Alien: Resurrection - Special Edition

Despite being centred almost entirely around Sigourney Weaver, Alien: Resurrection registers as dashed off, even perfunctory. As a sequel it's a small-scale entry that repeats a lot of the hits but in a faltering, blubbery context, eventually proposing a massive course correction for the series that didn't actually end up going anywhere. Weaver plays Number 8, an imperfect clone of the Ellen Ripley who hurled herself into a lead furnace at the end of Alien³. This military-issue copy is, thanks to genetic tampering, a mutant. Reborn hundreds of years into the future, Eight is both physically and psychologically intertwined with the creature that once grew inside her - a human vessel that has overcome its infection and been irrecoverably changed in the process.

Eight then allows Weaver the opportunity to play a kind of alien empress, the mother of the majestic, pregnant menace at the centre of this sequel's malfunctioning space station. Disappointingly, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and screenwriter Joss Whedon never find the scenes or sequences that really tap into the odd, maternal energy that Weaver is broadcasting. Yes, Winona Ryder's neurotic human-trafficker Call does end up under Eight's wing but the connection is cursory. Similarly, the bond she has with her offspring is less about exploring a peculiar feeling of bereavement or the female dominated hierarchy of the alien race and more about finding a way for Eight to end up, unmolested, in the depths of a hive, witnessing the birth of an abomination.

Although Jeunet and cinematographer Darius Khondji find a variety of ways to keep the film's endless brass corridors visually interesting, the duo struggle when presented with ADI's sopping monsters. Mostly photographed as a mouth probing away at the camera, the special effects house obliterate all sense of detail by drowning the puppets in lubricants. Wider shots default to a CG model that not only exaggerates HR Giger's original bio-mechanoid to the point of parody but also blasts back every instance of light directed at it. The unholy ambulation seen in James Cameron's Aliens is abandoned too, arriving at a beast that moves like a massive instance of the scuttling insect seen in the opening of this fractionally longer Special Edition. The Newborn, Chris Cunningham's contribution to the xenomorph pantheon, fares worst of all; the Rubber Johnny director's diseased, tumescent concept art rendered here as kin to Pizza the Hutt from Spaceballs.

Scorn - SOMBRE TAPESTRY

Today's Inside Xbox event served up a quick look at Ebb Software's long gestating, bio-mechanical adventure game, Scorn. Presumed vapourware after an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign in 2014, Scorn is now locked in as an exclusive for Microsoft's next-gen system. Originally conceived as a Myst-style prod game influenced by the surrealist artworks of HR Giger and Zdzislaw Beksinski, the Series X version of Scorn promises shooting mechanics and landscapes lifted straight out of Hans Ruedi's airbrushed art books.

AVP: Alien vs Predator

AVP: Alien vs Predator's finest quality is that co-writer-director Paul WS Anderson has understood that one of the Alien series' key tensions is that women, no matter how accomplished they are, end up routinely ignored by their male colleagues. Like Ripley before her, Sanaa Lathan's Alexa Woods is the smartest, most capable person in the room and, just like Ripley, the men who buzz around her interpret her informed, credible guidance as dreary micromanagement designed to ruin their fun. Of course then Woods goes on to be the last human standing, surviving long after everybody else.

AVP stammers elsewhere. Anderson and accomplice Shane Salerno write everything shorthand, meaning character and detail are delivered in scenes that pivot on one-upmanship and zings. It's a shame the lower rating certificate that AVP aims for doesn't really support the profanity required to make these scenes bearable. For the most part, people in AVP are simply cogs in an efficient, genre literate machine that has a pressing need for victims. Hence everyone is deliberately underwritten in case we get too attached to them. The effect of this choice is a film full of aggressively disinteresting drones marching towards their evisceration.

Anderson and Salerno have a little fun with their cast's disposability, casting aside a half-dozen eligible men (and one woman) to anoint an adolescent Predator as the closest thing to a love interest for Alexa. The seven-foot tall big-game hunter even goes so far as to bashfully reveal his monstrous face to his new best friend. This moment would probably sing if the mask Amalgamated Dynamics delivered was lit and photographed to conceal its stuttering motors and waxy, synthetic hide. Likewise, suit actor Ian Whyte conveys very little of the elegant, androgynous determination that Kevin Peter Hall brought to Predator and Predator 2.

