Movie Moments XXVIII: May 2020 (Alien edition)

I’ve never watched any of these before, so this is a grand adventure! You are getting slightly filtered, but entirely new thoughts! Meanwhile, I am slightly terrified! This is going to be gross, I’m pretty sure.

Prometheus, 26 May 2020, streamed via Google Play
I decided to watch these in chronological order, which should be fascinating, since I recall that folks were less than thrilled with whatever happened in this one.

• Crew: 17. Oh, THAT can’t be good to know. If ever there was a signal that most of the crew is toast, that is it.
• WAIT, why are you going out suited first? Why don’t you send a drone or something? It’s like you WANT to get murdered by this planet. And forbidding weapons? Dude, you don’t go into the wilderness without prepping yourself for bears. (If you want me to believe this is in the future, you could maybe use tech that we haven’t already developed.) OH MY GOD, why are you going inside the structure without checking it for anything dangerous? You could have mapped everything from outside the door, you idiots! Why must movie scientists always be so dumb? I actually yelled aloud, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING? No! NO!” when the dude took his helmet off. BREATHABLE AIR DOES NOT MEAN FREE OF PATHOGENS. (Little did I know, at this point, that this is basically the movie, except with increasingly dumber choices as time passes.) ”I think we’ve affected the atmosphere in the room.” NO SHIT, LADY.
• Oh, an alien head with cell damage in an unknown state of metamorphosis, yeah, go ahead and wake it up, that’ll work out well. Meanwhile, robot guy just cracks open a tomb carafe like there’s popcorn inside.
• ”We made you ‘cause we could.”
  “Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you, to hear the same from your own creator?”
  “I guess it’s a good thing you can’t be disappointed.”
  Oh, man, you are getting murdered by this robot for SURE now..
• Hey, should a flamethrower work in that atmosphere? Is there enough oxygen?
• ”I watched your dreams.” Or, uh, her family history is in her personnel file? Nobody on this ship understands how systems work.
• Weyland’s old age makeup is pretty bad.
• Oh sure, the woman who just gave traumatic surgical birth to an alien lifeform after her partner died of an unknown pathogen should absolutely be allowed to immediately wander around the ship in her underwear without additional checkup or, maybe, clothing? Yeah, Weyland being old totally needs the attention of ALL the med team, sure.
• Hey, why is that one guy the only one in stasis? Why didn’t whoever stopped them before go farther in containing the threat? And then they repeatedly had star maps to this random place slipped into Earth artwork over the ages? Because they hoped someone would come here and wake the dude up? Or was it supposed to be a warning? “Sometimes to create, one must first destroy.” THAT PHILOSOPHY MAKES NO SENSE IN THIS CONTEXT, ROBOT GUY. None of this makes sense from an organizational standpoint and I am OFFENDED.
• Having robot guy’s head just hanging out is much more comedic than I think they intended.

Well, I know why the reception to this movie was so mixed now! Lordy.

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Alien: Covenant, 27 May 2020, streamed via Amazon

• Weyland once watched Blade Runner and decided This, but an Apple store. Anyway, Weyland is what happens when you teach Intelligent Design in science classes instead of as an...anthropological?...subject. Some messianic douchebag in Silicon Valley runs with it until only extranatural versions of himself are acceptable as humanity’s originators.
• I mean, can we really argue with a movie that begins with ritually setting James Franco on fire? I think not.
• Seriously, why do none of these expeditions have drones to do advance exploration? Or any sort of equipment that would let them do a preliminary assessment of the area? WHY. We have this technology now! We had some of it decades ago! ALSO, does the ship seriously only have one lander? That is some extremely shoddy planning.
• Whoever did the crew’s psych evaluations screwed up real, real bad. Like, yes, we know the pathogen is horrifying, but Faris freaked at the jump when it was just respiratory trouble.
• Listen, if the weirdly affectless robot guy who has been experimenting with parasitic alien genetics tells you to follow him into a dark basement and take a close look at a squishy freestanding womb, DON’T..
• Seriously, who did the rebuild of David’s body? I can’t imagine the Engineers’ ship had spare robot parts lying around.
• ”No one understands the lonely perfection of my dreams.” Elizabeth died of mansplaining, didn’t she? No other explanation rings as true.
• Well, that was a clearly telegraphed “twist,” wasn’t it?

All right, time for the old school run. *cracks knuckles* Let’s see how accurate cultural osmosis about these movies has been.

Alien, 28 May 2020, streamed via HBO Now

• Ah, the Nostromo. Seven crew members seems like not a lot. (Is it me, or are all these big movie spaceships understaffed? That is a TON of room for a handful of folks to rattle around in. It seems less than efficient to lack any redundancies in personnel, given the risks out there.)
• I know it’s easy to snicker at depictions of what they thought future technology would look like, but man, the hair in this movie would have kicked me right out of my normally resilient suspension of disbelief on most days.
• I will say, after seeing three distinct planets that have been seeded by the Engineers, I have many, many questions about WTF they were doing. Are the parasites found or made? Why the determination to crash ships all over the galaxy to conduct the experiment? (At some point, SOMEONE should have been like, “Hey, guys, we should think of a less expensive way to do this.”) Or were they fleeing an infestation and just did a really, really poor job of disinfecting their vessels before the run? How do they benefit at all? And if they ARE trying to draw in experimental subjects, why plant a warning in the ship after it crashes?
• ”It seems to have life. Organic life.” THEN STEP AWAY, WHAT ARE YOU DOING. And then they just hang out in medbay wearing surgical masks? And then y’all go investigate a hull-breaching acid in your shirtsleeves? And then poke the squishy dead alien thing with your naked faces only a foot away from it?
• This movie is pretty slow, y’all. There’s some decent camerawork, but rarely so striking as to merit lingering...on...every...single...shot. (I am fully aware I have no appreciation for the classics.)
• Man, that sucker grew FAST. How is that possible, given its rate of consumption? It had only fed on the one dude thus far. What about conservation of mass? What’s propelling its growth if it isn’t ingesting, like, stuff?!
• I will say, though, that while the movement of the alien is all jerky puppetry, the sculpting of it isn’t really any less gross/scary than the fancy CGI-assisted ones.
• I do really like how a lot of the action is the entire team working together--none of this running off with a giant machine gun without so much as a by-your-leave to the rest of the crew.
• ”Crew expendable.” Daaaaaaaaang.
• Oh, hey, a robot guy! They’ve become much less resilient after the David/Walter days.
• Aw, man, poor Parker and Lambert. They were so close to making it! I’mma pretend Ripley dragged Parker’s and Lambert’s unconscious-but-not-dead bodies into the shuttle with her.

