Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 221: Alien

Episode Date: May 20, 2019

The last survivors of the Nostromo—Jeremy Parish, Benj Edwards, Chris Sims, and Ben Elgin—transmit from deep space to pay tribute to Ridley Scott's film Alien and its influence on pop culture and video games.

This week in Retronauts in space, no one can hear you podcast. Everyone, welcome to episode episode some such. I'm going to say episode 220. Let's see if I'm right. Episode 220 of retronauts. My goodness, that's so many retronauts. And I'm Jeremy Parrish, still here, 220 episodes later, talking about video games and things related to video games, mostly things related to video games in this episode. And with me here as my accomplices in this criminal act, we have.

Ben Elgin. I might have been on like 20 of these, maybe. I don't know. I'll be up to that by now. Perhaps. Chris Sims, the ultimate and alien terror. Benjid, which, and I've probably been on like 40 of these now, right? Right.

And you have like an inside mouth, a mouth inside your mouth that comes out and like clamps into people's faces. I'll talk like this. The mouth inside. I cannot imagine anything that would freak me out more than a tiny binge head coming out of a regular size bench head. We're going to stop thinking about that right now. Yeah. So this horrifying episode is, it's a. appropriate because the topic we're delving into this week is the movie Alien, not the alien franchise, not aliens, and not really that many alien games. Just Alien the movie, because it just turned 40. Oh my God, 1979, April 26th, is that correct?

Was the 40th anniversary or the original release of 1979, yes, was the original release of the movie Alien, and that means it is 40. and this movie had such a massive impact on pop culture. Maybe not so much as its sequel, but it was significant in a different way. And it stands, you know, 40 years later as a singular work. Like, there's never been a movie quite like it. And certainly none of the sequels have managed to succeed in the same way that the original alien did. And because of that and because of the video games that it inspired and the comic books and the many, many other things

we're going to talk about Alien and why it was one of the greatest movies of all time. Do you guys agree? It was pretty good. I have mixed feelings these days. So it turns out I hadn't. So yeah, I was two and a half when Alien came out first time, so I didn't see it right then.

And I actually wasn't sure about this because it's such a part of pop culture that you absorb the major beats of it. And I actually didn't remember whether I'd actually seen the whole movie or not. Turns out I hadn't. I realized as I was sitting down to rewatch it For this podcast

You haven't seen the whole thing until just recently I had not seen the whole thing until about three days ago I sat down and watched it through So yeah, that was an experience And yeah, there were all these There were obviously like all these scenes that I'd seen Because they get replayed everywhere But I definitely had not seen it the whole way through before

So what is your take as a fresh-faced young man Coming into the world of alien? So, you know, I mean it's very obviously of its time Like, you, it's one of those things like, like, I mean, oh, it was great. But it's one of those things like, you know, the original 2001 where you can't get away with making a movie paste like this anymore. With this kind of slow build. Yeah. But you can.

Well, it's just, it's going to be a flop. No, I mean, things like, you know, Jordan Peel's movies are very much kind of this like slow creeping build. Well, okay. You know, I think there is space for this kind of. of movie. It's just, it won't be a blockbuster in the Avengers mold, but that's a different kind of movie. This is, it's a good point. Yeah, this is, this is a movie that does, you know, it, it explores the, the, the depth of the genre of science fiction. It's actually more of a horror movie, but it's still undeniably science fiction. Yeah, yeah. And it was, and it was fun

revisiting sort of this, the whole late 70 or early 80s, science fiction, a little like the same kind of things you get in Star Wars with these great models, um, and just, like, you know, doing a lot on not necessarily that much budget, not having, you know, the computer effects and all that. And then, you know, I'm not the kind of guy who says, like, the pre-computer stuff was always better. But still, it's really interesting to see what you could pull off. Yeah. I mean, there's definitely some stuff in this movie that is, in terms of effects work, that has not aged well. And that, you know, if they could enhance it digitally, I wouldn't complain. But for the most part, the use of practical effects, the fact that there was a real person

inside that rubber alien costume, like, that lends the movie a lot more realism. I mean, you know, like I said, it's a horror movie in a lot of ways. And so much of the movie, the suspense and the fear of it is reflected in the actors. And they are actually acting against something. They're not acting against, you know, a ping pong ball on a stick or whatever Jar Jar Binks was. They're reacting to a guy in a rubber. costume that's dripping with goop and blood. And there's

like in the chest burser scene, that's real blood, real ox guts. It's like horrifying. There's the famous story about how like, you know, the actors knew generally what was going to happen, but they hadn't been told about the like high pressure blood spurts and stuff. So a lot of that was actually them reacting to suddenly getting sprayed. Like you don't

you can't get that kind of responses, that kind of acting with digital reactions because or you know, digital effects and and green screen because it's just it's different. Like, there's nothing there to react. But I sort of got both sides of this, of this old effects coin with that one scene, because, like, you know, the, like, the act, the actress reacting in that scene was fantastic. Then, like, the actual chess version, you're coming out and running away.

It's just impossible in my mind to separate that from the Hello My Honey, Hello, My Baby version now. Yeah. I just like, I can't. Like, do you think we've come back around to the point where, like, you could do like a blockbuster movie and one of the selling points would be, it's all practical effects. I mean, Mad Max Fury. was so much about the practical effects and it made it such a difference like there's such you know those desert chase scenes are so convincing because it's actually dudes out there who are crazy like risking their necks on these like suspended things and there's actually you know

vehicles out there smashing into each other and a guy with an electric guitar shooting flames on the back of the truck is really shooting fire yeah i think the best things coming out today are the things that know how to combine the two to use practical when it's the best, and to use CG when it's the best. And I think, like, so that's, that's one of the huge skills in being a director or producer today is knowing, knowing when to go with what and how to combine them convincingly. Was that a selling point on Fury Road? I remember hearing about it much after, but I went in kind of cold.

No, it wasn't, no, it wasn't like a big deal in advance. No one was like, hey, it's practical effects. It's real people out in the desert, you know, chasing cars. But as that came out, people became increasingly aware and increasingly impressed by just how much George Miller accomplished with, you know, traditional methods and processes and, you know, the fact that digital effects were mostly used to embellish as opposed to replace. Yeah. That's a, that's a significant distinction.

Episode seven had, uh, JJ Abrams was talking about using a lot of practical effects on episode seven, Star Wars before it came out because it's going to be like more authentic. Instead of like George Lucas's prequels for all CGI green screen kind of things, crazy. Yeah, there weren't a whole lot of dexed. jetsters in the Force Awakens, and that was nice. Yeah. I am an increasingly curmudgeonly old man where, like, I just like models and mat paintings.

I love mad paintings. Yeah, they're cool. So the alien effects, there are a couple scenes. I just watched it last night, and a few things struck me about the effects, which is that the last time I watched it, it wasn't a high-definition TV set. And so now I see a lot of the, like, there's a part where Ash is. head gets knocked off, and then he's sitting on a table, and they boot him back up, and they switch.

Yeah, he's obviously just the plaster mannequin head or whatever they've fashioned, and then they, Oh, they look. Oh, no, the actors hit to a table. But it actually works because he is a deactivated robot. So, yeah, he's going to look weird and fake when he's off. I'm okay with that. It's just too fake looking. But that's also with 40 years of experience watching movies and sophistication and effects

after that. I can imagine at the time these things being incredibly crazy and wild. In fact, the alien itself, just in the I don't know, I think I haven't seen it for 10 years, but the behavior of the alien is really cheesy to me the last time I saw

it, like there's a scene where it comes at, somebody opens his mouth and death by jazz hands. I wrote down that same thing in my head. It was like spreads his fingers out. Like, oh my gosh, that's not scary. Some of the scenes with the alien worked for me and some of them didn't. Yeah, the jazz hands when the captain got killed was not one of the ones that worked for me. You need to see it on the big screen.

