On the origin of the xenomorph

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/05/2017 (3351 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As the director of both Alien and Blade Runner, director Ridley Scott is surely one of the most influential directors of science fiction ever to walk this Earth.

For proof, consider his legacy in 2017: Blade Runner 2049, a long-gestating sequel, is coming out later this year, a full 35 years after the release of the original Blade Runner. Alien: Covenant comes an astonishing 38 years after Scott unleashed his space horror film Alien on an unsuspecting sci-fi public who mistakenly assumed the movie would be a darker variant of George Lucas’s Star Wars, which debuted two years earlier, to the day.

It wasn’t. The movie was big, yet claustrophobic, ambitious in its concept, gloriously gothic in its unprecedented design and absolutely primal in its terror.

Unlike Blade Runner, Alien spawned an outright franchise. Interestingly, each sequel took a cue from the xenomorph of the title, in that the movies assumed different manifestations each time out.

With that in mind, here’s a look at the movies that led to Ridley Scott taking the helm of the official prequel to Alien. If you haven’t seen these movies, there will be spoilers.

 

Alien (1979)

The plot is simple. On a space trucking mission, the crew of the cargo ship Nostromo intercept a “distress signal” from another planet, which contractually warrants an investigation. The crew discover a nest of alien eggs, one of which hatches to launch itself at the face of Kane (John Hurt), who is ultimately impregnated with a bouncing, chest-bursting baby xenomorph, which grows quickly and sets about eliminating all the other crew members. Distinguishing herself among the alien fodder is Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), who overcomes treachery from within the crew (in the form of secret android Ash played by Ian Holm) to jettison herself from the ship with her fellow survivor, a cat named Jones.

Simple as it may be, the film is rich with disturbing biological imagery, thanks in part to genius artist HR Giger’s design elements, which include a phallic-headed monster and whole sets that resemble internal physiology. Set against that fantastic backdrop, the film presented characters that were painstakingly average, blue-collar human beings.

If the movie can be said to have a theme, it is that biology is often vicious, even — or especially — in the context of future space exploration.

 

Aliens (1986)

Wisely, sequel director James Cameron didn’t even try to match Alien as a horror film. He conceived of Aliens as an action-horror hybrid in which Ripley, released from decades-long cryo-sleep, is awakened to return to the planet of her nightmares to advise a military expedition sent to investigate why a colony of settlers has disappeared.

Instead of one alien, there’s dozens. The most advanced military technology proves increasingly inadequate as the xenomorphs reduce the human numbers, while Ripley adopts a small orphaned survivor in a setup to the mother of all maternal battles between Ripley and the Alien Queen.

One of the all-time great sequels, Aliens did just what a good Part Two should do: expand and enrich the world of its predecessor.

 

Alien 3 (1992)

Following a contrarian, punk sensibility, director David Fincher not only killed off a couple of key survivors of Aliens, he spends the whole of this third episode putting poor Ripley through hell on a prison planet before killing her too. A rushed script notwithstanding, Alien 3 has its defenders of its harsh flavour and relentlessly ugly esthetic, which included shaving Weaver’s head. Mostly, it made things nearly impossible for the possibility of a Sigourney Weaver-starring sequel. Yet …

 

Alien Resurrection (1997)

Screenwriter Josh Whedon devised a way for Ripley to return… as a clone. A military-industrial offshoot of Weyland Utani has been trying to replicate the creature, and one of its creations is a dangerous, predatory variation of Ripley who, nevertheless ends up helping a few sympathetic humans to eliminate the cloned threat before it lands on earth.

Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet invests the film with a certain dark humour, and actually creates some weirdly beautiful tableaus, in contrast to the unrelenting ugliness of Alien 3. And while the film goes to extreme lengths to justify Weaver’s participation, the grotesque spectacle of scientists playing God does actually tie the movie to its next instalment.

 

Alien Vs. Predator (2004)/AVP 2: Requiem (2007)

Neither of these films qualify as the “next instalment.” Both films are tie-ins with 20th Century Fox’s Predator series, basically an excuse to pit monsters against each other. As far as advancing the xenomorph universe, both films contribute little. Consider them the Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island of Alien movies.

 

Prometheus (2012)

Ridley Scott tended to shrug off overly analytical interpretations of Alien, insisting his intent was just to scare the audience’s collective pants off. But in Prometheus, an unofficial prequel to Alien, Scott attacks bigger, more complex themes having to do with creation. The film’s heroine, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), is on a mission to find a race of “Engineers” she believes to be responsible for human life. Alas, the Engineers are responsible for creating the xenomorphs and prove to be every bit as vulnerable as humans. By the end of the film, Shaw and the severed head of the malevolent android David (Michael Fassbender) are headed to the home planet of the Engineers to get some answers.

 

Alien Covenant takes place on that very planet, visited by a collection of space pioneers looking to lay down roots on a new world.

Suffice it to say: It’s going to get ugly.

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing