"Alien" Nation: Hollywood's Ickiest Franchise has Always Been an Incubator for Filmmaking Talent

In space, no can hear your scream at your A.D.

No film franchise has had a more accomplished class of filmmakers explode from its womb than the ALIEN-iad. Extraterrestrial, extraterrestrial, read all about it in the Paper of Record.

Egg McGuffin, or the Xenomorph-or-Egg Paradox

The 1991-2 production of Alien 3 was by all accounts more of a slog than this photo of Sigourney Weaver and her tall, dark plus-one would suggest.

Here’s a Smithsonian piece wherein I put my lifelong independent study of xenobiology to good use by documenting curator Ryan Lintelman’s quest to sleuth out exactly which ALIEN flick the big prop egg in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. It’s not the first time I’ve recounted the tortured history of of Alien 3, a less imaginative exponent of the visual and thematic ideas that had made the first two pictures in the slime-dripping series so widely admired.

Homage Control: Wherein I attempt to catalog all the shoutouts in "Avatar: The Way of Water" to Cameron joints past

My man Big Jim Cameron isn’t just a vegan pea protein farmer, he’s a committed recycler. Hey, at least he’s got the good taste to steal from the best.

This exhaustive-and-yet-surely-incomplete list I made of his many self-homages in the new Avatar: The Way of Water is up at Vulture.

POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR: "Avatar: The Way of Water" and What's Making Us Happy

Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Zoe Saldaña, and Sam Worthington shooting one of the current or forthcoming Avatar sequels at some point between late 2017 and early 2020. (Fox)

James Cameron only releases a new feature film every dozen or so years, so you’ll forgive me if I’m excited. My Avatar: The Way of Water media blitz kicks off with a fun PCHH wherein Stephen Thompson, whom I’d incorrectly predicted would hate this movie, Reanna Cruz, and I talk through our reactions, and I plug my holiday mixtape.

They mostly come out at night, mostly: ALIENS, briefly recalled on All Things Considered

Writer/director James Cameron with Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn on the Pinewood Studios set of ALIENS circa 1985. (Fox)

I was thrilled to get an invitation from All Things Considered to blab briefly with the great Audie Cornish about one of my favorite movies on the 30th anniversary of its release: SpaceCamp. No, it was ALIENS. Duh. The segment aired at the very end of an ATC that started off with live audio of the "Roll Call Vote!" chant from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. They're coming out of the goddamn walls, just like Private Hudson said.

You can hear the segment here. I had more to say than they could use, but that's radio, and hey, this is a show primarily devoted to, you know, real news. One of the first pieces I ever wrote for NPR was largely about ALIENS. I have a narrow range of interests, I guess.

Prose and Retcons, or Don't Fear the Rewind, or Mulligans' Wake

"Well, everyone knows Ripley died on Fiornia-161. What this ALIEN movie presupposes is... maybe she didn't?"

I have a long, long "Exposition" essay up at The Dissolve today inspired by (uncertain) reports that District 9 director Neill Blomkamp's upcoming Alien movie may be a ret-con scenario that undoes the events of 1992's Alien-little-three, or Alien Cubed – anyway, the one where Ripley died. The piece is about retconning in fiction in general, and why it doesn't much impair my ability or inclination to suspend my disbelief at all.

If you're quite comfortable in your chair, and you're stout of heart and nerdy of temperament... Onward!

What's It All About, Chappie?

So Die Antwoord won't be releasing a cover of "Alfie" with the lyrics updated to promote their surprisingly substantial parts in Neill Blomkamp's new RoboCop / Short Circuit hybrid, Chappie? Disappointing.

But so's the movie. My NPR review is here.

What Gravity Should've Learned from ALIENS

Sigourney Weaver and Carrie Henn in ALIENS. 

Sandra Bullock in Gravity. 

Admittedly, ALIENS is a film I've loved unconditionally since I was a kid. I need very little prompting to think about it, and only a little more prompting than that to write about it. But a deleted scene from that 27-year-old movie highlights what is, to me, the sole flaw in Alfonso Curaon's still-fantastic new space movie Gravity, and how audience expectations have changed in the generation since ALIENS. This is the subject of my first piece for Slate, which you can read here.