I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.

It's the only way to be sure. Oh, hold on, hold on one second. This installation has a substantial dollar value attached to it. They can bill me.



Matthew: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the IMMP podcast from the Inter Millennium Media Project. My name is Matthew Porter. 

Ian: And I'm Ian Porter. 

Matthew: I'm his dad, he's my son, and it's movie time once again. 

Ian: Ah, space movies. 

Matthew: Yes. 

Ian: Yes. 

Matthew: Back to the future. The future as depicted in 1986. 

Ian: Which was a very interesting future, I must say.

Matthew: It was. And it's kind of thematic. Last episode, we talked about an encounter with a being from another world that helped teach people important lessons about life and humanity. And This time we're talking about, yeah, encounters with beings from another world that taught important lessons. 

Ian: Absolutely! And it taught very important lessons, such as, don't put all of your explosives on one person.

It sounds like a good idea at the time, and just leads to major property damage. 

Matthew: Okay, that was not in Starman, that was in this one, right? 

Ian: It would fit in either one. Let's be honest, there's some stuff in there. But no, yeah, no, we're talking, we're returning to a franchise we've talked about before, and we're returning with more of them.

And how do we know there's more? It's pluralized this time. It's Aliens, the sequel to Alien. It's amazing how much that S does. 

Matthew: And I don't know if this is true, it could be apocryphal, but I've heard this story, I think I heard it first on the, the Blank Check podcast. Which, if you like this podcast and you're not listening to Blank Check

listen to Blank Check. I mean, you probably are because they're super popular and deserve it, but they talked about the fact that James Cameron's initial pitch for this movie was to walk into the room and write alien on the board and then add the S and Then draw a line to turn the S into a dollar sign.

Ian: Oh, that's pretty good. 

Matthew: It's a good pitch to a movie studio 

Ian: Well, yeah, and for a movie with an 18 million dollar budget It, did, like, 131 million box office. 

Matthew: Yeah, even in 1986, that was not a huge budget. 

Ian: Not a huge budget, but my goodness, they do a lot with it. Although, at the same time, there's some evidence of that budget at times.

Matthew: Yes, all of the, I think all of this budget is on the screen, as they say. They made a lot of use out of that, but yeah, there are some shots where, yeah, this might have been cleaner if they had a little more money.

But it is interesting to note the difference in just style of movie in Aliens. 

Ian: Oh, absolutely. 

Matthew: It was fun getting a chance to talk about Alien a couple of months ago, after having seen it on a big screen for the 45th anniversary re release. But, that was very much a 70's movie. That was science fiction from that gritty 70's realism kind of lens.

Ian: Yes! 

Matthew: And this, it's clearly related in style, but it is so much more an 80's movie. It is so much more a A polished, highly, highly produced action movie. 

Ian: A lot of people seem to like Aliens more than Alien, but they are almost incomparable films at times. Aliens swaps out a lot of the, the setting for different types of world building, I find.

And those can be attractive and everything else, but it's a different, a different set of circumstances. Even if it takes place in, sometimes, similar locations.

Matthew: And part of what it does, is something that I like very much when it comes to world building, especially when you start building a franchise, is that you start paying attention to the details of the original, and say, okay, what does this imply, and how do we explore that? In the original movie, we're on a cargo tug, tugging a space refinery around a working truck of a ship, but we have talked about the corporation and we have talked about shares and money and, and what kind of a life this is, and that raises the question for what is this company they work for like.

That A has these space refineries and tugboats and things, but also has secret orders to their onboard android to collect this dangerous alien, possibly for weapons development and things like that. This movie takes those implications and explores them.

Ian: Aliens definitely has more than one antagonist. But it's not the multiple aliens, it's aliens as a species, and it's Weyland Yutani corporations. 

Matthew: Yes, that's right. 

Ian: And I think one of the best examples of showing that is right at the beginning. Because we start out right where we ended the first film.

Which is Ripley in cryo sleep in the pod, and she's picked up by a ship and Extracted from this very frozen, very worn down looking pod 

Matthew: Right, it's still operating somehow, or at least the cryo sleep pods and everything else are still, still operating. But everything has this sheen of frost on it.

Ian: Which gives this interesting like, like sleeping in a field of stars effect beginning. Yes. But one of the first thing we see after this arm pulls her out, is this transition to her hospital room. And what is one of the only spots of bright color in that room? A big Weyland Yutani logo stamp on the biomonitor.

Matthew: Yes. 

Ian: Keeping track of her health. 

Matthew: Everything else is that same industrial sort of design we saw on the Nostromo, but cleaner because it's a hospital. 

Ian: Exactly. 

And Because of other information. It's a little cleaner and the design's a little different. Mm hmm. But that first moment is from the moment she's taken out of there, Wayland Yutani's presence is just looming on on the logos on the symbols everywhere.

It's amazing how much Like, world building and design work you can do with a pack of stickers. Build your entire set, and then go around and put stickers, brand stickers for the in world companies, all over things. And you will fill in so many gaps of your place. Right. So quickly. But we learned how long it's been.

Matthew: Yes, and that's a shock to Ripley. And, oh, and the cat is still there. They saved the cat. Jonesy is still around. Jonesy's, yeah. 

Ian: Save the cat. 

Matthew: And, yeah, it's been 57 years that she was drifting through space. And talking about drifting through space, I still like the way outer space is depicted in the few shots that we get in this.

Because, It honors the way it was depicted in Alien, in that it's not just stark, hard blackness. It's this wispy, nebulae kind of, is that a word? Nebulae? Nebulae kind of gaseous, cloudy space. It's Empty, but it still implies this emptiness has things in it. Looks kind of like a French comic book.

I love it. 

Ian: And I also will say, just in the way space is interacted with, Alien, the Alien franchise is a fine example of space as the ocean. 

Matthew: Yes. 

Ian: It is something that has this infinite void, this depth we cannot plumb. It is a place of vast riches and vast danger. And it is something with texture. 

Matthew: Right.

Ian: Despite the long stretches of a comparatively nothing. 

Matthew: Right. It's not empty. 

It's filled with mystery. 

Ian: Exactly. 

Matthew: That's right. Yeah. This definitely continues that. 

Ian: And that's, you described before the previous thing is a tugboat and that's where we definitely, I feel like in, in this, we wind up with a port town in terms of this grand office and hospital structure, this giant Weyland Yutani building in space.

Which is some sort of depot and hub for all their things. 

Matthew: Yeah, we, she never gets to Earth in this entire story. 

Ian: Never does. 

Matthew: And that's an interesting, talk about what is implied. Maybe they figure that if she's been in, the last thing she remembers is a space tugboat from 57 years ago. It would be too much of a shock to actually show her what Earth is like now.

Let's keep her on this Weyland Yutani space station in orbit. 

Ian: And, even beyond that, I got the feeling that like, Needing to go back to Earth, going to Earth, is a s is a separate thing from going home. Yes. There's plenty of people who are human that are not from Earth. In a world that is expanded like this, with colony ships and everything else.

Earth is just another place, to some extent. It's not, it's, it's, it's maybe a seat of power, but it's not a A collective home. 

Matthew: That's a great point. We, we never do get any confirmation that she was born on Earth or is from Earth. 

Ian: Yeah, 

but one of the things that I was very fascinated by is it's been almost 60 years in the story.

And she's talking to these big wigs of the Weyland Yutani corporation. The corporation is still there and still going strong. Yes. 

Matthew: And something I don't think we ever get in the alien world. At least not in these two movies. I don't think we ever get any acknowledgement or identification or reference to any kind of a nation state.

No. There is not a reference to the United States of America or any European countries or the European Union, are there? There are. Oh. But it's 

Ian: never spoken. Oh, where do we see that? Well, we see that on the suits and uniforms of the next group of characters we're introduced to. Oh, they have flags 

Matthew: on them?

Ian: Yes, because after being kind of brushed aside in a very, very particular way by the Weyland Yutani execs, Who are more happy to just get her story to be ignored and for her to be regulated to nothingness. She's still proving to be excellent at her job. Which says something when it's been 60 years and all of the mechanisms and machinery you used are still okay to go with.

You've not had to learn anything in 60 years on how to operate any of this machinery.

There's something very properly corporate about that. Why, why replace this if it's working? But they hear of a, a problem out at a I was a little confused by this It was a group of like claims investigators who found the alien ship again Reported it in, but it was then realized to be near a colony, I think.

Matthew: Oh, say that again? 

Ian: I was trying to figure out how they, how they like all lined up, but They, they pretty much hear about an instance with with another set of aliens attacking. 

Matthew: Well, , first of all, the interrogation that Ripley has to go through is over the fact that she's the only survivor of An event that cost millions of dollars in the form of the Nostromo, and it's cargo, and everybody else is dead, and she just has this story about these aliens that they found on a planet, and they think she's, either she's delusional or She's covering something up and but she's insisting.

