The Alien Movies

My absolute favorite movies were the Alien series of film. Everything about them was great. Sigourney Weaver was astounding as the tough, brave Officer Ripley. In the first movie, The Alien, the starship sets were as so realistic while watching the movies you felt that you were aboard a real starship. Artist H.R.Giger's design of the alien spaceship and the alien creature itself was superb. The suspense and terror rocked me to the very core. The sequel, Aliens, was as great and in some ways as the original Alien. Although not quite up to par with the first two, the third and fourth films, Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection, in the series were also quite good. The only disappointment was the fifth in the series, Alien vs Preditor, which was a complete bomb. This is the only one that Sigourney Weaver was not in.

Alien garnered both critical acclaim and box office success, receiving an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, Saturn Awards for Best Science Fiction Film, Best Direction for Scott, and Best Supporting Actress for Cartwright, and a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, along with numerous other award nominations. It has remained highly praised in subsequent decades, being inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2002 for historical preservation as a film which is "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and being ranked by the American Film Institute in 2008 as the seventh-best film in the science fiction genre.

Here is a summery of the plot of Alien. It contains spoilers. So, if you haven't seen the film and intend watching it, skip this part of my post. The commercial towing spaceship Nostromo is on a return trip from Thedus to Earth carrying its seven-member crew in hypersleep. Upon receiving a transmission of unknown origin from a nearby planetoid, the ship's computer awakens the crew. Acting on orders from their corporate employers, the crew lands on the planetoid, resulting in some damage to the ship. Captain Dallas, Executive Officer Kane, and Navigator Lambert set out to investigate the signal's source while Warrant Officer Ripley, Science Officer Ash, and Engineers Brett and Parker stay behind to monitor their progress and make repairs. The signal is coming from a derelict alien spacecraft. Inside they find the remains of a large alien creature whose ribs appear to have been exploded outward from the inside. Ripley determines that the signal transmission is some type of warning. Kane discovers a vast chamber containing numerous eggs, one of which releases a creature that attaches itself to his face. Dallas and Lambert carry the unconscious Kane back to the Nostromo, where Ash allows them inside against Ripley's orders to follow the ship's quarantine protocol. They unsuccessfully attempt to remove the creature from Kane's face, discovering that its blood is an extremely corrosive acid. Eventually the creature detaches on its own and is found dead. With the ship repaired, the crew resume their trip back to Earth.

Kane awakens seemingly unharmed, but during a meal before re-entering stasis he begins to choke and convulse until an alien creature bursts from his chest, killing him and escaping into the ship. Lacking conventional weapons, the crew attempt to locate and capture the creature by fashioning motion trackers, electric prods, and flamethrowers. Brett follows the crew's cat into a large room where the now-fully-grown Alien attacks him and disappears with his body into the ship's air shafts. Dallas enters the shafts intending to force the Alien into an airlock where it can be expelled into space, but it ambushes him. Lambert implores the remaining crew members to escape in the ship's shuttle, but Ripley, now in command, explains that the shuttle will not support four people.

Accessing the ship's computer, Ripley discovers that Ash has been ordered to return the Alien to the Nostromo's corporate employers even at the expense of the crew. Ash attacks her, but Parker intervenes and decapitates him with a blow from a fire extinguisher, revealing Ash to be an android. Before Parker incinerates him, Ash predicts that the other crew members will not survive. The remaining three crew members plan to arm the Nostromo's self-destruct mechanism and escape in the shuttle, but Parker and Lambert are killed by the Alien while gathering the necessary supplies. Ripley initiates the self-destruct sequence and heads for the shuttle with the cat, but finds the Alien blocking her way. She unsuccessfully attempts to abort the self-destruct, then returns to find the Alien gone and narrowly escapes in the shuttle as the Nostromo explodes.

As she prepares to enter stasis, Ripley discovers that the Alien is aboard the shuttle. She puts on a space suit and opens the hatch, causing explosive decompression which forces the Alien to the open doorway. She shoots it with a grappling gun which propels it out, but the gun is caught in the closing door, tethering the Alien to the shuttle. It attempts to crawl into one of the engines, but Ripley activates them and blasts the Alien into space. Ripley puts herself and the cat into stasis for the return trip to Earth.

If you haven't seen these movies, you've missed a great treat. Be sure to watch them on the largest screen you can find. I can't imagine what they would be like on IMAX in 3D.

Is Jurassic Park Possible

Among my movie favorites are the Jurassic Park trilogy. If you recall from the first movie, the dinosaurs were created by mixing dinosaur DNA with frog DNA. In those days, reptiles were considered the closest species to dinosaurs. If the movie were made today, probably they would have used birds. But, anyway, the dinosaur DNA was extracted from dinosaur blood within mosquitoes encased in amber. Actually, even on the face of it, this seemed very unlikely. How many insects encased in amber would you need before you found one that had bitten any particular dinosaur species? The chances would be one in a million that you would find any dinosaur blood at all.

In addition, biologists and paleontologists pooh-poohed the idea that biological matter would last millions of years. Even the original skeletal material in the bones of dinosaurs and other extinct species found has been replaced by inert minerals. Thus, the entire idea of recreating an extinct species that roamed the earth millions of years ago was considered impossible. Until very recently!

In a recent Scientific American article, Mary H. Schweitzer, a paleontologist, using a microscope, wrote how she and her assistant discovered tiny red spheres inside a slice of fossilized dinosaur bone. The slice was from a dinosaur that lived 67 million years ago. Since then, other bits of organic material such as bones, blood cells and claws have survived the ages.

