Kill James Bond! - S4E45.5: Alien

Episode Date: August 29, 2026

Continuing our exploration of Truckers, we turn our eyes to space. A crew of space truckers (canonical job title) are awoken from hypersleep when the ship detects a mysterious signal coming from planet scary. And bad news: The company says if you don't check it out, you get no bonus. ---- HANDS OFF LEBANON Here are some fundraisers to support collective rebuilding and survival efforts on the ground in Lebanon. -Beit El-Baraka started out as a food bank, but has grown to help people afford rent, cover their essentials, and live with dignity.  https://beitelbaraka.org/donate-directly/ or donate in general https://beitelbaraka.org/donate-now/ -LiveLove was a charity for a number of other matters, but since 2024 has been solely comitted to helping people displaced by Israeli attacks. https://livelove.org/donate -Lebanese Food Bank supports displaced and impoverished people https://lebanesefoodbank.org/take-action/donate/ Solar Powered Lebanon is an initiative to restore people's power using solar panels, since larger infrastructure is at constant risk of attack. https://fundahope.com/en/campaigns/solar-powered-lebanon ----- FREE PALESTINE My friend Ahmed still needs to feed his family and afford medicine. Anything you can kick in would be hugely appreciated. https://chuffed.org/project/150817-please-help-ahmed-and-his-family-get-food-drink-and-medicine And these are some more general links you can support collective efforts with! -The Palestinian Communist Youth Union is doing a food and water effort, and is part of the official communist party of Palestine https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-preserve-whats-left-of-humanity-global-solidarity -Water is Life, a water distribution project in North Gaza affiliated with an Indigenous American organization and the Freedom Flotilla https://www.waterislifegaza.org/ -Vegetable Distribution Fund, which secured and delivers fresh veg, affiliated with Freedom Flotilla also https://www.instagram.com/linking/fundraiser?fundraiser_id=1102739514947848 ----- WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly. I am joined, as always, by my friend Abigail Thorne and Devon. Hello, listener. Kawabunga. How are we doing? We got a real movie for you today. So good.

So good. Respect for Kawabunga. To a movie that I have been looking forward to for a long time, but I didn't think we were going to get around to until we got to sci-fi season, a horror season. But no, no, because the thing about Alien is, it's a trucker movie. It's a trucker movie.

It's a trucker. They're space truckers. The Nistromo is a truck. We established this very, very early. This is effectively black dog relayed to space. Black, wet, shiny dog. Yeah.

Alien's one of those films where I sort of have, I'm feeling the pressure a little bit here because it feels like everything that you could say about it has kind of been said. And now it's like, well, I love hanging out with my friends and talking,

but if you're asking me to say something new about this film, what do you want me to say? Sigoni Weavers and attractive woman? I'm with you on that. We could stake out a radically different position and just be like, it's shit, it's terrible, it's awful. We'll have difficulties with that.

I will say that. It's not. It's great. It is an assumption that this movie is good. This movie is like in the canon. And it's in the stars and the constellations. But it did come out in 1979. And I'm pretty sure that the entire next generation will have skipped over it. This might be the best, but like a bunch of zoomers are hearing people say,

it's actually really good. Go and watch Alien the first one. Like it's actually good. There is no shame to having gone to the Kill James Bond film school. You know? Absolutely not. There is absolutely no sort of shame in this. It's one of the reasons why I really like film as a medium is you can have heard about

film for the dumbest possible reasons and it can you know you can come to it in all sorts of ways and it can really really move you so yes this is your recommendation if you haven't seen alien if you're just like you know whatever because you've seen like maybe alien versus predispos or whatever yeah yeah yeah and you're just like this is going to have adrian brodie having his legs sithed off or whatever on a green screen no no watch the original because it's really really good putting the steak out here really scott tom scott's brother exactly The thing about Ridley Scott as well. I don't want to be mean.

I'm in your chest. I am here. No. The thing about Ridley Scott, and this has been said many, many times about Alien, like I said, I have a single novel observation about it. You're just along for the ride with me, right? Or rather, I'm along for the ride with you. I'm inside your chest cavity, and I'm telling you that the thing about Ridley Scott is

he is locked in a quantum sort of like, he's locked in a sine wave all the time, between like woke and misogyny, and the frequency of that sine wave changes quite rapidly, even within the course of this film. That's definitely true. We can track that over the course of things. There's legitimately a bit of this where I went, oh, he remembers he hates women in this shot. Yeah, no, I... Because I famously listed the main character Ripley, who's played by Sigourne Weaver, was originally written as a man.

And then they were just like, fuck it, she's great, we're cast her. Yeah, what if we just cast a woman? They accidentally let women be in films. Yeah, yeah. And since then, you know, it's a long downhill ever since towards the cinema duphoid that we live in now. And they forgot that every film that has a woman in it is a film about women. That's how that works. Yeah.