I saw it like 15 years ago in, like 25th anniversary in San Francisco. Is that the last time you saw it? No, no, no. I watch it pretty regularly, actually, because I think it's one of the greatest movies of all time. It's a great film, and it's incredibly influential, but I feel like I'm seeing these dated things. Sure, and you just have to kind of accept that. I mean, I saw Avengers last week, and guess what? I can see things that are not going to age well.

in like two years because digital effects are going to jump forward. There's, you know, like I look at the CD model for the Hulk and I'm like, well, that's a pretty good impersonation of Mark Ruffalo, but it's still an impersonation of Mark Ruffalo and it's not going to look any better further out. You just have to expect, you know, accept the fact that there are just limitations on what you can do with effects, whether it's digital, practical, whatever, and that's fine. And some of them really did work. Like I felt like the first, one of the first scenes where you see the polio and it's when it's

kind of somersaulting down out of the duct work to kill the first guy it kills like that one worked for me well that's because they hired like a dude who was really tall and lanky and could you know he he's like 610 and he was a an african art student working in london and they were just like you have this uncanny look about you this like your your body you know it's kind of like Doug Jones now. Like just, you know, a little inhuman almost just with the proportions. And so they coached him and were like, you know, can you do these things? And the ones he couldn't do, they had a, they had a stunt guy to step in for him because he wasn't an actor. He wasn't a stuntman. So he didn't have a lot of experience doing that. But, you know, I feel like almost that naivety kind of comes into

play because he, yeah, like the alien is just uncanny. It's a real. thing there in the space with everyone else. That would be an incredibly rude thing to tell someone. What? That you were in cany? You have a very uncanny look to you, almost inhuman. I mean, Doug Jones looks kind of inhuman. I mean...

That's like his career right there. You are not incorrect about that. And, you know, I love Mr. Saroo on Star Trek Discovery. And I'm happy that he got laid as a fish man. That's great. But, you know, that's like made a living out of it. So that's awesome. I'd like to say one more thing about the pacing point that's talking about,

which which blew my mind is that at the very end of the film, if this is a spoiler, I apologize, but she's in the ship by herself and she's about to. She being the main character, Ridley. Yeah, Ripley. Ripley, sorry. Ripley. Ridley,

yeah. So she's in the, the, what do you call it, the jet thing? The escape craft, yeah. The Narcissus. Yes. Anyway, so she's there. And then suddenly, she's just looking around. She's half naked and stuff.

she sees the alien sitting there. It's like five sixth naked. Yeah, five, six naked. And she sees this alien like just hanging out in the bulkhead just sitting there. And then she's like, oh, crap, the alien's there. And then suddenly she's like, oh, she backs off slowly and goes and hides it and closet and watches it. And it's just kind of sitting there.

Like, that's something that would not happen today in a film. Like, what is that alien doing lying down there, just relaxing in the bulkhead? Like, what is going on? And why does she have so much time to go get in the suit? and do all this stuff. Why doesn't it come get her? You know, today it would be some crazy, like, super 60 frames per second thing going, swirling around and stuff.

But, you know, that's something that would never happen in a film these days in terms of pacing. I don't know. Do you remember that? I watched it last night. Yeah, I know. At the end, she's, like, the creature has gotten into the shuttle and it's basically going into hibernation. Yeah, I feel like it lends some depth to it that, like, you know,

this is an alien creature and we don't know what it's, like, behavior patterns are. like, you know, if it has cycles of, like, being on and off and whatever, and it's just, and on the other hand, it also, it also, you know, lets you question, like, what its intelligence level is like, did it realize the ship was self-destructing and it had to get off? Or maybe it was just allergic to strobing lights? Yeah, I mean, that's that, yeah. Maybe they're just following the kitty. Who knows? There's two things that I really love about the movie. And I think one of them really ties into what Ben was just saying, that it's one of the first times in a long time, like, since, like, weird, like, 50s sci-fi stuff, like the blob, that you have, like, an alien monster, like humans versus an alien, and the alien is just completely alien.

Like, it doesn't reproduce in a way that we recognize, like, it, the look of it is weird. And we're all kind of, like, used to it. But that's such a great design, because it's got the right parts, right? It's got, like, a head and arms and legs. But they're all wrong. Right. Which goes back to us, basically. And you get this really interesting glimpse into it because we see this whole life cycle play out over the course of the movie.

So it's clearly, you know, this complex orgasm and it's got all this. stuff going on and you learn some of it, but it's so alien that you don't necessarily know what's going to happen next. Yeah. One of the great things about seeing the movie in HD is that you see that the alien mask is actually translucent. And there is like a humanoid skull underneath there. Like it's really hard to notice that. But there are a few scenes where you kind of get those glimpses of light and you're like, whoa, that's way creepier than I thought it was. Yeah. And you look at like the other two popular science fiction franchises of the time. you've got Star Wars

where the aliens are just people in suits who sometimes talk in weird voices and you've got Star Trek where the aliens are all metaphors and the alien and alien is not a metaphor it is just a it is a thing. But it is kind of it's an animal. It's kind of a metaphor for sexual assault, honestly.

Well, they deliberately reached out to H.R. Geiger, the Swiss artist, because his work was all just like bioorganic sexual erotica. And Benin, the guy who wrote the script is like on the record as saying, like, yes, like, I am trying to like sexually assault the audience with this. And not so much the women, but the men with like all these fears of like, you know, penetration and oral rape and impregnation and all this stuff. You know, I don't want to get too much in that way.

Like that was very much intentional in there. Yeah. I was thinking of, I was thinking of a metaphor. for like Frank Gorshyn saying that the guy with the face face. It's not quite, it's not that, yeah. But yeah, like, I actually honestly had never considered that, and it makes so much sense. So you're saying the alien was a giant walking penis? Yes.

I mean, it was designed by H.R. Giger to be specifically a giant walking penis with teeth. Wow. It's like vagina dentata, but flipped around on its side. It's meant to be, again, Uncanny, horrible, unknowable, like, revolting on this fundamental level that freaks people out. And that's a big reason that it's so, that alien design is so memorable. Like, there are so many video games and so many, you know, science fiction works, science fiction works that have taken that design and just run with it.

Like, Giger's visuals have become basically currency and pop culture because of this alien design. It's so weird and horrifying. And then, like, everything that's built around at the story as well just props that up. It's not just a freaky-looking monster. It is a monster whose entire existence is wrong and offensive and hostile. It doesn't have eyes. It does not have eyes. Which is a very important thing.

But it does have, like, sockets in the translucent part of the skull, but you don't see eyes there. Yeah. Yeah. It bleeds acid that melts through the ship. Yep. Yeah, it's toxic on every level and utterly inhuman on every level. And yeah, it has like silica, like armor or something, so it doesn't, it's hard to damage and stuff. Yeah, it's terrifying.

And his whole modus operandi is to, like, attack and impregnate you. Honestly, really shocked that I did not get the metaphor till just now. I feel like a real idiot. So as, as usual, we have, So as usual, you feel like an idiotous. this is a segue. As usual, we have gone almost 20 minutes into this podcast without really giving like the basic rundown. We started. We were so close. And then we got sidetracked. So people have had 40 years. Yeah, well, not everyone's been there. So if you are brand new to Alien, congratulations, welcome. There is a terrifying and fascinating movie experience ahead of you. But Alien was again, released in 1979 and was very much a movie kind of cut from the claw. of 2001, Star Wars, came out around the same time as Star Trek the motion picture, a few months, like six months before that. And both of those movies were, it had basically kind of

been languishing for a while in the studio backburner. And then the success of Star Wars made the studio say, oh, we need one of those too. And what they came up with for Star Trek was, you know, kind of like a basically like a prelude to the next generation, a very sort of slow-paced ponderous intellectual take on Star Trek. No metaphorical guys. You talk about slow pacing. I mean, it's the first Star Trek movie. Yeah, I love it.

