aliens – Page 2 – Pain In The Bud

Review: Alien Romulus Is The Only Worthy Sequel To The 1979 Original

It took a fresh vision to prove there’s still cinematic life in the xenomorph and its ability to terrify audiences, but Romulus really shines where its affable characters are concerned.

Over four decades and six films — eight if you count crossovers — in the Alien universe, no one had been able to capture even a fraction of the terror, novelty or magic of Ridley Scott’s original 1979 science fiction-horror classic.

James Cameron turned the immediate sequel into a James Cameron movie, which means it’s packed with Velveeta one-liners, Spanish catch-phrases that no Spanish-speaking person would ever utter, and doesn’t exercise an ounce of the restraint Scott used to such cosmic effect.

In the third outing, David Fincher took on the impossible task of trying to reconcile the tone of the first two films and set the entire thing in a drab space prison, while Joss Whedon’s script for the fourth film was Firefly in Alien trappings.

While the xenomorphs never looked better, Alien: Covenant felt like half a movie, ending on a cliffhanger that will never be resolved.

The titular monster had been stripped of nearly all its mystique by the time Scott returned to the franchise with Prometheus and Covenant, the fifth and sixth installments.

Both films were visually spectacular thanks to Scott’s efforts, but suffered from characters audiences couldn’t connect with, and in the case of Damon Lindelof’s script for Prometheus, characters the audience loathed. Instead of leaving the origin of the aliens ambiguous, Prometheus and Covenant offered a bizarre, nearly franchise-killing backstory involving alien-designed panspermia, artificial intelligence gone rogue and half-baked creationism given the veneer of science.

When Fede Alvarez presented his vision for an Alien film, he understood he had two do two things:

Ignore everything that came after Scott’s original film
Offer something more than the formulaic “monster stalks the cast deck by deck and kills them one at a time, leaving only the Final Girl”

Alien: Romulus sets off on that task by engaging in economical world building to give us more context than the five previous sequels managed together.

It’s tightly focused on our heroes, a group of five twenty-somethings who were born on a fiery world where lava perpetually flows, novel diseases spawn every year and a permanent atmospheric coat of soot and ash hides the sun and sky from the people who live there.

It’s a hellish place, and they’re there because multinational megacorporation Weyland-Yutani (“the company” in Alien parlance) wants the valuable ores within the planet’s crust. Like the crew of the Nostromo, the people are expendable in the company’s pursuit of profit.

Alien Romulus: Jackson's Star — The people who live in the colony at Jackson’s Star can’t even see their own sun as they slave for Weyland-Yutani corporation.

Our heroes work for the company, and they’re all orphans who lost their parents to work-related accidents or diseases from the mines.

Marie Rain Carradine’s (Cailee Spaeny) hope lies in the completion of her indentured servitude. With 12,000 hours of service to the company under her belt, Rain can finally take her brother to the colony world Yvaga, where the air isn’t toxic, people aren’t worked to death, and best of all in her mind, you can see the sun.

When Rain visits a Weyland-Yutani administrative center to formally separate from the company and relocate to Yvaga, a bureaucrat doubles her work requirement to 24,000 hours with the stroke of a key, damning her to another five or six years toiling on a planet that kills everyone eventually. Worse, the bureaucrat transfers her from farming to the mines, where her parents died.

“Know that the company is really grateful for your service,” the Wey-Yu representative says with an infuriating affect, dismissing the shocked young woman.

It’s in the depth of her despair that Rain gets a message from her friend Tyler (Archie Renaux) and listens to his pitch. Tyler and the others were working their orbital jobs miles above the colony’s surface when their computers pinged, alerting them to the approach of a massive starship.

Scans revealed a decommissioned Weyland-Yutani vessel that hadn’t been entirely stripped of its useful parts, slowly drifting through the system. Crucially, the ship still carried functional cryo pods, which would allow the group to sleep out the nine-plus year journey to Yvaga.

It’s freedom, there for the taking “before someone else does,” Isabela Merced’s Kay tells Rain.

When Rain balks at the dangerous and highly illegal plan, Tyler points out Weyland-Yutani will never grant them approval to leave the nightmarish world where they were born.

“I don’t want to end up like our parents,” he says, nodding toward the dead-eyed, soot-covered miners marching back to their utilitarian prefab homes after another shift toiling for the company.

You don’t need to guess that the plan does not go smoothly, nor the reason why.

