out the same if Newt was a boy. Not that the scenario is unthinkable, but that I don't think a blockbuster from 1986 would do it. That Newt would be given some opportunity to help kill the Queen, or cleverly escape, or there'd be much more overt gay panic to maintain the sexual menace.]

Burke is a pathetic bag of shit whose combination of stupid, desperate to please his corpo overlords, and inured to the violence he inflicts on other people (since he's always done it at a distance) leads him to release facehuggers on Ripley and Newt. But because he's human, and he's a human within a system that rewards those behaviors, I think he deserves much more of the culpability than he's given. The xenos are amoral in the extreme, voiding even the baseline behaviors of a normal animal half the time (because these movies can never make up their mind.) They're as evil as a forest fire, while Burke is someone doing a gender reveal party because he thinks that nothing bad will happen to him.

But, just because Burke probably deserves to get beaten to death with a crowbar doesn’t mean that beating him to death with a crowbar is good. It's good for the story, certainly, because it can add moral complexity and play up the compare-and-contrast between Ripley and the Queen, but it's still a pretty brutal murder.

[All this is ultimately the balance I try to walk with MSF and my other work. It feels good to imagine the fist of an angry god leaving a red smear on the sidewalk where a particular motherfucker once walked. It's also far too easy for that fantasy to become an idol and for the retributive violence to become the object of worship. It's the evergreen tweet about knowing that monarchy is shitty but wanting all the same to see the chosen king wielding his magic sword. We all want to see mama bear kill the shit out of whoever threatens the cub, but we've got to remember that she's still going to leave a mangled corpse when she's done.]

I don't really have a closing thought for this, there's no real conclusion. But, man, there is a lot of Gender this series and none of it gets any better handled than this.

Things I like about the ending:

Queen effects are 11/10.
The Queen knows how elevators work, and that’s hilarious.
Ripley is smart and cooks the eggs before they can hatch.
Bishop is great, he's been great this entire movie.

Things I don't like about the ending that I haven't already mentioned

Can we not with the flashing lights?
A 30 km blast zone means they need to get at least 18 miles away in seconds. I don't remember how much time they had, but if I'm charitable and say that they have 10 seconds to do it, that's 6480 miles per hour for the bare-minimum safe distance. Miracle everyone on board was not utterly obliterated.
How the fuck did the Queen piggyback on the shuttle with no one noticing?
Ripley's airlock maneuver probably should have torn off her leg.

Alternate Ending: Burke finds out about the Queen (probably through the notes left by the colony scientists), and ends up snapping under the pressure and going full cultist. Like he’s certain the Queen is sapient and can be reasoned with, and kidnaps Newt in the chaos for a bit of human sacrifice (“We’ve killed so many of her children, we need to pay her back with one of our own"). Give him some sort of repellent just convenient enough to get him to the heart of the hive unharmed but not convenient enough to solve the problem. Probably some hacked together job of “oh xenos use scent or some kind of ultrasonic pulse to identify each other so if we’re super careful and don’t do anything to blow our cover we can get through the hive.”

Ripley tracks him down, shoots him in the head / beats him to death with a crowbar, rescues Newt, escape sequence as normal. Me being me, I'd probably not end up killing the Queen. Wounding, yes, but if we're going to imply the Queen is sapient (as this movie has), I'd be fine with an "all right, now we're even" ending. We're no longer in horror mode by the end of Aliens anyway, might as well lean into it and force whatever poor shmuck is stuck doing the third film with that can of worms.

I mostly enjoyed Aliens, but I think this is the point where the series hits the point of no return. Most of the ways it builds on Alien are both cool and make sense, it's expanded the world in interesting and generally logical ways, but it's closed things off as well. How do you build off of this? We've escalated to action shlock (mostly positive) so now this is what people will expect. We built on what came before but didn't add enough extra parts to build off of later down the line. The trajectory is set, and now it will just get harder to diverge from it.

