Sunday, November 29, 2020

MOVIE REVIEW: ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

 Directed by John Carpenter

Produced by Debra Hill and Larry Franco

Director of Photography Dean Cundey

Production Designer Joe Alves

Editor Todd Ramsay

Music by John Carpenter and Alan Howarth

Written by John Carpenter and NIck Castle

Pervasive Atmosphere of Cool Cynicism by Post-Watergate Disillusionment and Cannabis


Starring

St. Louis as Manhattan


Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken

Dick Warlock as Stunt Plissken

Ernest Borgnine as Cabbie

Season Hubley as Girl in Chock Full O’Nuts

Adrienne Barbeau as Maggie

Harry Dean Stanton as Brain

Joe Unger as the Mysterious Taylor


Donald Pleasence as President

Lee Van Cleef as Hauk

Charles Cyphers as Secretary of State

Tom Atkins as Rehme

John Strobel as Cronenberg


Isaac Hayes as the Duke

Frank Doubleday as Romero

Ox Baker as Slag


Nancy Stephens as Stewardess


Buck Flower as Other President



“We left our country for our country’s good.”

-attributed to George Barrington, Australian pioneer, 1802


“If you love someone, set them free; if they come home, set them on fire.”

-George Carlin, Brain Droppings (1997)


Review by William D. Tucker. 


Did you know that in the 1990s, Manhattan was turned into a huge penal colony? 

That’s one of the things you learn when you watch Escape From New York


You see, America became a police state either because people started committing too many crimes and acting all crazy, or-what’s more likely-the government decided to criminalize most anything you could think of: drugs, disloyalty, birth control, abortion, foul language, public assemblies,  sex before marriage, non-Christian religion, atheism, sex during marriage, unions, sex after marriage, non-incumbent political parties-


I mean, cigarettes are still legal. That’s for sure. You get to see some throwback smoking-on-camera in this one. I bet Tom Snyder loved this flick. I’m even willing to bet that somewhere inside retro-future Manhattan, Snyder’s still hosting his show. Got to be. 


Of course, I’m just speculating about everything other than the cigarettes, because all we’re told is that the crime rate rose 400% in 1988, which sounds to me more like they just radically increased the number of things you could get sent up for, as opposed to a legit breakdown of the social order necessitating some kind of a police intervention. But maybe I’m wrong. I wasn’t there, you know. Yes, I was alive in 1988, technically, but I was living in a different reality than Escape From New York. I think. 


Air Force One is hijacked by a radical communist militant who has disguised herself as a stewardess, and this lady crashes the plane into one of the many darkened skyscrapers on Manhattan. The stewardess reads off a manifesto stating that she is crashing the plane into the Manhattan penal colony because she thinks the American government is a racist police state and that the figurehead of that police state-the President, natch-should be consigned to the very hell on earth he has constructed. Fair enough. 


Once again, we are reminded of just how easy cuddly ol’ Tricky Dick Nixon got off when we take the long view of history.  (To be fair what’s a few sideshow bombings of Cambodia, really, when you get down to it? It’s fine, it’s fine. I’m sure Jesus forgave Nixon all his sins before tossing him into the deepest pit of hell. It’s so fuckin’ fine. I could shit.)


Now, there is one big problem with 86ing the President under these circumstances. Apparently, he was en route to a three-way peace summit with China and Russia to perhaps end an ongoing World War III type of situation happening waaaay in the background of this modestly budgeted-but resourceful and imaginative-film. If the President can’t make his commitment to appear at this summit, then, well, the war might escalate. Maybe China or Russia or both will perceive America as a place where the culture and the government are in total free fall, and try to use that to their advantage. Remember, in politics, perception is everything. If your enemy perceives you as weak, as out-of-control, maybe they’ll pitch a nuke your way. See if you really are packin’ some kind of Raygun Ronnie Reagan orbital defense system. Maybe you’re nothing but a stuffed suit of clothes. Not the best look for Baldy Ol’ Eagleland. 