What most people will need to know, in order to entrust two hours of their time to a franchise that has been beating a dead horse for decades, is that Alien: Romulus is the kind of sequel Scott himself would have made after the original, at the height of his directorial powers, if he hadn’t moved on to other projects.

Romulus replicates the magic of the original by taking things in exciting new directions, and by giving the audience a series of astonishing set pieces, including a gloriously nail-biting sequence that not only captures the beauty of space, but reminds us how hostile it is to our fragile human bodies.

It also takes care to give us reasons to root for characters we’ve just met, to sympathize with their plight and understand why they’d do something so desperate and reckless.

Alien Romulus: Cailee Spaeny — Cailee Spaeny is inarguably the best of the actresses who have tried to take the mantle from Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in the last several films from the franchise.

Rain and her friends have one important thing in common with the characters from the first Alien film — they’re fighting for survival in more ways than one. There’s the immediate threat to their lives, and their eventual slow, agonizing doom if they don’t find a way off their colony world.

Unlike the characters from the previous sequels, they didn’t volunteer for a military mission, an archaeological expedition or to be pioneers on a world full of life. They’re desperate adults barely out of childhood who know life holds nothing but misery for them if they don’t succeed.

Like the best science fiction, Romulus doesn’t just entertain, it uses an imagined future to comment on our society. AI has now permeated our lives, but mainstream science fiction is still stuck on the same tired “AI evolves, turns on humans for reasons and tries to wipe us out” narratives.

Alien Romulus — Andy (Jonsson) in an airlock early in the film.

For those of us who are genre fans, it’s frustrating to see Hollywood clinging to ideas that were first kicked around many decades ago by science fiction novelists. Besides, the “AI turns on humans” thing has little to do with reality and everything to do with human anxiety that we’ll be judged for our behavior as a species the moment we encounter an intelligence capable of judging us.

Romulus eschews the formulaic stuff to explore a more interesting question: what separates biological intelligence from artificial intelligence, and can the latter really qualify as life? Can machines ever approximate human emotions, or are they limited to simulating them for our benefit? It’s still not the most original idea, but it’s a marked improvement from the same old Terminator and Ex Machina-inspired narratives.

As for the alien itself, it’s more menacing than it’s been since the first film, and it has a few tricks up its sleeve thanks to circumstances that tie directly into the original. To say more would be an injustice, because the twists here are well-conceived. They also make perfect sense given what we already know, and don’t require any great shift in franchise lore.

Lastly, as an admirer of retrofuturism, I can’t let this review pass without praising the set designers, special effects teams and Alvarez for reviving the utilitarian 1970s vision of the future from the original. This is a worn, lived-in universe, not a gleaming utopia. Alien’s aesthetics influenced virtually every science fiction effort over the last 45 years, and for good reason.

Alien Romulus sets design — Set designers at work on an interior for Alien: Romulus

There’s something anachronistic about a civilization that has mastered interstellar propulsion, cryopreservation and advanced artificial intelligence, but remains reliant on monochrome displays with vector graphics and tactile interfaces. And yet that visual shorthand signals to viewers that this is a return to the fundamental elements of the franchise, and a universe where space exploration is corporate and soulless.

Perhaps the best sign that Romulus has revived Alien is the fact that a sequel is already in the works. Spaeny and David Jonsson, who plays Rain’s brother Andy, are already on board for a second installment.

There’s certainly more story to tell, and if Alvarez can maintain the magic blend of homage and novelty that made Romulus such a strong entry, we’re in for another fun ride. To Yvaga!

Alien: Romulus is available to stream on Max, Hulu and Disney+. For a list of alternate sites where the film can be rented or purchased, or to check availability in regions other than the US, check out the movie’s listing on JustWatch.

The Greatest Feline In Science Fiction Film History Is About To Turn 45

Making his debut in 1979’s Alien, Jonesy is one of the most famous felines in cinema history.

There’s a popular meme among Alien fans that depicts Jonesy the Cat walking nonchalantly down one of the starship Nostromo’s corridors with his tail up, carrying the corpse of the recently-spawned alien in his mouth like he’s about to present a dead mouse as a gift to his humans.

The joke is self-evident: if the crew of the Nostromo had allowed Jonesy to take care of business from the get-go, the alien would have been disposed of before it had the chance to grow into the monstrosity that haunted the decks of the Nostromo and the nightmares of viewers.

Jonesy Alien — “Who’s a good boy? Who just saved his crew from certain violent death at the claws of a ruthless alien predator? That’s right, you did!”

