The Alien Franchise

[TheRedStranger]

 

First and foremost - you gotta love the atmospheric music, designs, love and effort put into this film and it's subsequent lore. The plot is simple and solid at its foundation yet innovative beyond its core concept ("slasher in a haunted house"). It brought horror into the cold confines of space without jumping the shark. The blend of serious dystopian sci-fi (a hard-sci-fi version of Lucas-style "dirty-space") and horror gave us a frightening form of futuristic horror that helped bring the film out of the cheesey mire of prior   B-movies that tried to mix scifi and horror (including its comical prototype Darkstar). Basically the anti-Starwars of its time, it paved the way for a grand and meaningful view of space with its rich themes about corporativism, the duplicitousness of technology, mistrust, and humanity's possible promises and dark pitfalls beyond our earth from a more macrbe perspective of solid sci-fi scary story rather than a futuristic take on high-fantasy. It was a significant evolution in film and open the door to popularizing many of the dystopian, neo-gothic, and technically-rich design styles of people like Ron-Cobb and H.R Geiger, who arguably would even influence the artwork and backgrounds of works like our forum-favorite Satam. It would also rocket the genre of sci-fi-horror to help later give us films like John-Carpenter's The Thing, the Borg from Star-Trek, and games like Dead Space.  

[Mike Arcade]

There's so much I can say about Alien and the whole series, but really it's just a big inspiration for me regarding it's style and atmosphere. No matter how the series goes we'll always have the Original Film and it's Sequel Aliens. However I must say that I LOVE the look of the Xenomorph, just  H.R. Gigar in general had some wonderfully disturbing artwork with the bio-synthetic look of his art and said Alien. I don't see all that much Bio Synthetic/Organic threats nowadays, then again it also threads close with a Lovecraftian style I'd say. I mean the danger of robotics and such is effective (as seen in many series like The Terminator, Mega Man, Sonic SatAM obviously) however with a more Organic sort of threat in a similar vain has always appealed to me in some ways a lot more. I like both Robotic and Synthetic monsters of sorts, yet as I grow older I find the appeal and dangers of Eugenics a lot more appealing. It's not like they have to be separate either as both together are often seen in many fiction are a very effective threat.

Can't go without mentioning how I prefer a more harder, grittier sci-fi that while Alien goes further than say the Original Star Wars Trilogy is more my own taste. Although I do like a cleaner sci-fi at times like in some of Star Trek and the Raygun Gothic era of Serials and Comics such as Flash Gordon. I just like certain amounts of Sci-fi, I'll just keep it that simple.

Although I do have to wonder what other sort of Xenomorph Hybrids would look like, as all Chestbursters take traits on whatever it bursts out of. I can't help but wonder what say a Jaguar Xenomorph would look like or one of those aliens from Avatar. Heck, how terrifying would a Mobian Xenomorph be? O_O