It's languid. It's not Star Trek 5. No, it's definitely no Star Trek 5, and thank God. But what Fox came up with for Alien is like the anti-Star Wars. It's hard to imagine this movie was greenlit. I mean, it's got more in common with John Carpenter's The Thing, which actually came later. it is it is very much a horror movie in the sort of like michael meyer's uh Halloween

Friday the 13th slasher mold and that was something that was just beginning to take off you know leather face uh what was that Texas chainsaw massacre but but you know tied to science fiction and uh yeah it's it's an interesting proposition and there was nothing else like it at the time so the the premise of the movie is that basically some space truckers are rerouted by their bosses to check out an emergency signal from an uncharted planet. So they go and they find this like space wreck. And inside the space wreck, they find these weird eggs. And one of the eggs pops open and sticks something to one of the crewmen's face.

So they take him back into the ship. Even though Ripley's like, quarantine, quarantine. The evil robot says no. But we don't know he's evil. He's just a dick. And so they bring the guy. into the ship and everything seems okay. The face thing goes away after a while after they realize they can't kill it,

but it just leaves on its own. And they're like, oh, everything's great. Let's go back into space hibernation, have one last meal, eat some food. Oh, my God. We were eating dinner and all of a sudden something blew out of his chest and now it killed everyone. So basically, there's this monster loose in their space truck. And it kills off pretty much everyone except the one person who was like, quarantine, quarantine.

And she manages to escape with a kitten. and the alien gets blasted out into space and then they made many sequels. Thank goodness. The cat survives. And that's the other thing that I really like about alien.

Not the cat. The cat's probably part of it. You mentioned before we were on mic talking about it, it's a working class space adventure. And you always hear in Star Wars that you're always here, always hear about Star Wars that it was like one of the first sci-fi movies to show like degradation on the spaceships from traveling through space like they get hit with

stuff and so they need to be repaired people people live inside of them maybe if you look at the millennium falcon in solo versus the millennium falcon in uh in the new hope uh like this is a bachelor and his large hairy pal that live in the spaceship by themselves and you you can just like look at the falcon inside and be like that smells so bad. in there. It smells like socks. But in Alien, like, Han Solo, Han Solo's like a cool guy with a cool job. Like, he's a smuggler.

He has a gun. In Alien, they're all, it's the first time that I remember really seeing, just people have jobs. Like, menial, boring jobs in space. Salt to the Earth. Two of the characters, like, their primary motivation in this movie is, like, getting a better cut of the discovery. They're just like, we want a better percentage.

You know, this was not in our contract. So give us a better percentage. They're just working class guys. They're mechanics. Yeah. I mean, this also differentiates this from other like slasher movies, which are mostly about a bunch of teens getting killed. This is, these are working class adults.

The characters, you know, the youngest of the cast, I think, was Sigourney Weaver, who was 28, 29. Yeah, something like that. And, you know, Tom Scarrett, I think was like almost 50. Yeah, most of them were in their 40s. Yeah. Which, in all fairness, like, even though I feel like it's in pacing and, in content, a markedly different movie,

I do feel like you do get a lot of that in aliens. Because, you know, they're all soldiers, but they all feel like they're people who do jobs. Right. But that all leads to the moral of alien, which is if you thought capitalism was bad on Earth, way to like it gets to space. Yeah, and that's the thing is it's not just blue collar guys.

It's a coalition of seven people. That's one of the interesting things about this movie. There are only seven people plus the alien who appear on camera. like it is it is a small cast it is it's kind of like a bottle episode but it's not because it takes place across you know several parts of the stromo the the space truck which is still a pretty tight location but then there's also several spaces in the planet and then there's the narcissus the shuttle so so i find the the ship itself really interesting because you get this picture of this gigantic starship flying through space but it's not like an imperial star destroyer in star wars

it is an ore refinery carrying like 20,000 tons of ore, 20 million, okay, yeah, just like a ridiculous volume of ore and the space vehicle itself, the Nostromo, is actually very small and it mostly consists of engines. It's a tugboat. Yeah, like it's just pulling this huge ore refinery through space that's, I guess, churning away and refining the things they've mined from other planets as they're back en route to Earth to sell it or turn it into the, company or whatever. But the Nostromo itself has kind of a sort of clearly regimented spaces.

You've got, you've got like the common mess. You've got the cockpit. You've got the computer center, which is very clean and intercepting. It looks like nothing else on the ship. And, you know, some other common spaces where there's like pinups and stuff on the wall. It's just like working class dudes. It's kind of gross and dirty in there. And then there's like the bowels of the ship where the mechanics work. And that place is weird. It's like all. steam and pipes and it's just like constantly dripping from condensation because of the, I guess the heat of the engines or the heater or the refinery. I don't know. But like the ship has never really explained and you just get a sense of like these are these people who live

and work in the space and they're how many light years away from anything else in the, you know, in the known universe. Like it's a very lonely kind of isolated experience and that just makes the horror worse because there's nowhere for them to run to. They are on this ship and they like all they can do is try to survive and kill this alien invader that's taken over their ship or that it's not even taken over it's just prowling and killing everyone it's very much like the the sci-fi equivalent of like a mining town a company town you know like a logging camp a mining camp where you like they definitely get paid in like in like in like shit yeah what's the company waylon utani will and utani that's it waylon utani fun books yeah you can see them at any wayland utani location but yeah i mean it's it's actually it feels like one of those sci-fi movies that was very predictive of the future because that that whole like weird hybrid of military and corporate space is really kind of happened already and you know you get out you take take you know military contractors PMCs out into outer space and you probably have

something that looks a lot like wayland utani well and then and then of course the you know the crisis the situation extrapolates to that to the extreme where the computer decides on orders from headquarters that, you know, it has this new priority. And by the way, that means the crew is now expendable. Yeah. Like, it doesn't matter if everyone dies just as long as you bring the alien back. And that's why Ripley gets in trouble because everyone dies and she doesn't bring the alien back. She kills that mofo. Although, what about the cat? Is it impregnated with an alien that gets out in the next film? No, no. It is not. I'd like something about something about the computers as far as something about the computers as fun.

As a vintage computer guy, I love the computers in this film. And it's funny how they reflect the sensibility of the late 70s in terms of the sound people made them sound like teletypes. They're like all this stuff when it's printing out stuff on a CRT, which never happens, of course. But that was like what you'd think of as a computer at the time. And I was watching this with my wife last night. And she, we've come so far from that. It's cool for me. I remember the text interfaces, obviously, and all that stuff.

But she was watching this, and she's like, who's mother? Like, isn't that obvious? It's the computer. M.U. dash, you are. It's like Siri on your phone. Oh. I'm like, I'm thinking now that we know these computing metaphors because we grew up with them and we know them. But there may be future generations who are actually confused about what this means and what they're doing with this computer.

I mean, does not compute and what is they're talking to it. I definitely could see Alexa. saying that my life is expendable and telling the Android to kill me. Like, that's going to happen in our lifetimes. Yeah. But there's also, I mean, there's also a lot of really interesting design that just went into all this retro computer stuff. It's beautiful equipment.

Yeah, it's like, there's a lot that's like doesn't actually make any sense, but it's very striking. Like the actual like Mother Control Center, which has just literally thousands of indicator lights across all. I mean, like, there's no way this could actually be useful. But it's a really striking visual. But I mean, if you look at like a space. shuttle control panel. They do look

like that. They've got all these indicator lights. I mean, you need to know what they mean. Cockpit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but he's talking, I mean, it's like thousands and thousands of little lights. It's so much to worry about. Well, I... There's one that says alien. I want to build a room like that. There's like a dome igloo

with the lights all around it. That looks awesome. I wonder if any fan has recreated that because I'd like... Probably. They've recreated the Enterprise Bridge. So you feel like Mother's control room is in there, too. And there's all these weird little touches. Like, I I actually paused the movie on, there's a control panel that I think is in the escape shuttle that just has all these keys with different iconography on them.

