Pictured here: young Noah, who for some reason shares a fascination with Alien and Aliens with my own youngest creature. Called Ronia, she has red hair and blue eyes, which I think is the rarest phenotype. Anyway! These youths could not be more different, but they are absolutely united on this: Alien and Aliens ball hard. That is to say, they ball out of control.
They used to kick it when I was over at Chez Gribb, but they both hit a point at about eleven where they just sorta shuffled around each other and made little sounds in their throat. It just now occurs to me that there might have been a crush situation. Not sure why that took so long. Oh, yeah; That's definitely what it was. Ha! Oh, man.
But there is something about these movies that is just… lost. Some index might be that when the new director set about making Alien: Romulus, he just went back to the old drawings and started from there. But we don't really have a character like Ellen Ripley in our modern heroic pantheon, and I think that alongside crafty things like practical effects and a strangely elite team drawn from the ruins of earlier films it may be that we forgot how?
The way I tried to explain the movie to a friend of Ronia's yesterday was… Hm. It just occurs to me that I might be the kind of weird neighborhood dad people talk about. But what I said was this: these are, in fact, horror movies. The only two that exist, I mean. But the Xenomorph is bad for all of the obvious reasons. Even their blood is dangerous! Their life cycle is the stuff of nightmares. But things like the boardroom scene in the second film establish the real substrate underneath it: what people do to each other is the material source of the horror. That's where it comes from, that's what it bubbles up and around, up to your neck. Ripley even calls it out! It's a full-throated anti-corporate barrage, fired by one of the best heroes science fiction has ever seen.
(CW)TB out.