Manhattan, in the movie reality, is a desperate place. The electricity’s been cut off. A wall has been built around the island. All the rivers and canals have been mined. There’s a completely militarized National Police Force that patrols the penal colony with attack helicopters equipped with rockets and machine guns. And this is where all the criminals end up-everybody’s here. No one’s been left out. Murderers. Rapists. Thieves. Counterfeiters. Embezzlers. Dissidents. The wrongly accused. The sick. The mentally ill. People who couldn’t pay their rent. Women who shot their rapists. Anybody who isn’t strictly heterosexual or cis-gendered. Income tax evaders. Income tax protesters. Narco-entrepreneurs. People who’ve been unemployed for too long. East coast intellectual elites. Mild critics of the government. Strident critics of the government. People who used to be in the government prior to the current administration. The loyal opposition. Civil rights activists. War protesters. And they’re all left to fend for themselves, to make the best of a tough situation. As Jaimie Lee Curtis tells us in voice over, “There are no guards. Only the prisoners and the worlds they create.” 


The prisoners of Manhattan have figured out ways to kludge steam engines and mini-oil refineries out of the cars and infrastructure left behind from before the lockdown. Rival gangs and tribes have piled up junkers to form little Berlin Walls between the different ad hoc power blocs. They’ve got shivs and baseball bats with nails driven through the heads and garbage can lid shields and  Molotov cocktails-oh, yes! The DIY spirit is truly ascendent despite the total lack of government. Maybe it’s because of the lack of government. Hard to figure. 


This new Manhattan is a fearsome place, tho’-you won’t catch me going there voluntarily. You’ve got hordes of people living in the sewers and the subways who’ve gone not just feral-but full-on cannibal. They emerge in the dead of night to raid medical supplies, building materials, and meat. People meat. Just don’t eat the brains. You don’t want to fuck with rogue prions, now. Unless you’ve gone full zombie. In that case, eat your fill. 


There’s no government, but there is royalty: the Duke of New York played with a sullen, creepy intensity by Isaac Hayes. I’m not sure, but I think the Duke is just one warlord among many in Manhattan. We don’t get any official back story on the Duke, but he has adorned himself with a sort of community theater looking Napoleonic outfit. In my head canon, I imagine him as a guy who came to Manhattan scared out of his mind, and so he holed up in some abandoned apartment where all he had was a biography of Napoleon. This became his self-help regimen: he imagined himself as a great conqueror, and so he found the will to carve out his own piece of hell. 


The President survives the plane crash, and is kidnapped by the Duke. A group of national cops goes on a commando mission to get the President back, but they are warned off by the Duke’s Number One Guy: a freaky-deaky dude named Romero, who seems to have fashioned himself into a kind of punk rock Nosferatu. Remember, it’s just the prisoners and the worlds they have created, so maybe that’s a way of saying that each inmate has resorted to living in their heads . . . until their dark dreams have broken loose-no doubt a liberation for some, and a nightmare for others. 


Romero definitely seems to be in his element. Here’s some more gratuitous head canon: tho’ the movie predates the advent of widespread live action role playing, maybe in the parallel timeline a kind of analogue of those vampire and werewolf LARP games evolved. Romero could’ve been a LARPer, pre-lockdown, and now he’s living his best life inside the new Manhattan. 


Romero tells the super-pigs to fuck off, and shows them a finger sliced off the President’s hand bearing a ring with the Presidential seal. Super-pigs do the backdown. The President’s now in the clutches of the Duke and his people. 


The Police Commissioner of Manhattan-a Bob Hauk-decides that taking the island by main force will just end up with a dead President, and so he turns to super-badass motherfucker Snake Plissken-conveniently in pre-processing for transfer to the penal colony on charges of armed bank robbery-to execute a solo penetration mission and rescue the nine-fingered chief executive. Snake isn’t just a violent criminal. Snake’s ex-special forces, a master of killing people, breaking shit, and survival under hellish circumstances.  He ran some kind of heavy shit down in Leningrad. 


Hauk reads off Snake’s permanent record, and we find out that ‘S.D. Plisskin’ is the dude’s government name. Snake’s the name he’s given himself. Snake also wears an eyepatch. I like to think Snake carved out his own eye, just so he could keep everything two-dimensional, but I’m the only one who thinks that. Hauk dangles a full pardon for all crimes committed on US soil if Snake sneaks into Manhattan and extracts the President. Hauk has Snake by the balls. Snake takes the job.  