And if you pause it and look, and they say things like Linga, Yoni, Shakti, Excess, Drew's Pile, Pranic, lift. And so it's actually about like the Kama Sutra? It's all Sanskrit. And so I actually, I actually looked this up because I was hell of curious. And evidently, the guy who designed that control panel, it was very last second. He needed some weird technical sounding things. And evidently he was reading this book by this like Russian person into weird conspiracy theories who was into this Sanskrit stuff. And so that's why there's these random Sanskrit works on.

I thought I saw some Cyrillic characters on there. There's a lot of, there's a lot of random iconography that you have. And it kind of works because the Nostromo crew is so multicultural. Like there's no, there are no set roles by race or by gender. I mean, the basically kind of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. Hardline, like, corporate person, you know, we got to keep on the clock, everyone, you know, by the rules. That's Ripley. She's like a young woman. She's the youngest member of the crew. She's a woman. The pilot is a woman. Yeah, like, and it's not the black guy who dies first. That's not one of the really refreshing things about watching this movie today is all the white guys die first. It's the seasoned captain. Like you think, oh, the captain, he's the hero. He's the captain Kirk or whatever. No, he gets killed. He gets taken. And, you know, there's like a deleted scene where he actually gets, uh, you see him captured and, like, strung up in a cocoon, and he's like, kill me, please. And that's something they actually added back into some of the later cuts.

When I saw it in the theater 15 years ago, they had added that in. And I feel like it adds something. You're like, whoa, there's no going on here. It's not just like the alien is killing people, but it's keeping them alive for some other reason. Yeah, the cut I saw last night didn't have the cocoon thing in it. And I was disappointed. I feel like, I feel like how many cuts of this are there? because I feel like I saw new things last night

when I was watching this that I didn't see the last time I see this movie. I mean, it's no Blade Rutter but there are several cuts. Yeah, the one that I saw, because I didn't, I am notoriously not a fan of scary movies. But I don't, I mean, it's a horror movie and it's scary, but not

in the same way as the kind of movie I don't like. So I didn't see this until I was in my 20s, and I believe I watched the director's cut on DVD. And Ridley Scott's into those directors' cuts. Yeah, Lloyd Runner is also Ridley Scott. Although I think Ridley Scott was actually on record saying originally that he preferred the theatrical cut of this one.

That, like, he had done the director's cut at the behest of the studio and, like, it was okay. But a lot of, you know, a lot of the things were cut for a reason. He didn't necessarily even like it better. I think Alien works better in the director's cut form. I think aliens works better in the theatrical cut. Because the theatrical cut of that shows, like, the Newt's family, finding the alien on LV-3-4, or whatever it is. S-R. No, that's the wrong one.

It shows them finding the family, like, early in the movie, and it just takes away all the suspense, because in aliens, you don't see the xenomorphs until, like, it's like 40 or 45 minutes into the movie. It's, or maybe not quite that far, but it's a long ways into the movie. And that's the same thing here. Like, an alien, you don't see the alien for a long time. It's like the last third of the movie that you really, you know, that it's like just killing off the crew and stalking the ship. Up until that point, it's about, you know, these people waking up. and trying to figure out what's going on, why they've been called to this other planet,

exploring the other planet, like figuring out what the hell is down here? What's this giant, like, elephant dude in a navigator chair? I love that. Why is he turned into stone and there's, like, a hole in his chest? What are all these weird eggs with a laser over, like the laser mist over top of them? It's just, it's weird and mysterious,

and the movie never explains it. And then, you know, Ridley Scott has made Prometheus and all these other movies that explain it, and we don't need that. Yeah. The laser effect was quite That was actually another thing I looked up Because I'm like, was that like a laser layer over the eggs

And so I looked at him as yes Apparently they borrowed the lasers from the who Yeah Who who was filming next door in the sound studio But I love that you know It's it's a laser But they have like this folion there When he puts his hand and breaks the laser

There's like this sound You're like what is that? Yeah and it's just this fog And it's really like it's just like another like strata Of that alien ship Yeah and then he says Captain we've discovered a who concert.

Yeah. Getting back to what you were saying about the crew and the kind of multicultural makeup of the crew, I feel like it's definitely intentional that our heroine is our heroine and that the captain dies because I feel like there's a very logical progression from watching an episode of Star Trek and being like, he's going to wrestle the alien? The gorn? Really? The gorn.

Okay. And then watching Star Wars and being like, okay, but how did they make that thing. That's the size of a moon. And then you get to this, which is sort of the answer to both of those. But I'm wondering if you think that's the makeup of the crew is intentionally meant to counteract or maybe even accentuate the fact that this is an inherently, in a very literal sense, xenophobic movie. Like, this is first contact. No, literally when they cast the movie, they were told, like, these characters were written unisex. Okay.

They could be, any character could be any gender, any age, really. Um, just hire the best actors for the roles. So they hired the people that were best for the roles. That's literally all they did. So the, the cast they ended up with, I mean, uh, of, of the entire crew, I think John Hurt was probably the biggest star, but Yafat Koto was probably the second biggest, um, at the time. So, you know, it's, um, they went,

a lot of unknowns. Like, who the hell was Veronica Cartwright? Who the hell was Sigourney Weaver? So, yeah, like, you know, Harry Dean Stanton is kind of a long, experienced character actor. So they, yeah, it's a really interesting mix of actors, really. And everyone does fit their part because they are all so different. I mean, from, you know, from Ian Holm playing the kind of politely sociopathic android who has a secret agenda to Ripley being the pragmatian. practical survivor to Tom Scarrett being just like this extremely tired, just, you know, whatever, Captain. Like, we just got to do this thing and move on. You know, we've got the next job coming up.

We've got to get back to Earth. Like, everyone is just cast perfectly. And, you know, a big part of what makes this movie work is the actual screen chemistry because the director, Ridley Scott, filmed it in a very naturalistic style. It was not, like, everything is not super scripted. There's a lot of improv and a lot of people playing off each other. And, you know, there's a lot of sort of quiet, muffled dialogue where people are making asides and things like that that you don't see in modern movies, you know, where everything

is either like scripted rigidly or it's a Seth Rogen comedy where everything is just like wacky improv. But, you know, this is a different kind of improv and it's just about people living in their lives and being, like, inhabiting their roles. And it really, really helps sell the characters, I think. Like you really kind of feel like they work together, and sometimes they don't really like each other that much, but they're all stuck together in this space tugboat for who knows how many years. And that's just the life they live. I noticed that when I was watching it, about the mumbled, muffled, overtalking dialogue and the echoee, you know, they're watching around, they're walking around exploring the ship and they're just talking about stuff they see and things like that.

And it doesn't, you don't really hear it, but it's just like color. Yeah, you know, like you don't get that these days. because, like, people complain that there's something wrong with the sound. You know, every line isn't crystal clear. But there was definitely a lot of just, you know, like cross talk and just like... Yeah, and they even play with that. The scene where Ripley is arguing with the two guys, the two mechanics, and they're actually like, you know, not tormenting her,

but being deliberately obstinate by opening up the steam valve. So it's creating all this noise. And they're just like shouting each other. You don't really know what they're saying. And then she leaves and they turn off the steam valve and just chuckle about how they were harassing her. Yeah. But it's not in like a second. sexual harassment kind of way. It's just like, you know, we're just being kind of dickish and we want our fair cut. And, you know, she is, she represents the corporation. And we are the people who are actually doing the hard work. So, you know, why make life easy for her?

