Tag: alien

Ellen Ripley, or the epitome of female power

In the dying days of 1979, Ridley Scott’s Alien introduced a brand new mythos to the world of cinema. The alien creature soon became an icon of the relatively new (for 1979) sci-fi horror genre, spawning movie sequels, countless imitations, games, books, and a whole bunch of movie memorabilia.

Alien’s premise is simple enough. A Weyland-Yutani- (the ‘Company’) owned commercial freighter called Nostromo (a nod to Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness) is on its way back to Earth after a deep-space mining expedition (to the fictional, resources-rich planet of Thedus, for those who love their facts). Somewhere along the way, the ship’s central computer, Mother, intercepts a transmission, and in accordance with Yutani’s standard operating directives to investigate any transmission with a possible intelligent origin, wakes the crew up from hypersleep.

After setting down on the planetoid where the transmission came from, the crew discovers what appears to be a derelict spaceship with a cargo of thousands of egg-like objects. A crew member, Kane (John Hurt) touches one of these eggs and something leaps out from within, attaching itself to his face.

What follows is movie history. The alien life-cycle, the derelict spaceship, the Engineers, all entered the popular psyche and culture.

Alien is certainly notable for many things, and besides creating the whole mythology surrounding the alien creature, it also introduced the character of Lieutenant First Class Ellen Ripley, portrayed by Sigourney Weaver.

Weaver was barely 30 years of age when she accepted the part that would turn a largely unknown and struggling actress into a household name. Alien was, in fact, Weaver’s first major role, as she had only had a minor part in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall two years prior.

The character of Ripley as we know it today almost never existed, however, as Ripley was indeed a male character in early drafts of the screenplay. It only switched genders after a personal request by Scott.

Alien surprised pretty much everyone by having the seemingly lead male role, Dallas (Tom Skerritt), killed off early in the movie. This is a masterstroke, as it throws both the Nostromo’s crew and the audience into disarray. From that point on, anything is possible, and as the Alien picks off crew members one by one, Ripley emerges as the last survivor.

Ripley’s Journey: Alone in space, from surrogate motherhood to hardened warrior

Much has been written about Ripley’s endurance and resourcefulness while facing a superior foe. Our protagonist finds herself in a rather unenviable plight: Last one standing, alone inside a gigantic spaceship in the far reaches of the Outer Veil, with a monstrous alien creature stalking her. Where most women would have crumbled and broken down waiting for their inevitable fate, Ripley makes use of her cunning and will to survive, first by setting up the detonation of the spaceship and finally outwitting the heinous menace.

Ripley’s character stands out for many reasons, not least because a female lead was almost unheard of at the time of the movie’s release. Ripley contravenes all the rules of what a woman is supposed to be. She stands strong and determined in the face of adversity, facing off against a dark enemy. She refuses to give into despair by rising up to the challenge, on her own, and against all odds.

The character of Ellen Ripley would be further developed in the powerful sequel Aliens (1986). Under the expert direction of James Cameron, Ripley would evolve into a matriarchal role to the last survivor of Hadley Hope’s colony, 12 year old Rebecca “Newt” Jordan (Carrie Henn).

The relationship between Ripley and Newt is interesting. As both females grow closer throughout the events of the movie, Ripley becomes an accidental mother to the child, and there is a key element that explains this dynamic, though it is absent from the version of Aliens released in theatres.

It wouldn’t be until the release of Aliens: The Director’s Cut that we learned about Ripley’s own daughter, Amanda. After the events depicted in Alien, Ripley spent 57 years drifting through space on board the Nostromo’s lifeboat. She’s eventually picked up and taken to the Gateway Station, orbiting Earth. It is at Gateway that she learns of Amanda’s death in the intervening years.

This fact explains Ripley’s bonding with Newt, as Ripley perhaps attempts to redeem herself from the guilt of ‘abandoning’ her own biological daughter.

Get away from her, you bitch

Besides being a savior for Newt, Ripley’s character becomes a warrior of superior caliber, a fact that it’s perfectly epitomized in her final confrontation against the Alien Queen at the end of Aliens.

Using a Power Loader, Ripley takes on the Queen on her own terms, pummelling the monster into submission for attempting to take Newt from her. Once again, Ripley is the last one standing, empowered by her own resolution to save the child from the clutches of the cruellest of fates.