AVP's Predators are lumps, their cinched waists and barrel chests explicitly recalling the kind of simplistic, easily reproducible shapes you see in cheap supermarket action figures. The Aliens don't fair much better. Following on from their work on Alien: Resurrection, Amalgamated Dynamics once again render the title creature with elongated, insectile limbs and a rabid, bestial gait. The added screentime required to churn through actual fights scenes doesn't help, we're either stuck with ugly CG pouncing or prolonged glimpses that utterly expose the weightless, jittery rubber required to create the Alien's back-piping. We're a long way from Giger using repurposed medical grade bones and Rolls-Royce cooling tubes to arrive at something genuinely nightmarish.

Sci-Fi Revoltech #001 Alien and #016 Alien Warrior by Sabres21768

Prometheus

Conceptually, Prometheus is pretty wonderful. The lead dick of the Alien franchise's evil corporation hustles together an elite team of scientists to investigate a series of prehistoric cave paintings that point off into the heavens. After a couple of years of hyper-sleep, the team finds a planet spotted with unused Alien concept art, and a progenitor race of marble headed scumbags. Prometheus proposes a scenario equal parts Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods?, and Yoshiki Takaya's Bio Booster Armor Guyver battle manga. To wit: humanity is but an experimental building block in a chain of biomechanical monstrosities. It's an enticing proposition that organically feeds into the lifecycle shock established by Ridley Scott's first trip to the stars. Unfortunately this slither of excellence is buried in mulch.

Prometheus had a well documented dance with the American ratings board, pinballing back and forth between PG-13 and R certificates. With ratings, there's the idea that the difference between them is minor, amounting to little more than detailing. PG-13 affords you one 'fuck' and some bloodless pounding. Score an R and you can have as much sexualised swearing as you like, with a glut of dismemberment to match. This is wrong. Ratings damage at the conceptual stage, affecting tone and even structure. Despite the certificate Prometheus ended up with, it is clear that the film began life as a teenager friendly summer blockbuster. This isn't a film for adults. The mechanics are much too insulting. The characters, despite their apparently world beating scientific credentials, are buffoons. How else to explain a biologist who ignores the skull of an extraterrestrial astronaut to run around like a headless chicken? With two members of his crew stranded in an inhospitable murder pyramid, how might you expect the ship's captain to react when he gets a lifeform reading in their neighbourhood? Why, he'd laugh and slink off to put the moves on the nearest blonde of course. These aren't world class brains struggling through an existential horror, they're teenagers inclined to froth until danger becomes explicit. It's interstellar exploration as a drunken lark.

Despite Scott's rambling about sharing DNA, Prometheus doesn't remotely resemble Alien. That film posited a fairly believable situation in which a gang of space truckers utterly failed to cope with an aggressive first contact. The crew argued, the fought, and finally whimpered in the face of the insectile rapist that haunted their ship. The staff of the Prometheus are numb by comparison. No-one bothers to follow up on an episode in which one of the crew hijacks an executive surgery pod to abort the squid growing inside her. The doctors she beats senseless prior to this process don't even blink when she rocks up two scenes later clutching her stapled gut. They're too busy nursing a wildly unexpected plot development back to health. Everything in Prometheus is weightless. Rather than track one accidental infection and how it impacts on a close-knit group, the film juggles several contaminations, playing them like aces when they suspect the attention of their childish audience is starting to drift. There's no sense of tension or claustrophobia then, just witless downtime while we await the next creature attack or unheralded twist. Prometheus is a bit of a fumble. The unknowable, fossilised horrors of Alien repackaged as dull, meandering murderers in a film ordered like a Friday the 13th kill flick with sequel stings strung haphazardly throughout the credits.

Alien by Walter Simonson

Walter Simonson's take on Giger's Star Beast. For a complete look at Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson's adaptation of Alien for Heavy Metal, head over to Grantbridge Street & Other Misadventures.

Sci-Fi Revoltech Alien Warrior

Kaiyodo's latest addition to the heavily articulated Sci-Fi Revoltech action figure series is the Aliens re-draft of the xenomorph design.