I'd like to say something about the character of Ripley, which is that in watching this last night, I was struck by, it took a while in the movie before Ripley actually says or does anything, too? Like, we think of her as the main character now because we know she survives and she goes through the other film series. but if they played it up in a way I think that you don't know what the heck is going to happen who's going to survive who will be the last person out which is obvious in retrospect

she's very much a secondary character in like the first like third of the movie yeah and again the biggest actor in the movie John Hurt is the first guy to die they you know they kill him off this is what they wanted to do with the TV series lost

they wanted to hire like Michael Keaton and have him as Jack Shepard and then kill him at the end of the first episode so everyone was like wait a minute he's the big star and he's dead what's going on? Like they did exactly that with alien.

They killed off John Hurt and that's it. Like he's got a hole in his chest and everyone's spattered with pig blood and there's this like weird little thing running around the ship now. What do you think about Ripley as a heroin surviving? That was innovative in that era. Sadly, it's still innovative. But I mean, we still have aliens like he really becomes an action hero in the next film. I mean, that's kind of tying into the horror roots.

there is a trope in horror movies called The Last Girl, where, like, you know, the sensible, smart woman is the one who survives. You know, the scream movies, I think, did that, or at least the first one. It's been a long time since I've seen it. But that is very much a horror thing. Like, you know, the one who survives is the practical, smart, thoughtful woman who doesn't rush headlong into things, but actually takes the time to figure out how to outsmart the monster. And I feel like that that really does tie into the horror leanings of alien.

But you don't see it as much in sci-fi for sure. Sci-fi is all like, you know, it's the original poster for Star Wars where Luke Skywalker is like super muscular. He's got a bare chest and he's holding a laser sword and Princess Leia is all like clinging to him. Yeah, that's that's sci-fi, unfortunately. Even Star Wars was a subversion of that to a degree. Yeah. Yeah, so we were talking about Ripley. and oh yeah the horror thing

I noticed also it's just like a horror movie in terms of you see these characters make bad decisions over and over again that you wouldn't make or that you say oh that's wrong don't go down that corridor get out of that house do that thing but instead they're like

they investigate the guy goes into this alien ship and he falls down into the thing he's messing with the egg and then he comes back and then they let him in all these things don't do that that's like a completely horror movie type, you know. It is, but in this case, like Ripley is actually saying, don't bring him in. He's got to be in quarantine until we figure out what's going on. And because there is

a nefarious purpose, you know, that the characters don't really know about at the time. Yeah, it turns out there's reasons. That's why it happens. Like, you know, everything that happens, yeah, it's deliberate. The corporation's like, wow, a crazy murderous alien life form. We've got to get me one of those. Also. And that's actually, that's actually, was another interesting to me. I was watching all the way through this for the first time is I had actually forgotten that Ash was an android. And I didn't actually realize until he had the white sweat because I never because I've seen aliens more recently.

I remember Bishop. And I'm like, oh, right. Okay, that all makes sense now. But it does feel like it's nice the way it ties everyone's motivations together by the end and like the things that happen make more sense than they maybe seem to at the time. Yeah, that made me think, yeah, they don't show. It's not obvious that he's an android at the beginning, but it all. also made me think, like, if they can make an Android, why are these computers so clunky?

Well, yeah, because it's the 70s. They put all their tech into the Android. Yeah. It's like a biological Android. Well, I think also that gets down to the nature of the Nostromo itself. It's not meant to be top of the line. It is, it's a space semi, basically. So, like, if you look in a, you know, a trucker semi, it's probably not going to have top

of the line equipment inside. I mean, some of them probably do at this point. But, you know, there's probably still. trucks that don't have GPS or whatever they've still got an AM radio but they have an Android co-pilot yes absolutely Chris

probably cheaper to build an Android than to build a whole new ship especially when they can carry 20 million tons of ore yeah once the technology is there it carries its own refinery that's that's that's crazy that's wild yeah they've been using it for a hundred years probably

probably yeah do we know what year this takes place in by never say and that's fine it's not meant to you're not meant know. But they mention Earth, don't they? They do. Yeah. These are humans. This is the future of humanity. I mean, if the corporate takeover didn't convince you, what will. Yeah. That's true. So the last thing I want to talk about in terms of the movie is the actual

the chest burster scene because it's really the most memorable moment of the movie and for good reason because, one, it's horrifying. And, you know, like I said earlier, the actors are having real reactions to that scene. But, Also because there was, there just been nothing like that in movies before. These days, like, it's, it's so visceral, but we just kind of take it for granted because, you know, the stakes have been raised, you know, by things like robocop and so forth. And, you know, to the point where we are now where, you know, people just, they don't even flinch of that stuff anymore. But in 1979, that was, that was intense. And I was aware of alien throughout the 80s.

But my parents were like, you are not watching that because it is just not appropriate. it. And, like, this, the chest-wisher scene took on this sort of mythic air. Like, everyone knew about it. Everyone talked about it. Like, it was known. But, you know, even knowing about it, if you haven't actually seen it, like, it's still pretty shocking the first time you see it. At least it was back then. Especially if you don't know what's going to happen, which is kind of impossible. If you've seen space balls and stuff. It's been so, like, absorbed into, like, the public consciousness. I saw space balls before I saw aliens. So it spoiled it for me. because we were kids and stuff.

And it's much less gory in that one because it's just supposed to be silly, but it'd be... There's something to be said about the level of gratuity in movies, like gratuitous gore, viscera violence and stuff, and how that amped up. And yeah, this was definitely like a watermark moment in terms of like showing graphic things in a mainstream film that wasn't a slasher flick or something.

Yeah, I mean, you know, there's an alien monster that bursts through a man's sternum and like he's sitting there twitching and bleeding out as this thing like looks out of his chest and kind of takes stock of the world around it before darting off and disappearing dancing hello my day really hello nope just kidding i love that marvel comics completely ripped off alien everyone is completely ripped off alien the brute is especially the brute is especially brood is alien. Like Chris Claremont and Dave Cockram saw the alien, and then we're like, we should do that with the X-Men. But you can't have something tear its way out of Wolverine's chest in 1980. So instead it just like slowly turns you into a brood, which is sort of different kind of horror. But like I love that that's the one thing they had to change. And also Space Whales and Carol Danvers were there.

As usual. Yeah. Space whales and Carol Danvers make everything better. I don't know about the space wheels. I love the space wheels. That makes Farscape better. I don't know about the other stuff. Macross 7.

Okay. All right. Reading X-Men Comics as a kid, like, I didn't know how much it was just alien, which is a great thing about comics. Did the brood have a queen before the aliens? No. No? They were just the brood, and then after aliens came out, then they got a queen.

Then they got the brood queen. And come on, Claremont. It was too busy writing about domination and BDSM. Yeah, which is just an episode of The Avengers. Right. Like, I love going back and looking at the direct connections between, like, what somebody was watching that week and what made it into comics. Like, the entire first 50 issues of the Punisher ongoing series from the 80s, it's literally just the plot of whatever, like, schlocky action movie, Mike Barron had seen that week. Like, there's a, there's a class of 1984 story arc.

there's a stone cold, a story arc, where Frank's a biker who invalryates a medealing gang. Like, it's just each of these movies one by one. Yeah, and before everything was connected on the internet, the media, they could be their own little islands of media. You know, like early video games plagiarized music, like popular music, sometimes in their tunes and stuff. I mean, that was a world where the people who would sue you for that music would never encounter that stuff, whereas today everything's interesting. Now they've got an ID match. Yeah, so as soon as you upload it to YouTube, you're someone else is getting monetized for your work. It's great. I love it. I love it.