Once again, Ripley succeeds where a whole platoon of tough Marines failed. It is clear that a point is being made here. She represents the power of a female, the embodiment and pinnacle of Second Wave Feminism. Ripley may be armed and dangerous, using man-made technology to defeat a cunning adversary. Yet, it is a woman using a flamethrower to burn the Queen’s carefully laid eggs. And it’s also a woman emptying her weapons on all of the Queen’s unborn children, and later squaring off against Her in the Hangar Bay on board the Sulaco.

Conclusion: Ripley, icon of power and victory over male superiority

Early in Aliens, Company rep Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) asks Ripley to accompany himself and a platoon of Colonial Marines on their mission to find out why all communications have been lost with Hadley’s Hope. He refers to the Marines as ‘tough hombres’, adding that they’re ‘packing state-of-the-art firepower.’ But Ripley is not fooled by this. She has seen what just one alien creature can do, and initially refuses, perhaps believing that wars cannot be won by firepower alone, a fact painfully learned by the American army in a well known conflict in South East Asia.

But more significantly, Ripley stands up against a man’s world. Earlier on, while being grilled by a Company committee about her role in the detonation of the Nostromo, the almost all-male commission implicitly accuses her of blowing up the ship in a reckless act, dismissing her accounts of the alien creature. And when the only female member of the committee appears to back up the Company’s opinion that such creature is nothing but an invention (‘LV-426 is a rock. No indigenous life’), Ripley quips “I told you, it wasn’t indigenous. There was an alien spacecraft there. A derelict ship. We homed on its beacon…”

Later on, as the Colonial Marines platoon is decimated, largely because of its inexperienced commanding officer, Lt. Gorman, Ripley once again kicks into action and takes control. She turns the tables around and is chastised by it, but at least manages to save some of the Marines.

Ellen Ripley stands as an icon of female empowerment, both as a woman, a mother, a hero, and a kick-ass warrior.

 

 

 

 

 

Body Horror: Visceral Fantasies

Your body is your temple, right? Wrong.

The human body is a lab, a smouldering cauldron of fluids, muscle and sinew ripe for unholy modifications, a testing ground for the darkest and utterly twisted pseudo-scientific nightmares conjured up by that darkly pit of premeditated depravity that is the human mind.

Throughout the years, film makers and literary authors have regaled us with all sorts of body-related transformations, mutations, parasitic infestations, disfigurement, physical reconfiguration, perverse warping, and a whole lot more yucky and generally nasty physiological aberrations.

What exactly is body horror?

While a precise (clean?) definition is hard to come up with, the moniker relates to that sub-genre of horror cinema that shows, usually without sparing any gory details, the purposeful experimentation, alteration, contamination, plain deformation, and ultimate destruction of the human body.

The flesh is weak, and frail. It can be easily changed and corrupted, and the movie trope of the mad scientist with a bloody white apron and a grin on his face is no longer the sole source of our deepest fears. Experimental drugs, radiation, viruses, and weird parasitic creatures spawned from a godless place all conspire to taunt our will to be scared nowadays.

Unlike other, more popular horror sub-genres such as slasher movies, body horror is somewhat more intimate. The deeply invasive nature of the procedures being performed, and the sometimes openly sexual tampering with human flesh turn the whole body horror experience into a voyeuristic tour de force.

Also unlike most other sub-genres of horror cinema, the foe is usually not an external one. Rather, it comes from within, in the form of a disease, a microbe, or a parasite that infects the body and grows into a horrendous life form, or causes the body to transform into a monstrous thing. In body horror, we become witnesses to the horrific decay and breaking down of the flesh. The body turns into a canvas to bring someone’s dark obsessions into an organic and disturbing imitation of life.

The metamorphosis of the flesh heralds a catharsis, a change, as the body turns into something new. The old you has died, and you have become a brand new self, stepping through the veil of the flesh into a new dimension of existence. Such fantasy sometimes requires the total decomposition of your old form, as seen in the much loved 1986 remake of The Fly.

Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) in 1986’s The Fly. Photo credit: Fox

Here, we see loner scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldlum at his best) slowly evolve from human to a six-feet high insectoid through the second and third acts of the movie. Such transformation begins rather subtly, with Brundle showing a curious and intense craving for sugar. Superhuman strength and agility follow, making him believe that the experience of having your body structure systematically broken down and reformed again via the teleportation device of his own invention has bestowed god-like abilities unto him.