Via

Alien

Between bonus gripes, a crew of grumpy space truckers stumble across what appears to be a distress signal. Following a traumatic landing, a small team of heavily dressed snoopers wander out to find the source, inadvertently bringing back an aggressive, mutating infection. The title character of Alien is a curious creation, worlds away from the huffing, invincible clods that typically clog up sci-fi anxiety yarns. Designed by surrealist painter HR Giger, and played by seven foot plus Bolaji Badejo, the alien is a bio-mechanical agitator blessed with snaking limbs and a camouflage naturally attuned to filthy, industrial spaces. At one point the science officer of this besieged ship categorises the beast as the son of the astronaut it births from. This throwaway line frames the monster in the most interesting way: the creature is not wholly alien, it is instead a hybrid that has calibrated itself to human dimensions.

As if to underline the point, the creature even seems to operate with the basic, procreational instincts of a prehistoric hunter gatherer. It's territorial, instantly brutalising all the male crew members it encounters while, conversely, displaying an obvious fascination with the females. The Alien pores over the women, savouring its proximity to them. Lambert's death in particular seems to be about a grim kind of enchantment. The androgynous alien looms over the shrinking Navigator, excitedly hooking its stinger tail between her legs. Desperate, but apparently unable to rape her, the alien instead skewers its intended off-screen. This strange savagery attracts a sense of fraternity in Ian Holm's pre-programmed snitch. Ash is another bio-mechanoid, this time designed by humans and acting in secret on behalf of amoral, corporate calculations. When Sigourney Weaver's interim leader Ripley gets wind of the crew's company mandated expendability, Ash attacks her with a rolled-up porno magazine, attempting to force it down her throat. Like the Alien, Ash is another neutered half-man scrambling for a penis substitute. This is the horror in Ridley Scott's film. Death and consumption seem like secondary concerns when you're being considered by a violent, extraterrestrial sexuality.

AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem

Researching this atrocity, I was struck by one fact: it isn't the special effects creators of each creature that gets continued credit, it's the writers who worked on the original films. Whilst I have no problem with writers getting their due - neither series would exist if those people hadn't got their think on - it just seems an ethical dereliction to not name HR Giger as the creator of the Alien, nor Stan Winston as the Predator's.

Both species are broad ideas on the page, given fantastical, expressive life by their respective designs. Giger crafted an exoskeleton penis that wandered and loomed in its space-nest; Winston was given a brief that asked for a dog-man, instead he turned in an enormous Masai with dreadlocks and mandibles. The blueprints for both monsters were so strong that immediate sequels only sought to embellish them. In Aliens James Cameron and Stan Winston crossed the Giger form with a Black Widow spider, and gave us the Alien Queen. For Predator 2, Winston simply worked up some gee-whizz gadgets and gave the intergalactic hunter a steeper forehead.

AVPR: Aliens vs Predator 2 - Requiem doesn't turn in any radical reworkings of either creature: the Alien looks to be a mish-mash of the warrior suit from Cameron's film, and Alien Resurrection's lanky clones. Meanwhile, the Predator seems to be directly inherited from LA 1997. The directors, who choose to be credited as The Brothers Strause, don't appear to have any real interest in either monster, or their visual aesthetic.

Apart from a few mime sequences framed from a Predator viewpoint, the majority of this film is made up of scenes that establish the boring slasher prey; cut-out nobodies who hate their jobs and are bullied by stock jocks. These phantoms burn screen-time. When it does remember to return to the beasts, the film is slick with an almost impenetrable darkness. Both monsters are shot in tight, geography denying close-up. There's a presumption that they're clashing, but you can't be quite sure.

Experimentation is reserved for this instalment's big idea - a cross-pollination. The dreadfully named Predalien skulks about the place abusing barely established women and leading its pack of lobotomised insects. The Predator DNA splice has created a life-cycle defying super stud who can vomit up embryonic offspring. All the better to cram in as many targets as possible. It's worth noting that said children do not retain any of the Predalien's features, mediocre human alignment wins out there.

AVPR is a depressingly minor addition to either saga. The alien comes off worse, an Old God bio-weapon reduced to a sewer skulking bottom feeder. The Predator is at least allowed a baffling, bureaucratic mindset - dispatched to Earth on a clean-up mission, the hunter liberally applies a blue gunk to any shred of xenomorph evidence, instantly dissolving it. When a community cop stumbles across this cosmic clean-up operation does the Predator attempt to conceal his presence? Nope. He skins and maims the bystander, hanging up what's left for others to find. You get where he's coming from though. You've got to find joy in your work.