So much of this movie is about a man on a mission. Snake has his objectives laid out, he even has a much pared-down version of those Q-sequences in the 007 movies, where all his gadgets and weapons are set out before him while Tom Atkins exposits the basic rules of the DIY tribes of the new Manhattan. Snake gets a big watch with a countdown to doomsday clock. He has a walkie-talkie so he can stay in contact with mission control. He gets a submachine gun. I caught some ninja stars on the equipment table on the rewind. Snake’s bringing some serious party favors. 


Hauk doesn’t trust Snake, nor should he. So, in his hard-boiled wisdom, he has a doctor inject our hero with a pair of tiny explosive devices that slowly dissolve in the bloodstream until their lethal cores are exposed and cause fatal internal hemorrhaging. What’s interesting about this scene is that it is not clear that Hauk was going to tell Snake the truth. First, he flat out lies to Snake telling him he’s about to get some kind of powerful antibiotic that will protect him from the unsanitary environment of the new Manhattan. But then the doctor goes off program and insists that Hauk tell Snake the truth. This is a moment-maybe one of the few-where somebody actively resists some manifestation of the corrupt American government-Police Commissioner Hauk is the avatar of corruption in this instance-and tries to operate according to a credible ethical code. Yes, the doctor has already violated his hippocratic oath to do no harm-but he owns up to his crime to the degree that he can. I’m always struck by the doctor’s tiny act of resistance. It’s something. 


Once Snake finds his way to Manhattan, we get a lot of impressively wide shots where our hero wanders in the middleground of elaborately bombed-out areas of the big bad city while distant figures move furtively in the deep background. One shot even glides past a listless wino intrusively breaking into the foreground of the shot as he stares at the impressive action figure of a man that is Snake as he stalks towards the background to get a look at the burning wreckage of Air Force One. 


Another shot stretches out ahead of us with jealous green streetlights-somebody’s hooked up to some rogue juice-as Snake stalks deeper into the metropolitan labyrinth. 


And the deeper in we get, the more the new Manhattan seems to become a kind of repository for eclectic bits of cinematic fantasy: 


A drag show where the band consists of some bedraggled cowboys who look like they escaped from the legendarily dysfunctional set of Heaven’s Gate; which is the fire, and which the frying pan, eh?


Adrienne Barbeau looking like a seductive enchantress as she descends the stairs into a subterranean antechamber to a bizarre hybrid of library and oil refinery bearing a proper burning torch as though she were in the depths of Frankenstein’s castle. 


We even get a Karnov-looking pro-wrastler in the middle of a smoky indoor gladiatorial arena. 


Westerns. Gothic horror. Lethal bloodsport. DIY oil rigs in the middle of libraries. There’s something for everybody in the new Manhattan. 


(I found myself thinking, “Maybe the American police state has become so repressive, because it has no way of incorporating the rebellious and fanciful side of the collective human psyche. It has to partition it off into a very harsh place where it’ll fester and grow and take its own path. Maybe China and Russia and the White House will come to regret the loss of the authentically human spark and endeavor to play at some proxy wars and start hustling in weapons and big ideological promises and trash bags full of cash-call it Manhattan-stan-in order to claw back what they were once so eager to excise from the body politic. In the end, everybody still wants to be in New York . . .”)


Now, I should remind you-remind myself-that so much is left unsaid in this movie. All the background details are just that-background. The main action is Snake and his mission, but you can well see how you could derive a whole tabletop RPG sourcebook by scanning its ninety-something minutes over and over. You may already be aware that Snake Plisskin was the inspiration for the video game character Solid Snake in those Metal Gear and Metal Gear Solid games. Hideo Kojima-the former creative lead behind everything Metal Gear-has claimed that Escape From New York  was a big influence-although I think Kojima appropriated more material from the much-maligned Escape From L.A., if you look into it.


Snake is the perfect video game protagonist: the dude can move, he can fight, he can pitch a blade into a dude’s skull, he knows how to shoot, he can climb, he can jump, and he has just enough stripped down humanity to fill up a few cutscenes if you need some of those. Kojima’s knockoff version is way chattier, and, frankly, way more of a normie. The more I think about it,  Solid Snake strikes me as some fucking dad cosplaying as an actual tough guy. Solid Snake seems to like people, and he seems to want people to like him. Snake Plisskin’s fuck dispenser broke down long ago.


