Tag: Alien

‘Alien’ vs. ‘Bloodchild,’ Part 3: The Director’s Cut

Before we get into a further discussion of the themes of Alien, I want to spend a little time on the director’s cut, which released in 2003. Ridley Scott went back over the film, tightening up parts and adding in a few deleted scenes. Unusually, the end result was a minute shorter than the original theatrical release.

My personal opinion about “director’s cuts” in general is that I don’t like them. In my experience, more often than not, a director’s cut is analogous to a novelist who goes over the head of his editor and includes a bunch of material he was advised to take out. More often than not, it’s material the final product was better off not having.

The biggest change in Alien is a scene near the end in which Ripley finds two of her crewmates cocooned into a wall by the alien’s secretions, a scene that anticipates the alien hive full of ill-fated colonists in the sequel—a concept James Cameron apparently came up with independently. Although kind of a welcome detail in hindsight, it disrupts the tension of movie’s climax, and for that reason the film is better off without it.

Also, I have twice now seen fans interpreting this as depicting human victims transforming into alien eggs, something that would contradict the alien life cycle that the franchise ultimately developed, though I admit this interpretation does not appear to me to be warranted by anything in the scene.

The only included scene that I thought made an improvement is after the first crewman, Brett, gets killed: Two others rush in to see the alien dragging him away, which makes for a better transition to the next scene.

Aside from that, most of the changes are almost impossible to notice except to someone who’s memorized the film.

I thought something similar when I watched the theatrical and director’s cut versions of the sequel Aliens side-by-side. Aliens is an action movie, and the theatrical version is faster-paced and more intense. The added scenes—a monologue by a marine, a pointless subplot featuring automatic gun turrets, a lengthy scene featuring the doomed colonists—accomplish nothing except slowing down the action. Again, there’s one exception, the detail that Ripley had a daughter who died while Ripley was in suspended animation, which anticipates her relationship with the orphan girl Newt.

Also, I have to add one additional curiosity: I have never thought Alien, with its deliberately slow pacing, was very scary. I recently showed it to the magical girl for the first time, and she made the same comment, that it was an impressive film but not particularly frightening. She was clearly much more moved by Aliens, which made her jump or squeal several times and during which she showed a lot more emotional engagement.

Updates in the Time of Quarantine

I’m a few days late on the next in my series of essays partly because I was watching both the theatrical and directors’-cut versions of both Alien and Aliens to refresh my memory. I am of the heretical opinion that the theatrical version of both movies is the superior one, an opinion I may discuss at greater length later.

For now, I wish to give a more personal update. The magical girl and I got married three weeks ahead of our original schedule because she’s a nurse, and I wanted to limit her contact with her elderly parents, with whom she was living. That’s why we got married in a private ceremony with the permission of our bishop, and we were just in time, as all public ceremonies of any sort were suspended just a week later.

Anyway, as I assumed would eventually happen, she’s now definitely been exposed to the virus at the hospital where she works, though her own test results aren’t back yet. In any case, if she has it, I definitely have it. We’re quarantining ourselves in our apartment right now while we wait. Nobody in our immediate vicinity, including the patient who tested positive at the hospital, is exhibiting symptoms.

It just so happens that we got this news right as we were beginning our break from work that was originally supposed to be the start of our marriage and honeymoon. That works out well for us: I’m off work anyway, but I’ll be put on administrative leave later if it looks like I need to stay away from my job for longer than our planned vacation.

Admittedly, the two of us are having a much better time than a great many people. While others are getting seriously ill or going stir-crazy, we’re on a little newlywed honeymoon staycation, which both of us are mostly enjoying, even without the slightly larger wedding and honeymoon we originally planned. In any case, the way events have played out have convinced me that I did the right thing to ask the bishop to let us marry early, a request he graciously granted even though it was Lent. I had some doubts at the time, naturally, but now I’m further convinced that was the right move.

‘Alien’ vs. ‘Bloodchild,’ Part 2

Today, as promised, we continue to compare and contrast the famous and influential film Alien with the less well-known but nonetheless celebrated short story “Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler. In this essay, I will tease out some of the themes and concepts behind Alien.

For much of the content in today’s post and in subsequent posts, I am indebted to Xenopedia, the Alien vs. Predator wiki, where hardworking fans have compiled a lot of history and trivia, as well as an essay I read many years ago and have not (alas) been able to relocate.

It was this essay, of unknown title and authorship, that first made me aware of the sexual symbolism behind the creature designs and situations in the Alien movie. The premise of the essay was that Alien is ultimately about “fear of female sexuality” (that men are terrified of horny women is one of feminism’s most popular canards). Although exhaustively explaining the film’s imagery, the essay failed to make its case, and I came away from it with the opinion that Alien is a mishmash of sexual menace with no real point behind it—an opinion I still hold, and which I will ultimately defend.

