1,920 words
Raw, analog interfaces and whirring computers, primitive digital readouts, clicking binary code, churning cogitators, and flashing buttons. Eerie red light transfusing a zero-gravity space, the silent cockpit of a spaceship, and the white lights of the Mother artificial intelligence mainframe room. The tortured, dying machines of the analog age. (more…)
2,076 words
Director Alexandre O. Philippe has followed up his 2017 documentary on the shower scene in Psycho (78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene) with Memory: The Origins of Alien, a documentary on the creation of Alien that attempts to chart the film’s wide-ranging influences and explore its mythic resonance. The result is an underwhelming muddle that lacks direction and often retreads old ground, particularly in an overlong segment on the chestburster scene. (more…)
1,948 words
With its stunning H. R. Giger designs and first-rate cast, Ridley Scott’s classic Alien (1979) is imaginative, visually striking, immensely atmospheric, and sometimes just plain terrifying. Together with its worthy but very different sequel, James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), it spawned a vast pop-culture “franchise” (which is Hollywood-speak for a mythos) including two unworthy sequels, Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection, plus two Z-grade Alien vs. Predator movies, (more…)