Brundle ultimately pays dearly for his hubris, after discovering that he unwittingly became fused with a furtive common house fly at a molecular and genetic level. Brundle’s body slowly decays into a pathetic and gruesome creature with cravings that go well beyond sugar. The Brundle character represents mankind’s misguided belief that technology and ego can rule over nature and bend the laws of physics to our own advantage. But nature always finds a way of expressing its inherent superiority over man, in this case via such a lowly creature as a common fly.

The Fly also serves as a reminder that body horror victims are rarely, if ever, willing participants in the nightmare unfolding under their very skin. Extraneous sources are usually at play, whether human, supernatural, or extraterrestrial, these dark forces use the victim’s body as a conduit for their own wicked desires.

Allegories in the Body Horror genre

Body horror is sometimes an allegory to sexual frustration or repression. In 1982’s The Entity, for example, single mother Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey), begins to experience increasingly violent episodes of sexual abuse by an unseen force in her own home. Some would postulate that the entity’s attacks were a manifestation of the woman’s repressed sexual fantasies.

The link between body horror and sexual activity is a pervasive one. The Fly was released in 1986, at the dawn of the AIDS era. Many saw the movie as an allegory of the sexually transmitted disease. In David Cronenberg’s first feature film, Shivers (1975), parasites introduced into the human body induce an uncontrollable sexual appetite on the host. Bizarre sexual activity in the context of body horror is epitomised in Society (1989). This (almost) forgotten classic by American director Brian Yuzna shocked audiences by featuring a final 30- minutes long so-called ‘shunting’ scene, that can only be described as a surreal orgy of kinky, melty, oozy flesh involving the rich and famous in a private American society literally feeding on the less well-off. Society was actually Yuzna’s directorial debut, and he delivered what he set out do in spades. The movie turned out to be as much as a horrific portrayal of depraved lust as a social commentary of the stark class divide so prevalent in modern day America.

Body horror movies, or books, or whichever media it is expressed through, tap into people’s primal fear of their own mortality, and also the fear of disease, of being unclean, eliciting that feeling of helplessness that an incurable and terminal sickness may bring to its sufferer. And it’s not a subtle fear, either. There is plenty gore and explicitness in body horror experiences. Slow, graphic transformations, gaping fleshy cavities oozing unspeakable fluids, limbs becoming impossibly elongated, and much more, are common sights. The unnatural birth of the alien creature in 1979’s seminal Alien is a prime representation of one of man’s primordial fears, that of giving birth. In the movie, Nostromo’s Executive Officer, Kane, is inseminated with an alien egg when the Facehugger inserts a phallus-like proboscis into his throat. The egg gestates inside Kane’s body and eventually bursts out through his chest.

Body horror usually attempts to provide an explanation for the horrifyingly grotesque decay of the body, though this is usually a thin justification to exponentially augment the gore level.  Whether the menace comes from within or from the further reaches of space, body horror shares a common goal: the utter destruction of the flesh. In 1982’s remake of The Thing, for instance, a group of scientist make the fatal mistake of allowing an extraterrestrial organism that had been frozen inside an Antarctic ice plateau for thousands of year to thaw out. Once freed from its icy prison, the creature runs amok, beginning to take over people’s bodies with its inherent ability to imitate life forms. Only sometimes, the extraterrestrial menace is interrupted mid-process, and the resulting stomach-churning monstrosity lumbers around with a mangled, perverse strut of stunted growth.

A fear of blood tends to create a fear of the flesh, some say. Body horror is the science of the insane, a kaleidoscopic circus of nightmarish visions full of gore and indelible and uncomfortable sights that will always remain off the mainstream due to its very nature. The body horror sub-genre has experienced somewhat of a revival in recent times, thanks to a new generation of film makers like the Soska Sisters, a pair of Canadian twins whose end-of-year project at film school, Dead Hooker in a Trunk, put them firmly on the horror map. They followed it with American Mary (2012), a film about a medical student-turned-body alterer for money. From the dawn of time, people have had a fascination about human flesh.

Whether it manifests in a sexual context, or pure voyeuristic enthrallment,flesh never goes out of fashion!

Alien: Covenant review

covenant

Photo credit: Fox

Of neomorphs and duplicitous synthetics

There is a moment in Alien: Covenant when David, after having taught his synthetic counterpart Walter how to play the flute earlier, hears him play a tune. David walks in and says “Whistle, and I’ll come.’