This is super dangerous. You need to send somebody to investigate eventually They tell her we don't have to the planet you say you picked up this alien on We've had people on there for 20 years because we have a terraforming colony on that planet and everything seems fine So they actually went back to the same mysterious planet from which they found the signal in the original movie And they're colonizing 

Ian: That was it.

Matthew: And, so, this does not, you know, lend a lot of credence to her story until they lose contact with the colony. 

Ian: Yeah, the colony goes out of contact and they say, Oh, hey, you want all those licensing? Like, all that licenses we, we got rid of, all your, like, driver's license, command license, everything else. We'll give it back to you if you help our marines out.

Matthew: Right, they want her to go along as a consultant. After not believing her, they now realize she may be the only person who has any knowledge. Of what these marines are going to be facing so they want to send her and meanwhile She hasn't had a whole much in her life since coming back. She's been working in a cargo dock and Trying not to have too many nightmares, which she's failing at 

Ian: failing hard 

Matthew: and she eventually realizes, She, after, after refusing to go along with the Marines, she eventually realizes, No, I need, this is going to A, help people, and B, maybe get me some closure, if I go with them.

And she just wants to confirm, the reason we're going is to kill them, right? And for some reason, she trusts space yuppie Paul Reiser as 

Ian: space yuppie 

Matthew: as he was such that was such a distillation of an iconic kind of 80s person and character in the in Carter Burke played by Paul Reiser. Guy who's, who's got a 

Ian: smooth 

Matthew: line of talk.

He's not just the company line, but he's also trying to promote his own career, but he's all about figuring out the dollar values and potential return on investment. 

Ian: Oh yeah. But. Yeah, we do see, there's a, I believe, I know that a couple of the col the colonial marines we meet have American flag patches on their shoulders.

But I think a couple of them might have other nation patches too, I'm not sure. 

Matthew: Yeah, I'm looking up some more information, apparently it is the, the United States colonial marines for, like, United America, I believe their flags have a lot of extra stars. As if the Americans are now one nation, but part of the problem I have with these colonial Marines is they are bad Marines.

They have no discipline, they have no sense of order, their, their specific technical training seems to be pretty good. And some of their unit cohesion seems to be good, but they're so poorly disciplined they would be a disgrace to any U. S. Marine today, I think. And yet they're held up as this are these cool army guys, but no, they're, they're really, it's really disappointing.

And that comes back, that, that factors into the story too. 

Ian: It reminded me greatly of the game Helldivers 2, which is, which takes a lot more of its A styling from other sci fi things such as Starship Troopers. But one of the funny things about that game is that it puts you through the very bare minimum tutorial level.

Which is your basic training. And then immediately your character is put into cryo sleep. And when you start your first mission, it's your character being woken up and thrown down to a planet to do the job. Right. The idea that at a sense of scale, the amount of training per unit drops significantly, kind of came through here too.

It's like, this is not, this is just a whole lot of people of this type, and there's a lot of other things like this going on elsewhere. And so at some point, the what you give them to do Or what you give them as training before you send them out to do whatever is lesser, just because they've got so many other places they're looking as well.

Matthew: And I also had the impression, and, and, yeah, the United States, or the, you know, in some way, still exists, but, Maybe that's just a veneer over corporate rule. Because one of the explanations to me for why these Marines behave the way they do could be they are not doing it for the same kind of reasons the United States Marine would be doing that.

In the 2020s or the 1980s, they are not doing it from any sense of love of country or duty or patriotism. It's a job for the corporation, which they're not super happy with, but they'll do it. It's a job where they get to blow things up. And so it attracts a certain kind of person, but there's an Yeah, we've got their lieutenant who does seem to have some military discipline to him We've got sergeant Apone one of my favorite characters who just seems to love the life of the Corps 

Music: Mm hmm, 

Matthew: and then there are all these Marines with horrible discipline 

Ian: there's this implication that being given the you the the colonial Marines here is Not being given the good people if you were given Weyland Yutani security forces that might be saying you're getting someone bigger You 

Matthew: Maybe, maybe, but maybe Waylon Is that kind of 

Ian: like, yeah.

Like, like, there's that weird, like, implied hierarchical aspect, because fixing this is always talked about in what it's doing for the company, even by the Marines. 

Matthew: Yes. And they're taking their orders from their sergeant and their lieutenant, but the, the strategic goals seem to be completely set by Weyland Yutani.

Ian: Mm hmm. 

Matthew: And I almost get the impression that, yeah, if this were more important, we might send a detachment of our security forces, but those are expensive. And we've got insurance companies where we have to pay off survivors and things. Let's let the Marines take care of this, because that's cheaper for the company.

Ian: And there's another reason we get towards the end as to what Weyland already knows enough of and why they might want to send more expendable people. 

Matthew: Oh, yes. 

Ian: So this is where Aliens proves something about its design. I talked a lot about the cinematography and the the, and we talked a lot about the set design in the original movie, Alien.

Aliens is not a tugboat movie like Alien was. Aliens is a submarine movie. 

Matthew: A submarine movie. 

Ian: That difference, or at the very least, its design aesthetic is. 

Matthew: Huh. 

Ian: The polish and the design, it's the similar tools, but a lot of the, the grime and the left around things, the homey lived in environment we saw, is replaced with storage bins and lockers and that military sharp edge nature.

Matthew: Yes. 

Ian: Which changes the aesthetic even if it's the same types of screens. The cleaner desks and the, the straps and webbing and everything else are such a change in tone. Huh. That, that the environments are different. And I'm going to say straps, webbing, and grating., I described that Alien was a movie all about like, the way the camera zoomed in changed who was in control of the space.

But Aliens is a movie in which one of the best metaphors, I think, out there is any sort of grating. It's a symbol of the unknown. Yes. There's something that might 

Matthew: be able to see us or do something to us, but we're, we can't do anything back. 

Ian: The moment a character walks off of solid floor onto a grated platform, they are in danger in a brand new way.

It keeps happening. It happens all over, and when they realize there's grating above us, not just below us, that's one of the scariest moments in a film. I'm fascinated, because it, it's, it's playing the same, like, back and forth, who's in control, who knows what. It's using some of the same, , concepts, but it's using very different visual language to talk about it.

Gone are the, the shifts in camera distance to show anything. Instead, there's a lot more claustrophobia, but there's plenty of safe wide shots and tense wide shots. Those don't immediately mean one or the other, but what the characters are physically around changes things. 

Matthew: I like that, and it's not inconsistent with the way I tend to think of this movie.

I tend to think of this as a war movie, naturally, but specifically an analogue to a A war movie about a specific event in the island to island campaigns in World War II. 

Ian: Yeah. 

Matthew: Where this island, the beach and the jungle, they look like the last two dozen beaches and jungles we had to take, but we still don't know what's here, and as soon as we are out of sight of our landing craft and we're into the jungle, anything could happen, and we have that combination of unknown and claustrophobia.

Yeah. 

It's not just the potential enemy who is our greatest danger, but also our environment is a danger to us.

Ian: Yeah, absolutely. 

Matthew: And I like that point about the, the grating. You're right. 

Ian: But yeah, we're being sent down with these colonial marines to go investigate. What happened to the colony? 

Matthew: Because there were hundreds of colonists on this planet. Operating their town and operating the terraforming units. And now there's not a peep from them. 

Ian: Yeah.

Matthew: And things, but don't look great when they get there. 

Ian: No, this movie does love using the fact that it, it assumes, you know, what the nature and everything of an alien is. It, it like, like you're expected to be there with Ripley in terms of knowledge. 

Matthew: Right. We're, we're kind of riding along with Ripley because we know what she knows and we learn things, new things as she learns new things.

Ian: I almost wish I could have seen this movie without having seen Alien first, though, because the idea of not knowing their blood is acid, not knowing that like, what the different creatures looked like in their stages of evolution. 

Matthew: True. Now, we do get her telling, we get her telling the corporate folks about a lot of those details early on, but still not having seen them, it still would be a shock.

Ian: But they ramp up the tension walking around and seeing, you know. Bullet holes. Acid burns. Yes. All these little signs, goop, in corners where the, where things had obviously happened. 

Matthew: And you almost get the impression that, that Carter, Burke, and some of the others who knew of, or who paid attention to Ripley's briefings, they didn't entirely believe her, but now they're starting to see the evidence of these.

Ian: Mm hmm. 

Matthew: Where they see an acid burn in the, the grating in the floor. Wow, that's scary and impressive. And then they look up and realize, Oh, this came from several stories above and kept burning through. 

Ian: One of the interesting things that this lets us do is another visual aspect that Aliens loves is showing us the Screens or showing us people looking at screens, right?

Because all of the Marines have body cams. Yes, not on their bodies. They've got these little like antenna arms off to the side that have a camera on them. But everyone's got a heart monitor and a camera. And it means we get to watch people back at the base watching what the Marines are looking at through the cameras.