And yet . . . Snake does start to get it by the end of his mission. It may not be enough to save the world. It’s barely enough to save himself. But he does start to see the world just a tiny bit beyond his own narrow survival trip.


When given the chance to speak to the President, Snake asks him what he thinks about the fact that lots of people have died as part of the rescue mission. It’s hard to know for sure, but Snake seems to be asking about all the dead, friend and foe alike, since all the people who’ve been shipped to the new Manhattan have basically been forced into a desperate war of all-against-all by a totalitarian regime. Snake isn’t really mad at the people he’s been obliged to kill in order to achieve his mission. He’s mad at the overall perma-fucked reality he finds himself fighting to survive. 


And Snake gets an answer.


It’s a shitty answer, but he gets it.


Be happy you get even that. 

 

As with a lot of fantasy settings, the new Manhattan seems like a fun place to go crazy for a few days, but you wouldn’t want to actually live or die there. 


Or maybe you would. 


Unlike present-day Manhattan, you could probably afford the rent. 


That’s for goddamn sure. 


Wednesday, November 25, 2020

About that blu-ray player I purchased in 2003 . . .

 . . .of course, it began in the box as a cheapshit, off-brand DVD player, but I always believed it could be whatever it wanted to be.

It just needed discipline. 

So, right outta the box, I kicked its ass. I didn't coddle that DVD player. I threw it against the wall. I dunked it in a bucket of water. I taught it strength. 

And when it was 'broken,' when its 'warranty and terms of service' had been 'violated,' and I'd put a disc in and all it did was click and throw up that error screen-

Do you know what I did?  

I kicked its ass some more.

I made that player understand the total, absolute truth : 

That you gotta be tough in this life of war eternal. 

And sure enough, that DVD player came back online with extra functionality even.

Backwards compatibility with VHS, Betamax, Laserdisc-it even manifested cartridge slots for Atari 2600, NES, SNES, Game Boy, and SEGA Genesis. 

By early 2004, I had full blu-ray capability-there weren't even any blu-rays yet-you want to talk about early adopters. Shit. My DVD player was positively prophetic. 

I kicked its ass some more-soon, I could play PS2, 3, 4, 5, and Xbox. 

Now, I got 69K divine lossless output-that's real-time self-correction entertainment prolepsis-basically, it's kicking MY ass, now, okay. It knows me better than I know myself. It tells me what movies to watch via direct microwave induction of my brain jelly. Sometimes it just creates new movies using psionic phantasia protocols. Other times, it opens my tray and puts a blu-ray in me.

And my output is pristine, but with some signal loss.

I just gotta get my ass kicked some more, you know.

Get my ass kicked enough.

The path of strength-where else you wanna be walking? 

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Love is dead to me . . .

 . . . because a root beer shell has hardened my heart.

Sunday, November 22, 2020

MOVIE REVIEW: OUTLAND (1981)

 Written and Directed by Peter Hyams

Special Effects John Stears

Special Optical Effects Supervisor Roy Field

Production Designer Philip Harrison

Art Director Malcolm Middleton

Costume Designer John Mollo

Make-Up Peter Robb-King

Director of Photography Stephen Goldblatt

Head of Video Department Richard Hewitt

Editor Suart Baird

Produced by Richard A. Roth

Music by Jerry Goldsmith

Leisure Club Music Produced and Composed by Richard Rudolph and Michael Boddicker and performed by Ganymede


Starring 

Sean Connery

Frances Sternhagen

Peter Boyle

James B. Sikking




“It figures. It’s all happened too sudden. People gotta talk themselves into law and order before they do anything about it. Maybe because down deep they don’t care. They just don’t care.”

-Lon Chaney, ex-Wolf Man, former Jr., in High Noon (1952)


“Never send a human to do a machine’s job.”

-Agent Smith in The Matrix (1999)



Review by William D. Tucker.


The Company is back. Kinda. I’m talking about the Company referred to in the  1979 film Alien, and, well, they’re up to their old tricks of exploiting workers’ desire for wealth and adventure out on the frontiers of space. This time the setting is a harsh, dystopian mining colony on Io, a moon of Jupiter. The colony proper comes across on screen as a  warren of cage-like capsule bedrooms and spartan apartments alleviated by a laser light titty bar, some wall tennis courts, a bleak cafeteria, video golf for the hardcore assholes, and legalized prostitution. 


Workers have been behaving erratically in statistically significant numbers: suicides, assaults, murders, all seemingly coming about due to the extreme psychological stress of working in an ugly, depressing, dehumanizing environment. A guy takes off his spacesuit helmet while on a moon surface worksite. Another guy enters an airlock with no suit, just regular clothes, and a cigarette behind his ear. Guess he was going out for a smoke. Sex workers are reporting injuries due to assaults, rapes, and beatings in higher than normal numbers. The Io colony is not a happy place. 


Head explosions are a thing in this movie. Caused by explosive decompression. Which is not scientifically accurate. I dunno, maybe there’s something weird about the way the pressurized atmospheric environments interact with the monumental gravitational force exerted by Jupiter? Eh? (Shrug) I never been to Jupiter, okay, so I can’t speak about it from direct experience. Of course, the movie follows a theme of ‘people under pressure’ which is to some degree literal, but also metaphorical. So, I don’t know, maybe the various head explosions are meant to be taken, um, not so literally? Look, if you’re a stickler for scientific accuracy, you’re probably gonna laugh at those bits, so that’s not super-terrible. It’s kinda fun in a sicko sort of way.  


On top of everything else at the Io colony-the suicides, the murders, the brutalizations, the sexual violence-on top of all of it . . . there are fucking cops on the moon of Jupiter. That’s right. LIke they needed that as a cherry to lord it over the turd cake. Not just regular cops, either-space marshals. And who is the Number One Space Marshal on Io? Sean Connery, of course. 


But this isn’t 007 Connery. This is Connery when he was in his real prime as an actor. When he was older, and when the roles had nuances worth digging into. A lot of people like to say, “Oh, Connery was the best Bond. He was the best as 007!” And, you know, sure. You can say that. But if you actually look back at those Connery Bonds, I think you’ll see he was at his best during moments of absurdist comedy. The look on his face when a woman tells him her name is Pussy Galore in Goldfinger. It’s the same look he has on his face when he shows up  dressed to the nines at a sleazy casino full of cowboys in leisure suits in Reno in Diamonds Are Forever. Connery mastered deadpan comedy beats as 007. But I don’t think he really came into his own as a dramatic actor until much later in his career. 


In Outland Connery’s marshal character is very much inspired by Gary Cooper’s beleaguered lawman in High Noon, as he realizes that the entire system of the lunar mining colony runs on greed, corruption, and the murder of anybody who fights the extractive-capitalist status quo. Gary Cooper gets deserted by the entire town of Hadleyville. Sean Connery stands alone on the moon of Jupiter. Harsh realm, my dude, harsh realm. 


Like Alien, Outland is a highly inductive piece of film, assembling a wealth of fascinating science fiction world-building details that eventually submit to the grand deduction of the total fuckedness of existence under no limits gangster capitalism. The Company has constructed the perfect system that can function no matter the misery and waste it generates in volumetric quantites. 


But there are moments where the inhuman perfection glitches:


-an assassin using a futuristic infrared scope botches his shot when sweat gets in his eye;


-the greedy corporate supervisor played by Peter Boyle as a version of his maniacal character from Joe-think of him as ‘Joe made good’-playing video golf. Just like a proper all-American oligarchic asshole would;


-Sean Connery and his corrupt subordiante James B. Sikking slamming tennis balls against a slab of what looks like the Berlin Wall to pass the time, and avoid confronting their growing rift directly;


-Connery wields a sawed-off shotgun because buckshot scatters, and that’s safer than a rifled shell which would drill holes through the walls of the pressurized space colony and thus cause everyone’s head to exlode . . . but I think we can all agree: buckshot or shell, let’s not go firing off guns inside space colonies or space ships, okay? Glad we all agree . . .


-the fact that Connery actually engages in some detailed detective work, aided and abetted by Frances Sternhagen’s ornery moon doctor-how much actual sleuthing happened in 1982’s Blade Runner, eh? Yup. Outland, tho’ mostly forgotten by pop culture, is a better police procedural future investigation than the 1982 world-building trendsetter.


Speaking of forgotten movies: my legitimate Warner Brothers DVD copy which I bought for $5+applicable sales tax some, I dunno, ten or eleven years ago? It has the video quality of a bootleg VHS rip. Technically, it’s in letterbox-not the ‘enhanced for widescreen TVs’ lies printed on the insert paper on the inside of the plastic sleeve-which means you can watch it in its proper aspect ratio but it’s smaller on the screen than it should be. This kinda sucks . . . but it is amusing that I can have the thrill of watching what feels like a bootleg VHS-perhaps purchased through a late-1990s Luminous Film Works catalog of gray market reduplications-from a ‘legitimate’ home media release.


It’s the fuckin’ Company, man.


You just can’t win.


Friday, November 20, 2020

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEW #4B: CASTLEVANIA III: DRACULA'S CURSE (1989)


D.I.S.: Dracula Invasion System

Yoke the iconic image of Death-the Grim Reaper-to your unholy desires

This figure is current in the collective imagination of humanity 

Deploy the undead

All the graveyards in the land are full of conscripts-and-saboteurs-to-be

Put ‘em to work: skeletons, zombies, ghosts, monsters manifesting out of some blood-soaked battlefield past, enraged nature spirits taking the form of outsized swamp critters,  

the Dracula Invasion System shows how to employ a rigorous metaphysical logos to call forth beasts of mythos

reshape the land into ruthless gauntlets of traps and strenuous stair-climbs and asshole-clenching leaps-over-deadly-voids

it’s not just about your people in the field

it’s about total dominance of the landscape

which you must make hallucinatory at key moments

suddenly the blighted towns and forests give way to Atlantean ruins

the glories of yore beguile, perhaps things are not so bad, it could even be the Golden Age come again-

-this is the mindfuck you put onto Enemy

with the Dracula Invasion System

as this or that Protagonist Aspirant stumbles dreamily through your custom trip

now sic the fish people and the dragons and loose the flooding waters

break the will-to-resist

with overwhelming illusions

of total battlespace dominance

With

D.I.S.

Dracula Invasion System

-November 2020


Wednesday, November 18, 2020

MOVIE REVIEW: ALIEN (1979)

 Directed by Ridley Scott

Jones trained by Animals Unlimited

Alien design by H.R. Giger

Alien head effects by Carlo Rambaldi

Special Effects Supervisors Brian Johnson and Nick Allder

Concept Artist Ron Cobb

Production Designer Michael Seymour

Art Directors Les Dilley and Roger Christian

Screenplay by Dan O’Bannon

Story by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett

Director of Photography Derek Vanlint

Edited by Terry Rawlings

Executive Producer Ronald Shusett

Produced by Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hill

Music by Jerry Goldsmith


Starring

Sigourney Weaver as Ripley

Yaphet Kotto as Parker

Tom Skerritt as Dallas

Ian Holm as Ash

Veronica Cartwright as Lambert

Harry Dean Stanton as Brett

John Hurt as Kane

Bolaji Badejo as the alien

Helen Horton as the voice of Mother

Jones is Jones


...


“Pathetic earthlings, hurling your bodies out into the void without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you’d known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would have hidden from it in terror.”

-Emperor Ming the Merciless, Ruler of the Universe in Flash Gordon (1980)



Review by William D. Tucker.


In the future, being an intergalactic space traveller is just another shit-ass fuckin’ job. You’re basically an extension of an artificially intelligent space ship-the whole goddamn operation could run without any all-too-human bags of meat, couldn’t it? The only reason why you’re there is politics and economics: labor negotiations to ensure jobs for highly evolved primates inside the hyper-rationalized, mostly autonomous ultra-tech resource extraction industries of whatever distant century within which Alien takes place. 


The space ship is the Nostromo, a vast and ugly, yet star-worthy, mobile ore extractor, refinery, and transport vessel, which visually evokes a dystopian devolution of Cloud City from The Empire Strikes Back. When we first see the Nostromo it’s in visual contrast to a huge, Saturn-like planet with impressive rings of space rocks, and all this measured against the pitiless void of space. We eventually go inside the Nostromo, and it is so dense with Millenium Falcon-esque run-down retro-future details that, if you’re watching this at home-as opposed to a COVID-19 superspreader theater-you’ll want to pause and play back a lot of the scenes after you watch it through once without stopping, just to try to suss out what all the gadgets and junk are supposed to be:


-robot heads that seem to pilot the craft whilst the human crew are locked in cryogenic hypersleep-those fuckin’ robo-heads always creep me out, as they seem to be sending and receiving some kind of machine language, which you know is bad, right? When the machines are talking to each other when no humans are around . . .