Continue reading “‘Alien’ vs. ‘Bloodchild,’ Part 2”

‘Alien’ vs. ‘Bloodchild,’ Part 1

A couple of months ago, I sat down and rewatched Ridley Scott’s classic 1979 science-fiction horror film, Alien, a movie that was influential and unusual in cinema in large part because its sequels and spinoffs seemed bent on refuting it: Its well-received sequel Aliens, from James Cameron, deliberately went in a different direction, and the decidedly less well-received Alien 3 went in a different direction from that.

I recently saw a few of my mutuals on Twitter dissing the original film, calling it the product of a nihilistic era of cinema and accusing it of having few if any redeeming features. I am of a different opinion, so though I am ready to admit it has flaws, I am also happy to defend Alien as a great movie. But I think that greatness is at times despite, rather than because of, the film’s creators: There was a lot of pretentiousness behind Alien, but most of it either failed to make it to screen or was subtle enough that the average viewer could easily ignore it.

I wish to compare and contrast Alien with a short story by the late Octavia Butler, who in spite of her tragically short career and small corpus has over the last decade become something of a darling amongst the more vocally politically left wing of the science-fiction community. I read her story “Bloodchild” years ago, and it quickly became one of my favorites. It is in concept so similar to Alien that I convinced myself she meant it as a sort of answer to, or subversion of, the movie’s themes—which is not impossible, since she published the story in 1985, well after Alien made its appearance.

Perhaps I haven’t looked hard enough, but I have not seen anyone else discuss the parallels between these works. Although the subdued but sexually charged imagery of Alien has been interpreted (and over-interpreted) time and again thanks in large part to the unique creature design by the always-creepy H. R. Giger, most who discuss Butler are too busy obsessing over her black skin or her womanhood to grant her the place she deserves in the larger field of science fiction.

What characterizes both of these works, the horror film and the short story, is that they depict humans—vulnerable and mostly unwitting—coming into contact with an extraterrestrial species with endoparasitoid reproduction: That’s a two-bit way of saying these aliens spend their early life growing inside a host, which they then kill. In the real world, this kind of parasitism is known mostly from insects, but it’s creepy and disconcerting enough to make good fodder for sci-fi.

In both stories, the parasitically reproducing aliens are huge, powerful, and at times violent. Thematically, both Alien and “Bloodchild” use their basic concept for similar ends, presenting a sort of monstrous sexual menace involving a reversal of the usual roles, with men becoming “impregnated” and giving a gruesome kind of birth.

In this aspect, however, “Bloodchild” is the more successful of the two. The alien in Alien is simply a monster running on instinct. Although the screenwriter, Dan O’Bannon, described the action of the “facehugger”—an intermediate creature that implants the alien’s embryo—as performing “oral, homosexual rape,” this probably doesn’t come across to most casual viewers: The thing is an animal and acts like one. It’s a parasite, and what it does cannot, strictly speaking, be called either homosexual or rape.

By contrast, “Bloodchild” depicts the endoparasitic aliens (called “Tlic,” unfortunately) as intelligent and reasonably civilized, so the relationship between the Tlic and the humans who bear their young becomes a mutual one that is nonetheless fraught with tension. Butler herself described “Bloodchild” as a love story, and though that is likely to raise the average reader’s eyebrows as much as O’Bannon’s talk of homosexual rape does, she has more justification for that description.

By coincidence, O’Bannon originally planned something remotely similar for Alien: His original concept had the alien growing out of a ravenous adolescence into a calm and enlightened adulthood, and he envisioned an advanced alien civilization with an entire religion based around its inhabitants’ peculiar reproductive methods.

This of course never came to fruition, as the final version of the creature is simply a movie monster. Nonetheless, O’Bannon’s muse apparently grabbed Butler later to tease out the ideas he had left undeveloped.

Tomorrow, we’ll begin diving more deeply into the origins, plot lines, and themes of these works. Stay tuned.

James Rolf on the ‘Alien’ Franchise

James Rolf of Cinemassacre is reposting several monster movie reviews for Fall (or what I like to call “Pumpkin Spice Season”). His overview of the Alien franchise is entertaining and informative.

I always respect Rolf’s thoughtful reviews. I have a slightly better opinion than he does (and than most people do) of Alien 3, and I note that he doesn’t mention either the bizarre, disjointed sexual subtext of Alien, nor the dependence of Aliens on the Rambo movies, but this is nonetheless a thorough set of involved reviews. His discussion of the influence of Alien on video games such as Metroid, Xenophobe, and R-Type is interesting; certainly, the influence of its set and creature design is felt still today.

And I agree with him that Alien vs. Predator: Requiem totally sucks. I don’t remember why I even saw that, but I do remember it being my second worst experience in a theater, right after Pluto Nash.