A personal Alien History

When I think back on it, my Dad was always terrible for giving away 'spoilers' for movies. Before I'd ever laid eyes on the first Alien film I'd been told about the disgusting details of the chestburster scene and how he found the scene with the hanging chains and dripping water the most scary part of it. Rather than being annoyed at these revelations, I was totally enthralled by the descriptions and couldn't wait until I could finally see it for myself. I don't think there was too much consideration of whether I was old enough or not, I was probably waiting on it being shown on TV again as we didn't have a VCR at the time. I don't think I was disappointed by the first film but I probably saw the sequel fairly soon afterwards, which I was even more impressed by. To a young boy, the all out action and variation of Aliens was clearly a bigger draw than tense horror and fleeting glimpses of the titular creature.

'Gorilla Alien' with grabbing arms
and 'acid' (water) spraying action.

Images from Super Toy Archive

After that I was completely hooked on the whole concept, and while my information sources were limited back then I still wanted to find out more. I remember reading some of the graphic novels that involved Newt's life after Aliens (d'oh) and I also bought a fair amount of the toys made by Kenner.

The Alien Queen was quite impressive
and included the second set of jaws

Yeah, I definitely remember
 Apone's bright yellow T-Shirt...

Despite all of the toys being fairly lame looking back on them, even at the time I clearly realised that the human toys were rubbish (I'm not even sure I ever saw the marines for sale in the shops, I just remember seeing them advertised on the back of packaging) so these were substituted for G.I.Joe figures. I already had a collection of those and they actually seemed a better scale compared to the Aliens. I even went as far as creating a Blue Peter style playset with a papier-mâché hive underneath and cardboard cut-out corridors above. The fact that these toys weren't released until 1992 makes me slightly uncomfortable about the age I must have been while doing this...

'92 also saw the release of Alien 3 but I didn't see it in the cinema so I'm not exactly sure when I first saw it. At the time I don't think I thought it was awful but it didn't grab me as much as the others. I still felt that it was a reasonable way to end the series though and I think there is a good film in there somewhere - sadly neither the original or directors cut are that film. Strangely enough I feel that the alien coming from the dog works the best, partly because the directors cut switching to a cow seeming to come out of nowhere and also just because everyone loves dogs so you feel some sense of loss at its death. It would also need something doing about some shots of the alien too - how they managed to make actual puppets and models look like bad CGI I'll never quite understand...

After Alien 3 I pretty much treated the series as over, bringing back Ripley in Resurrection felt like it cheapened the end of 3, no matter what your feelings are on both films. I think I've watched Resurrection a couple of times and I watched the first AVP film once, which was enough to tell me to leave the sequel well alone. Funnily enough, the best thing to come out of the Aliens Vs. Predator concept has always been the video games. The demo of the first PC game kept me going for a long time, it was absolutely terrifying and I was convinced that the feeling of being in Aliens couldn't be simulated any better. There was a random nature to the aliens that always kept you guessing and I even remember on one occasion being too scared to leave the APC at the start of the level and one of the bastards found its way in and killed me.

To bring all of this back towards some kind of point, all of this has been going through my mind in preparation for Ridley Scott's new film Prometheus. For a long time there was a lot of speculation about whether this was a straight prequel to Alien or exploring similar ideas etc. until the following trailer came out.

Right then I went from a vaguely interested party to a rabid fanboy who had to see the film on day one. By now I've come to appreciate Alien more so the nods and style similarities to the original are great. It just seems to be pitched perfectly to get over the feeling of "don't worry guys, we're not going to screw this up". I reserve the right to still be disappointed by it but that trailer just made me feel so much more comfortable about the concept as a whole. Despite wanting to go into the film fresh, it's been hard to resist following the frame by frame analysis of that trailer and what other possibilities can be drawn from it. There hasn't been much more to go on until this new viral video, which is a really nice touch as it may not even be part of the final film.

I feel like I've reverted back to that childlike state of trying to seek out every bit of information and with the internet it's now actually possible. I've recently been working my my through articles on a blog called Strange Shapes, which has some amazing stories and details about how the films came together. If my younger self could have read it, I'm sure my mind would have been blown completely. It's also very interesting to see that things that you felt were designed so perfectly were really just trial and error when you see some of the abandoned ideas - Maggots inside of the Alien's domed headpiece anyone? There's also a lot of different scenes that were planned for Alien that had to be abandoned either because of not having the time or the alien suit not being as easy to move in as imagined.

Re-watching the originals before the release of Prometheus is clearly on the cards, though I'm currently contemplating whether to upgrade from the DVD boxset to Blu-Ray. This is complicated further by the fact that there now seems to be two versions of the "Quadrilogy" on Blu-Ray and I'm not sure what the difference is if any. Though the DVD version does tend to pause quite badly as it changes between the different scenes used in the two cuts available on each disc, so getting rid of that problem would be a definite plus. Any other arguments I can use to convince myself?