-what is that-is that an elephant key chain hanging on someone’s astro-navigation monitor? Is that Dumbo? Someone adding a little kitschy human flair to their work station?


-smooth glide, stalkery camera maneuvers combined with Jerry Goldsmith’s eerie score give us the sense that the Nostromo is haunted by some unseen, pervasive evil presence-which would be capitalism, of course-BUT, if you mute the sound and watch it again, it’s almost like a virtual tour of some second hand space craft. Try before you buy.


-and then we get to the hypersleep bed-pods. The lids open. John Hurt slowly sits up, awakening from a no doubt years-long slumber. He’s so pale and withered looking. Yet he has a kind of anguished Zen about him, as though he is resigned to his dehumanizing fate as a disposable cog in the overall corporate machine. A quintessentially John Hurt moment-see also 1984. 


-and soon the rest of the crew is awake, and gathered around the mess table, eating a variety of vaccuum-packed self-heating meals. You’ve got the alert and by-the-book science officer Ian Holm, who’ll surely dole out plenty of technobabble and vital exposition as the movie chugs along. You have chief engineer Yaphet Kotto who brings up the “bonus situation” on behalf of himself and his fellow below-the-line engineer Harry Dean Stanton. Tom Skerritt as the laconic hard-on of a captain tells him everybody gets paid what’s in their contract-so, a very reasonable, “Fuck you.”


Warrant Officer Sigourney Weaver and astro-navigator Veronica Cartwright soon realize that their star charts are all wrong for an automated return trip to Earth. Something has diverted their homeward voyage: a signal, of either distress or warning, from an unknown source on an unexplored planet. The laws of space travel require that any capable crew has to assist another vessel in distress, and so the homeward voyage becomes a rescue operation. 


Look, you’ve seen Alien, right? This is one of those movies everybody’s seen. Or it used to be. It still is, right? Is it possible to spoil Alien, in this miserable fucking pandemic year of 2020? 


I’ll err on the side of caution. I’ll try not to totally spoil this one, ‘cause it is one of the best. Not so much in terms of absolute originality of ideas or themes-Alien is highly derivative of earlier sci-fi B-movie thrillers. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon may have lifted a crucially disgusting aspect of the titular alien creature’s life cycle from David Cronenberg’s Shivers, tho’ I don’t know that for sure. I wasn’t there myself, you know. 


What sells Alien is the obsessively wrought production designs of the Nostromo and the structures awaiting the human crew upon the surface of the planet where the mysterious signal originates; the off-the-cuff Robert Altman-esque overlapping dialogue scenes shot and edited in what William Friedkin would call “induced documentary” style; the nasty twists and turns of plot as the wealth of inductive details give way to terrifying deductions about the horrors that are possible in a universe that is both mind-numbingly vast and utterly indifferent to human moral conceptions-


-okay, okay, I’ll do a major spoiler . . .


. . . WARNING! WARNING!

YOU ARE ENTERING A SPOILER CONTAINMENT ZONE . . .


. . . the Company sends mostly extraneous humans on their mostly automated ship because machines can’t be infected with parasites. Thinky meat-bags chasing paychecks and financial stability and bonuses and class mobility are the bait, my friend . . .


YOU ARE NOW EXITING THE SPOILER CONTAINMENT ZONE.


Just one more thing, Human.


There’s a scene that really got to me this last time I watched Alien


Okay, the Nostromo is run by an intelligent computer called Mother. Mother-or some sub-system of her-is engaged with an ongoing translation process of the signal from the alien planet. This process is entirely automated. When it’s done, there’ll no doubt be a ping or a beep and an indicator light. But Sigourney Weaver insists on watching the raw feed, the translation-in-process-not because she or anyone else on the crew can do anything to make Mother’s work go faster . . . I guess she just wants to be there as the results come in, even if all she can do is take it in, and see if the new information clarifies the larger situation. 


We are hypnotized by a flow of inductive detail, so compelling, so novel, leaving so many possibilities wide open, until we are crushed by the grand deduction that it all adds up to being cosmically fucked to death by both alien indifference to the value of our lives and human malice towards the same. 


Enemy without. Enemy within. 


Right.