Sunday, September 13, 2026

Alien Franchise Watch-Along: Alien

Nathan Anderson

Somehow, in attempting to fix the image in this post, blogger 1) wiped my draft when I tried to undo some wonky formatting 2) autosaved the wiped version 3) didn't autosave when I reversed that change, put all the text back, and exited the draft. So I had to dig through all the previous versions of my main gdoc to find it again and then re-do the final polishing. Eesh.

Alien

Covenant

Been a while since I did a rewatch post, eh? My partner and I had talked about doing an Alien marathon ages ago but never got around to it until now - we’re a one streaming service at a time household, and for some Byzantine licensing reason HBO Max had all the Alien films available through the end of May. When in Rome, die screaming alone and in space I suppose.

Breaking with previous tradition, Alien is the only rewatch of the lot of them: the rest are my first time (adjusting for osmosis).

Alien

(1979, dir. Ridley Scott)

Damn what a good opening. Cuts right to the heart of the thing in no time at all.

Some small, interesting details:

Antarctic Traffic Control
“Out of the Solomons” - evoking the islands on Earth
I didn't learn until fairly recently that the Nostromo is named after a book by Joseph Conrad.

The Nostromo crew’s first question about the LV-426 distress signal is “is it human?”; That says to me that they expected the chance that it wasn’t, which is going to segue right into one of my major questions for this series going forward: what do people in the Alien universe know about alien life?

Because as we see later, they’re not really surprised by the crashed ship or the Space Jockey, but they’re not familiar with it either. This specific sapient alien is an unknown quantity, but the presence of a sapient alien doesn’t seem to be out of the ordinary for the crew. Those factors combined aren’t even worth noticing for Ash (I can kinda buy the rest of the crew shrugging it off, if they exist in a space where alien life isn’t a huge deal)

This implication is in total violation with everything else in the setting, and I have a feeling that tension will remain for a long time.

Alien is one of those works that is so aesthetically strong that it basically dooms all its successors to either rote imitation or jarring discrepancy. I think the latter can be navigated, but not when there's this much money involved.

No time wasted in this movie, the cuts are masterfully done to show the passage of time without ever getting confusing. No filler anywhere.

Always love an engineering estimate gag.

The landing on LV-426 is masterfully tense. And even if unintentionally so, it's a response to the sci-fi of Star Wars and Star Trek magicking away the fact that even the basic functions of a spacecraft are going to be highly technical, deliberate, and very dangerous.

Lambert: “I like griping.”

I feel like Sigourney Weaver went and just created a gender in that shot where Ripley has her sneakers up on the cockpit dashboard.

Details about the Jockey’s ship: it’s asymmetrical (which is weird, even the Nostromo is symmetrical despite being much bulkier), the interior looks like the exterior of a xenomorph, the Jockey is fucking huge, and it’s still warm down in the lower levels.

Ripley somehow being able to identify the difference between a “come here” and a “go away” signal from an alien broadcast is a stretch, but I’ll let it slide. I wonder how long the thing’s been on, anyway?

My partner, on watching Kane investigate the eggs: “My brother in Christ what the fuck.”

I agree. For a movie that has everyone being pretty competent at their jobs, this is a really weird oversight (but also necessary for the movie to work, and he had no idea what they were so he gets a pass.)

Jesus that is a strong acid. Basically an alkahest. My partner suggested that it might be a predator-deterrent, rather than a generalized defense like Kane says, and I like that theory.

The acid also means that xenos are extremely weak to chemical bases, a tactic that I don’t expect to show up in later films. (Spoilers: it does not)

They dragged Kane through a dry ice snowstorm with a massive hole in his helmet. The facehugger might be making a seal? It’d have to be pumping in the suit’s air supply rather than external air.

Ripley grills Ash after he opens up the door and my partner pointed out that the conversation sounds like she’s fishing for programmed responses, like the tests in Blade Runner. I think she’s already suspecting him to be an android.

So I heard it as “Datas”, but apparently the Nostromo was launched from Thedus (at least according to the wiki), which EU material has pegged as Epsilon Reticuli. I want to keep EU stuff at a minimum for now but this does provide a good segue for me to talk about Space Map Shit™.