And this came out in June 86, and it was one of the inspirations, I believe, for, but my goodness, I saw things of the original Doom and some of those first person games in just the way this depicted that over the shoulder camera with the gun in the bottom corner from the person holding it as they look around and witness environmental storytelling of the horror.

Matthew: Yes, this owes a lot to military science fiction that came before, like, the the novel Starship Troopers, things like that, but it also influenced military science fiction for decades later. 

Ian: Yes. 

Matthew: And yeah, we still have that remove where a lot of critical things, we are seeing it through a fuzzy CRT as another character sees it which makes it seem bigger, scarier, and harder to know because we're not there.

And to the extent that we are there with the. the marine unit who go into the facility. Things don't go well and it's hard to keep track of things even if you're in the middle of them. 

Ian: And it pulls an excellent magic trick in that sense because it's the idea of we watch like we watch Ripley watch someone through a screen or let me put this way we watch through a screen Ripley watch someone through a screen.

Matthew: Yes. 

Ian: And Ripley is there reinforcing the fact that No, you're in danger, person on the screen. And if you're in danger That means it's going to come after me next. And in a brilliant A equals B and B equals C, there's that little thing in the back of your mind that says, and if the person she's watching This danger means she's in danger, then her danger is my danger.

Matthew: Oh, it's like the transitive property of scary movies. 

Ian: Exactly. 

Matthew: I like that. 

Ian: Yes. The fact that you are this afraid of the thing through the screen being able to come at you from there adds to the amount that it feels like these aliens can come through at you. 

Matthew: You're right. There is that little sense. Even if it's hard to articulate, you feel like, oh, watching this puts us in danger.

Because it means we're close to it. Exactly. 

Ian: And I had, like, it took me a bit to realize, and they've got, she's got all of these videos of all these people, and they're each finding more evidence that it's there. Yes. And it just builds, kind of funneling towards you on the other end of your two layers of screen.

Matthew: And their first, their first operational goal when they go in, is to find out where are all these colonists. And they're all in they were all embedded with like a subcutaneous tracking device But they need access to the computers And we have Hudson, played by Bill Paxton. He's one of the most famous characters from this Among the Marines.

Certainly the most quoted with his Game Over Man. And I had forgotten that he is their tech specialist. He is the guy who can bypass the security doors and get into the colony mainframe to find the tracking information. But he is he's a weird and fun and sometimes annoying character.

But but Paxton plays him really well.

And they find that they're all in the same place over in another like Generator facility or something like that like in the basement and they're saying, you know It looks like a town meeting and then Ripley's saying no.

No, they did not go there voluntarily. This is not a town Yeah, but the Marines go to find them And they find them, and it's not, hasn't been good for the colonists. 

Ian: And even before that, even before they get down there, they go to the medical bay to get the computer information because they find in the medical bay something very disturbing, multiple dead facehuggers. 

And two live ones. 

Matthew: Wow. 

Ian: Yeah, and the facehuggers in the tubes, and that's where you watch all of the Marines walk into the room, see something actually alien for once, and suddenly, click. All of them believe Ripley. 

Matthew: Yes, and they suddenly call the lieutenant they don't have a lot of respect for, for him to see this.

And he brings in Ripley, and yeah, this is why we have this consultant here, because we've never seen this, and she has. 

Ian: And you get this little moment where they're like, Ah, yeah, acid for blood, yeah, I getcha. Oh, yeah, that's trying to attach, attach to your face through the tube. That's what she said it would do.

And they're still making their little jokes. I'll look at. Love at first sight, looks like it wants to kiss ya. But there's this, nope, I know what that thing does, I did listen. 

Matthew: And there are medical records of the fact that the the people in this facility have been studying , these things. They were attached to colonists and they managed to remove them.

The colonists died in the process.

Ian: If it gets , That tube down your throat, it will not let you go. 

Matthew: No. And this raises the question, they were doing all of this stuff with the aliens and they had already encountered the aliens and had colonists attacked by them, and they hadn't said anything back to Earth?

Ian: We actually do get an explanation of that too, though. Yeah? Because one of the earliest moments we see is a family going off on a survey mission. 

Matthew: Well, wait a minute. You're talking about a different version of the movie that I rewatched. Yeah. You're talking about the extended director's cut, which I think that and I've got to say, I think that is not as good a movie.

Really? Yes. 

Ian: Ah, the director is not as, 

Matthew: I think. And because it explains so much upfront, we have less mystery in the original cut of the movie, we go in, we don't know anymore. than the Marines know or any more than Ripley plus the Marines know and they're discovering all this stuff and eventually we have revelations about how the how the colonists encountered the Aliens and all of that and in the extended cut you're right we get these scenes where the colonists go out to the site where the derelict ship was and bring back stuff and they had been given these coordinates and By somebody back at corporate headquarters and those are things that we learn later on in the original cut But we see that and we get to meet another character.

We're about to meet Newt and her family So how do you feel about these two different versions of the movie? 

Ian: I admit I'd watched them, I watched the extended for this and it's getting mixed up in my head and it's such a different thing. You're right. In some ways I liked that because the extended was able to tell me that the reason why they might not have talked back.

Is because they were worried that their claim and the worry that the company would swoop in and take it away Unless they had enough evidence and support to say we're the ones who got this pay us what we're supposed to There was that fear in the background and that explains some of what looks like a failure to be properly communicative right but It also, I can understand, does really change the nature of it where some of that reveal is gone.

Matthew: Right. In the original cut, we eventually learn Carter Burke is not a good guy. Not that we didn't suspect him from the beginning, but Ripley puts it together and determines, Oh, I know how these things got back to this place. This colony facility you sent them there and then Burke starts explaining how you realize how Valuable this would be to Weyland Yutani's bioweapons division if I'm the guy who's responsible for finding this and getting samples back to earth We I'm gonna be set for life and you could be too if you play along Ripley but that's why he sent the Coordinates to the colonists and have them go out and find this thing in the the way it is in that original theatrical cut So you're right.

There is an explanation that they they were either they kept things quiet Because they were concerned about their claim or they had been in contact with corporate But the people at corporate they'd been in contact with didn't want anybody else to know, because they wanted to get this stuff.

Ian: Yeah. , either way, the colonists were doing all this research already, but that meant that there was a lot of these active. And two live ones implies a lot of dead ones. 

Matthew: Yes. 

Ian: And dead ones means they did what they needed to. . 

Matthew: And you're right, that's when they were in the medical center, they're able to tap into the tracking system and find where all of these colonists tracking devices are.

Ian: And that's part of why when all of them are like, oh, it's a town meeting, we're okay. And when Ripley says, that's not a town meeting. Right. All of the Marines who now believe her because they've seen one of these facehuggers They haven't even seen a full xenomorph, which I believe we did get the name of them.

Matthew: Yes 

And the way they're using xenomorph in the briefings and things I don't know if they're specifically referring to this alien or if that's the the official corporator technical term For any alien life form, which is kind of what it means an alien form.

So Yeah We, we, this, the big chap in Alien is definitely the xenomorph, but I don't know if that's yet part of their vocabulary. You also get the impression that this is not the first alien life form that's ever been encountered. But most of them have just been, as the marines were complaining, you know, this is going to be another bug hunt.

Like we're, we go in as exterminators. That's not what we're trained for. We don't, that's, that's a boring mission. And as soon as they hear xenomorph, they say, oh, it's another bug hunt. So I get the impression that there are some colony worlds where. Yeah, there was indigenous life that was kind of considered vermin that needed to be exterminated before we put people on there.

Ian: Yeah, and that's one of those other like world building wild things. It's like, Oh, this isn't the only alien thing we've met. This alien is different. 

Matthew: The first one to be this big a threat as opposed to an annoyance. Is the impression we got.

But now the Marines are paying attention because they realize that if all of this so far is confirming what Ripley told us, I'm gonna have to assume the rest of what she told us is true, and that's scary. 

Ian: Mm hmm. And so they go in prepared and scared when they go down into the basement. And excellent set design again.

We walk from the floors of the rest of the colony , which have been destroyed and broken and such, but they were on nice solid rooms and such before, down the grated staircases. And, as they descend, basement level to basement level, the walls start changing, because underneath has been transformed.

into something that looks a lot more like the alien ship. 

Matthew: And that confused me a bit. I'm interested in your take on this from a design point of view, because in the original Alien, there was the alien ship that was transporting a cargo of the xenomorph eggs, but the alien ship was not a xenomorph ship.

They had not built it and were flying it. So all of the weird design Of that ship that we get, all that H. R. Giger ship design. That, I always assumed, okay, that is the design vocabulary of whatever species built this ship and decided to fly around with a cargo of eggs. And whose pilot met the chestburster because we find his remains in the first movie.

And yet, now we've got something where it's the xenomorphs who are changing things. And we get a similar design. Now, is that because what we were seeing in the original ship was actually the ship as it had been changed by some xenomorphs that hatched? 

Ian: That's what I think it kind of retroactively did it, where the idea is a little bit like the xenomorphs are parasitic in that sense.