They accidentally, you hate for a really, really good sort of like, you know, a piece of feminist filmmaking to have arisen purely by going, yeah, you just write her as a man and then change it, you know, that feels too pat, but it does kind of work, you know, as the problem. They just change the pronouns. You can't do that anymore, of course. It's illegal in Britain. It feels, it's like passing, not to get too discursive, right? But it's like, yeah, I'm annoyed that this works, you know? Like, this is sort of perpetuating a series of sort of cultural things that I'm not that thrilled by, but also it's a lot better than if I wasn't, I guess.

No one can clock your scream. True. That's so true. It's not even that it just worked as well. It was unbelievably good. I mean, everyone knows Ripley is like the banner for what you think of as like a female protagonist for one of these kind of movies. Yeah, yeah, baby. Everyone except the Amazon Prime synopsis, which they...

I like this. This is a little bit of a bait and switch, but I think they were doing to the audiences at the time. Yeah, it sort of gives you a sort of unexpected direction for it. The Amazon Prime synopsis of this, which I assume is probably written by AI, is when Kane, brackets John Hurt, and the crew of the space ship and Nostromo, investigate a transmission from a deserted planet, he is attacked by an unknown organism which attaches itself to his face. Technically true, but not how I would have summarized it. That is one of the things that happens in Alien, yeah.

You left out the main character? That's so good. That's so good, man. Pretty good. thinking he's the main character. When Tej, the main character of the Fast and Furious, meets a gang of races. It's like, what the fuck is wrong with it? It is the synopsis that Tej would have written.

When Q, a gadget maker for MI6, bumps into it. I love this. I think they should do this more often, more, more completely sort of like orthogonal synopsies. But so, we begin in space. And in space, we see the commercial to- vehicle, as a little intertitle informs us, the Nostromo. HMS Nostromo.

No, that's a truck. Seven soldiers board, zero guns. Napoleon is Master of Space. The Wayland-Utani Corporation is all that stands before him and Alpha Centauri nebulae are battlefields. Pretty good. Pretty solid. It's towing a refinery, processing 20 million tons of mineral ore, and it is going back

to Earth. Space truck. Mm-hmm. Space truck and factory. Yeah, it's towing 20 million tons of ore. And as far as I can tell, like, shitloads are loose water just in the ship. I don't know. Yeah.

It's the wettest ship I've ever seen in my life. Yeah, you gotta have that for drinking. But raining? Yeah. Yeah, it is very wet in the ship. Important for the sort of dustboats atmosphere, but so it's... We see the exterior of the ship and then the interior. It is so industrial.

It is exquisitely greebled. Yeah. Shit looks like Rorschach. It's got pipes. It's got like AC units bolted to the wall. It's dark. It's like the inside of a truck. It's not like a sleek Apple fucking corporate store shit.

Like a weed store. It's just like a big fucking ugly fucker. What kind of weed stores do you have out there? California is changing. Weed stores look like Apple stores. They do. They're all- They look like. It's fucking crazy.

It's so bad. We should never have done this. And it's like 40% THC out there. It'll kill you. Stuff's crazy. Oh my God. You can immediately get like 10,000 points from me just by having the brainwhip. where you're like, oh, a vehicle that's only ever in space doesn't need to be aerodynamic.

And they've had that brainwave, and I love it. This thing is just like a skyscraper the right way up in space. It's like a factory ship, you know? It's like Port Talbot flying through fucking space. I'm looking at this thing. I mean, if you look at like offshore rigs, some of them are like this, just on the ocean even. So it's very much that kind of vibe. Very evocative, yeah.

At the start, there is no one on the ship that we see. it's like a ghost ship, like the Mary Celeste, right? And so we're getting these like long shots down, these empty corridors, lots of sort of like beautiful industrial design, where it's, I say beautiful, it's beautiful to us. It's intended to be like ugly, right, and functional. Yeah, like just there's pipes absolutely everywhere. It's all kind of wet. There are breaking lights like coming through the grills and everything.

It's a hostile environment. Immediately you're like, this is a ship that was built by like the lowest bidder. And the ship's computer wakes up, because we haven't seen the scenes yet, the ship's computer wakes up and it makes kind of like gongy fart noises. And it's going like, and like displaying things across the moment. It's just like, oh, it's picked up a signal. It sounds like an old dial-up modem. It's great.

Yeah, it's really good. And then like some inhuman process has been instigated by the spaceship. Yeah, it's also worth noting. There's the only kind of human touches we see here are the fact that there's like sort of safety mesh. It's like we see all of this reflected in the like visor of what we're shown. Yeah, as an emergency helmet. And little abandoned bits of whimsy. There's a couple of like toys. Somebody's left like a dipping bird out in a glass of water. Love that.

I really love that. And it's only sort of like you have this like whimsy that's completely surrounded by this like industrial coldness. It's really really good. Yeah. But so we awaken the crew in a really sort of temple looking sort of sleep sleeping chamber thing where they've been frozen. When the shot is symmetrical, I'm pointing on screen, I'm going, that's movie. Yeah, that's a movie. Yeah, they're all in hyper sleep in these parts. The first one is John Hurt, Kayne, the main character of the front.