Of course, at this point it is not known whether the organic material contains enough of the original DNA that was in it when the creature was alive. And even if it were, how could it be used to create a replica? But who knows? Maybe in the future some enterprising entrepreneur may open a Jurassic Park.

The Movie 2001, A Space Odyssey

One of the best science-fiction movies of all time was Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey. Many people nowadays wonder what the big deal was with this movie. They have only seen it on the small screen. With digital special effects in more modern movies, the special effects seem ho-hum. In 1968, in a theatrical release, it was spectacular. I was one of the lucky ones who saw it in Cinerama in a wide-screen theater. It was nothing short of mind blowing.

The film deals with thematic elements of human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and extraterrestrial life, and is notable for its scientific realism, pioneering special effects, ambiguous imagery that is open-ended to a point approaching surrealism, sound in place of traditional narrative techniques, and minimal use of dialogue.

In my opinion such movies as Star Wars and Alien probably would not have been made were it not for the success of 2001. It was the first movie to show that a serious SF film with great special effects could draw a large audience. Perhaps one of the reasons for this was that the Apollo space program and other NASA space probes were gaining popularity. It was only a year later that Lance Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the surface of the moon. Four years later Pioneer 10 had reached the planet Jupiter.

For those of you who had never saw the movie, here is a synopsis (warning, it contains spoilers): The movie starts millions of years ago when a group of subhumans are competing with tapirs and other hominids for food. One morning a tall, thin, rectangular black monolith stands among the rocks. The ape men are excited but touch the object and calm down. By touching the monolith, they have learned to use bones as weapons and tools.

In the next scene the action moves to the near future where travel to the moon is an every day affair. A similar monolith is found on the moon and sends a signal towards Jupiter.

Eighteen months later a manned spacecraft is sent to Jupiter to investigate. Two of the team are awake to run the ship with the aid of an almost human AI called HAL. The other three are in hibernation. Hal announces that there is a problem with the AE-35 unit and it will fail with 100% certainty within 72 hours. The astronauts go EVA to replace the unit. The two astronauts scan the removed AE-35 unit but can't find any defects. Hal suggests putting it back in service to let it fail. Mission Control believes Hal has made an error because their HAL9000 unit, a twin to the one aboard Discovery, finds no flaw in the AE-35. Hal denies any chance of computer error. The astronauts go to a pod to have a private chat and decide to disable Hal's higher functions without disturbing the automatic ship control functions. Hal can see the men through the pod's window and reads their lips. When Poole goes out in the EVA pod, the pod murders him. When Dave uses a pod to recover Frank's body, a computer malfunction alert goes off and the life signs of the three hibernating astronauts flat line. Hal refuses to open the pod bay doors for Dave, explaining that he knows Dave is planning to disconnect him because he was able to read Frank and Dave's lips when they discussed it. He says the mission is too important to allow humans to jeopardize it. Dave releases Frank's body and maneuvers the pod to the emergency airlock hatch. He uses the pod's arms to open the door, holds his breath and jumps over to the ship. Dave goes to the computer room and shuts down HAL.

A much larger black monolith floats in Jupiter orbit,. Bowman leaves the Discovery in another EVA pod and enters a wormhole. The pod ends up somewhere in time and space in a bedroom with luminous white walls and floor and furniture in the style of Louis XVI. Dave ages swiftly until he is a dying old man. A monolith appears and transforms him into a star child.

If all of this sounds sort of mundane, it is because there is no way to describe the marvelous cinematography, special effects, music and emotional impact of the movie.

The idea for the movie was taken from an Arthur Clarke short story, The Sentinel. Clarke also wrote the script.

A sequel to the movie was released in 1984 called 2010: The Year We Made Contact starring Roy Schneider. The plot is based on Arthur Clarke's novel 2010: Odyssey Two.

It is a rather good movie itself, but nowhere as spectacular as 2001.

My Love of Fantasy and Science Fiction

I loved these genres since I was very young. My parents were great readers and so I became one too. I loved to go to the local library and browse through all the wonderful books. I liked books about pirates and the usual fairy tales. When I was seven, something wonderful happened to me. It was the movie "The Wizard of Oz." Back then, it was shown in theaters. On the big screen, it was wonder of wonders. After that I began to buy Oz books, of which there were many, not only by Frank L. Baum, the creator of Oz, but by his successors, Ruth Plumly Thompson and John R. Neil (who by the way was the illustrator for all three authors).

The next good thing happened when I was in the third grade. I came across a book about an imaginary trip to the moon and the planets. That hooked me on science fiction. I read everything I could find about space travel, time travel and so forth, mainly the comic books, Superman, Captain Marvel, Planet Comics and so forth. When I was twelve, I discovered the pulps, eight and half by eleven magazines with garish covers and printed on thick cheap paper. These contained stories by such greats as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg and so many more.

About that time I also saw the movie "House of Frankenstein" with such a great cast, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carridine and Glen Strange. It's still one of my favorite movies. Although billed as a horror flick, it's really science fantasy. Speaking of movies, a few years later my favorite movie of all time came out, "2001, A Space Odyssey," which I saw on the wide screen. Believe me, it is stunning in the theater. Since then, there has been "Alien" and its sequels, all the Star Wars movies, Star Trek and its spin-offs, Jurassic Park and its sequels, etc., etc. We're living in my idea of paradise as far as movies go.

And then there are the books. I have so many favorite fantasy and SF authors that I could fill this page with their names.

From a love of these genres I decided to try my hand. The results you can buy at Renaissance Page Turner Editions, Fictionwise.com, Amazon and other online book sellers.