And this is something I will say, whatever you want to say about the later things in the Aliens franchise, it's one thing I think they've actually grown consistent of. Which is that the xenomorphs are powerful because they take the form of whatever they're dealing with to some extent.

Right. They take what they're facing and they perfect it. 

Matthew: They wouldn't necessarily be bipedal if they hadn't been hatched inside a human. 

Ian: Exactly. So, it's like, first step, take over whatever's there, kill them off, and make more of ourselves. Yeah. Step two, take whatever they've got technology wise and modify it to us.

Huh. Step three. Go someplace else and repeat. It's very viral in that sense. Yeah. Like, infect, modify, and then distribute. And that, it kind of implies that if left alone, eventually the entire colony would just be resin coated and alienified. Mm hmm. And it would be there ready for the next thing.

And possibly, all the little ships and pods and such, any vehicles would be alienified and flown off in other directions to crash, to arrive, to expand, to whatever. So this infection kind of working up from the bottom, I think does work. And actually adds an extra layer of oddity to the alien ship, because it's an alien ship for sure, but did it crash because the aliens did it?

Did it crash because the things that made the ship crashed it? Is this the remnants, not of the aliens themselves, but of the last poor fools to find and get infected? Yeah, that's the way it whole extra aspect. Yeah, 

Matthew: to me it kind of seems as if the aliens are a, like you say, a parasitic species that spreads throughout the galaxy, but Their method of spread is to rely upon the

unthinking curiosity and greed of species that have spaceflight. They are built around being stowaways. Eventually they encounter some species with spaceflight, and that species is in, because there is something powerful about the xenomorphs and their eggs, they're going to fly some of them somewhere, thinking they can use them and control them.

And that's what the xenomorphs rely upon to spread. It worked with the giant who had piloted the derelict ship in the first movie. It's working with Weyland Yutani and their spacecraft in the other movies. It's like they rely upon the flaws of other intelligent species to help them spread. 

Ian: Mm hmm. And it kind of makes the xenomorphs The giant filter of potential when it comes to space travel.

It's like, this is the thing that will be the, this is the hubris of Of attempting to expand through space manifest, in that sense. 

Matthew: Yeah, it's like another potential answer to the Fermi Paradox. It's not that eventually life gets intelligent enough to destroy itself. It gets intelligent enough to find space travel, to achieve space travel.

And once it achieves space travel, it encounters the xenomorphs. And that's game over for everyone but the xenomorphs. 

Ian: Mm hmm. And that's the other thing, like, xenomorphs are A species that we have not seen have a place within any ecosystem. 

Matthew: Right. 

Ian: So we don't know what deals with them,

but we watch as they go down and they find the colonists all having been turned into incubators. 

Matthew: Right. 

They're all resined up to the walls and matched up with eggs and most of them are gone. 

Ian: And the creepiest thing is a pile of dead facehuggers, I will say. That's one of the simplest and creepiest pieces of, like, environmental prop design.

Matthew: Right, just do the math. Every one of these equates to a big guy. 

Ian: Mm hmm. 

Matthew: And we do get a kind of necessary gross out scene where there's a colonist who's still alive, and they encounter them just as the chestburster is about to come out. 

Ian: Reasonably enough, the response is not Firearms. It's not things with splatter because these things have a acid for blood.

It's flamethrowers. 

Matthew: And there's also the fact that they're in the basement of a enormous power generation system and they are concerned that any firearms are going to breach the cooling system and turn this into a giant nuclear bomb. It's actually Ripley who points that out and Carter Burke backing it back in the APC watching the screens and then Carter says, yeah, she's right.

So the lieutenant issues the order for the sergeant to collect everybody's magazines and no firearms, just flames, no grenades, no firearms. And this does not please the Marines, but that's why they're set to use flamethrowers when they encountered this thing. 

Ian: Although it did give me a wonderful flashback to one of my favorite lines from a movie from four years earlier.

Which was the line from John Carpenter's The Thing of Mac wants the flamethrower. Mac wants the what? It's like, yeah, you know what? That absolutely fits. The thing, aliens, similar enough. Flamethrowers. Flamethrower's the answer to creepy things from space. We're building a little flowchart here. 

Matthew: Why is that reminding me of the line from Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Buffy wanting to arm herself with a wooden stake and somebody pointing out, you know, but, but this guy's a human. You'd be surprised how many things are killed by wooden stakes. Yes. 

Ian: They've done a good job. I will say Aliens is also a film that is absolutely chock full of Chekhov's gun. This is not just Chekhov's gun. This is Chekhov's armory. 

Matthew: It's almost distracting. It's like every time you see something, Okay, let's put that on the bingo card because we're going to see it later.

Ian: Oh yeah. Yeah who here likes playing Sierra adventure games? Raise his hand. Who here knows what it's like to realize you've collected seven items that don't make sense, but there is one room at the end of this game where you will somehow use all of them? That's aliens. I appreciate it, but it is distracting.

Matthew: Yeah, it does not make sense that you found a roll of tape and you found it there, but trust me, you will need a roll of tape later. 

Ian: Exactly. So, in some ways, you wind up with this, you know, oh, cameras? Check. Flamethrowers? Check. Ripley, despite being 60 years out of date, is able to pilot a modern day loader vehicle?

Check. 

Matthew: Well, they do explain that. That was her day job after she got through her interrogation at the station. 

Ian: Oh, yes, but she also just kind of pilots better than their other pilots at this because she's good at controls. 

Matthew: Yes, she did 

impress the sergeant. 

Ian: She rolls a natural 20 on skill check and proves that this is what she put her points into.

Matthew: And that's one of the reasons I love Apone. When they're getting ready for this mission, they're loading up their armored personnel carrier and she says, I need something to do. I can drive that loader for you. Once he sees what she can do. He is delighted. He says, this is awesome. Yeah, you can put that in Bay 12, please. Thank you very much.

Just that smile we get from Sgt. Apon. 

Ian: There's a little bit of a, why didn't I have her on my team earlier? 

Matthew: Yeah, I could use a dozen marines like her. 

Ian: Yeah, it's like, she's faced stuff I can't imagine, and she's good at it, and she's keeping a level head. I can go for that. Yep. But, yeah, they see the infant alien burst out and they're like, nope, fire.

Fire. They burn it all, but that doesn't go well, because there's a lot of aliens. Yes. Crawling across the ceiling. Excellent use of what I assume to be an upside down camera shot, I will say. 

Matthew: I guess so. There are some of those shots where we've got the aliens swarming along ceilings through tunnels and things.

I find them distracting because they are, they lose that physicality that the aliens have. The aliens seem to be like more puppets. They're barely skittering along the surface. They have no sense of being connected to what they're moving against. You're right. I think they may use they may use upside down shots for that to make it easier to show them crawling along on the ceilings, but.

Some of the practical effects they used for that, I think, are lacking. 

Ian: One thing I will know, and that is the combination of lower budget and the nature of early xenomorph costumes to begin with. Yeah. The black leotard aspect that is the core of a xenomorph costume, and the having a lot more of them with a little bit less budget to spread around because you've got a costume, seven people in this instead of just one has an unfortunate dance troupe kind of energy.

Matthew: Yes, it does. It does. 

Ian: There's a little bit of a like, Oh, I'm being, I'm being attacked by the Jabberwockies. 

Matthew: We're surrounded by Mummenschanz. Yes.

Ian: But they do a good job of being creepy and doing a good job of still showing the like, Curled up in the walls spring from the shadows and the curves of the environment kind of Ambush hunter element that is the xenomorphs 

Matthew: and another way that they convey some of that limited information to keep the tension up Kind of like what you were saying with us watching it through CRTs is that the Marines apparently now have standard issue motion trackers 

Now, 

the motion tracker that they were using on the Nostromo was something that was jury rigged from some components that they had aboard the ship. It must be parallel development because it's not like the Nostromo had reported this development back to anybody. But by about 60 years later, yeah, marine units going into an unknown place, they have these motion trackers with them. Yeah. And they can see on the screen all the pulses that that represent trackable things moving towards them.

Ian: There's also a little bit of a, that's a Weyland Yutani tracker. Yes. There's a little bit of that, you know, sticker branding always in the background. The colony is a Weyland Yutani colony. Everything is here. The containers, I think, have a Weyland Yutani logo on them, if I remember correctly. Mm hmm.

There's a little bit of a You have a device that's oddly good at finding these specific things and being prepared for these specific things. 

Matthew: That's true, and it was the sinister android Ash who developed that or provided that aboard the Nostromo. Maybe A, he knew about this technology from something that Weyland Yutani had developed.

Maybe he was sending some information back to the company during the first movie. Maybe. That we don't learn about 

Ian: or it's like oh, why is this now standard issue? Yeah, well, they developed it for a reason and it's just been 60 years the military tech Filtered down to ironically in this case the military because there's a military above military.