Yeah, the main point. We're all came, he's pointing towards us. John Hurt, and his kind of twinkish every man, every boy, days. It's great. I didn't recognize him at all because he's not an old man in this. He's not like that. He looks like an old man, even when he's not an old man. Yeah, some people are just born to be old men.

Yeah. I don't know. I don't know if I know anyone who's born to be old anymore. And maybe that's something that, like, smoking took from us, you know? Maybe. You might be right. This is the face you get when you smoke 40 cigarettes a day for a thousand years. Yeah.

Like, maybe if I kept smoking into my 30s, I would be like, oh, I can't wait to be 50 and look like this, you know? A cigarette smoking is like hyper-sleep ventilator. Oh, my God. I keep it circulating. I mean, because, like, the rest of the crew, get up and immediately go for lunch or I guess breakfast. And they're all smoking. They're all smoking.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In space, in a spaceship, smoking. Because they're blue collar. They're eating out of the cubes. And I'm just yelling all of their names out as well every time I see him, I'm like, The Body Weaver, Yafit Koto. Yafit Koto is so good in this. Yafikato, baby.

Oh, good to see you, buddy. It's my word. Guy, we love to see. Amazing. Harry Dean Stanton. They're all eating out of the meal cubes and I just, again, not to you know, sort of tangent off of this

into something I can talk about but I had a glimpse here of what Starfield could have been and I'll never forgive them, you know. God damn it. Could have been eaten on nutrient cubes. They're all talking about we're about to get back to Earth, right? They think they're about, they think they've been working up to go to Earth.

And we see the captain, Captain Dallas, talks to the ship's computer whose name is Mother, interestingly. It's an acronym. And it's like, just spells out on the screen. It's like, you are not at Earth. He goes into the big padded computer room

with the blinky lights to talk to chat GPT. It is chat GBT. You have to address it in full sentences as well. He has to like flick a bunch of individual switches and push a bunch of buttons and then type on a keyboard that doesn't bear any relation to letters to ask chat, GBT, what's going on? What's up?

Yeah. Hey girl, how you doing? We have picked up, we've picked up a signal. But can you say that in like a more flirtatious tone too, me and like more sycophantic, please, you know. It's that good. So the crew have already figured out that they are not in the right place on account of Earth isn't there.

They look out the window and they're like, huh, Earth's smaller than we thought. It's really good. We see them all doing their jobs. Like, they all finish their meals and like they've had an argument about who's getting paid what as well because our two like engineer guys, Brett and Parker, are immediately like, are we're only getting like a half share of the bonus. They're trying to like organize or at least they're. grousing about it and then they get told to go and work, right?

And we follow the flight crew in the cockpit and it's great kind of like competence acting. They're all moving like they know where all of the switches are and they're really like, you know, doing something meaningful here. It's a great set for it as well. You know, it's very, very... Chostrophobic, like really low ceilings, very, very harsh lighting, if there's any at all. Fantastic. And it's really well studied.

So Dallas briefs the crew and he tells them, you've already figured out we're not anywhere near Earth. We've picked up a strange transmission, might be an SOS, and we are obligated to check it out. And Yaffa Koto and Harry Dean Stanton, the engineers are like, now, fuck that, we're not doing that, that's not a job. And at this point we meet Ash, who is the ship's science officer, Ian Holme, Bilbo fucking Baggins, baby.

And he's like, actually... wearing the kind of like toothpaste minty green jumpsuit, which is really making it for him. Yeah. Yeah, it's good. He's like, actually, there is a line in your contracts specifically dealing with this scenario if you pick up a strain transmission that might indicate intelligence, then we have to investigate it. Because what we established from this is like, we're out in space, like Earth has expanded beyond the bounds of our planet. But we've never encountered any life out there. We've just been mining dead planets, right? This transmission looks like it could be from a like a radio transmission, from an intelligent source. So we have to go and look. They don't know what it is, only that it's like automated. It's just like a beacon that just repeats every, you know, eight seconds or whatever. And they make it about money as well.

They go, the line in the contract says, if you don't do this, you don't get any of your shares. So we have to. Yeah. I love Ian Holmes performance in this. He's so, he's very, well, he's British, first of all. He is. But he's very chill, very reserved. Just like, yeah, contract says you've got to do it.

So you don't have a choice. otherwise you're all fucked. And it's like, okay. Yeah, absolutely. Very, very cold. Yeah, very clinical. But so they have to land the ship on the planet. And we see this whole sequence is like,

it's very much like plain flight crew kind of level of sort of complexity and like sort of crew resource management, you know, which I really, really like. Yeah. They've got a planet scary, which is in the matte painting galaxy. Oh, fantastic. I love my galaxy. Looks so good. I love the, it's not that they beat, they don't like beam down to the planet's surface,

Like, there's so, it shows you the whole physical process, like, traveling through space is a physical fucking thing with machines that can go wrong, and there's, like, turbulence, and it has effect on people's bodies. And what this whole sequence establishes is that, like, when you are in space, you are vulnerable, you are physically there. You're not just like, a beam of energy that can zip everywhere. Like, you could potentially be hurt by turbulence or, like, gas or something like that. If you want to hear the rest of this episode.