So LV-426 is in Zeta Reticuli (hilarious), which is 39.3 LY / 12 parsecs away from Earth; at 10 months to get back home that gives an extremely neat cruising speed of ~4 LY / month or ~1 LY a week. Which is ludicrously fast, to the point of going plaid, but also the Nostromo is shot such that it always feels slow and ponderous to the observer despite going faster than light.

Kane’s increased appetite makes total sense, but it also doesn’t seem to be necessary: he barely gets a few bites in before the chestburster explodes. Makes me think that it’s a reaction of his own body, rather than one triggered by the xeno.

Chestburster! Weird lil’ guy screaming and causing a mess. Looks so goofy now, but in a very charming way.

No one says anything when they give Kane his space funeral. That says a lot more than even a filler goodbye.

(Thank you 33 for reminding me to return and add this comment) Ash's "ultimate lifeform" line gets taken as a given in later installments and that's kinda lame, but taken as purely Ash's view of them it's gives a really interesting coloration to android psychology (that is, of course, never followed up on.)

The ultimate lifeform, for this particular android, doesn't have to think. It has no interiority, it's not conscious, it operates purely on the automatic instinct to kill and eat and reproduce. Its existence is an unthinking, pointless exercise in filling an environment to capacity and then...nothing. A monotonous eternity of xenomorphs in hibernation, having killed off everything else in the universe and accomplished nothing.

Now is the circuit burnt out in the 12 module, or did it get chewed through?

Well, at least they’re splitting up to save the cat.

Speaking of Jonesy: that cat must be immune to industrial toxins or something, living on a refinery ship filled with giant rooms with no discernable purpose that are definitely hazardous to biological life. Like there’s enough space in there that the temperature variation is causing moisture to condense (DON’T DRINK IT, DUMBASS)

Mother admits when it doesn’t have enough data to give a good answer, which is a decidedly optimistic view of artificial intelligence.

I also find it interesting how her voice is distinctly elderly - that’s not something you typically get in modern AI assistant ladies for drearily predictable reasons.

I like how the breaking point with Dallas in the vents is as simple as Lambert freaking out and giving him bad directions. One slip-up triggers the domino chain panic-spiral.

In light of special order 937 and Ash’s insertion onto the team, does that mean that the Company knew about the Jockey ship ahead of time? Or was he was just put on the Nostromo for an unrelated reason and special order 937 is just standing Company policy?

This sort of shell game of “so and so actually knew X the entire time” has never been appealing to me: it introduces so many additional questions that can’t get good answers and didn’t need asked in the first place.

More movies should do the casting roulette that this one did. If nothing else it's a way to give people shots at a big break.

Holy epilepsy warning, Batman! The constant flashing lights in the end sequence are the one major beef I have with the movie, they make it legitimately hard to watch.

Jonesy must be getting real sick and tired of being manhandled and kicked out of all his sleeping spots. When he was in the carrier, did the xeno leave him alone because it gave up with trying to get him out, or was it using him as bait?

It’s weird to see the xeno sleeping (I presume it’s sleeping) on the shuttle at the end. It's the one part in the film where it acts like an ordinary animal.

There’s a lacelike pattern on the helmet seal of Ripley’s suit. We get a good look at it in one closeup.

The destruction of the Nostromo should not have been visible from the shuttle, considering that the shuttle was still going at lightspeed and the Nostromo was very suddenly not. But who cares? Spaceship go boom.

The xeno isn't burned by the shuttle engines, it's knocked into deep space by them. And is also a toy.

And there we have it. Perfect movie. It could have been a one-and-done, and perhaps it should have been, or it could have been spun off into an anthology series, and maybe that could of happened. To offer a bit of a presentiment of the future, this post series is going to be a front-row accelerated time-lapse of franchise decay.

But, that's for the future, and the great thing about sequels is that they can't actually diminish the originals. Shitty "remasters", on the other hand...