Aliens, 29 May 2020, streamed via HBO Now
They didn’t think real hard about the title, did they?

• IS THIS A DREAM? DO MINE EYES DECEIVE ME? Someone finally used tech to scan an unknown and possibly dangerous area! For, like, a minute and maneuvered by hand, but at least it’s something.
• Wait, fifty-seven years?! And the cat made it? That’s...extremely good cryotech. Also, this board of directors or whatever is getting pretty snippy about a ship that they wrote off, like fifty years ago.
• I spent a goodly amount of time looking forward to all those bros dying in agony in the following two hours.
• They really, really wanted us to see the metaphor when they designed those guns, didn’t they? And ten thousand undergrads began writing their essays about how the queen is, like, a yonic signifier.
• They got ambushed, like, a dozen times, and yet they still don’t LOOK UP AND DOWN when they’re sweeping the corridors.
• NGL, I straight-up cackled when the queen came out of that elevator.
• Oh good, Ripley’s jaeger came back!
• I call 100% B.S. on Newt calling Ripley “Mommy.” You’re old enough to remember your actual mother, Newt! Don’t be a dick about it.
• I mean, the alien queen IS a yonic signifier, but there’s kind of a weird doubling where Ripley’s fight requires she act as both yonic and phallic signifiers, and in this essay I will

Alien3, 30 May 2020, streamed via HBO Now

• How is it that nobody has learned how to detect alien stowaways? Surely SOMEBODY has some idea? (Or they escape the main horde, get onto the shuttle and are, like, Okay, now a really BIG one is going to attack us, brace yourself.)
• I suppose one of the reasons they set this in a prison is so we can feel less sad when they die, but honestly, they’re not too different from the bros in Aliens. Also, I am 100% aware and aggravated that someone, somewhere, thought, Hey, you can’t be a Strong Female Character if you don’t at least get threatened with sexual assault.
• The director and cinematographer are really, really into intense close-ups on small patches of body parts as well as faces and it’s creepy.
• It’s kind of awful that Ripley didn’t explain about the aliens immediately. I mean, people tend to disbelieve her, but how hard is it to say, “There was an alien pathogen.” (Especially since, as shown in Prometheus and Covenant, they can actually be transmitted as microorganisms.) But also: You're the prison warden, and three of your inmates are killed--”diced”--in quick succession, and then the woman from the crashed ship where everybody mysteriously died says there’s a thing that might start killing everybody. MAYBE INVESTIGATE?
• So, like, WHY do the aliens have matryoshka mouths?
• Wow, that did NOT end like I thought it would. Though I salute the franchise commitment to its motto: NOBODY LIVES.

Alien Resurrection, 31 May 2020, streamed via HBO Now

• Ripley’s end in the last movie was a grace note lovely enough that I am sad this movie happened, honestly. But sequels cannot be denied, I guess.
• Super-powered Ripley is fun, on a meta level, and it must have been fun for Weaver to do the entire schtick, but in terms of narrative? Eh.
• There is so much male gaze happening here that I was kind of stunned for a while. Like, the previous movies did a lot of weird stuff with gender and sexuality, but at least we never had a scene of some poor woman’s ass for no reason connected to the narrative requirements.
• The aliens in this one are way less interesting-looking than previous ones, right? It’s as if they think covering them with extra goo and giving them people teeth will distract from the lack of work on the rest of the body.
• Honestly, I’d expect a little more organization in a military research facility. That base fell apart quicker than the prison did.
• Okay, the underwater scene is pretty great. (As with all filmed underwater scenes, everybody holds their breath about three times longer than an average human could.) It must have taken forever to film, though--that’s a huge set to put in a tank, plus you’ve got all the team from multiple angles, AND getting special effects, or whatever, right for the camera angles. And I legit gasped when the camera pulled back to show they were swimming right into the nest.
• Okay, the auton thing is kind of fascinating. Robots designing other robots? We’re getting singularity-adjacent here. Also: “I burned my modem; we all did.” I’d watch that movie.
• I wonder how gross it was to hug that alien?
• Did I laugh when they gave the reveal shot of the pregnant alien queen? Take a guess. Also, that’s not actually a positive evolution--birthing is way too inefficient. It puts the queen out of commission for a lengthy amount of time, and restricts the number of offspring to the limited size of the queen.
• WTF is up with skullface alien? That also seems like a poor choice--human skulls are not really built for biting the faces off things. And why does it need a tongue? Its digestive system is pretty hardy (I assume), so there’s no need for the alien to taste anything.
• Ripley really should have warned them that the alien is always hiding in the cargo bay. It’s not a proper escape unless they’re attacked by the alien in the cargo bay!

So yeah, I spent half of every one of these movies yelling at people for bad science, and the other half hiding behind a pillow until the squishy sound effects stop. Next up, the DC Extended Universe!