This is of course a reference to the classic ghost story ‘Whistle and I’ll come, my lad,‘ by English author M.R. James. Such reference is bound to be missed by all but the most hardcore of horror & classic literature fans, but it is a shining moment in the somewhat derivative and cliche-ridden script that underlies the latest chapter in the long running Alien story arc.

Covenant‘s main flaw is that a ‘seen-it-all-before’ sense pervades the entire movie. From the opening credits (a revisit of Alien’s original piecemeal lettering credits), to the final 20 odd minutes (a shameless reimagining of the classic final showdown scene in Aliens, where Ripley kicks the Alien Queen’s spiky ass with a Power Loader, replaced with a loading crane here), we can’t help by feeling that it’s all been done before. Scott played it safe, and used (perhaps overused) the most recognizable moments of the movie’s predecessors to convey his own story.

Bar Walter/David (by far the most interesting thing about Covenant), the characters here are unashamedly one-dimensional. Alien fodder, if you will, to be gruesomely dispatched one by one to whittle down the crew to the Final Girl (Daniels, played with great talent and intent by Katherine Ross). There are attempts to imbue some characters with an extra layer of depth. Oram, for instance, is a religious man (which is why the Company did not allow him to lead the mission, as his religious views might cloud his judgment). This also serves as a conversation point between him and David, after we learn of David’d activities since landing on this planet. But by and large, the crew is there to be offed by the alien creatures, deemed ‘neomorphs’ here. If you are seasoned enough, you can almost tell the order which they will each die in.

Covenant is full of common tropes of the horror genre, down to the ‘sex equals death’ one. I mean, when are people going to learn that nookie in deep space with an alien menace lurking around probably won’t end well. One could safely replace the classic line with ‘In space, no one can hear you come,’ (cause you will die before you do.)

We have touched upon the Walter/David duality, both roles played flawlessly by the solid Michael Fassbender.

As Walter, he is the Bishop-type. A synthetic tasked with looking after the ship and its crew, and prevent either from coming to harm. Crucially, this new-generation synthetic is purposely devoid of the willingness and ability to learn, instead being consigned to serve its masters and creators. David remarks upon this point during one of the movie’s best scenes, and a rather intimate one, too, as David teaches Walter to play the flute (I’ll do the fingering, David says,) while Walter blows down the pipe.

We also learn about the fate of Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, from Prometheus, and what happened when the Juggernaut reached the Engineers homeworld. David has been up to no good.

But Covenant’s most critical flaw is its final twist, which you can see coming from about the movie’s halfway point. It won’t be revealed here, but think of the switcheroo, and you won’t be far from the truth.

Overall, Covenant is a solid, if somewhat cliched alien-by-the-numbers yarn. It is much more cohesive than Prometheus’ disjointed proposition for sure. But it is also not a huge departure from the series as Aliens was to Alien, for example, which turned out quite the better for it. David Fincher’s Alien 3 attempted to be different and ended up disappointing because of immense production troubles, and the less said about Alien: Resurrection the better. Not even the presence of the wonderfully underrated Brad Dourif could save it from imploding.

Covenant’s ending nicely sets up the next instalment (sequel to Covenant, prequel to Alien), provisionally called ‘Alien: Awakening.‘

We might see something different by then. For now, it’s alien business as usual.

Cosmic phenomenon, or alien craft? Astronomers ponder the origin of powerful radio signals

telescope

Our Universe is full of weird and wonderful things.

A number of incredibly strong radio signals detected by Earth’s telescopes have baffled astronomers and researchers for some time.

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are powerful radio blasts lasting for a few milliseconds only, first noticed when reviewing long-range telemetry data from 2001. Since then, twelve more such signals have been picked up.

The peculiarity of FRBs is that they appear to be one-off events, originating in a single location. The vast energy of these events equals to roughly that of five hundred million suns.

One thing that astronomers do know is that the signals come from outer space, as far as 5.5 billion light years out. Local interference has been categorically ruled out. This is significant, as previously thought ‘alien messages’ turned out to be interference caused by a site’s microwave oven, for instance.

But so far, researchers have been unable to agree on the source of such signals. An existing theory is that they are emitted when super-dense objects like black holes or neutron stars collide.

Another, far more interesting theory, is that the signals are artificial and the energy released is being used to power gigantic alien space craft. This theory gains traction given the fact that FRBs are arranged in a very peculiar pattern that does not conform to current understandings of astrophysics.

Telescope equipment is now been fine-tuned to look further into the FRB phenomenon, as astronomers are keen to pinpoint its origin.