Of course then there’d be no movie. No ripples of shock in theaters across the US as audiences were confronted by something more nightmarish and utterly alien than popular culture had ever seen before. No indelible mark left on science fiction.

Despite the film’s retrofuturistic aesthetic, it’s difficult to believe Alien first hit theaters almost half a century ago.

That’s testament to director Ridley Scott working at the height of his powers, the carpenters, artists and set dressers who created the starship Nostromo’s claustrophobic interior, the design of the derelict starship where the alien was found, and the bizarre creature itself.

The alien ship and creature designs were the work of Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, who was little-known at the time but floored Scott and writer Dan O’Bannon with his hyper-detailed paintings of grotesque biomechanical scenes.

Signourney Weaver and one of the cats who played Jonesy in the first film.

Kane explores the infamous egg chamber in the derelict alien ship.

Fan art of Jonesy

A close-up shot of the retrofuturistic tech used in the series, a design decision that departed from the gleaming visions of the future common at the time.

A set photo showing the first film’s crew on the iconic space jockey set.

Giger’s work, specifically his 1976 painting Necronom IV, was the basis for the titular alien’s appearance. The alien, called a xenomorph in the film series, is vaguely androform while also animalistic. It is bipedal but with digitgrade feet and can crawl or run on all fours when the situation calls for it. It hides in vents, shafts and other dark spaces, coiling a prehensile tail that ends in a blade-like tip.

But it’s the creature’s head that is most nightmarish. It’s vaguely comma-shaped, eyeless and covered in a hard, armored carapace that ends just above a mouth full of sinister teeth like obsidian arrowheads. There’s perpetually slime-covered flesh that squelches when the creature moves but there are also veins or tendons or something fully exposed without skin, apparently made of metal and bone. Maybe those ducts feed nutrients and circulate blood to the brain. Maybe they help drain excess heat from the creature’s brain cavity.

Regardless, it’s a biomechanical nightmare that the Nostromo’s science officer, Ash, admiringly calls “the perfect organism” whose “structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.”

The alien, Ash declares, is “a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.”

Alien xenomorph — The alien, also referred to as a xenomorph, “that thing,” a “dragon,” “the perfect organism” and various other names by characters in the series. Credit: 20th Century Studios

Part of what makes Jonesey so beloved is the fact that, together with the xenomorph and Ripley, he completes the triumvirate of survivors. We see Jonesy scurry into the protection of tiny confined spaces to escape the alien, hissing at it in the dark. We see him dart into the bowels of the ship after sensing the stalking creature, adding another blip to the crew’s trackers. Finally we see him settling into a cryosleep pod with Ripley, like so many other cats with their humans, when the threat has passed.

Jonesy — affectionately referred to as “you little shithead” by Ripley in the second film — appears in the franchise’s two most famous films, his own comic book series titled Jonesy: Nine Lives on the Nostromo, a 2014 novel (Alien: Out of the Shadows), and in hundreds of references in pop culture over the last half century, from appearances in video games (Halo, World of Warcraft, Fortnite) to references and homages in movies and television shows.

A page from Jonesy: Nine Lives On The Nostromo, which tells the story of Alien from the cat’s perspective. These panels depict Jonesy watching Ash and Dallas examining Kane in the ship’s medical lab.

He’s like the anti-xenomorph. Cats are predators, after all, and Jonesy might be the xenomorph to the ship’s rodents just like every ship’s cat in thousands of years of human naval endeavors. But to the crew members Jonesy’s a source of comfort, a warm, furry friend to cuddle with. Unlike the xenomorph he’s got no biological programming urging him to impregnate other species with copies of himself in one of the most horrific gestation processes imaginable.

Xenos are like predators on steroids, gorging themselves on their victims to fuel unnaturally swift cell reproduction and growth. As a result, over the decades some have speculated that the alien simply ignored the cat, deeming its paltry caloric value unworthy of the effort to kill.

The idea that Jonesy was too small to interest the alien is proved a fallacy in later franchise canon when we see the aftermath of a xenomorph consuming a dog. It’s indiscriminate in its quest for energy, feasting on adult humans and animals alike until two or three days pass and it’s a 12-foot-tall, serpentine nightmare the color of the void of interstellar space.

Just imagine sitting in a theater in 1979. Your idea of science fiction is sleek jet-age spacecraft, Star Trek and Stanley Kubrick’s clinical orbital habitats from 2001: A Space Odyssey. You’re expecting astronauts, heroes, maybe a metal robot or an alien who looks human except for some funky eyebrows, green skin or distinct forehead ridges.