Yeah, but it filters down You know, our cell phones are built off of things that that years ago were military grade tech, and years before that were experimental grade tech. It's always this downward pipeline, to some extent, in a military industrial complex. If this is now standard issue there, there might have been something that they were making it for earlier.

Oh, yes. And there's a fine chance it was these things. Yeah. Is kind of where I got that. It's like, 

hmm, 

nice outfitting. 

Matthew: And if they've had more colonies where the Marines had to go in for a bug hunt early on, Yeah, this would be useful for finding other smaller annoying critters. Just like Jonesy kept, you know, got in its way on the Nostromo.

Ian: And that's one thing, they do save the cat early and then leave the cat behind. 

Matthew: Yeah, let's save the cat by not having it involved in this story. 

Ian: It's like you know, keep the cat out of this. Is that, is that a theme? Is that a subset of being the hero archetype. But.

Those trackers are huge for this entire story. 

Matthew: And during this encounter in the place to which the aliens had harvested most of the colonists, that's where we lose most of the Marine unit. Because, you know, there is, it is a 

Ian: 50 percent right? 

Matthew: Absolutely. So we lose we lose Sergeant Apone.

We lose a lot of the the Marines. We keep Vasquez. This is one of their heavy gunners. We keep Hudson, we keep Hicks, played by Michael Bean, who's a, a James Cameron go to. He was in The Terminator and he's later in The Abyss.

And is that all? And we keep the lieutenant, although he is knocked unconscious during the dramatic rescue of the survivors from this encounter. 

Ian: Yes. 

Matthew: And we keep Bishop, the synthetic person, played by Lance Henriksen. 

Ian: Because apparently it's standard operating procedure to have a synthetic. Always on board now.

Matthew: Right. And this does not please Ripley because of her very, very bad experiences with Ash, the synthetic aboard Nostromo. And this very soft spoken bishop is saying, well, I'm terribly sorry for that experience. And naturally, it's possible for that older unit to have malfunctioned, but it could never happen to me.

And he quotes what are essentially Asimov's laws of robotics about how he couldn't harm a human or allow a human to come to harm. 

Music: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. 

Ian: And it's interesting to see that little bit of change where, like, on the Nostromo, the fact that one of their, their people was not actually human was a surprise.

Yes. But all the marines just know he's not. Mm hmm. That, that change in 60 years of making that just known and normal. 

Matthew: And he's kind of their science officer, so he is, looking through the medical records from the colony and he's doing some analysis of what they have found. And. And he's able to do that because essentially they wind up being holed up in the little command center area that includes the medical bay.

Trying to just stay alive and seal themselves off and keep the, the aliens out. So that in, somewhere between 17 to 48 hours they might receive, they might get or excuse me, days. Sometime, you know, 17 to 20 days they are going to finally get some rescue. 

Ian: But they've 

got to set up turret guns in the meantime, they have to prepare, you know, figure out what they've got in terms of rations and such, there's a lot of like, we're just gonna hunker down and keep this there.

And a lot of it is posturing. It's a lot of seal doors off, put guns here, we don't have enough ammo. But if we can scare them off once, they might not know that. 

Matthew: Right. And if we can slow them down by welding doors shut and all that. And one thing that gives them a little bit of hope, or at least gives Ripley a bit of hope, is they have another member of their group now.

Yes. Because they find a little girl, who we do meet earlier in that director's cut. Because it's her family that went out to get the alien eggs, but it's it's Newt. Her name is Rebecca, but she's called Newt. And she's been hiding out in the tunnels and the air ducts and things and staying away from the aliens.

And apparently she's the only surviving colonist. 

Ian: She's very, very, very resilient little girl. 

Matthew: Of course, she's super traumatized and frightened and wants nothing to do with these soldiers. And even, Ripley, but eventually, Ripley brings her to safety and builds some kind of rapport with her.

Ian: Which is important because, and I'm not sure how much they emphasized this extra in the director's cut, but Ripley, had a daughter 

Matthew: Yeah, I don't even think they mentioned that at all in the in the other. Ah, 

Ian: yeah, it in the director's cut. It really changes stuff because there's this big through line of Ripley having had a daughter and the daughter having died in the 60 years 

so the idea of that lost family. And she can take care of Newt and maybe make up for the time she was not there and everything it took from her. But even without that, honestly, Newt is just kind of a I don't want to call her an audience surrogate because Newt is scared. But she's also the only person, possibly more than Ripley, who knows what's going on.

Yes. And becomes, becomes more of this engine of the plot voicing don't get complacent. 

Matthew: Exactly. It's not just you on the line anymore, you kind of get the impression that Ripley went into this mission wanting to kill these aliens, and if it meant that she died in the process, she was okay with that.

Now she has something to live for. And so Newt becomes she's in some ways, she's an information source. In some ways, she's a MacGuffin, especially in the last act of the movie. And yeah, in some ways, she is a fulcrum on which Ripley changes. And it's another reason why I'm not crazy about that director's cut, because yes, we get the fact that Ripley had a daughter and she missed her daughter's life.

She was gone for, you know, pretty much all of it. And that's the reason why she Connects with Newt so strongly and that I don't think a good character needs that I never felt like I was in the original cut. I was wondering well Why does Ripley care about this kid Ripley cares about this kid because she's a good person She has some innate parental instincts like most adult humans do I Sometimes get the impression that James Cameron doesn't quite trust his audiences That he wants to make things super explicit because he doesn't trust us to believe that this adult woman could have parental or maternal instincts towards a child she just met.

I think people can have that. It made Ripley a richer character to have that seemingly come from somewhere that had not been awakened before. 

Ian: Yeah, that's a good point. 

Matthew: Not that those scenes that they did add were not done very well, I think they were shot very well, they were played very well. 

Ian: And I'm glad I watched the other version right now because it definitely added to what I was thinking and what I was seeing and how I approached it because having to see the same story with those different pieces forces you to look at the different parts that it was made out of.

Yeah. It, it lets me step back out of the story a little and look at it as an art of filmmaking. Mm hmm. By seeing what is overlapped, what is changed, and everything else. 

Matthew: Yeah, I'm kind of glad that you watched that as well because it gives us a chance to compare them and talk about how they do change the movie.

And it's not that one is a good movie and one is not a good movie. But they are such different movies, it makes sense to have opinions about which one is better. 

Ian: And here on the Intermillennium Media Project, we discuss movies. But we're not just here to give you a summary of the one movie we watched.

We're here to discuss how that movie was interacted with. Yes. Yes. And this is exactly one of those things, because for me, Director's Cut versions probably existed most of the time. When you first might have seen this movie, and I'm not sure when you first saw this one, that didn't exist yet. It was going to be something that came out later.

So, for me, what Aliens is, includes the Director's Cut as just part of the media of it. But for you, it's a separate object, probably, from that release aspect, from what I'm understanding. 

Matthew: Yeah, I saw this movie first, probably its opening weekend. In 1986, saw it in a theater. I saw it probably a couple of times in theaters, and a few times on TV or on VHS, and I didn't see the director's cut until not more than, not much more than 10 years ago.

I think I saw the director's cut when we were reviewing these prior to the release of Prometheus, so that's not very long ago. 

Ian: Not very long ago. Yeah, that Prometheus is 2012. So yeah, that'd be around 2011 2012 ish. Yeah. Yeah, and that's around when I first saw the movie because you were showing me alien and aliens for the first time to go see this new movie and it was such a A different experience for each of us.

Yeah. Me experiencing it for the first time, I'm like, Oh, that's just part of what this is. And it's this franchise that's been in the zeitgeist that all these other things reference , with this creepy design and everything else. But, what a xenomorph is, is something that's already been done. culturally filtered to me.

So I'm coming at it a little bit more from Newt's perspective of it's been there, it's existing since I was young, it's scary, it's exist, it's there. And you've got this different walking into it and saying, okay. I've seen it once, but now I'm seeing it again. There's that element of who we can relate to.

Matthew: And they give Newt these clear, simple lines, and they're portrayed so well by this young actress, Ripley's trying to, to assure her that she's gonna be safe, these men are here to protect you. They're soldiers, and Newt just says, it won't make any difference.

Ian: Yeah. 

Matthew: It's like, she knows far more than you think she does. 

Ian: And I will say, I also love the little bits of, as she does get comfortable with them, there's that little bit of bleed in discussion and everything, where it's, Newt not wanting to talk to the soldiers after they've all experienced stuff.

Newt and the soldiers nodding to each other about 

stuff. 

Or, or like Newt will describe something and then the soldiers will say that same thing. 

Matthew: Right. 

Ian: With such certainty. It's like, Like, no, we've both seen some stuff. I now know what you've survived, kid. I now trust and respect you. That same way they kind of click respect for Ripley, there's a moment, less clear, but they do click respect for Newt Earl later.

Yes. Plus, you, that took out half our squad and you've avoided them all? You've survived? 

Matthew: And we also see Newt, an impressionable kid beginning to pick up some of their turns of phrase and affirmative and starting to want to be part of a group because she's had no one for so long. 