I don't know. So if we're like segueing into influences, there's also like, there's some things in Alien that just seem like gifts to game design, even though they weren't done that way intentionally. But so like the proximity motion detector things that they use. And, you know, obviously in the in the film, it's being used as a way to like ran. pump tension like you know something's coming but you only sort of know where it is not exactly and so it's it's a great diagetic concept because you know the uh the the crew of the nostromo because they are space truckers they don't have access to like high-end scientific equipment they can't use the tricorder coupling things together yeah they can't use the force they're just you know truckers in space so they cobble together a motion detector yeah that's all they can do

but and this is you know i mean this is just like a gift to like game adaptations both directly of aliens and other games, because it's just, it's just this, this template for, you know, yeah, there's a template for something you can throw up on a HUD and, like, use as a game mechanic. And then we've also got, you know, great fun things like flame throwers. Right. And, you know, crawling through the duct. Yeah. And, you know, the self-destruct sequence.

I mean, yeah, that's a lot to alien. Oh, does it? I was, there's an enemy named Ridley. Yeah. And the main character is a lady who fights a parasitic alien. And then at the end, after blowing up the computer, she has to escape before the whole place explodes around her. Yes. Yeah, like watching Ripley set that self-destruct sequence in motion.

I'm like, this is the template for every self-destruct sequence for the next 20 years, like right here. I know I talked about loving practical effects, but if we could go in and make like a special edition of Alien where Sigourney Weaver is in like Chozo Armor and like turns into. a morph ball occasionally that would be I mean she even strips down to like a bikini and thong at the end just like Samus if you get a good ending watch by the way I noticed this I noticed when watching the movie

watching Sigourney Revever move around it looks like Samus like the the way she carries herself I'm not joking like there's a couple poses stuck out and she has the other arm resting on top of it yeah there's just a couple poses where like I'm just like you know she's just standing there and it looks like they look Well, it looks like some artist

in Super Metroid or Metroid looked at it and just... I mean, that's entirely possible. You know, but that ruined my best joke. I was going to say the best alien game is Metroid. There's the Chozo, too. That fossilized dude? Yeah, yeah.

The space jockey. The statues of the old civilization. And yeah. I got... No, did Ripley ever get the Varia in those movies? Only in Alien Resurrection. Okay.

Doesn't count. Well, in Alien 3, she kind of goes... for a lava bath, but it doesn't work out so well. Yeah, she forgot the gravity suit. Yeah, she needed the gravity suit first. Anyway, yes, Metroid owes a lot to alien. But a lot of games, you know, like there's Alien Crush by Naxat, which is a pinball game that is basically just like, here's, you know, everything that H.R. Geiger has ever drawn.

There's Darkseed. I don't know if you guys ever played that, but that's a graphical adventure game from the early 90s from the CD-ROM era. and it's very, very alien kind of meets Lovecraft, where you're a guy who discovers that he has this, like, bizarre alien god thing implanted in him, and it's going to grow and, you know, evacuate his body and kill him in the process if he doesn't get rid of it within, like, 24 hours or something. And all the artwork is done by H.R. Giger. So they basically were just like, hey, Giger, we're basically going to rip off alien and put it in, you know, like a love. craft setting like a modern day's kind of sort of mansion with a parallel universe could you do that and he was like yeah sure about that ever i'd call that biological horror yeah like a mixture of

terrifying um parasitic organisms and stuff and biologically themed ribby like structures and stuff like gigger's style is so distinctive it's just kind of a whole subgenre to itself that people draw from there's a film that where there's a recent film is like corridor set what was that some kind of like, there's like an alien refugee encampment and a guy's arm is like a cannon and stuff. You're thinking of, um, last 10 years, seven. It's, um, yeah. District 13. Yes, that's it.

Yeah, that was terrifying, crazy kind of weird, kind of mixtures of mixing biological with technological and alien and stuff. Yeah, and I mean, at the furthest extent, you know, the alien concept has been sort of adapted into just like standard zombie panic. So you have something like Halo's Flood, which is very similar to brood. Yeah. And Doom. Doom is like space marines and stuff. Yeah, I guess there are like the Revenant type Marines. A bunch you got into some of that style, even way back in like Pathways into Darkness.

I mean, that's more, that's more Lovecraftian, yeah. And Doom is also a corporation screwing things up. That's true. Well, that's what corporations do. You ever been on social media? Anyway, yeah, so lots of games have borrowed heavily, liberally, from alien. We can't even begin to list all the games, the influences. But, I mean, Contra, geez, like the whole Red Falcon thing.

Well, like, R-Types. Oh, yeah, the Dobeckeras or whatever it's called, Dobokeratus. Shit, something. Super Mario brother. Yoshi. Only the movie. Only the movie. Yeah, you're right.

That's true. Bowser and Yoshi was like, yeah. So let's actually talk about the games that were based on Alien. Not all aliens games, just the games, because there are,

I would say, are four games based on Alien. Would you guys agree? Do you think there's more? I think... Those were the ones that seem to be, you know, just drawn from Alien as opposed to the sequels.

Once aliens came out in 1986, everyone was like, that's it. That's our video game. That's every video game forever from now on. And so that was all she wrote. So, you know, it's a squad shooter.

Yeah, I mean, when alien... The whole movie is a squad shooter. When alien isolation came out, oh my God, four years ago, I guess, that was a revelation because it was about alien. It was about evoking the horror and creeping terror and suspense of the original alien. Not about the like, go, Marines, go! Destroy everything. We are leaving!

Yeah, not the aliens style. It was just like the... You're trapped. with aliens and you have to survive. That was great. I would say that video games did not start out quite that way. The very first adaptation of Alien was created by Fox for Atari 2,600. And it is not, I would say, it does not successfully evoke the spirit of the movie.

Now, on the bright side, it may be a better Pac-Man than Pac-Man on the Atari-26-Hund. Yes, it is a Pac-Man clone. unabashedly, and it is better than, better than, you know. Atari 2,600s. It's a good Pac-Man. Was that Harshaar, Todd Frye? It's Todd Frye, yeah. This is the, oh, sorry.

Well, I was just going to say, it's a pretty good Pac-Man clone. It's got some. With a little bit of Frogger clone bolted on it. Yeah, although I played it for a while, and I couldn't figure out whether you could actually do anything with your flamethrower. I couldn't figure that either. You can't kill the monsters. theoretically, you're supposed to be able to do get power pellets that you can eat the

Aliens basically destroy them. Yes. Remember when Ripley eats power pellets and the aliens turn blue and she eats them? Yeah. This is great. Just like Pac-Man. I think the pellet is an ant-acid that neutralizes their blood long enough for her to devour them. This is the other thing that I want in our special edition of Alien is like one of the, like, we get a pastel pink alien, a pastel yellow alien. Ripley eats one.

I think there's a toy line like that, actually. Well, and the dots that you're going over are supposed to be alien eggs that you're neutralizing. Oh, really? Yeah, that's what it's up the manual. With your anthacid. Yeah, so we need the scene in the new movie where you're just going down the corridor, like, stomping on every egg on the way down. By the way, this is the origin of this game, I do not know the actual origin, but these types of games came about very frequently because there was a developer who made a Pac-Man clone. I just had it sitting around, and they're like, oh, we need a...

Alien game. And so they merge the two together. Slop the sprites in. Yeah. So, and then there you go. Now it's an alien game. I do actually quite like the sprites in this game. I think it's kind of cute. For the 2600, I think they look like pretty good kind of scary aliens. I mean, they're better than a lot of the other like base game sprites from that era, which were really clunky. It's still just not convincing. I don't know. It's not. If I were a kid, I'd be like, well, for one thing, if I were a kid at that point, I would not have watched Alien yet. Because I had not watched Alien yet. But if I were a grown man who was at least 18, an old enough to see an R-rated movie like that, I would have said, this is not my alien experience. Where is the creeping terror? I would have been very disappointed in 1980. So decent Pac-Man clone, not that exciting as compared to the movie. Just wait for weird science.