Instead you get a crew of seven weary deep space ore haulers inhabiting a worn, scuffed corporate transport ship, complaining about their bonuses and aching for home, family and the familiar tug of gravity.

But home will have to wait. The ship has logged an unusual signal of artificial origin broadcasting from a small planet in an unexplored star system. The crew has no choice but to investigate. It’s written into their contracts, which stipulate the crew will forfeit their wages if they disregard the signal.

So they land, suit up, move out and find a derelict starship. An incomprehensibly massive vessel so strange in detail and proportion that it could only have been built by an alien mind, with unknowable motivations and psychology.

The Egg Chamber — The egg chamber of the derelict alien ship, designed by Giger.

Inside, hallways that look like ribcages lead to vast chambers with utterly bizarre, inscrutable machinery that seems to consist of biological material — skin, bone, joints, organs — fused with metal. In one of them the corpse of an alien, presumably a pilot, is integrated into a complex array. It’s at least twice the size of a large human man. Its elephantine head is thrown back in the agony of its last moment, when something exploded outward from its body, leaving a mangled ribcage, torn papery skin and desiccated organs.

And beneath that, a shaft leading to another horror — a chamber that seems to stretch for kilometers in either direction, where leathery eggs are cradled in biomachinery and bathed in a bioluminescent cerulean mist.

The decision to enter that chamber sets off one of the most shocking scenes in cinema history, leads to the birth of pop culture’s most terrifying monster, and sent millions of theater-goers home with nightmares in the spring and summer of 1979.

It’s almost too much to handle. But take heart! The unlikely female protagonist makes it to the end, and so does the cat. What more can you ask for?

Jonesy on the Nostromo — Jonesy grooming himself on the flight deck of the starship Nostromo. Credit: 20th Century Studios

Cat On The Street: Spy Balloons And UFO Scares

What do felines make of the spy-slash-UFO drama that has consumed the popular imagination for the last week?

The humans have been freaking out about a big balloon flying over Humanland, believing other humans sent it to spy on them. But some humans think aliens are behind the nefarious balloons, and they’re not balloons at all — they’re super sneaky alien craft sent here to scout ahead for an invasion. What do you think?

“If I wanted caviar for breakfast, I would have told you. Stick with the schedule.” – Versace, 13, show cat

“You gonna eat that hedgehog?” – P-84, 1, puma

“Hey up, mates. What’s this, then? Can’t we just fire a few fecking missiles at them and get on with it?” – Liam Gallagher, 8, British cat

“Allow the aliens to land. They look delicious.” – Zanzibar, 5 months, apprentice murderer

“We need a bunker, do we have a bunker? Well why didn’t you BUILD a bunker? Do I have to think of everything?!?” – Buddy the Cat, 8, ex-president of Americats

“This is clearly the work of the aggressive regime in Luxembourg. We should invade, confiscate all their cheese and make them a vassal state.” – Cicero Nash, 4 1/2 months, couch stylist

Catstronauts: Buddy Leads Exploratory Expedition To Epsilon Eridani

Kittens back home on Earth ask the brave catstronauts about their mission and life in space!

STAR COMMANDER BUDDY’S LOG, STARDATE 12142022, Aboard the USS Fowl Play

Lt. Commander Freddie Ferocious has command of the bridge while I’ve retired to my ready room for the important task of answering video messages from kittens in Mrs. Meowmore’s Kittengarden class.

Myles, a three-month-old tuxedo who wants to be a catstronaut when he grows up, has asked me how catstronauts eat and use the litter box in zero gravity.

“Well, Myles,” I tell him, “as you may have guessed, regular litter is no good without gravity! You can’t bury your business, obviously, and you run the risk of free-floating poops and granules of litter escaping into the ship’s habitable areas, so a litter box is out of the question. That is why we have a sealed Litter Chamber and a special suction device. It takes some getting used to, especially since it tends to pull on your fur while you’re doing your business!”

Sophia, a five-month-old Calico, asks us what we eat in space.

“This morning at 0100 hours I was informed that our food replicators are malfunctioning, which means the entire crew has had to make do with freeze-dried kibble and pate MREs. No wonder we’re all so cranky! I have ordered the engineering department to devote all available resources and catpower toward the repair of the replicators. This simply cannot be allowed to go unresolved, for a cranky crew can easily become a mewtinous one, and I don’t want to have to start spacing kitties out of the airlock. Er, I mean throwing ’em in the brig! Chief Engineer Meowdi LaForge tells me the replicators should be back online by breakfast.”