Ian: She kind of gets adopted.

Matthew: Yes. Yes. 

Ian: But. That's only lasting so long this is where one of the classic lines comes from. They've lost all this, that all the group, they're figuring out what to do. And it's, you know, nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. Yes. Says, says Ripley. And yeah, this is where, where some of the mask falls off from our, our space yuppie here as he wants to, not lose all of it.

And it's like, there's a large financial investment. We can't just blow this all up. Right. And the Marine says, nope, fly up there, nuke it from orbit, turns to Ripley, it's the only way to be sure, 

nods.

Matthew: And this is coming from Hicks Michael Bean's character corporal Hicks who is now the senior ranking military officer or or personnel in this mission because everybody else is dead, including Sergeant Apone. And the lieutenant has been knocked unconscious. So he has command. 

Ian: Yeah, we have to see the group kind of go through the process of figuring that out when they start realizing we don't want to listen to the corporate guy, 

Matthew: right?

And the corporate guy is saying, Well, yeah, technically, this corporal might be in charge, but this facility has a substantial dollar value attached to we can't have Destructive decisions like this being made by a grunt, no offense but yeah, you're right, he Hicks agrees with, with Ripley, nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure, but first they have to survive long enough to get to orbit, and, Their original attempt to escape, by the way, was, was thwarted by the fact that they had a they had a gunship carrier type type vessel that brought them down from orbit, and that their armored personnel carrier rolls off and then the carrier dusts off and waits to come back and pick them up.

While it was waiting, a xenomorph got on board. Killed that crew and during that fight it crashed into the armored personnel carrier So now they have no way back. There is another dropship on their spacecraft in orbit but that's going to take a while for Bishop to get to a place where he can tap in into an antenna and Prep that ship remotely and fly it down remotely and you then use that to pick them up So that's gonna take hours And it's hours they don't have a lot of, because the damage that was previously done to this facility means it's going to blow up within a certain amount of time.

So there's a ticking clock that they've added for the second half of the movie as well. They not only have to survive, they have to survive and get away, and they have to get away by a certain time or the whole place blows up. 

Ian: Yeah. Really, really kind of getting pincered maneuver by their own devices and the aliens themselves.

Matthew: And in here is where, while they're waiting and while they are waiting for Bishop to get the ship back down. This is where Ripley puts it together and realizes why the The colonists had these eggs in the first place and that it was Carter who sent them to go get them and he explains the value of this to the bioweapons division and we can both be set for life if you play your cards right.

And Ripley, of course, refuses to go along. So Carter attempts to use the two living facehuggers to implant aliens in Ripley and Newt so he can use those to smuggle them back to Earth. 

Ian: Yeah, I forget like they're they're like sleeping in the medical bay because that's where they've all holed up, 

Matthew: right?

Right, 

Ian: and and and you know Ripley and Newt wake up to find the door to the medical bay They're in locked and the two containers cracked 

Matthew: and the weapon that Ripley had brought in with her gone So it obviously was not a mistake. Somebody actually set them up this way. 

Ian: Mm hmm and That scene is so creepy fighting it off in the in the medical bay because we get to see face huggers Usually we've seen them just go and just hook on immediately.

This is when we actually see them skittering around on the floor. Yes Trying to lunge and lurch and a lot of tail whipping Like grab attacks, which we see the aliens themselves do a lot of tail attacks right across this film like we kind of get to see how aliens fight more and it's very interesting and creepy, but the Tension of there's this thing scurrying in the corners after they fend it off and beat it off and smash it with All sorts of devices.

It is interesting to imply that like they're not acidic yet 

Matthew: Well, were they? Because the, in the original movie, it was the incision on the face hugger that first released the acid. And yeah, I think in general, they're a little fast and loose with when the acid appears and how bad it is in this movie.

Ian: Yeah, because, because this is, , like, Oh, we can't get the thing. We can't get out they trigger a little alarm and they get the Marines to rush in to help deal with it. Yes. And the Marines look at what's happening and realize. Her weapons outside now the door is suddenly locked and those are open.

Damn it. I know what's happening 

Matthew: Yeah, they absolutely believe her when she says it's Burke and they're trying to figure out 

Ian: What 

Matthew: to do with to and about Burke when they realize they are being swarmed by aliens coming through the ceiling and the floor and And then it becomes a chase. They have to run away and not everybody survives that 

Ian: They've shotgun to the the face huggers.

Mm hmm. They've Left Burke for dead. No. 

Matthew: No, he is part of the chase as They all try to run away and he actually gets ahead of some of them and tries to seal doors behind him But the aliens get him that that scene got a cheer in the theaters First saw this when we get this scene where Burke who has just locked Ripley and Newt and everybody else behind the door He thinks is gonna keep him safe and he turns around and there's an alien there.

Yeah, everybody in the theater I thought the space yuppie had gotten what he deserved 

Ian: Good. Huzzah! Just, yay! 

Matthew: But not many people survive that. No, The lieutenant, who is now awake, does not survive that, neither does Vasquez. 

Ian: But, it's also around this time that they've been trying to figure out how to deal with the aliens as a whole.

And they start making estimates, like, well, there's a bunch of eggs. Something had to lay eggs. Are these things, like, bees? Or ants? Yep. They have a 

Matthew: queen. That's another reason why they figure we've got to get out of here and then nuke the place or let the place nuke itself. 

Ian: Yeah. 

Matthew: And the death of Vasquez and the lieutenant I thought is especially good because Vasquez is the, none of the marines had a lot of respect for this lieutenant who didn't have a lot of combat experience.

And Vasquez especially did not like this lieutenant. But as they're running away and Vasquez is injured and runs out of ammo, the lieutenant comes back to get her. And while he's trying to bring her to safety, they get surrounded. So they, they set a grenade, and while they're both clutching this grenade, knowing this is the end for them, but at least they're gonna take out some of the aliens who are chasing their friends, they die together.

They finally have that respect. 

Ian: Yes. That moment of respect is so powerful. 

Matthew: Yep.

Ian: And,

We wind up with, all of them running down their hallways, almost getting out of the place. And they did a good job. Once again, like, that's one of those setups, all the hallways and all the, the structures we've seen it. It's a movie that kind of plays its adventure backwards. They work their way down to where the aliens are, then they work their way back and back out.

Matthew: Yes. And some of this sort of rhymes with the final scenes in Alien as Ripley's running through Nostromo trying to get to the shuttle, trying to get back to Jonesy and to save Jonesy, etc. But at the end of all of this conflict Vasquez is gone, Hudson is gone, he also dies in this conflict, Lieutenant is gone Carter is gone.

All that's left are Hicks, who is severely wounded by acid blood, and Bishop, who is out elsewhere piloting the ship remotely, and Ripley and Newt. And Newt disappears. She falls down through an air shaft and is picked up by an alien. 

Ian: Yes. Which picks her up 

Matthew: Yes. And brings her to someplace where they've been gathering people to, to harvest them.

And one thing, and they're able to track her because Hicks earlier on. Hicks, and we've seen a little chemistry between Hicks and, and. Ripley, early in the movie. Hicks gives Ripley his little wristband tracker, which all the marines have apparently, to let them be tracked. And then, shortly after that, Ripley gives it to Newt to reassure her I'll always be able to come and find you.

Ian: Doesn't she have an installed tracker though? 

Matthew: She should. 

Ian: Yeah! 

Matthew: Yeah, I wonder about that. A, she's a colonist. Why doesn't she have an installed tracker? Or maybe they can't do that for people who are too young. I don't know. 

Ian: Oh, it's your 18th birthday. Here's your tracker and your job to listing. Ha 

Matthew: ha ha.

But B, they were sending Ripley on this mission with the Marines. Why didn't they give her one of the tracking wristbands all the Marines have? 

Ian: That's where I started to think that the plan of, that's where the plan of Ripley's not supposed to come back got a little bit more clear for me. I guess the idea that Space Yuppie is just like, ooh She can either die and hide the secret or She's a vessel for bringing one back.

Matthew: Yeah, 

Ian: okay 

Matthew: And either way, you know, it's already standard equipment for the marines, but we're not gonna pay for another apple watch for 

Ian: Exactly 

Matthew: for this consultant. 

Ian: I mean they barely pay for training for those marines Yeah, why would they pay for giving her equipment? 

Matthew: But yeah, I did wonder that why didn't newt have a tracker?

Ian: That's a good question. 

Matthew: Oh, maybe there's some Privacy laws that prevent you from doing that too for people who are too young to consent I don't know one can that's a 

Ian: good question one can hope so now, they're working their way to the escape, Newt goes missing, and Ripley's response is, I need to go get Newt.

Matthew: Right. So she has to go back down. You made a good point about they have to, they go down, encounter Hell, they fight their way back up, and they get to the drop ship that that Bishop has successfully gotten for them and is now piloting. They get Hicks safely aboard, and Ripley just uses a few minutes to gather as many weapons as she can.