I think it's a neat game, though. Yeah, in retrospect. It's not bad. It's a nice game for that era. Yeah. But yeah, much more interesting is the C-64 version of Alien, which came along a few years later. It's really complicated, and I did not have time to really dig into this game. So just watching some videos and reading, you know, like an overview of the game, I'm kind of at a loss.

It's almost like FTL or something. Yeah, it's like an adventure simulation. There was actually a recent indie game that came out, which is about directing all your crew on a small ship and trying not to die. F-TL? Yeah, the one you're talking about? Was it F-L? Okay. Maybe like that.

There's another one. There's probably another one. But yeah, so you have these like multiple floor views of Nostromo in very simplified graphics and you're like seven crew members and you're basically kind of doing this term-based thing telling them what to do. But it's this very complex simulation is you can like pick up tools and use them and tell people to go in and out of the vents. And like your crew members have actual like emotional states so they can be like calm or they

and be freaked out, like, it starts to feel almost like a dwarf fortress kind of seemingly like so much that's not that complicated. I mean, I think that is really important because, you know, the compromised emotional state of the crew was a huge part of how alien happened, you know. I was talking about the actors responding to things, but like for a lot of that movie, a lot of the scenes that involved Veronica Cartwright, she was actually like freaked out of her mind just because it was so intense and, you know, it's a such a harrowing experience it hadn't really been produced in Hollywood before.

So people weren't really prepared for that. They didn't know how to cope. And so, you know, capturing that in a video game, that's remarkable. Yeah. And so this is like, like, it's, you know, very simple graphics and term-based gameplay, but it draws a whole lot directly from the scenario of the movie. And then, but then evidently kind of remixes it. Because if you're playing the long game version of this, basically,

it just like picks a random crew member to be the one who dies first and picks another crew member to be the one who's the traitorous Android. so you don't necessarily know how it's going to play out. So it's kind of like clue? Yeah, kind of like that. And there's also, and evidently there's like multiple wing conditions. So you can, you can end up doing it like the movie where, you know, most people die and then you blow up the ship and escape. But apparently you actually get more points if you manage to kill the alien without blowing it.

So you can actually succeed at like drawing the alien over to an airlock and blowing it out without scuttling the whole ship. Fascinating. Yeah. The thing that came to mind for me when I was watching this was fun. It's of Prettys. I can see that. Yeah, like, you're kind of like looking at the floor plan and sort of managing everything. And then occasionally the alien shows up.

And it's actually like a little bit scary because that's, well, there's this big cool graphic of the alien. Like it's the only high, like the only interest in graphic in the whole game because everything else is this low resolution. It's stick figures and then the alien. Yeah. And then there's this huge like half screen detail. So this is a prequel for Five Night Shepredes.

It's a prequel to Night Trap, which was the prequel of Five I'd say the board game analogy is pretty good in terms of this is something like it could be a board game but you want the computer to facilitate all this some of the grunt work of doing this fascinating I've never actually played this I tried to find the ROM disc image this morning to play it but I didn't get it a chance but I looked at it and it looks awesome yeah it looks really interesting I'm glad that you were prevented from doing crimes yeah I almost went to jail this morning So the Alien Game is based on the Alien Games based on Alien.

I guess is Alien Trilogy for PlayStation 1 and Saturn by Probe? It's pronounced Probe. Is it? Okay. Are they French? Yeah. I think they are French. They are not.

I think they're British. I could look at this game for like two minutes, so I'll let you guys handle this one. I mean, it doesn't really have that much to do with the original aliens. Supposedly, it's based on all three of the movies, but like it draws from them all. And like the environments are, you know, it's. It draws in these visual elements, but other than that, it's a mid-90s first-person shooter. Yeah, it's not an attempt to capitalize on the unique strengths of the film. It's just an attempt to take, you know, the current hotness and shoehorn and some alien elements into it.

And with less success, I would say, than Alien versus Predator for Jaguar a few years before. When a Jaguar game outdoes your PS1 game, you got problems. You're in trouble. Well, apparently they actually like mochapped the enemy alien. for this, and that was like a selling point for them. They actually put people in the sense of mocha. But they're just like wandering around aimlessly. Yeah, it's a mid-90s PS1 shooter.

And so, you know, it's low frame rate, kind of pixelated enemies, and you can't really tell that they were mocha. So what I know is, I've never played this either, but it looks like from watching a YouTube video that it's a shoot everything that moves kind of FPS instead of like the suspense and things. And then the comments are instructional

because a lot of people were talking about how it completely terrified them as kids or something because I guess I don't know if the aliens are jumping out at you or something. I think they do. Like they fall out of the ceiling and that kind of thing. And it's also like, you know, it's trying to recreate sort of the hopelessness of the movies. And so evidently your weapons are not really very good. And you just, I was watching someone playing this as a review. It's just like you're just going to die a lot.

Speaking of weapons, this isn't a slightly tangential thing is there's no proof in the movie that the fire flamethrower actually does any damage to this alien, right? I mean, it just maybe scares it off, but we don't know, you know. So like nothing damaged except the airlock maneuver. Yeah, pretty much. Anyway. There was that one gas that didn't like. I was always wondering why there was this control panel to flood the escape pod with like various kinds of toxic gas. Are they toxic or was it like liquid oxygen?

It might have just been cold. Yeah, I feel like my thought was it was just like. But she tried like three different gases until she hit one that actually didn't like. I thought it was just like a loose tube that connected the cryo chamber. So it would have been some sort of coal. She has a control panel that literally has different like gas names on it. Does it? Like Yanni and.

Yeah, but no, these are actually like chemical compounds like on this one. And she hits like three of them. And it's like the fourth one that finally makes it scream and move. Okay. Anyways. I want to play this alien children. though. Too bad I didn't get to do it in time. It looks neat.

It's a 90s. I mean, I like, as far as the 90s, FPS aesthetic nostalgic. If I'm going to have that, if I'm going to have that, like, mindless first-person shooter style, I don't want anything more than a 2.5D engine. I want like build engine or the Doom engine or the marathon engine or something.

The old is the best. Yeah, well, one of those, any of those, just like, give me those. I don't want polygons, damn it. Just keep those out. Like, if you're going to, if you're going to be dumb and fast-paced, just give me, like, fast-paced graphics. Are there polygons in this? I don't remember seeing any.

It's all 3D models. Okay. Well, I mean, the enemies were sprites. Okay, there you go. But the environments were modeled. Yeah. Okay. And finally, we come to the best and last of the alien games, which is not technically

retro, but it had such an old-school mindset to it that I'm willing to allow it. And that is Alien Isolation, developed by Creative Assembly, and published by Sega, 2014. And they really, this was a labor of love by people who really got the first movie and said, we don't want to make an aliens game. We want to make an alien game. And so it is a first person survival horror game. It does turn into a shooter, like more straightforward at the end. But most of the game is a direct sequel to Alien, starring, oh, crap, I just blanked out her name, Amanda Ripley, Ellen's daughter.

who is actually, you know, canonical. She's mentioned in the intro to aliens as having become an old woman in the time that Ripley was floating aimlessly out in space. But you are trying to survive your way through Sebastopol Space Station that, of course, has been taken over by some aliens. There's not a lot of them, at least at first, but they are omnipresent and extremely scary. And you have to creep around silently and avoid them. And you really cannot defeat them. So it's just a game about avoidance and stealth and creeping. And also there's robots because Androids are evil and they hate you and they'll try to kill you and give your position away and so forth.