Simba, three and a half months, asks: “Dear Commander Buddy, how far are you from the place you’re traveling to, and what will you do when you get there? Is it true there might be monsters? That would be scary!”

“Thanks for writing, Simba! It’s 10.47 light years to the Epsilon Eridani star system, which is a long ride! Fortunately the USS Fowl Play is a pretty big, comfortable ship, with lots of stuff to do to keep her running, and some pretty cool options for entertainment and R&R when we’re off duty. We’re less than two light years away from our destination now, which means the Fowl Play has already flipped and is engaged in a prolonged deceleration burn. We have to do that, see, so we don’t sail right on past Epsilon Eridani!

“Where did you hear about the thing with the monsters? It’s not true, okay? I don’t know what anyone told you, probably that jealous jerk Commander Calvin, but I totally did not run screaming from a monster during the expedition to Luyten 726-8, okay? That’s fake news!

“What happened was, I saw the monster and issued a blood-curdling battle cry, but then I hit the wrong button on my Planetary CatRover, which caused it to spin around and run in the other direction. I was trying to inspire my team, not abandon them. I would have turned around and battled the monster too, except by the time I realized my mistake I was already more than half way back to the lander and the others had scared the monster away with their laser pointers.”

That’s my rover on the left, and the Scary Monster on the right. As you can see, I’m very brave for facing the Scary Monster:

Buddy’s Planetary Rover

The Evil Monster, whom Buddy was totally not scared of.

Five-month-old Pepper asks: “Star Commander Buddy, do you think smart aliens are out there? What do they look like? Will they be nice when you meet them?”

“Hi, Pepper! Those are good questions. Well we should remember that we cats are not only a super intelligent species, but we are intimidating too! We have sharp teeth and claws, some of us can roar, and we look really strong and tough! So maybe the aliens will be scared of us!

“I think there will be smart aliens even though we haven’t found other intelligent life on Earth. I mean, there’s humans, but they’re simple-minded creatures, aren’t they? That’s why they’re our servants! LOL! Maybe the aliens will only have fur on their heads like humans. Maybe they’ll look like dogs. Gross, I know! Or maybe they’ll look like a cross between elephants, manta rays and aardvarks.

“We just don’t know, which is why we’re trying to find out. Picture it: Star Commander Buddy, fearlessly leading the first expedition to make contact with smart aliens. It’ll be pretty cool to be in the history books. Tell ya what, Pepper. If we find smart aliens, you and the rest of Mrs. Meowmore’s class will be the first to know. After NASA, of course. We’ll send you pictures. Deal?”

Buddy: ‘It Wasn’t Me!’

Cats don’t accept blame, George Carlin once observed. Even when you catch them red-handed.

A few nights ago I was watching the Yankees lose when Buddy jumped on the coffee table, settled into a loaf position and started doing what he does best — knocking things onto the floor.

Usually it’s remote controls, water bottles, my phone. Usually he has the good sense not to knock over glasses with liquid in them, or plates of food. But not always.

Bud turned, looked me in the eye, meowed and proceeded to swipe a tub of wasabi peas (just the like one pictured above) off the table. The package hit the ground and popped open, spilling the peas and their powdered wasabi coating all over the floor.

buddyaliens — “They came down in a big spaceship, and they said ‘Buddy, we’re gonna spill your human’s snacks and then blame it on you!’ And I said ‘No, aliens! Not on my watch!’ But they distracted me with turkey…”

Bud looked at me, trilled, then took off, perhaps put off by the scent of the wasabi.

A few seconds later he returned as I was sweeping them up, trilled again, and looked at me like “What happened, dude? Someone knocked over your wasabi peas? That’s terrible!”

If he could speak — you know, besides his incessant trilling and meowing — the conversation would probably go something like this:

“It was you! You did it!”

“No I didn’t.”

“I watched you do it! You made eye contact with me as you casually slapped them off the coffee table!”

“You’re mistaken. Perhaps it was another cat who looks like me.”

“You’re the only cat who lives here!”

“Then it was a chalupacabra.”

“You mean a chupacabra? Those don’t actually exist, you know. Have you ever heard of Occam’s Razor?”

“Aliens, then. Yeah. Probably aliens. I keep trying to tell you, aliens are responsible for those hairballs. Remember the time you found puke in the bed? That was aliens too. I told them ‘Be gone, aliens! You’re not welcome here!’ but they just can’t help themselves….”

As George Carlin said, “Cats don’t accept blame.” Even when they do things right in front of you, apparently.