And we saw earlier, Hicks training her in how to use these weapons. So That does pay off. And then she goes back down into hell to get Newt, because she promised Newt she would never leave her behind. And this is where it's, it's , that archetype of the, the mother who will fight through anything to save the child.

Ian: And where a lot of these, a lot of these sometimes more literal Chekhov's guns do come into play. Where it's like grenades, the types of guns they've had, how often we've seen them jam, and how often we've seen them be effective. Mm hmm. We've seen all these little bits and pieces, and so Ripley literally loads up in the armory with a lot of these things we've gotten hints of.

Trackers, everything else, and works her way back down, and fights and works her way through the aliens. This is one of those not just a piece of catharsis for this movie, but it is also for the original movie, where these things that were unkillable are now being shoved back. Human force is pushing back on them.

In some ways, it makes them look less threatening. They're a little less squishier. It's that concept of I think I'll call it the, inverse law of ninjas, like, one ninja is a terrifying threat, a dozen ninjas is a thing your main character can fight off to prove they are powerful.

It's like, the more aliens, the less powerful each alien is. 

Matthew: I like that. That's a good point. Otherwise, why would the movie need so many? 

Ian: Exactly. It's like, you can fight off this many in that sense. She's making a point, but it's also it's still threatening, it's still dangerous. 

Matthew: And it does make sense in that the first movie, it was one of these creatures against a bunch of tugboat workers.

They are not armed and prepared to do any of this. And In the second one, it's force against force, it is a bunch of aliens against a squad of marines whose job is to kill things and blow things up. 

Ian: Exactly. That just changes the entire dynamic, but she makes her way there, and they finally do encounter the queen.

Alien queen surrounded by eggs. And I don't know what I think of the design of the Queen. 

Matthew: Me neither. I mean, I can see where it's an extension of the original Giger designs of the Alien. But, it doesn't always make a lot of sense in terms of evolutionary biology, for lack of better terms.

Ian: Mm hmm. And, and Giger was not involved with Aliens. No. So this was not his His evolution of the design I can kind of see that

But I also think they're dealing what they can with what they've got Like finance and everything else wise. Right. I don't know in what order they filmed stuff But the the Queen having just this giant headpiece and the extra arms works but has a you know The upgraded suit kind of feel at times 

Matthew: right 

and the idea of the Queen being bigger and more fearsome in a fight I mean, this is a different species from a different world, but that is not how queen based colony insects tend to work on Earth.

The queens are not the fighters. 

Ian: But it is a narrative counterpoint to what Ripley is being. The mother who will fight through everything faces off. Against a mother who's defending all of her children. 

Matthew: Absolutely. That's what they're setting us up for. It's these two different maternal figures fighting each other.

Ian: And Ripley's response to seeing the egg start to hatch is flamethrower. As we've learned, that works. And that is not something that has responded too well. 

Matthew: No, no, no, 

Ian: no. 

Matthew: And we get the first indication of real clear communication among the aliens. 

Because ripley is in the egg chamber with the Queen who's laying the eggs, and aliens start to approach her from the sides.

Ripley starts torching eggs, without any words that we can necessarily understand or even hear, the Queen communicates something to these aliens who then back off. 

Ian: Yeah. 

Matthew: So the Queen is in control of what's happening here.

Ian: Yeah, no, this one's mine to fight. Right..

And the Queen chases them out. And this is where, there's this big scene out in the, loading docks where this ship is. This drop ship to be able to escape. 

Matthew: Right, because she, she blows things up in her wake to, to escape with Newt. And manages to get back to where the drop ship was and the drop ship is gone.

Did the, did the synthetic person betray people once again? But no, Bishop just dusted off because the platform was getting too unstable, but he was right there and he manages to pick up Ripley and Newt and bring them back to the orbiting marine spaceship. So we get our nice ending. We get our nice false ending, just like we did in Alien, where everything seems okay and we survived.

Ian: It's the classic. Yep. And Bishop is just like, see, we've made it safely, is bisected. 

Matthew: Yes, because just as the the big alien had stowed away aboard the escape shuttle on the Nostromo. The Queen has stowed away in the landing gear compartment of the dropship and is now aboard the spaceship and has, has torn Bishop in half and is trying to get at Newt and Ripley.

And it seems personal that she's going after Ripley and Newt because she's mad at Ripley. 

Ian: Absolutely. This is personal. This is weirdly human emotion from the aliens. 

Matthew: And that's a big change because one of the scary things about the aliens has been that they are emotionless. But that's not true of the Queen.

And some, in some ways that kind of does make sense. 

Ian: Yeah. This is personal and, and pointed. And Fighting very, very, very viciously, but Ripley is still the defender and suits up in the classic scene, getting into one of the loaders, and that fight is so iconic. 

Matthew: Right, this suddenly makes her as big and as strong as the Alien Queen is.

And they have this mecha versus alien fight on the hangar deck. 

Ian: Get in the loader, Ripley. Yes. But, that fight, it does also though, you described it being parallel to the original alien, it is extremely. 

Music: Yes. How 

Ian: do you get rid of a stowaway alien?

You shove them out and airlock into space. It's the exact same trick. It's just at a different scale. 

Matthew: If there's something on your spaceship and you don't want it to be there, that's probably your go to technique. 

Ian: Absolutely. And on that fight is wonderful, but at the same time, there's not much to say, it's a lot of, you know, tail whipping and gnashing and there's classic moments, the, the little mini mouth of the queen darting towards Ripley as she's in the cockpit of her, her loader, the the throwing it down and pinning it with the loader in the weirdly vertical airlock dump, 

Matthew: right?

Although I guess there's no vertical in space, but. 

Ian: Yeah. On the, the hangar deck there is. Yeah. Which also implies this is a spinning ring or something? 

Matthew: I don't know. There, there clearly is artificial gravity in this technology because Nostromo had artificial gravity and it wasn't spinning. 

Ian: Yeah. So, artificial gravity.

So it's got a down. Right. But they've got a down into the pit. Yeah. 

Matthew: And at the bottom of the pit is the outer airlock door. 

Ian: But that means the airlock doors have gravity pullers? Yeah. Well, the airlock chamber itself, I guess. I yeah, I guess. I'm trying to figure out if it's like the floor pulls you down, or is it the ceiling pushes you away system?

Matthew: Don't know. Don't know. Either way, once they're open, the air is gonna pull you out. 

Ian: Yes. And, but you know, the fight ends with the dramatic launch, which is a little cheesy, but in the right cathartic way of seeing the alien queen writhe out in space and scream kind of for vengeance.

Matthew: And that's the kind of shot in which the limited budget and the limited tech of 1986 reveals itself. Some of the shots of the drop ship. Entering the atmosphere and flying down to , the planet at the beginning, the shots of the dropship taking off again to rescue everybody in the, as you say, the shot of the alien being blasted out into space.

They're kind of distractingly crude composite shots in some ways. 

Ian: Yeah. Not the best. 

Matthew: Reminds me a bit of some of the, the spaceship footage in Dune from 84. 

Ian: Very much so. Very much so. 

Matthew: But it works for the movie. If there's enough going on, it's not going to distract too much. 

Ian: Exactly. And we get our, our ending there with three and a half survivors.

Matthew: Yes, Bishop, being synthetic, is able to survive that. 

Ian: They've only got a half Bish, half of Bishop. They saved the Bish or the Hop, but, Ha 

Matthew: ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! And and Hicks, who is wounded and unconscious, is is, has still survived, so he's in a, in a pod. 

Ian: Mm hmm. 

Well, he's in a pod and doesn't he have like a blindfold over his eyes?

Matthew: I think so. 

Ian: Damage to his face. So there's this very much like almost hear no evil, see no evil thing to the end here with, with how everyone is, is, is wounded at the end. But it ends in a very, very similar place to where it starts, which is Bishop and and, and Hicks are put into cryopods. Newt put, Newt is put into a cryopod and Ripley, then.

Settles in to fall asleep in a cryopod again, and there's, there's such a tension there which loops it around because last time she did this survive an alien attack and put herself into a cryopod it was 60 years 57 years before she was woken up again. 

Matthew: And presumably this marine ship is programmed to return to the Earth system and they don't have to worry about drifting around, but they don't make that explicit.

And that's where the movie leaves us. And I think that means we're moving on to our final questions.

Ian: I think so. 

Matthew: But before we get there, please stay tuned for those. But first, if you like the Intermillennium Media Project podcast, if you're enjoying the IMMP, and you'd like more, Please go to immproject. com, where you'll find all of our back episodes. Or go to Patreon, and go to Patreon, where you will find lots of bonus content if you join us there. Starting at the Content Companion level, for just 3 a month. Or, if you want more, you can join at the Movie Club level, and you will periodically get a mystery DVD in the mail, for something that's going to be an upcoming episode.

of the podcast and you can go to Patreon, you can find a link to our Patreon at immproject. com. And also on immproject. com you'll find a link to our store if you like t shirts and coffee mugs and other fun things like that. A contact page where you can reach us by email or by actual honest to goodness US mail.