So it's an interesting game. Apparently they got like a lot of the like several of the people who worked on the original alien to come in and consult. And so they really went all out on recreating the aesthetic and the ambiences to the point to the point where they like created computer screens and then random. through VHS cassettes to give them these like old video effects because that's what it had in the in the 70s version. Yeah, I mean, the aesthetics of this game, the Sebastopol Station really feels like it's cut from the same industrial molds as the Nostromo. And you get, you know, those different areas.

There's like a medical area and a science area and so forth. And each of those has a different feel. But it feels very authentic with, you know, the shape of the architecture and the signage and labels and everything, the computer. computer screens. It's all just very, very true to the original alien. But it plays really well. Like it is one of the most intense and, I guess, tense, really, games that I've played. Because, you know, there is constantly this alien around and it's possible to outsmart it. And there are a few scripted sequences. But a lot of it, it's just kind of moving randomly through the station. And if you make noise, it will start, you know, it'll realize you're out there and it'll hunt for you. And you'll have to like hide in a locker for five minutes and wait for it to creep past and it'll eventually go away. And one of the really cool things about the game is that the save stations, it doesn't have save anywhere mechanics. It's very much about

a safe station, like find a point where you can save your progress, which is a very sort of old school approach, but it works here because a lot of the save stations are exposed. And so there is this risk. You're like, well, I need to save my game because it's been 25 minutes since I last saved and I've made some progress, and, you know, I've opened up some of the map and I've collected things and so on and so forth, but there's an alien roaming around, and if I just make a break for the save station, it's going to see me and it's going to come over and kill me as soon as I save or before I even save. So it creates, it just really ratchets up the tension. I don't know. Have you guys played isolation? I haven't actually played it, but I watched some of it. And I think, like, a really interesting thing about it is another thing they did to increase this tension is that so much of, The time the alien behavior, like, isn't scripted. It's just, it's running its own little AI routine, so it's going to do different things, different times. And apparently one of the things they did to make it seem like it's learning is there's not actually a machine learning algorithm in here, but they had different levels of AI behaviors that it sort of unlocks over the course of the game. So it's like its behaviors get more complex as you go on.

But again, there's a sense that you can never quite predict where it's going to be or what it's going to be doing. and, you know, maybe even sometimes it'll do something that'll luckily help you, but you don't know. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely marauders on the space station and, you know, the robots and stuff. The aliens will ignore the robots, but if there are other humans who are trying to fight you, if they make noise, the alien will come after them. And that can, you know, expose you. But if enemies are coming after you and shooting at you and you manage to hide, the alien will just come and clear out the room. And you're like, well, okay, thanks.

So, yeah, it's interesting. it's very dynamic. It's a really, really cool game. And I was actually, I went to see this in the UK before it was announced or when it was very first announced. And, you know, Sega was like, hey, we're going to show off a game about Alien. I was like, okay, sure, I'll go on this trip. Not expecting anything of it. But then they took us to Creative Assembly's offices and let us demo the game. And I was just like, I can't believe someone actually adapted the spirit and essence of Ali's offices. into a video game. It really was like it went from zero expectations to being, you know, mind-blowing. And I really love this game. I think it's fantastic. I remember the critical hype about this game. It's probably

Jeremy's fault, but you know, a lot of people thought it was very scary and suspenseful and stuff. But you know, I haven't played it because I don't play games that are any younger than 20 years. So I'm hardcore. It looks cool.

I want to play it. It's really good. and you can buy it for like three bucks now on Steam or you know PS4 or whatever it's a modern modern gin game and is easily available it hasn't gone out of print

and sold pretty well I think so it's it's readily available you have to buy it though man that's okay it's seriously like five bucks it's worth it for sure and I think there was an expansion that I never had a chance to play that

I can't remember if it like gave you scenarios from the original alien? They did actually recreate some of the self-contained scenes from the original movie, and they actually got some of the original actors back to DuVo. That's right. I need to play those. That's really cool.

Like I said, it's a labor of love by people who really appreciated the first alien for its uniqueness and tried to turn that into a video game. And I wish more great movies had that. I wish more developers were like, let's really translate what makes this film unique into a video game experience. It can be done.

Alien isolation is proof, but it's pretty rare. Especially with the technology we have these days. Like to go back to a 79 movie and do that with our, you know, we can really do it now with the tech we have now, graphics-wise and everything. It would be cool to look back at some of those older, you know, films and recreate them in video game form. Yeah, I mean, just think how many mediocre Star Wars and Star Trek video games

there are that just don't quite catch the spirit. What else do we recreate? Maybe the black hole. I would love that. that. That would be, especially if the ending, you actually end up in hell, trapped inside Maximilian. I'd be into that. When are we doing a black hole podcast, guys? My dad used to love that movie. It's not a good movie, but I love it. It's so, it's so weird. Okay, so Star Trek the motion picture, Alien and the Black Hole, where three different studios attempts to do the Star Wars thing. And they're all very different and all very, hit very, very, distinct degrees of success. But I love all of them for different reasons. Anyway, I think that's it for Alien.

We don't need to belabor the point. It really is like a super influential movie. And, you know, we've pretty much spoiled the whole thing. But it's a movie that I can go back to and watch over and over again. And I'm not someone who enjoys horror. But it's just such a well-constructed film. And it's such a foundational pillar of so much, sci-fi that uh yeah like it's just it's it's right up there with with uh you know blade runner for

me like riddley scott used to be so good what happened man what'd you do it's like james cameron all these these guys who made great stuff in the early 80s but thatal angel was good my last thought is that alien is like a comfortable place to go because it reminds me of a Metroid okay yes the might be the only person for whom alien is comfortable yeah yeah A nice place to go. I'm sure it's nice and cozy inside of someone's chest. I'm glad you didn't turn my. Okay.

All right. Any final thoughts on Alien? I mean, I think I'm in the same place as you. I'm not a horror guy, but I definitely enjoyed going back and watching this all the way for the first time. It was a great experience. All right. Well, at some point, we will tackle aliens because that's an even more influential movie. And wow, its impact on video games and the number of

video games based directly on it are innumerable like the sands on the beach the stars in the sky it's going to be a three hour podcast probably that's not happening today because we didn't prep for it. We need extra boost for that one. Yeah. Yeah. So everyone, tell us about yourselves and where we can find you. I guess I'll start. Hi, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You've been listening to Retronauts. Retronauts.com is where you'll find this podcast also iTunes. Lipson. That's where we're hosted these days. You can support us on Patreon if you enjoyed this episode. Want to hear more like it or more not like it.

We do a variety of things. You can go to patreon.com slash retronauts. And for $3 a month, you can subscribe and listen to each episode a week early with higher bit rate quality and no advertisements. So it's a dangling enticement that we are holding there in front of you. And I think it's a good one. So check us out. But anyway, Ben.

I'm Ben Elgin. Most of my other retro-focused endeavors are on heatus right now, but you can always keep up with me on Twitter, where I am Kieran, K-I-R-I-N-N. And that's about all that's updated right now. I'm Chris Sims. And if you don't mind me missing what are, in retrospect, some extremely obvious pieces of imagery, then you can find all of my stuff by going to t-H-E-I-S-B.com. that's the ISB, my website, where you'll find links to comic books that I write and columns that I write around the web and other podcasts that I do, including Apocrypal's, which

is the podcast where two non-believers read through the Bible and it's assorted, associated, extremely weird, non-canonical texts, but we try not to be jerks about it. And I'm Ben Jedwards. You can find me on Twitter at Ben Jedwards, and I'm still kind of building joysticks at bx foundry.com. temporarily stop taking orders because I got too many, but I have a feeling I will do it again later. And we'll look forward to it. In the meantime, Retronauts will be back in probably like a week with another episode. We might have one this Friday. I don't know. We do bonus episodes every other Friday. So just keep your eyes on the Retronaut's feed. And we promised not to explode out of your chest when you're least expecting it.

CHIN You're going to be able to be, you know, and so on, you know, You know,