Ian: Oh my goodness. 

Matthew: But the best way to support the show is just to let your friends know about it, share the information, go wherever you get your podcasts and give us five stars and just help people discover it. And Ian, where can people find you? 

Ian: I can be found at itemcrafting. com or at ItemCraftingLive on Twitch.

Come see me play, you know, Myst and Riven, point and click adventure games. I might even try playing some of Alien Isolation coming up. Having, having done this recently, I thought I'd re download that game and see what it was like to, to play an alien story in first person. 

Matthew: That sounds cool. I look forward to seeing that, and you can find me at by matthew porter.com.

That's where you'll find links to whatever it is I'm doing. I'm also at by Matthew Porter. Do at Mastodon Social on Mastodon. I am now by Matthew Porter on Blue Sky. And you'll also find it by matthew porter.com, a link to the Drafthouse Diaries. on YouTube, where I review all of my far too many visits to Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas.

Ian: Ha ha! 

Matthew: And now it is time for our final questions. And it's a movie! It is! Screen or no screen? 

Ian: And I've got an interesting response, which is, Screen the original cut. 

Matthew: Oh, I agree, I agree. 

Ian: Yeah, I watched the directors again to remind myself, but I'd seen the original before. Partially because you insisted to see the original, but when I was able to get copies of this later, a lot of the new versions are like both versions on the disc, kind of.

If you get like, the Alien Collection, you get both versions on the same disc, you get a couple of different options. They're packaged together. I wish I'd watched the original again, because you're right, the Director's adds things and changes stuff so much. And I love having , those extra features, those extra elements.

They shift the story so much and the original is amazing. It is a major success It is the inspiration for so many other things. I love I'm a huge fan as anyone who's listened to the podcast No, knows of things like the mothership RPG, which is a love letter to this film so much And it says something that when I get that game released one of its Entire, like, how to play booklets, the thing was called Another Bug Hunt, which is just sending you through pretty much what it implies the previous missions for the Marines were.

It, it's a love letter that and so many other things are inspired by. There's, there's references to how the Aliens franchise has done its things in everything from, of course, Doom to Five Nights at Freddy's and horror things overall. Take inspiration, I'd say, from the way this movie, these movies did their things, and the original cut is better.

Watch the original cut, even if you're not as much of a horror fan, I think it's worth it, because it's just important to cinema, in that sense. 

Matthew: Yeah, I agree. I would say screen, And if you have to choose, I would say definitely choose the original cut. I think it's a better movie. It's a more engaging movie.

And, you know, if you're curious after that, go ahead and watch the director's cut. But I don't think it is as good. And you're right about the influence this had. I talked about how this owes things to prior military science fiction, like the novel. Starship Troopers, and some of the influence this had later, I think that the movie version of Starship Troopers, the often misunderstood movie Starship Troopers, owes a lot to Aliens in terms of the way it depicted on screen future sci fi military.

And as you say, it's not just science fiction, military science fiction, that's influenced by this. I think it's a lot of kinds of horror movies. have been influenced by aliens. So absolutely screen it and choose the original cut. And by the way, I re watched it on Max, and the version on Max is the original cut.

Ian: Okay, that's good. 

Matthew: So our next question is an interesting one. Revive, Reboot, or Rest in Peace. 

Ian: Well, as always, we've got to discuss the other things. This came out in 86, and has since then been followed with Alien 3 in 92. Oh, hey! Alien Resurrection in 97. And then, two of what was supposed to be a prequel trilogy, which was Prometheus, the only one to not have Alien in its name, And Alien Covenant in 2017, so 2012 and 2017.

And then, they've got Alien Romulus coming out now, which is actually a mid quill between the original Alien and Aliens. 

Matthew: Oh, it is. It takes place less than 57 years after Alien. 

Ian: Yes. Huh. So this is the movie that takes place in between, right in the space that we're talking about. And that right there tells me they've played around with this.

They've had further stories of Ripley. They've had what had happened before in all sorts of different ways. And they're still exploring that. So when we're talking about aliens, it has to really start from aliens as the setup and going from there. Hmm. And I think there's only one path to go. Yeah. Hmm. And this is where I have to mention some other things.

The Alien franchise is not just movies. 

Matthew: No, it's not. 

Ian: There's a lot of other stuff. There's, of course, spinoffs like Alien vs. Predator. Yeah. But there are games like Alien Isolation and the maligned Aliens Colonial Marines. 

Matthew: I know very little about that. 

Ian: That game has problems and it's not something I can really dive into.

Okay. Right now. But I think it had a good idea as to where to follow, because my suggestion is the sequel to Aliens should be about the colonial marines. We've talked about this group being not well funded, not well trained, and have apparently been sent on cleanup missions and other stuff before. I'd be fascinated to see what other Stupid things the Weyland Yutani Corporation is up to, and what other things they throw people at.

Because the one problem with world building of this grand, overarching conglomerate that runs all of these things and throws people at gaining xenomorphs is that it implies the Weyland Yutani Corporation has nothing to do other than throw people at collecting xenomorphs. I'd love to see an Aliens franchise film.

That doesn't deal with the aliens. 

Matthew: Yeah. But 

Ian: shows us of the other problems and issues and the other social things of being in the Weyland Yutani cooperation controlled space exploration future, following a bunch of insufficiently prepped marines. It can still be horror. You can still have a cast that starts out large and ends small due to on screen deaths.

But. I want to see the rest of the world in that sense, and that's where I'm suggesting they go. 

Matthew: That's interesting, and we get a little bit of that additional world building in Prometheus. Especially at the beginning about Weyland Yutani and the people behind it and yeah, and I almost I sort of wonder maybe The xenomorphs are the most interesting thing Weyland Yutani is into because they have essentially taken over everything else and they build all the spaceships and the space stations and Terraform all the planets and things like that.

And this is the one thing that's new That they can get their hands on and and I wonder what else do they use the colonial marines for because obviously there's been nothing like The encounters with the xenomorphs before and maybe it's just bug hunts and putting down colonial rebellions And there's not much else But, I don't know.

It would be interesting to see more of that setting. As frustrating as I find the Marines to watch sometimes, especially at the beginning, when you see how undisciplined they are that could be interesting. If they wanted some kind of a spin off, that would be the way to go. Apparently, again, I don't know anything about that game, apparently that did not satisfy it.

Ian: Yeah, that game was plagued with issues. Yeah, 

Matthew: sounds like the less said the better.

So, yeah, I am revival curious about this movie. I think there's more that you can do in , the Alien slash Weyland Yutani setting. I am interested to see what they do with Alien Romulus. I was really interested when I saw the interview between Fede Alvarez, the director of Romulus, and Ridley Scott, who directed the two other prequels, as well as the original.

And yet And Fede Alvarez, good horror movie director, mainly a horror movie director, and yet when I see the trailers, so many of the shots seem to be just rehashes of things that came in previous Alien movies. Now maybe that's because that's what the people who edited the trailer decided to do, and what the studio wanted from the trailer is make sure people know it's more of the same because they liked what came before.

And maybe there's more innovation in the movie itself. The trailer has me, the trailer has tempered my expectations a little bit, but I'm still very interested to see what Alvarez does with this. 

Ian: And I will say, this will be an interesting thing to see a movie that's going back to the first two kind of films style, but possibly with some of the later films, grander political machinations of the Weyland Yutani Corporation storylines.

Right. There's been a lot of, every movie has to leave its mark, and what each movie has layered on has expanded their world. So it's interesting to see going back to the well of how it all started. Yeah. Possibly with this extra knowledge from the the fan base as it does the one thing we have done a lot when we've talked about remakes and reboots and such is differing perspectives and changing the perspective so that the new version of a film is not the exact same as the old version because they both can have their benefits.

This might be that we've not seen it when we're recording this that movie has not come out yet. So, there's possibilities, and by the time you hear this, it will have, so it'd be, feel free to send us messages and talk with us about what you thought and how you feel aliens and the new movies have done.

Matthew: And you know, I think we're gonna have to go and see Romulus. 

Ian: I think we will. 

Matthew: So, it's gonna be something new to watch. Yeah, heads up on Patreon, you can expect some comments about that. 

Ian: Mm hmm. 

Matthew: But, in the meantime, I think that's gonna be all for this episode of the The Intermillennium Media Project.

And coming up, of course, it's October. 

Ian: Oh, yes. 

Matthew: The Halloween season, so we've got fun things planned for that. Ah, 

Ian: what do we have coming down the pipeline? Ha ha ha 

Matthew: ha 

Ian: ha. 

Matthew: Is my thumb pricking a little bit? Might be?

Ian: Ha ha! 

Matthew: But thank you very much for joining us, and we hope you will join us in a couple of weeks for more tales of media from the 20th century.

Ian: In the meantime, go find something new to watch.